Within CSAIL, Professor Devadas’ work concentrates on computer architecture, computer security, and the intersection of those two spheres. He is a member of the Computation Structures Group and, in recognition of his contributions to MIT, has been awarded the MacVicar Faculty Fellowship and an Everett Moore Baker teaching award, two of the most distinguished undergraduate teaching honors within the university.
Professor Devadas strongly feels that building infrastructure that is secure is a priority: “I think of computer security as being something that is now really essential, just like physical security is essential for all of us.” He and his colleagues thus treat security as a first-class design metric, equally important as design parameters like high performance and low energy consumption.
As technology advances, however, Professor Devadas is confronting an increasing number of challenges. “The variety of attacks has been surprising to me, even though I’m a researcher in the field,” Professor Devadas reveals. There are remote attacks and software attacks but also attacks associated with human error. These are particularly challenging because of the wide range of causes; an employee may unknowingly click something that they should not or perhaps bring a device into the security perimeter that had already been compromised. Industrial espionage is also a potential hazard.
New threats are constantly arising, forcing Professor Devadas and his team to be flexible with their design. He explains that he’s encountered several experiences where, halfway through building a hardware system, he’d have to change the design because a new class of attack had surfaced.
Professor Devadas anticipates that these challenges will continue to grow, especially as attackers learn more about particular systems and share information amongst themselves. Attackers and adversaries work tirelessly to understand a system and determine its weaknesses, and now researchers and organizations must spend more time considering potential attacks before they design their systems.
As Professor Devadas and his team design and prototype these systems, his goal is that their solutions are picked up by companies that build computer infrastructure. Ultimately, software does run on computer hardware, and Professor Devadas hopes his ideas can help hardware and software work in conjunction to promote cybersecurity.