Contact
You can reach me by email at aemichae[@]cs[.]washington[.]edu.
GitHub: aemichael.
Google Scholar: here.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/aemichael.
About me
I am a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Washington in Seattle. I have a B.S. in Computer Science from UC San Diego.
My research interests lie at the intersection of security, programming languages, and compilers. I focus particularly on applying formal methods to challenging problems in hardware security.
My advisors are David Kohlbrenner and Dan Grossman, in the Security and Privacy and PLSE labs, respectively.
Ongoing research
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Compiler-based mitigations for hardware side channels
Recent work has found that previously proposed microarchitectural optimizations, if implemented on forthcoming hardware, have the potential to open novel avenues for leaking information through side channels. Some of these optimizations are already being implemented in newer processors, and we anticipate that more of these optimizations will appear in real hardware as time goes on. In response, we are developing novel compiler-based approaches to mitigate the resulting vulnerabilities in security-critical code.
Collaborators: Michael Flanders, Reshabh Sharma, David Kohlbrenner, and Dan Grossman.
Publications
Michael Flanders, Reshabh K Sharma, Alexandra E. Michael, Dan Grossman, David Kohlbrenner. Avoiding Instruction-Centric Microarchitectural Timing Channels Via Binary-Code Transformations. ASPLOS 2024 (to appear).
Alexandra E. Michael*, Anitha Gollamudi*, Jay Bosamiya, Evan Johnson, Aidan Denlinger, Craig Disselkoen, Conrad Watt, Bryan Parno, Marco Patrignani, Marco Vassena, and Deian Stefan. MSWasm: Soundly Enforcing Memory-Safe Execution of Unsafe Code. POPL 2023.
Teaching
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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.
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.
Life
(Because PhD students are human too.)
I draw, read, drink coffee, play video games. I also do Aikido.
The best way to distract me from research is to give me a puzzle to solve. Logic puzzles, jigsaw, 3D, anything works. Bonus points if the puzzle is the research.