INGI Seminar - Lessons Learned In Building Trustworthy Systems with Trusted Execution Environments

by Valerio  Schiavoni, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Available as dedicated hardware components into several mobile and server-grade processors, and recently included in infrastructure-as-a-service commercial offerings by several cloud providers, TEEs allow applications with high privacy and confidentiality demands to be deployed and executed over untrusted environments, shielding data and code from compromised systems or powerful attackers.

After an introduction to basic concepts for TEEs, I will cover some of our most recent contributions exploiting TEEs, including defensive tools in the context of Federated Learning, building secure cache systems for edge networks, or shielding novel environments (ie, WebAssembly). Finally, I will highlight some of the lessons learned and offer open perspectives, hopefully useful and inspirational to future researchers and practitioners entering this exciting area of research.

Valerio Schiavoni is MER (maître d'enseignement et recherche, "kind of" Senior Lecturer) at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He received his B.Sc. & M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Roma Tre University (Italy) and from the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland), respectively. He was a Research Engineer at INRIA Rhone Alpes (France) and intern at Yahoo! Research (Spain). In 2014-2017, he was appointed scientific coordinator of the Centre of Competence for Complex Systems and Big Data at University of Neuchâtel. In 2019-2021, he coordinated the CUSO (Conférence Universitaire Suisse Occidentale) for the Computer Science programs. He co-founded one start-up (SafeCloud Tech), and co-founded the ARM HPC User Group (AHUG).

He published more than 100 papers and served on more than 50 TPCs as well as several organizing committees.

He currently serves as PC Co-Chair of ACM Middleware'24, IEEE PRDC'24 and EuroSys Artifact Evaluation 2024.

His research interests lie at the intersection of systems broadly conceived, security, and data management.