Mengjia Yan

Homer A. Burnell Career Development Professor
Assistant Professor, MIT EECS
The Stata Center, 32G-840
32 Vassar St, Cambridge, MA 02139
mengjiay [at] mit [dot] edu

I’m an assistant professor at MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. My research interest lies in the areas of computer architecture and security, with a focus on side channel attacks and defenses. My group works on exploiting new micro-architectural vulnerabilities and designing comprehensive and efficient defense mechanisms.

Before joining MIT, I earned a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where I worked with Professor Josep Torrellas. I received a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Zhejiang University, China.

I'm looking for highly-motivated PhD, MEng, and UROP students. If you are interested in working together, please read below.
  • PhD and MEng: If you are a current MIT student, feel free to email me to schedule a meeting. For others, I would like to suggest following the normal PhD application process and indicate me as a preferred reader when submitting your application.
  • UROP: If you are a current MIT student, I would recommend filling in this form to help me understand your background. For students interested in summer internship positions, please send me an email with your CV and a statement to describe your past project highlights.

News

  • 11/2021: DAGguise is accepted at ASPLOS 2022.
  • 04/2021: CaSA is selected as a finalist (out of 4) of Intel Hardware Security Academic Award.
  • 03/2021: I am co-organizing the Third Young Architect Workshop (YArch) in conjunction with ASPLOS 2021. Please find the schedule of the workshop here.
  • 02/2021: Received the NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award.
  • 07/2020: CaSA and InvarSpec are accepted at MICRO 2020.
  • 07/2020: STT is selected as a CACM Research Highlight.
  • 06/2020: My PhD thesis "Cache-based Side Channels: Modern Attacks and Defenses" is selected as an honorable mention of the 2020 ACM SIGARCH/IEEE CS TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Award.
  • 05/2020: STT is nominated by SIGMICRO as a CACM Research Highlight.
  • 01/2020: STT and Microscope are selected as MICRO Top Picks 2020.
  • 10/2019: My PhD thesis "Cache-based Side Channels: Modern Attacks and Defenses" is selected for the David J. Kuck Outstanding PhD Thesis Award.
  • 10/2019: "Speculative Taint Tracking (STT): A Comprehensive Protection for Transiently Accessed Secrets" won the best paper award at MICRO 2019.
  • 09/2019: "Cache Telepathy" is accepted at USENIX Security 2020.

Students

PhDs:
  • Peter Deutsch
  • Yuheng Yang
  • Weon Taek Na
  • Joseph Ravichandran
MEngs:
  • Brandon John (w/ Lincoln Lab)
UROPs:
  • Jack Cook
  • Miguel Gomez-Garcia
  • Jay Lang
  • Albert Kwon
  • Jessica Zhang
Alumni:
  • Miles Dai (MEng'21 → Google OpenTitan)

Teaching

  • 6.004 Computation Structures: Spring 2021 (Recitation), Fall 2021
  • 6.823 Computer System Architecture: Spring 2020
  • 6.888 Secure Hardware Design: Fall 2020, Spring 2022

Publications

  • DAGguise: Mitigating Memory Timing Side Channels; Peter W. Deutsch*, Yuheng Yang*, Thomas Bourgeat, Jules Drean, Joel Emer, Mengjia Yan; ASPLOS, 2022.
  • SpecTaint: Speculative Taint Analysis for Discovering Spectre Gadgets; Zhenxiao Qi, Qian Feng, Yueqiang Cheng, Mengjia Yan, Peng Li, Heng Yin, Tao Wei; NDSS, 2021.
    [paper]
  • CaSA: End-to-end Quantitative Security Analysis of Randomly Mapped Caches; Thomas Bourgeat, Jules Drean, Yuheng Yang, Lillian Tsai, Joel Emer, Mengjia Yan; MICRO, 2020.
    Intel Hardware Security Academic Award Finalist
    [paper]
  • Speculation Invariance (InvarSpec): Faster Safe Execution Through Program Analysis; Zirui Zhao, Houxiang Ji, Mengjia Yan, Jiyong Yu, Christopher W. Fletcher, Adam Morrison, Darko Marinov, Josep Torrellas; MICRO, 2020.
    [paper] [slides]
  • Cache Telepathy: Leveraging Shared Resource Attacks to Learn DNN Architectures; Mengjia Yan, Christopher W. Fletcher, Josep Torrellas; USENIX Security, 2020.
    [paper]
  • Speculative Taint Tracking (STT): A Comprehensive Protection for Speculatively Accessed Data; Jiyong Yu, Mengjia Yan, Artem Khyzha, Adam Morrison, Josep Torrellas, Christopher W. Fletcher; MICRO, 2019.
    Best Paper Award
    IEEE Micro's Top Picks 2019
    Communications of the ACM Research Highlight (CACM)
    [paper] [slides] [formal analysis/security proof]
  • SecDir: A Secure Directory to Defeat Directory Side-Channel Attacks; Mengjia Yan, Jen-Yang Wen, Christopher Fletcher, Josep Torrellas; ISCA, 2019.
    [paper] [slides] [poster]
  • MicroScope: Enabling Microarchitectural Replay Attacks; Dimitrios Skarlatos, Mengjia Yan, Bhargava Gopireddy, Read Sprabery, Josep Torrellas, Christopher Fletcher; ISCA, 2019.
    IEEE Micro's Top Picks 2019
    [paper] [slides] [open-source release]
  • Attack Directories, Not Caches: Side Channel Attacks in a Non-Inclusive World; Mengjia Yan, Read Sprabery, Bhargava Gopireddy, Christopher W. Fletcher, Roy Campbell, Josep Torrellas; S&P, 2019.
    [paper] [slides] [poster] [talk video] [HASP workshop slides]
  • InvisiSpec: Making Speculative Execution Invisible in the Cache Hierarchy; Mengjia Yan, Jiho Choi, Dimitrios Skarlatos, Adam Morrison, Christopher W. Fletcher, Josep Torrellas; MICRO, 2018.
    IEEE Micro's Top Picks 2018 Honorable Mention
    [paper] [slides] [poster] [open-source release]
    [corrected version of the paper] [one-page explanation of the correction]
  • UCNN: Exploiting Computational Reuse in Deep Neural Networks via Weight Repetition; Kartik Hegde, Jiyong Yu, Rohit Agrawal, Mengjia Yan, Michael Pellauer, Christopher W. Fletcher; ISCA, 2018.
    [paper]
  • Record-Replay Architecture as a General Security Framework; Yasser Shalabi, Mengjia Yan, Nima Honarmand, Ruby B Lee, Josep Torrellas; HPCA, 2018.
    [paper]
  • Secure Hierarchy-Aware Cache Replacement Policy (SHARP): Defending Against Cache-Based Side Channel Attacks; Mengjia Yan, Bhargava Gopireddy, Thomas Shull, Josep Torrellas; ISCA, 2017.
    [paper] [slides] [poster]
  • ReplayConfusion: Detecting Cache-based Covert Channel Attacks Using Record and Replay; Mengjia Yan, Yasser Shalabi, Josep Torrellas; MICRO, 2016.
    [paper] [slides] [poster]
  • Cache-based Side Channels: Modern Attacks and Defenses; Mengjia Yan; Ph.D. Thesis, 2019.
    2020 ACM SIGARCH/IEEE CS TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Award Honorable Mention
    UIUC David J. Kuck Outstanding PhD Thesis Award
    [thesis]