Hossam ElAtali

Welcome to my website! I’m Hossam, a PhD student at the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Prof. N. Asokan. My background is originally in electronics, but I shifted more towards computer architecture during my Master’s. After that, I worked at Mentor Graphics (now part of Siemens) as a C++ SW developer for 5 years before starting my PhD.

My current research is on hardware-assisted security mechanisms, including trusted execution environments, memory safety and side-channel resistance. The main project I’m working on is BliMe (ElAtali et al., 2024), which enables secure side-channel-resistant outsourced computation, even when all software running on the server is malicious. You can read more about it here.

My skills span both hardware and software. My previous job had a lot of C/C++ development (ranging from USB drivers to GUI work), and my current project has me doing a lot of Chisel/Verilog, assembly and C++.

selected publications

Cancellable Memory Requests: A transparent, lightweight Spectre mitigation

H ElAtali, and N Asokan

arXiv preprint, 2024

arXiv
BliMe Linter

H ElAtali, X Duan, H Liljestrand, M Xu, and 1 more author

arXiv preprint, 2024

arXiv

HOST

Data-Oblivious ML Accelerators using Hardware Security Extensions

H ElAtali, J Z Jekel, L J Gunn, and N Asokan

In IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), 2024

arXiv Bib Website

@inproceedings{dolma24,
  title = {Data-Oblivious ML Accelerators using Hardware Security Extensions},
  author = {ElAtali, H and Jekel, J Z and Gunn, L J and Asokan, N},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST)},
  location = {Tysons Corner, VA, USA},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.1109/HOST55342.2024.10545398},
}

NDSS

BliMe: Verifiably Secure Outsourced Computation with Hardware-Enforced Taint Tracking

H ElAtali, L J Gunn, H Liljestrand, and N Asokan

In Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2024

arXiv Bib Code Website

@inproceedings{blime24,
  title = {BliMe: Verifiably Secure Outsourced Computation with Hardware-Enforced Taint Tracking},
  author = {ElAtali, H and Gunn, L J and Liljestrand, H and Asokan, N},
  booktitle = {Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)},
  location = {San Diego, CA, USA},
  year = {2024},
  isbn = {1-891562-93-2},
  doi = {10.14722/ndss.2024.24105},
}