Arafin & Khasawneh Studying GPU Microarchitecture-Based Power Attacks & Countermeasures For AI Data Centers
Md Tanvir Arafin, Assistant Professor, Cyber Security Engineering, College of Engineering and Computing (CEC), and Khaled Khasawneh, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering (CEC), received funding for the project: “GAIA: GPU Microarchitecture-Based Power Attacks and Countermeasures for AI Data Centers.”
They are designing benign-looking microarchitectural attacks that force co-located applications to draw more power or to produce targeted power fluctuations, exploiting power oversubscription to push multi-tenant GPU servers toward instability and failure.
They are also developing and evaluating defense mechanisms built on hardware-software monitoring and load-balancing services such as performance counters and filler kernels.
Additionally, they are building a prototype of a monitoring pipeline that flags anomalous power-driven load before grid-level disruption occurs.
Arafin and Khasawneh received $100,000 from Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation for this work. Funding began in Aug. 2026 and will end in late July 2027.
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