Department of Computer Science announces promotion of five faculty members

The Department of Computer Science is pleased to announce the promotions of the following faculty members, effective July 1, 2025:

• Murat Erdogdu promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure

• Fan Long promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure

• Kirill Serkh promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure

• Bo Wang promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure

• Tovi Grossman promoted to the rank of full Professor

University of Toronto team discovers vulnerability at hardware-software boundary in cloud systems

From left to right: David Lie, director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute, Gururaj Saileshwar, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, and Yuqin Yan, a student at the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, discovered a security flaw in AMD’s cloud protection technology, revealing how interactions between hardware and software can expose sensitive data. (Photos: provided)

Cloud computing has become an essential part of our everyday lives, both personally and professionally. Whether it’s storing family photos, running a business or training cutting-edge AI models, we rely on remote servers to keep our data safe and secure and trust that it won’t be modified in any way.

Although storing information in the cloud exposes data to potential risks, hardware vendors like AMD mitigate these risks by collaborating with major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, to provide hardware-level protection that is meant to keep data secure and confidential even if the cloud provider experiences a security breach.

However, a team of University of Toronto researchers led by David Lie, director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute (SRI) and Gururaj Saileshwar, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, and executed by Yuqin Yan, a student at the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE), found a flaw in these systems. They discovered that the complex interactions between the software that the cloud providers run, and the hardware-level protection, leads to new security challenges and vulnerabilities.

“Unlike most security vulnerabilities that are found in either the hardware or the software, what sets this discovery apart is that it was found in the interplay between the software and AMD’s hardware” said Lie, who is cross-appointed to the Department of Computer Science. “In this case, it was found when the hypervisor and central processing unit (CPU) interacted.”

We can think of a hypervisor as the “virtual landlord” of AMD’s chips. It is software that “rents” out computing resources, such as memory, to the cloud customer “tenants” allowing various customer workloads to run securely, independently and confidentially on its CPU.

AMD’s confidential computing technology is designed to protect such tenants in the event that the landlord is controlled by a malicious entity; in other words, if it is hacked. It encrypts data in a way that depends on its location within memory, so if the same data is stored in two places, it is encrypted completely differently. That makes it difficult for the hypervisor to know anything about the data or track it across locations, increasing the security of the data.

“The system lets the hypervisor move data around to manage memory efficiently,” explained Lie. “So when data is relocated, AMD’s hardware decrypts it from the old location and re-encrypts it for the new location. But, what we found was that by doing this over and over again, a malicious hypervisor can learn recurring patterns from within the data, which could lead to privacy breaches.”

Vulnerabilities like this have the potential to affect people and organizations alike.

“These are the kinds of unexpected consequences that come from the complexity of modern systems,” said Saileshwar. “The attack we discovered, which we call Relocate-Vote, shows how that complexity, especially at the boundary between secure hardware and untrusted software, can lead to serious vulnerabilities.”

The majority of the research was performed by ECE student Yuqin Yan. It also included now-graduated ECE student Wei Huang, ECE and SRI Postdoctoral Fellow Ilya Grishchenko, and UBC faculty member Aastha Mehta.

“Our role in academia is to identify vulnerabilities in real systems,” said Saileshwar. “I am proud of the work our team did. We are pleased that Yuqin was able to present this paper at the USENIX Security Symposium in Seattle, Washington.”

Going forward, Saileshwar notes that the consequences of hardware security are only going to grow and affect more organizations over time.

“As we move more of our data to the cloud, hardware security is becoming more important than ever,” said Saileshwar. “Hardware is becoming more complex, it’s adding more features all the time, and we’re relying on its security features even more. We’re placing a lot of trust in hardware, making the research our team is doing at the University of Toronto into hardware security issues more impactful than ever.”

For more information about Relocate-Vote, please visit the project website.

Original story by Andrea Wiseman for the Schwartz Reisman Institute

Alán Aspuru-Guzik honoured with Heinrich Emanuel Merck Award for Computational Sciences

The Heinrich Emanuel Merck Award was awarded to Alán Aspuru-Guzik on June 28, 2025, recognizing groundbreaking innovation in computational sciences.

Alán Aspuru-Guzik talks about the interplay of chemistry and information in Lindau. (photo: supplied)

According to a press release from the science and technology company Merck, the award honours “extraordinary contributions in the integration of advanced computational methods with scientific discovery.” It celebrates current innovators in tribute to namesake Heinrich Emanuel Merck’s legacy of scientific curiosity and innovation.

Aspuru-Guzik is jointly appointed as Professor at the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Computer Science. Receiving the prize in Lindau, Switzerland, he said, “My research interests are in areas that are poised to disrupt the chemical sciences. We have pioneered algorithms for near-term quantum computers, artificial intelligence and robotics for new materials. Recently, we have focused strongly on AI agents that do science.”

“Receiving the Heinrich Emanuel Merck Award is a testament to the exceptionally talented, motivated and collaborative Matter Lab research group that we have assembled at the University of Toronto.”

Laura Matz, chief science and technology officer at Merck, also spoke of cooperation and collaboration, “Today we celebrate not just individual achievement, but a vision for a future where scientific breakthroughs transform lives and create new pathways for innovation.”

Aspuru-Guzik was lauded at the event as “a leading researcher, at the intersection of quantum information, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, automation and chemistry, dedicated to accelerating scientific discovery and finding novel materials.”

“His work includes utilizing generative machine learning to optimize wave functions for quantum simulations,” read the press release. “Additionally, he has made significant contributions in creating self-driving laboratories (SDLs) that leverage Al and automation.”

The Matter Lab’s innovative work, it noted, includes integrating quantum components into drug discovery pipelines, showcasing the potential of hybrid quantum-classical systems in generating viable drug candidates.

Aspuru-Guzik delivered a talk at the Lindau award ceremony, entitled, “The materials for tomorrow, today.” In it, he argued that the interplay between chemistry and information started four billion years ago and continues evolving thanks to the availability of AI algorithms. "Eventually they become autonomous research scientists."

— Original story by Alyx Dellamonica for the Department of Chemistry

U of T computer scientists highlighted in BetaKit's 'Most Ambitious' issue

(Photo: Matthew Volpe)

More than two dozen startups and entrepreneurs from the University of Toronto community are recognized in BetaKit’s first ‘Most Ambitious’ issue.

The online tech publication’s special issue aims to spotlight the “big swings” taken in tech and innovation in Canada.

Of the 85 tech players mentioned in the issue, nearly one third have a connection to U of T.

Among the people and companies recognized with ties to the Department of Computer Science are:

• Waabi, the autonomous trucking company founded by Professor Raquel Urtasun

• Cohere, the enterprise AI company launched by alumni Nick Frosst and Aidan Gomez; and former computer science student Ivan Zhang

• Associate Professor Jimmy Ba, founding member of xAI

• Alumnus and recent honorary degree recipient Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, and more recently, Safe SuperIntelligence

“This list demonstrates just how integral U of T-affiliated companies are to Canada’s innovation landscape in crucial fields ranging from sustainability and space tech to health care and transportation,” says Leah Cowen, vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives.

“The university has long been committed to generating big ideas and game-changing research — and then providing the support necessary for ambitious entrepreneurs to move those discoveries out of the lab and into the world where they can have the most impact.”

With files from U of T Celebrates