Modern processors are fast in part because they guess. Rather than waiting to find out which way a program will branch, a chip predicts the likely path and races ahead. When the guess is right, time is saved. When it's wrong, the work is discarded, but traces of it linger, and since the Spectre vulnerability was disclosed in 2018, attackers have known how to read those traces to pull secrets out of memory they should never see.
Join CSAIL Alliances Member Citadel Securities for a tech talk, followed by networking. This session is intended for PhD Students. More info coming soon!
Srini Devadas, MIT Webster Professor of EECS and CSAIL principal investigator, has earned the 2026 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award for making key contributions to “secure architectures with broad industrial and academic impact,” according to the ACM and IEEE.
At the recent AI and Society Forum at MIT, experts from across the Institute discussed the potential benefits and dangers of technological innovation on labor, the nature of work, civil discourse, election administration, and other topics.
As AI tools reshape what it means to write software, a hard question is emerging for educators: what do you teach the next generation of computer scientists in the world of AI?
When security researchers want to understand what a modern processor is really doing with the kind of detail that determines whether attacks like Spectre and Meltdown are possible, they usually run their experiments on top of an operating system that was never built for the job. They open up macOS or Linux, patch the kernel by hand, and hope the modifications hold. The approach is unstable, hard to reproduce, and on Apple's platforms, slated for deprecation.
A new method developed by MIT researchers can accelerate a privacy-preserving artificial intelligence training method by about 81 percent. This advance could enable a wider array of resource-constrained edge devices, like sensors and smartwatches, to deploy more accurate AI models while keeping user data secure.
David Clark, Senior Research Scientist at MIT CSAIL, helped design the system that connects nearly every computer on earth. As Chief Protocol Architect of the Internet from 1981 to 1989, he was there for the beginnings of the Internet. Calling the wave of AI technology an “echo” of what happened in the 80’s, Dr. Clark is cautioning, “ maybe we need to slow things down and think a bit.”
