​Friday Hacks #291

​​Friday Hacks, by NUS Hackers, is a weekly event where invited speakers share their technical experiences and interests! In this week's session, we have:

​Talk 1 (7pm): Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, How I Wonder Myself to Space

​In this talk, Zhen Ning will be sharing how he ended up building a space company in Singapore and a little about the technical challenges faced along the way. He would be sharing his life experiences and how wondering about things got him into this field.

​Speaker Profile

​Zhen Ning graduated from NUS with a degree in Engineering Science Programme. Upon graduation, he worked at DSO National Laboratories before returning to NUS as a Research Engineer working on cubesatellites. In 2018, NuSpace was founded with a mission to provide affordable connectivity to remote locations.

​Talk 2 (8pm): How a CPU Performance Feature Became a Security Vulnerability

​Modern CPUs are built for speed, using techniques like pipelining, caching, and branch prediction. But these same features can also create surprising security problems.

​We start with the basic architectural ideas behind modern processors and build an intuitive picture of how speculative execution helps CPUs run quickly. We then show how attackers can turn these mechanisms against the system, using transient execution attacks such as Spectre to leak information that should have remained secret.

​In the final part, we discuss how new vulnerabilities were found using model-based relational testing, a discovery that triggered a nearly two-year embargo while hardware vendors prepared mitigations.

​Speaker Profile

​Flavien Solt is an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the SLICE Lab at UC Berkeley. He received his PhD from ETH Zurich in 2024 and was recognized with the ETH Medal.

​See you there!