Dear Computer Architecture Community,
We take this opportunity to invite you all to the first-ever edition of the IEEE International Symposium on Secure and Private Execution Environment Design (SEED). This blog post will provide an overview of the inaugural edition of IEEE SEED 2021 and its program. The conference is sponsored by TCCA and will be held virtually. The technical program consists of a total of 26 papers accepted and two keynote talks.
There were four categories for submission: (1) regular papers with 11 pages, (2) Systemization of Knowledge (SoK) papers with 11 pages, (3) Seeds of SEED papers with 6 pages, or (4) Work in Progress (WiP) papers with 6 pages. The primary focus of the regular papers was to describe new research ideas overlapping computer architecture/systems and security, supported by experimental implementation and evaluation of the proposed research ideas. Systemization of Knowledge (SoK) papers would mainly evaluate, systematize and contextualize existing knowledge on computer system security research topics. The primary focus of “Seeds of SEED” was to describe the promising designs, initial development, and preliminary evaluation of new ideas critical to the security of future architecture/systems. Contributions from industry, that bring awareness to a new security problem and/or lay vision for sound architecture/systems security principles, were especially encouraged for Seeds of SEED papers. Work-in-Progress (WiP) papers describe novel secure systems designs supported by experiments. For papers accepted under the WiP category, the authors were informed that they would be given an opportunity to present at the conference and receive feedback and that only the title and a brief abstract will be displayed on the conference website. This was done to help these ideas mature into full-length papers in the future.
The SEED program committee reviewed a total of 33 submissions, along with 10 invited submissions from a broad spectrum of computer architecture and systems research communities. The review committee consisted of 28 members. Paper review assignments were made by carefully taking the conflict of interest into account. Each regular submission received at least 3 reviews. Additional reviews were solicited for papers that did not have consistent scoring across the reviewers. There was also extensive post-review online discussion among the reviewers to seek all of their opinions. Final decisions for each paper were made through unanimous consent among all of those who had reviewed the submission. If a subset of reviews pointed to major concerns that cannot be addressed before the conference but the submission had shown a good potential overall, we sought the authors’ feedback on whether they were willing to present the work as a WiP paper. In the end, 13 papers were accepted as the regular full-length papers, along with 10 Seeds of SEED and 3 WiP papers. The program captures many of the recent trends in computer systems and architecture security, while also representing some of the more classical themes. Privacy-enhancing computing has been an emerging topic to capture the community’s attention, and we will have a roundtable session on this topic. The program also includes papers on many recent topics that address side channels, memory systems, and safety. The first keynote by Prof. Milos Prvulovic of Georgia Tech will reflect upon the analog side channels that are far less understood and present greater dangers in the future. The second keynote by Prof. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi of TU Darmstadt will discuss the future of the Trusted Execution Environment and their requirement to address the ever-changing security landscape.
We take this opportunity to thank everyone who helped us put together the SEED’21 technical program. We thank all the authors for their submissions to SEED. We could not have put together such a strong program without the hard work of the program committee. They were generous with their time by providing detailed and insightful reviews and actively participated in the subsequent online discussions. We thank the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA) Executive committee for supporting our venture to inaugurate the SEED conference. We express our sincere thanks to Prof. Jakub Szefer and Prof. Yan Solihin, the General Chairs, for their meticulous efforts to organize the first edition of the SEED conference and all of their help with its organization. We express our special thanks to Dr. Wenjie Xiong, the publications chair for compiling the proceedings. Finally, we would like to thank all the attendees and offer our warm welcome to this inaugural edition of the SEED conference. We sincerely hope that you will enjoy, learn, and benefit from the program that we have put together.
Guru Prasadh Venkataramani, George Washington University
Yinqian Zhang, SUSTech
Inaugural SEED 2021 Program Chairs