Mengyuan LI Email: li.7533@osu.edu EDUCATION BACKGROUND Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) 09/2012-06/2016 Major: Information Engineering Department: Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering Degree: Bachelor of Science (Jun.2016) Ohio State University (OSU) 08/2016-Present Major: Computer Science and Engineering Department: Computer Science and Engineering Expected Degree: Ph.D RESEARCH INTERESTS & COMPUTER SKILLS Interested Areas: System Security, Cloud security, Hardware security, Side-channel attacks, Confidential computing, Network security Computer Language: JAVA, C Language, Python, Lab VIEW, MATLAB, FPGA, etc. SELECTED PUBLICATIONS ⚫ Mengyuan Li*, Luca Wilke*, Jan Wichelmann, Thomas Eisenbarth, Radu Teodorescu, Yinqian Zhang, “A Systematic Look at Ciphertext Side Channels”. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) 2022. ⚫ Shixuan Zhao, Mengyuan Li, Yinqian Zhang, and Zhiqiang Lin, “vSTX: Virtualizing SGX Enclaves on AMD SEV”. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) 2022. ⚫ Mengyuan Li, Yinqian Zhang, Huibo Wang, Kang Li, and Yueqiang Cheng, “TLB Poisoning Attacks on AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization”. In 2021 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC 2021). ⚫ Mengyuan Li, Yinqian Zhang, and Zhiqiang Lin, “CROSSLINE: Breaking ''Security-by-Crash'' based Memory Isolation in AMD SEV”. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2021. Nov. 2021 (Best Paper Candidate). ⚫ Mengyuan Li, Yinqian Zhang, Huibo Wang, Kang Li, and Yueqiang Cheng, “CIPHERLEAKS: Breaking Constant-time Cryptography on AMD SEV via the Ciphertext Side Channel”. In 30th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 21), 717-732. 2021. Website: CIPHERLEAKs. ⚫ Mengyuan Li, Yinqian Zhang, Zhiqiang Lin, and Yan Solihin, “Exploiting Unprotected I/O Operations in AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization”. In 28th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 19), pp. 1257-1272. 2019. ⚫ Guoxing Chen, Mengyuan Li, Fengwei Zhang, and Yinqian Zhang, “Defeating Speculative-Execution Attacks on SGX with HyperRace”. In 2019 IEEE Conference on Dependable and Secure Computing (DSC), pp. 1-8. IEEE, 2019. ⚫ Liang Wang, Mengyuan Li, Yinqian Zhang, Thomas Ristenpart, Michael Swift , “Peeking Behind the Curtains of Serverless Platforms”. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC), Boston, MA, USA, Jul. 2018. ⚫ Yuan Xiao, Mengyuan Li, Sanchuan Chen, Yinqian Zhang, “Stacco: Differentially Analyzing Side-Channel Traces for Detecting SSL/TLS Vulnerabilities in Secure Enclaves”. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2017, Dallas, Texas, USA, Oct. 2017. ⚫ Mengyuan Li, Yan Meng, Junyi Liu, Haojin Zhu, Xiaohui Liang, Yao Liu, Na Ruan, “When CSI Meets Public WiFi: Inferring Your Mobile Phone Password via WiFi Signals”. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2016. RESEARCH EXPERIENCE Graduate Research Assistant, System Security Lab at OSU Supervisor: Prof. Yinqian Zhang 09/2017-Present ⚫ A systematic study of Ciphertext Side Channel - Systematically study the ciphertext side channel in the entire memory of SEV-protected VMs. It shows that the ciphertext side channel can be exploited in all memory regions, including kernel structures, stacks, and heaps. - Present end-to-end ciphertext side-channel attacks against the ECDSA implementation of the OpenSSL library. Other main cryptography libraries (including OpenSSL, WolfSSL, GnuTLS, OpenSSH, and libgcrypt) are also shown to be vulnerable to the ciphertext side channel. - Show ciphertext side channel’s threat to all TEEs with deterministic encryption. Present a kernel patch to mitigate ciphertext side channels caused by kernel structures. The ciphertext side channel can be mitigated when adopting both the kernel patch together with software fixes from cryptographic libraries. ⚫ Virtualizing SGX Enclaves on AMD SEV - Present vSGX, a new system that allows the SGX execution atop AMD SEV enhancing enclave applications' inter-TEE operability in a virtualized environment. - vSGX achieves comparable security guarantees to SGX to allow secure execution of SGX enclaves, while preserving the benefits of being protected by SEV. ⚫ TLB Poisoning Attacks in AMD SEV - Demystify AMD SEV's TLB management mechanisms, which have never been studied and reported in-depth, and identifies a severe flaw of its design of TLB isolation that leads to misuse of TLBs under the assumption of a malicious or compromised hypervisor. - Present a novel category of attacks against SEV, namely TLB Poisoning Attacks, which manipulate the TLB entries shared by two processes within the same SEV VM and breach the integrity and confidentiality of one of the processes. ⚫ Exploiting Ciphertext Side Channel in AMD SEV-SNP - Present a novel ciphertext side channel on SEV processors. This discovery identifies a fundamental flaw in the SEV's use of XEX mode memory encryption. - Propose a new CIPHERLEAKs attack that exploits the ciphertext side channel to infer register values from encrypted VMSA. - Present successful attacks against the constant-time RSA and ECDSA implementation of the latest OpenSSL library, which has been considered secure against side channels. ⚫ Breaking ''Security-by-Crash'' based Memory Isolation in AMD SEV - Demystify AMD SEV’s ASID- based isolation for encrypted memory pages, cache lines, and TLB entries. - Propose the CROSSLINE attacks, a novel class of attacks against SEV that allow the adversary to launch an attacker VM and change its ASID to that of the victim VM to impersonate the victim. ⚫ Exploiting Unprotected I/O Operations in AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization - Exploit the insecurity of SEV from the perspective of the unprotected I/O operations. - Construct a memory decryption oracle and memory encryption oracle, which enable attacker to extract guest VM’s memory content protected by SEV or replace guest’s memory blocks. ⚫ Peeking Behind the Curtains of Serverless Platforms - Explore mainstream serverless computing services. Examples include AWS Lambda, Azure Fcuntions and Google Cloud Functions. - Conduct measurement study of more than 50,000 function instances in order to characterize their architectures, performance and resource management efficiency. - Explain how those platforms isolate the functions and characterize performance in terms of scalability, coldstart latency and resource efficiency. ⚫ Stacco: Side-channel Vulnerability Detection of SSL/TLS in Secure Enclaves - Build a Side-channel Trace Analyzer for finding Chosen-Ciphertext Oracles (Stacco). - Stacco is a software framework for conducting differential analysis on the SSL/TLS implementations to detect sensitive control-flow vulnerabilities that can be exploited to create decryption oracles for CBC padding oracle attacks and Bleichenbacher attacks. Open-sourced at https://github.com/OSUSecLab/Stacco SERVICE ⚫ Reviewer o IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC) ⚫ External Reviewer o IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland) o ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) o USENIX Security Symposium o ISOC Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)