About Me!

I'm a fourth-year PhD candidate in CSE department at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

My research interests lie in the field of computer architecture and security, with a particular focus on microarchitectural side-channel attacks and high-performance defenses such as control flow isolation.

I'm advised by Professor Dean Tullsen and Professor Deian Stefan, and I am also actively collaborating with Professor Kazem Taram.

Experience in the Tech Industry

• During the summer of 2024, I was a research intern at Qualcomm, working with the CPU Architecture/Performance team. My focus was on researching and modeling ideas on Fetch Engine, particularly modern Branch Predictors, for future secure and high-performance CPUs.


• Previously (2023-2024), I collaborated closely with Intel Labs' research team on the HARDEN project (GitHub Repo), focusing on advancing hardware security and efficiency.


• Additionally, I completed a hardware engineering internship at SiFive, the leading provider of RISC-V CPUs, during the summer of 2022.

Articles

Publications

Indirector: High-Precision Branch Target Injection Attacks Exploiting the Indirect Branch Predictor (Distinguished Paper Award Winner!)

USENIX Security Symposium, August 2024.

Luyi Li^*, Hosein Yavarzadeh^*, Dean Tullsen

^{*Equal contribution joint first authors}

[ Paper | Code | bibtex | Video | Slides]

Pathfinder: High-Resolution Control-Flow Attacks Exploiting the Conditional Branch Predictor

ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), April 2024.

Hosein Yavarzadeh, Archit Agarwal, Max Christman, Christina Garman, Daniel Genkin, Andrew Kwong, Daniel Moghimi, Deian Stefan, Kazem Taram, Dean Tullsen

[ Paper | Code | bibtex | Slides | Teaser | Video ]

Half&Half: Demystifying Intel's Directional Branch Predictors for Fast, Secure Partitioned Execution

IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P), May 2023.

Hosein Yavarzadeh, Mohammadkazem Taram, Shravan Narayan, Deian Stefan, Dean Tullsen

[ Paper | bibtex | Slides | Teaser | Video ]

Contact

Please do not hesitate to reach out to me at hyavarzadeh@ucsd.edu.