[AI Seminar Series] REMINDER: Seminar by Prof. Nael Abu-Ghazaleh, tomorrow Friday October 23rd, 12-1pm, MRB Seminar Room

[Vassilis Tsotras]

Reminder for the AI Seminar tomorrow. Please register using the link below
if you plan to attend.

V. Tsotras
----------------------------

On Sat, Oct 17, 2026 at 12:32 PM Vassilis Tsotras <vassilis.tsotras at ucr.edu>
wrote:

> The next AI Seminar will be on Friday October 23rd, 12-1pm, in the MRB
> Seminar Room (1st floor).
>
> *** Pizza and refreshments will be provided ****
>
> To keep track of the number of attendees, please *register* at:
> https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ai-seminar-series-tickets-2003552138380
>
> The talk will be given by *Prof. Nael Abu-Ghazaleh*, Department of
> Computer Science and Engineering, UCR
>
> TITLE: From Prompts to Silicon: Security and Privacy threats across the
> LLM Stack
>
> ABSTRACT:
> Large language models are now trusted with sensitive data, embedded in
> consequential decision pipelines, and are hosted on shared, expensive
> hardware. These factors make them an increasingly attractive target for
> attacks across their training, inference and deployment pipelines. In this
> talk, we'll go on a tour of LLM security and privacy threats, organized
> around a simple question, looking at different classes of attacks based on
> attackers' access points. I'll start where most people think LLM security
> lives: at the prompt itself, showing how attacker's with malicious intent
> can bypass the model's safety training. A second group of attacks targets
> training time, where an attacker who controls even a small slice of a
> model's training data can plant hidden behaviors that surface only later,
> including those that enable leaking private information or undermining the
> safety alignment of the model. Finally, we'll go below the model entirely,
> to the hardware it runs on: our recent work shows the GPU infrastructure
> powering today's LLMs leaks information across users who are supposed to be
> strongly isolated from each other. Taken together, these attacks show that
> LLM security isn't one problem but several, spread across different layers
> of the stack, including inference time, training time, and hardware and
> system vulnerabilities. I'll conclude with some thoughts about how to
> secure LLM pipelines.
>
>
> Bio:
> Nael Abu-Ghazaleh is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering
> Department at the University of California, Riverside. His research is in
> architecture and system security, and security for emerging systems. He has
> published over 250 papers in these areas, several of which have been
> recognized with best paper awards or nominations. His offensive security
> research has resulted in the discovery of several new attacks on CPUs and
> GPUs that have been disclosed to companies including Intel, AMD, ARM,
> Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia, and resulted in patches and
> modifications to products, and coverage from technical news outlets. He is
> a member of the Micro Hall of Fame, an ACM distinguished member, an IEEE
> distinguished speaker, and an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished
> Contributor.
>
> ------------------------------------
> Sponsored by the RAISE at UCR Institute, the AI Seminar Series presents
> speakers working on cutting edge Foundational AI or applying AI in their
> research. The goal of these seminars is to inform the UCR community about
> current trends in AI research and promote collaborations between faculty
> in this emerging field. These seminars are open to interested faculty and
> graduate/undergraduate students. Please forward this email to other
> colleagues or students in your lab that may be interested. After the
> seminar a discussion will follow for questions, open problems, ideas for
> possible collaborations etc.
>
> Sincerely,
> Vassilis Tsotras
> Professor, CSE Department
> co-Director, RAISE at UCR Institute
>
> Amit Roy-Chowdhury
> Professor, ECE Department
> co-Director, RAISE at UCR Institute
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ucr.edu/pipermail/raise-seminar/attachments/20261022/53bc1f3b/attachment.htm>