A Chat with Yan Solihin: Director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Cluster, a Pegasus Professor at the University of Central Florida

This week, Stephen Ibaraki has an exclusive interview with Yan Solihin.

Yan Solihin is the Director of Cybersecurity and Privacy Cluster, a Pegasus Professor and a Charles N. Millican Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida. The inter-disciplinary cluster he leads consists of 17 faculty members who collectively advise over 55 PhD students.

Solihin has pioneering work in computer architecture and computer security including cache sharing fairness and Quality of Service (QoS), split counter mode memory encryption, and Bonsai Merkle Tree. This work has significantly influenced Intel Cache Allocation Technology and Secure Guard eXtension (SGX)'s Memory Encryption Engine (MEE). These technologies have been widely deployed in server-class processors. He authored 100+ papers and 50+ US patents, and delivered 80+ invited talks/seminars. IEEE Spectrum, US News, PC World, HPCWire, Slashdot, and others have covered his research. He has written two graduate textbooks.

From 2011 to 2015, Solihin was a patent portfolio technical consultant for Intellectual Ventures, where he advised on technological trends and areas for patent acquisition investments. From 2015-2018, he was a Program Director at the National Science Foundation co-managing programs that included Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC), Computer Systems Research (CSR), and Scalability and Parallelism in the eXtreme (SPX). He co-founded the NSF/Intel Partnership on Foundational Microarchitecture Research (FoMR) program.

Solihin is an IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow, JSPS Fellow, and NAI Senior Member. He is listed in the ISCA and HPCA Halls of Fame. He received the 2025 Pegasus Faculty Award, the 2023 HPCA Test of Time Award, the 2023 ACM SIGMICRO Distinguished Service Award, IBM Faculty Partnership Awards, NSF Faculty Early Career Award, and AT&T Leadership Award.