Michael Schwarz

Michael Schwarz

Faculty

I’m a tenured faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Saarbrücken, Germany, with a focus on microarchitectural side-channel attacks and system security. I obtained my PhD with the title "Software-based Side-Channel Attacks and Defenses in Restricted Environments" in 2019 from Graz University of Technology (advised by Daniel Gruss).

CV

Faculty

CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

2020 – current

Postdoctoral researcher

Graz University of Technology

2019 – 2020

PhD

Graz University of Technology

2016 – 2019

Publications

Talks

Trainings

Awards

2025

Distinguished Artifact Award
ExfilState: Automated Discovery of Timer-Free Cache Side Channels on ARM CPUs
CCS October 13, 2025
Distinguished Artifact Award
Cascading Spy Sheets: Exploiting the Complexity of Modern CSS for Email and Browser Fingerprinting
NDSS February 23, 2025

2023

Best Paper Award
CustomProcessingUnit: Reverse Engineering and Customization of Intel Microcode
WOOT May 25, 2023

2022

Pwnie Award for Best Desktop Bug
ÆPIC Leak: Architecturally Leaking Uninitialized Data from the Microarchitecture
Black Hat USA August 10, 2022

2021

Best Paper Award
Automating Seccomp Filter Generation for Linux Applications
CCSW November 14, 2021