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. One of the projects 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++. I also have extensive experience with simulation/emulation for computer architecture (gem5,QEMU), where I’ve designed and implemented novel security features. I also have experience with Linux kernel and LLVM development, which was needed to add support for those security features.

Publications

CCS

BLACKOUT: Data-Oblivious Computation with Blinded Capabilities

H ElAtali, M Gülmez, T Nyman, and N Asokan

In ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2025

arXiv
CacheSquash: Making caches speculation-aware

H ElAtali, and N Asokan

arXiv preprint, 2025

arXiv

SecDev

BliMe Linter

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

In IEEE Secure Development Conference (SecDev), 2024

arXiv Bib

@inproceedings{blimeLinter24,
  title = {BliMe Linter},
  author = {ElAtali, H and Duan, X and Liljestrand, H and Xu, M and Asokan, N},
  booktitle = {IEEE Secure Development Conference (SecDev)},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.1109/SecDev61143.2024.00011},
  journal = {arXiv preprint},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.CR},
}

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},
}