Over the past few years, side channels have emerged as particularly powerful and reliable methods to attack computer systems. Deterministic Rowhammer, AnC, Meltdown, and SECTRE have made international news and the search for performance-neutral mitigations continues.

As evidenced by prior work, where software diversity was successfully used to prevent timing-based cache side-channel attacks, diversity generalizes to many attack vectors. Put differently, diversity is versatile. I will present new results of increasing the reach of diversity by presenting a new diversity-based defense against Drammer, and by discussing how diversity plays a vital role in lessening the impact of AnC, Meltdown, and Spectre.

In February 2011, Stefan received a Dr. techn. degree in computer science from the TU Wien under the supervision of Prof. Jens Knoop. Afterward, he was a postdoc at the research group of Prof. Michael Franz from April 2011 until June 2015. Upon returning to Austria, he became Key Researcher with SBA Research in Vienna until he received a call to join Paderborn University as a tenured professor for compilers and programming languages in October 2016. Stefan’s stay at Paderborn was cut short by receiving a call to join the newly established National Research Institute for Cyber Defense CODE in Munich as a full professor, holding the chair for Secure Software Engineering. This chair hosts the newly established SPECTRE lab, which focuses on security, privacy, and performance enhancing compilation techniques research.