Dr. Shuai Wang Awarded the Google Research Scholar Award

Dr. Shuai Wang has won the highly competitive Google Research Scholar Award (previously known as the "Google Faculty Award") with his research proposal titled "Exploiting and Mitigating Side Channels in AI Infrastructures" under the "Security" category. He is entitled to USD 35,000 support grant for the proposal.

Dr. Wang proposes to developing effective techniques and systems to uncover side-channel vulnerabilities in AI infrastructures, and systematically understand their security implications. Additionally, He will lead the design, optimize and implement countermeasures to secure AI infrastructures from side-channel attacks.

This proposal plans to leverage recent advances in contrastive learning to deliver low-cost MI estimation toward large AI infrastructures. It present some private images and text recovered from side channel traces in Figure 1(b). Additionally, the PI's existing research has found side channel vulnerabilities in production software including OpenSSL, Libgcrypt, GnuPG, Botan, and WolfSSL. The SCA analysis tools developed by the PI and his students have been adopted by the Botan and WolfSSL developer teams to continuously benchmark recent versions of their software.

The Google Research Scholar Program aims to support early career professors who are conducting research in academic fields that related to Google. With an emphasis on sponsoring top-notch research carried out by junior faculty members, it offers unlimited grants of up to USD 60,000 to support research at institutions all around the world.

Dr. Shuai Wang is the assistant professor in the CSE department since 2019. He received his Ph.D in Information Sciences and Technology from Pennsylvania State University in 2018. His research focuses on Computer Security and Privacy, and Software Engineering.

Congratulations to Dr. Shuai Wang!