Alexandra E. Michael

Contact

aemichae [@] cs.washington.edu

About me

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Washington in Seattle. I work with David Kohlbrenner and Dan Grossman in the Security and Privacy and PLSE labs, respectively.

My research interests lie at the intersection of security, programming languages, and compilers. I focus particularly on applying formal methods to hardware security.

I earned my B.S. in Computer Science from UC San Diego, where I worked with Deian Stefan.

Research

PL for hardware reverse engineering

How can we use PL and formal methods to build new and improved reverse engineering tools for hardware?
Mitigating and formalizing microarchitectural side channels

Recent work has explored how novel microarchitectural optimizations can, when implemented, open new side channels in previously constant-time code. Some of these optimizations are already being implemented and resulting in attacks. We are developing novel compiler-based approaches that leverage formal methods to identify and mitigate these side channels in software.

Publications

Avoiding Instruction-Centric Microarchitectural Timing Channels Via Binary-Code Transformations. Michael Flanders, Reshabh K Sharma, Alexandra E. Michael, Dan Grossman, David Kohlbrenner. ASPLOS 2024.

I presented a talk on this paper at ASPLOS 2024 in San Diego, CA.
I also wrote an introductory blog post on this work for the PLSE blog.

MSWasm: Soundly Enforcing Memory-Safe Execution of Unsafe Code. Alexandra E. Michael*, Anitha Gollamudi*, Jay Bosamiya, Evan Johnson, Aidan Denlinger, Craig Disselkoen, Conrad Watt, Bryan Parno, Marco Patrignani, Marco Vassena, and Deian Stefan. POPL 2023.

Teaching

UC San Diego—Undergraduate TA/CSE Tutor

CSE 20: Discrete Mathematics. Spring 2019 - Winter 2020, Winter 2021, Fall 2021.

CSE 95: Tutor Apprentice. Spring 2021.

CSE 105: Theory of Computation. Spring 2020 - Fall 2020.

Selected honors & awards

NSF GRFP Fellow. March 2023 - present.

Corin Anderson Fellow (University of Washington). September 2022 - June 2023.

Undergraduate Excellence in Research Award (UC San Diego Computer Science and Engineering). June 2022.

Summa Cum Laude (UC San Diego). December 2021.