Abdullah Giray Yağlıkçı successfully defends his PhD

We’d like to wish a very warm congratulations to Abdullah Giray Yağlıkçı on his successful PhD defense.  Giray defended his thesis “Enabling Efficient and Scalable DRAM Read Disturbance Mitigation via New Experimental Insights into Modern DRAM Chips” on April 30, 2024 (online).

In his PhD work, Giray made significant contributions to hardware security with a special focus on DRAM robustness and performance, in particular, on better understanding and solving the RowHammer vulnerability.

The core contributions of Giray’s thesis include:

  1. building a detailed understanding of DRAM read disturbance
    MICRO’21, A Deeper Look into RowHammer’s Sensitivities
    DSN’22, Understanding RowHammer Under Reduced Wordline Voltage
  2. leveraging insights into modern DRAM chips and memory controllers
    HPCA’24, Svärd: Leveraging heterogeneity
    MICRO’22, HiRA: Parallelizing Preventive Actions
  3. devising novel solutions that do not require proprietary knowledge of DRAM chip internals
    HPCA’21, BlockHammer: Selectively throttling unsafe accesses

His work on BlockHammer was named as a finalist by Intel in 2021 for the Intel Hardware Security Academic Award, and his work on Svärd received first place in the ACM SRC at PACT 2023.  Giray’s dissertation was also selected as one of the five finalists in the IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST) 2024 conference PhD competition.

PhD Supervisor: Prof. Onur Mutlu

PhD Committee:
Chair: Prof. Kaveh Razavi, COMSEC group, ETH Zurich
Committee members:
Prof. Norbert Wehn, University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU)
Prof. Daniel Gruss, TU Graz
Dr. Stefan Saroiu, Microsoft Azure

Abdullah Giray Yağlıkçı (defended 30 April 2024)
Thesis title: Enabling Efficient and Scalable DRAM Read Disturbance Mitigation via New Experimental Insights into Modern DRAM Chips
[Slides (pdf) (pptx)]
[Thesis arXiv (abs) (pdf)]
[SAFARI News]
Intel Hardware Security Academic Award 2021, finalist
ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) at PACT 2023, first place 
IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST) 2024 PhD competition, finalist

We recently interviewed Giray on his work, you can read more here: https://safari.ethz.ch/meet-our-members-giray-yaglikci-discusses-his-phd-work-rowhammer-and-future-plans/

Related PhD works:
For a full list of all Giray’s papers and all related links, see his website.

Lois Orosa,* A. Giray Yağlıkçı,* Haocong Luo, Ataberk Olgun, Jisung Park, Hasan Hassan, Minesh Patel, Jeremie S. Kim, and Onur Mutlu, “A Deeper Look into RowHammer’s Sensitivities: Experimental Analysis of Real DRAM Chips and Implications on Future Attacks and Defenses,” in MICRO, 2021. ∗contributed equally to this work. [arXiv version]

A. Giray Yağlıkçı, Haocong Luo, Geraldo F. de Oliveira, Ataberk Olgun, Minesh Patel, Jisung Park, Hasan Hassan, Jeremie S. Kim, Lois Orosa, and Onur Mutlu, “Understanding RowHammer Under Reduced Wordline Voltage: An Experimental Study Using Real DRAM Devices,” in DSN, 2022 [arXiv version]

A. Giray Yağlıkçı, Minesh Patel, Jeremie S. Kim, Roknoddin Azizi, Ataberk Olgun, Lois Orosa, Hasan Hassan, Jisung Park, Konstantinos Kanellopoulos, Taha Shahroodi, Saugata Ghose, and Onur Mutlu, “BlockHammer: Preventing RowHammer at Low Cost by Blacklisting Rapidly-Accessed DRAM Rows,” in HPCA, 2021. [arXiv version]

A. Giray Yağlıkçı, Ataberk Olgun, Minesh Patel, Haocong Luo, Hasan Hassan, Lois Orosa, Oguz Ergin, and Onur Mutlu, “HiRA: Hidden Row Activation for Reducing Refresh Latency of Off-the-Shelf DRAM Chips,” in MICRO, 2022. [arXiv version]

A. Giray Yağlıkçı, Geraldo Francisco de Oliveira, Yahya Can Tugrul, Ismail Yuksel, Ataberk Olgun, Haocong Luo, and Onur Mutlu, “Spatial Variation-Aware Read Disturbance Defenses: Experimental Analysis of Real DRAM Chips and Implications on Future Solutions,” in HPCA, 2024.  [IEEE Xplore] [Slides (pptx) (pdf)[arXiv version]

Oğuzhan Canpolat, A. Giray Yağlıkçı, Ataberk Olgun, İsmail Emir Yüksel, Yahya Can Tuğrul, Konstantinos Kanellopoulos, Oğuz Ergin, Onur Mutlu, “BreakHammer: Leveraging Adversarial Detection to Enable Scalable and Low Overhead RowHammer Mitigations” [preprint on arXiv].

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Awards, Papers, PhD Defense, RowHammer.