We comprise a group of individuals that are passionate about building computer systems with the following properties:

  • Secure: Software like the operating system and hypervisors operate at higher privileges than the rest, and are relied upon to enforce data protection in enterprise computers. Yet, hundreds of vulnerabilities are discovered in such software each year. Our research improves the security of system software with novel abstractions for protection and fine-grained attack investigation.

  • Trusted: In some scenarios, privileged system software like the operating system kernel and hypervisor may be controlled by untrusted individuals. One important scenario for this is computations running on cloud machines where system software is configured by cloud employees. Our systems guarantee computational confidentiality and integrity in such cases.

  • Reliable: The secure and trustworthy nature of a system depends on important assumptions about the reliability of its software and hardware components to correctly execute. For instance, memory errors in sofware can lead to crashes that invalidate the availability property of the system. Our research enables efficient and automated techniques to test these assumptions.

And that is why we are called the ASU Trusted, Reliable, and Secure Computing (ASTeRiSC) Research Lab!

ASTeRiSC operates out of the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence (SCAI) and is directed by Adil Ahmad.

❗ We are actively looking to hire PhD students for exciting systems and security research projects. If you are interested in working in this area, please reach out through email.

Recent Updates

  • Over 43 middle-school students attended our 2nd Desert CodeSprouts Workshop (detailed article coming soon).

  • Santosh successfully defended his MS thesis on secure gaming architectures (release coming soon)!

  • Registration is now open for the 2nd Desert CodeSprouts Workshop! Please visit our website for more information.

  • ✈️ Chuqi will be travelling to ACM EuroSys 2025 to present our work. Please connect with him there!

  • Our EuroSys paper's code artifact is evaluated to be available and functional. Congratulations Chuqi and Rahul!

  • Rahul presented his first poster at ISOC NDSS 2025!

  • ✈️ Rahul and Adil will be travelling to ISOC NDSS 2025. See you all there!

  • One paper accepted to appear at ACM EuroSys 2025! Congratulations to Chuqi, Rahul, and all collaborators.

  • Adil gave a talk at Seoul National University (SNU) on our recent research endeavours towards designing a secure logging infrastructure for mission-critical computers.

  • One paper and one poster accepted to appear at ISOC NDSS 2025! Congratulations to Rahul, Chuqi, and all collaborators.

  • Pooyan Fazli, Hasti Seifi, and Adil Ahmad have received a 2024 Google ExploreCSR award to expand our outreach activities (including the Desert CodeSprouts Workshop). Thanks Google!

  • One paper was accepted to appear at ACM CCS 2024! Congratulations to Chuqi and all my collaborators. You can find the research artifact on GitHub.

  • Intel has donated data center equipment to our research lab to help pursue secure enclave-related research. Thanks Intel!

  • Read all about the Desert CodeSprouts Workshop in this news article.

  • Organized the 1st Desert CodeSprouts Workshop for Middle-School Students in the Greater Phoenix area. Thank you to all the participants, coordinators, volunteers, and especially the workshop co-founder (Prof. Hasti Seifi). Special thanks to the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence (SCAI) and the American Cybersecurity Education (ACE) Institute for co-sponsoring this event. Please stay tuned for future workshop events at our website!

Recent Publications (... All)

   Erebor: A Drop-In Sandbox Solution for Private Data Processing in Untrusted Confidential Virtual Machines [paper | TBC]

     C. Zhang, R. Priolkar, Y. Jiang, Y. Xiao, M. Vij, Z. Liang, and A. Ahmad (ACM EuroSys 2025)

   Secure Data Analytics in Apache Spark with Fine-grained Policy Enforcement and Isolated Execution [paper]

     B. Kim, J. Hur, A. Ahmad, and B. Lee (ISOC NDSS 2025)

   The HitchHiker's Guide to High-Assurance System Observability Protection with Fast Permission Switches [paper | slides | code]

     C. Zhang, J. Zeng, Y. Zhang, A. Ahmad, F. Zhang, H. Jin, and Z. Liang (ACM CCS 2024)

   Veil: A Protected Services Framework for Confidential Virtual Machines [paper | slides | code]

     A. Ahmad, B. Ou, C. Liu, X. Zhang, and P. Fonseca (ACM ASPLOS 2024)

   An Extensible Orchestration and Protection Framework for Confidential Cloud Computing [paper]

     A. Ahmad, A. Shultz, B. Lee, and P. Fonseca (USENIX OSDI 2023)

Sponsors

We remain thankful to the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Google Research, and Intel Labs for support our research and education efforts.