Princeton University

School of Engineering & Applied Science

Ruby Lee

Forrest G. Hamrick Professor in Engineering

Professor of Electrical Engineering


Room: B218 Engineering Quadrangle
Phone: 609-258-1426
Email: rblee@princeton.edu
Webpage: Lee Lab: PALMS Security Lab

Education

  • Ph.D., Stanford University, 1980
  • M.S., Computer Science and Computer Engineering Stanford University, 1975
  • A.B. (with distinction), Computer Science and Comparative Literature, College Scholar program, Cornell University, 1973

My research interests lie in the areas of computer architecture, computer security and multimedia architecture. My current research focuses on trustworthy computer architecture and multicore security for facilitating secure and resilient systems. I investigate hardware-enhanced security for secure Cloud Computing, secure virtualization and mobile security. I also study how to design more trustworthy hardware subsystems with the goal of improving security and performance simultaneously. This includes, for example, secure cache architectures that do not leak information through software cache-based side-channels, while improving overall cache performance. My work includes minimal software-hardware Trusted Computing Bases, hardware trust anchors, mitigating processor-induced covert and side channels, wireless security and security validation. I am also investigating self-protecting data, no-overhead cryptography, bio-inspired defenses, and the mitigation of Internet and wireless epidemics. While I investigate clean-slate architecture to show the possibilities for future systems, I also investigate architectures with minimal changes to the computing ecosystem for faster deployment, based on my extensive industrial experience in the design of computer products, microprocessors and instruction-set architecture. My research also involves the design of high-performance microprocessors, including very fast permutation and advanced bit manipulation instructions useful for cryptography, multimedia and communications. In the manycore processor chip era, I am also interested in new models for ubiquitous parallelism that are inherently secure and trustworthy.

Honors and Awards

  • Best Paper Award at IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOMM '09)
  • Best Paper Award at IEEE International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (2006)
  • Best Paper Award at IEEE International Conference on Information Technology: Research and Education (ITRE 2003)
  • Best Paper Award at Design Technology Conference (1986)
  • Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE), 2002, for contributions to general purpose processor architectures
  • Elected Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), 2001, for pioneering multimedia instructions in general-purpose processor architecture and innovations in the design and implementation of the instruction set architecture of RISC processors

Selected Publications

  1. Eric Keller, Jakub Szefer, Jennifer Rexford, and Ruby B. Lee, "NoHype: Virtualized cloud infrastructure without the virtualization," Proceedings of the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA’10), pages 350-357, June 2010. Selected as one of three Out-of-Box papers.

  2. Champagne, D., Lee, R.B., "Scalable Architectural Support for Trusted Software", Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA’10), January 2010.

  3. Tian Lan, Ruby B. Lee, Mung Chiang, "Multi-path Key Establishment Against REM Attacks in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks", Communications and Information Security Symposium, IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Nov/Dec 2009.

  4. Chen, Y., Lee, R.B., "Hardware-Assisted Application-Level Access Control", Information Security Conference (ISC ’09), September 2009.

  5. Hilewitz, Y., Lee, R.B., "A New Basis for Shifters in General-Purpose Processors for Existing and Advanced Bit Manipulations", IEEE Transactions on Computing, vol. 58, issue 8, August 2009.

  6. Elbaz, R., Champagne, D., Gebotys, C., Lee, R.B., Potlapally, N., Torres, L., "Hardware Mechanisms for Memory Authentication: A Survey of Existing Techniques and Engines", Transactions on Computational Science IV, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), issue 5340, pp. 1-22, Special Issue on Security in Computing. March 2009.

  7. Zhenghong Wang and Ruby B. Lee, “A Novel Cache Architecture with Enhanced Performance and Security,” Proceedings of the 41st. Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (Micro-41), pp. 83-93, November 2008.

  8. Yedidya Hilewitz and Ruby B. Lee, “Fast Bit Gather, Bit Scatter and Bit Permutation Instructions for Commodity Microprocessors,” Journal of Signal Processing Systems, Springer New York, Vol. 53, Numbers 1-2, pp. 145-169, November 2008.

  9. Jeffrey S Dwoskin, Ruby B. Lee, "Hardware-rooted Trust for Secure Key Management and Transient Trust", ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’07), pp. 389-400, October 2007.

  10. Zhenghong Wang and Ruby B. Lee, "New Cache Designs for Thwarting Software Cache-based Side Channel Attacks", Proceedings of the 34th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), pp. 494 - 505, June 2007.

  11. Yedidya Hilewitz, Ruby B. Lee, "Performing Advanced Bit Manipulations Efficiently in General-Purpose Processors", Proceedings of the 18th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH-18), pp. 251-260, June 2007.

  12. Zhenghong Wang and Ruby B. Lee, “Covert and Side Channels due to Processor Architecture,” Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), pp.473-482, December 2006.

  13. Yedidya Hilewitz and Ruby B. Lee, “Fast Bit Compression and Expansion with Parallel Extract and Parallel Deposit Instructions,” Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP ‘06), pp. 65-72, September 2006.

  14. Ruby B. Lee, Peter C. S. Kwan, John Patrick McGregor, Jeffrey Dwoskin, and Zhenghong Wang, “Architecture for Protecting Critical Secrets in Microprocessors, “ Proceedings of the 32nd International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA’05), pp. 2-13, June 2005.

  15. Ruby B. Lee, Zhijie Shi and Xiao Yang. Efficient Permutations for Fast Software Cryptography. IEEE Micro, Vol. 21 No. 6, pp. 56-69, December 2001.

Ruby Lee's Research Interests

Application Thrusts

Core Areas

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