My research interest is on the broad area of Security and Privacy with emphasis on hardware support for security and privacy. Specifically, I'm interested in computer architecture, IoT Security, embedded/cyber-physical systems, side-channels, trusted computing and hardware enclaves, and security and privacy in machine learning.

Prior to joining to UCLA, I was a PhD student at the School of Computer Science in Georgia Tech working with Professor Milos Prvulovic and Professor Alenka Zajic where I worked on Securing Computing Systems by Mitigating and Leveraging Side-Channels. I earned my PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2020. Before that, I earned my B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran in 2013. I joined UCLA since July 2020.

NEWS

Best Paper Award, IEEE/ACM MICRO-49, 2016.
IEEE Micro Top Picks Honorable Mention, 2018.
Best Paper Nominee, IEEE/ACM HPCA-26, 2020.
Featured Paper of the Month, IEEE Transactions on Computers Journal, March Issue, 2020.
Second Best Demo Award, IEEE HOST, 2017.

Program Committees

ICCD, 2020
DAC, 2020 (external reviewer)
HASP, 2020 (in conjunction with MICRO'20)
MLArchSys, 2020 (in conjunction with ISCA'20)
EMC2, 2019 (in conjunction with NeurIPS'19)

Journal Reviewer

IEEE Transactions on Computers, 2018-Current
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2019-Current
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I, 2019-Current
ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems, 2020

Selected and Recent Publications

(For the full, and up-to-date, list of publications, please visit my Google Scholar webpage.)
Legends: Conference, Journal

A New Side-Channel Vulnerability on Modern Computers by Exploiting Electromagnetic Emanations from the Power Management Unit.
Nader Sehatbakhsh, Berkay Yilmaz, Alenka Zajic, and Milos Prvulovic.
HPCA'20 (Acceptance Rate: 19.3%)

EMSim: A Microarchitecture-Level Simulation Tool for Modeling Electromagnetic Side-Channel Signals.
Nader Sehatbakhsh, Berkay Yilmaz, Alenka Zajic, and Milos Prvulovic.
HPCA'20 (Acceptance Rate: 19.3%)
Best Paper Nominee

REMOTE: Robust External Malware Detection Framework by Using Electromagnetic Signals.
Nader Sehatbakhsh, Alireza Nazari, Monjur Alam, Frank Werner, Yuanda Zhu, Alenka Zajic, and Milos Prvulovic.
IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC), 2019.
Featured Paper of the Month/Issue (March)

EMMA: Hardware/Software Attestation Framework for Embedded Systems Using Electromagnetic Signals.
Nader Sehatbakhsh, Alireza Nazari, Haider Khan, Alenka Zajic, and Milos Prvulovic.
MICRO'19 (Acceptance Rate: 21%)

Communication Model and Capacity Limits of Covert Channels Created by Software Activities.
Berkay Yilmaz, Nader Sehatbakhsh, Alenka Zajic, and Milos Prvulovic.
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), 2019.

IDEA: Intrusion Detection through Electromagnetic-Signal Analysis for Critical Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems.
Haider Khan, Nader Sehatbakhsh, Luong N. Nguyen, Robert Callan, Arie Yeredor, Milos Prvulovic, and Alenka Zajic.
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2019.

Syndrome: Spectral Analysis for Anomaly Detection on Medical IoT and Embedded Devices.
Nader Sehatbakhsh, Monjur Alam, Alireza Nazari, Alenka Zajic, and Milos Prvulovic.
HOST'18 (Acceptance Rate: 19%)
Second Best Demo Award

A Directive Antenna Based on Conducting Disks for Detecting Unintentional EM Emissions at Large Distances.
Prateek Juyal, Sinan Adibeli, Nader Sehatbakhsh, and Alenka Zajic.
IEEE Transactions on Antenna and Propagations (TAP), 2018.

EDDIE: EM-Based Detection of Deviations in Program Execution.
Alireza Nazari*, Nader Sehatbakhsh*, Alenka Zajic, and Milos Prvulovic.
ISCA'17 (Acceptance Rate: 16%)

Spectral Profiling: Observer-Effect-Free Profiling by Monitoring EM Emanations.
Nader Sehatbakhsh, Alireza Nazari, Alenka Zajic, and Milos Prvulovic.
MICRO'16 (Acceptance Rate: 21%)
Best Paper Award

My research has been focused on improving the security and privacy of a wide range of systems- from modern computers to resource-constrained embedded systems. My work is interdisciplinary, spanning Computer Architecture, Security, Hardware Design, Machine Learning, Digital Signal Processing, and System design. The following describes them in more details.

Side-Channels: developing new methods to discover, model, and mitigate side-channels (both physical and digital/micro-architectural) on modern and embedded processors as well as on emerging technologies (e.g., NVM, PIM, 3D chips, etc.) and domain-specific accelerators.

Embedded and IoT Devices Security: developing efficient hardware-based defense mechanisms for protecting embedded systems, including new methods for establishing trust and attestation, monitoring, verifying, and profiling these resource-constrained systems.

Remote Computation, Trusted Execution Environment, and Enclaves: developing novel HW-SW methods (e.g., by leveraging hardware characteristics of the system, by designing low-overhead TEE, etc.) for secure remote computation (i.e., to securely execute an application remotely) on an untrusted resource-constrained computing device, and/or for securely verifying the status of the device.

Hardware-Support for Privacy-Preserving and Trustworthy Computation by utilizing novel HW-SW-Algorithm co-design methods especially designed for machine-learning applications and infrastructure-as-a-service scenarios.

**If you are interested in working with me please read this **

I'm looking for multiple highly motivated students who are interested in researching at the intersection of security, embedded system/IoT devices, and computer architecture. Ideal candidates should have some level of familiarity with fundamental concepts (or skills) in:

Security: cryptography, privacy-preserving computation, trustworthy and secure ML/AI, secure computation, memory safety, and side-channels,
Computer Architecture: processor design, hardware enclave, and cache/memory,
Programming: Python, C/C++, Micro-Architectural Simulators (e.g., gem5), Verilog.

If you are interested in working with me please use the following guidelines for contacting me (read it carefully please). I will try my best to reply as much emails as I can.

If you are applying for a PhD position, use the following subject for your email: "[PhD] Prospective Student" (it is important to use exactly this, otherwise your email will be filtered in a wrong folder).

If you are a master's or undergraduate student at UCLA, then use: "[BS/MS] Prospective Student"

In your email, please attach (in PDF format) your CV and Transcript (or list your most relevant courses in your CV). Also make sure to list your past and future research interest (either in the body of your email or in your CV).

If you have made it this far, please mention your favorite TV series (or movie) at the end of your email ;) (mine is )

You can find more information about UCLA ECE application requirements here. Good Luck!

Current Students

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