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Berk Sunar

Few facts about me: Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Founder of the Vernam Research Lab specializing in applied cryptography and cybersecurity.

My current research interests are in

  • Microarchitectural & Side Channel Attacks
  • AI Security & Security for AI
  • Post-Quantum Cryptography
  • Homomorphic Encryption

Recent Papers

  1. Non-Halting Queries: Exploiting Fixed Points in LLMs,
    G Hammouri, K Derya, B Sunar,
    Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SATML) 2025. arXiv Preprint
  2. Microarchitectural Security of Firecracker VMM for Serverless Cloud Platforms
    Z Weissman, T Tiemann, T Eisenbarth, B Sunar
    International Conference on Information Systems Security, 3-24, 2025. arXiv Preprint
  3. ZeroLeak: Using LLMs for Scalable and Cost Effective Side-Channel Patching
    M. Caner Tol, Berk Sunar
    European Symposium on Research in Computer Security ESORICS, 290-310, 2024. arXiv Preprint arXiv:2308.13062
  4. FAULT+ PROBE: A Generic Rowhammer-based Bit Recovery Attack
    K Derya, MC Tol, B Sunar
    arXiv Preprint 2024.
  5. LeapFrog: The Rowhammer Instruction Skip Attack
    A Adiletta, C Tol, B Sunar
    arXiv Preprint, 2024.
  6. Analysis of EM fault injection on bit-sliced number theoretic transform software in dilithium
    R Singh, S Islam, B Sunar, P Schaumont
    ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems 23 (2), 1-27, 2024
  7. Mayhem: Targeted Corruption of Register and Stack Variables
    AJ Adiletta, MC Tol, Y Doröz, B Sunar
    arXiv Preprint, 2024.
  8. IOTLB-SC: An Accelerator-Independent Leakage Source in Modern Cloud Systems
    T Tiemann, Z Weissman, T Eisenbarth, B Sunar,
    AsiaCCS 2023, arXiv Preprint arXiv:2202.11623v1
  9. Jolt: Recovering TLS Signing Keys via Rowhammer Faults
    K Mus, Y Doröz, MC Tol, K Rahman, B Sunar
    IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) 2023. ePrint Preprint
  10. Signature Correction Attack on Dilithium Signature Scheme
    S Islam, K Mus, R Singh, P Schaumont, B Sunar,
    7th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2022
  11. An End-to-End Analysis of EMFI on Bit-sliced Post-Quantum Implementations
    Richa Singh, Saad Islam, Berk Sunar, Patrick Schaumont
    ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems 2023 arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.06153
  12. Don’t Knock! Rowhammer at the Backdoor of DNN Models
    MC Tol, S Islam, B Sunar, Z Zhang
    IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Network (IEEE IFIP DSN 2023) arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.07683 2022