Working with me

I’m super excited to work with undergrads! Please see below for my expectations.

First, to work with me, feel free to send me an email (or email Chris, though I will be more responsive). Please send me your resume, transcript, and what you are interested in. Note, I have limited mentoring capacity and may turn you down.

If I take you on as a student, you will first complete two microarchitectural attack labs. These labs are design to help train you to think like a microarchitectural attacker and give you a flavor of microarchitectural attacks.

After you complete the two labs, we will have a discussion about potential projects. There are three options: (1) you assist an active project; (2) you validate existing results (and maybe find something wrong / weird); or (3) you lead an independent project. For those new to research, I suggest doing option one or two for the first project then transitioning to option three.

Prerequisites

While it is possible to succeed without these, I highly recommend the following:

• Taken the computer architecture course (EECS 152)
• Taken the computer security course
• Read some of my papers / other papers in the field. I recommend Spectre, Hertzbleed and its followup, Pixel Perfect Timing Attacks with HTML5, GPU.zip, GoFetch, Peek-a-Walk, and Pixnapping
• Are comfortable with C and Python. Maybe Java (depending on the project)
• Have good debugging skills
• Be ready for feedback. Research is all about feedback :). We will iterate on things extensively. This is the most important
• Be ready to be independent :). This is also very important

Authorship rule

For you to be added to a paper, you must have contributed content that ends up in the draft of the paper before the submission deadline.