Alexandra E. Michael

Contact me at aemichae[@]cs[.]washington[.]edu. I'm also on GitHub and LinkedIn.

About

I'm a PhD student at the Allen School of Computer Science, at the University of Washington in Seattle. My research interests lie at the intersection of security, programming languages, and compilers. I'm co-advised by David Kohlbrenner in the Security and Privacy Lab and Dan Grossman in the PLSE lab.

Currently, I'm working on compiler-based mitigations for microarchitectural side-channels. Previously, I worked with Deian Stefan on Memory-Safe WebAssembly during my undergraduate at UC San Diego, where I earned my B.S. in Computer Science in December 2021.

Publications

Alexandra E. Michael*, Anitha Gollamudi*, Jay Bosamiya, Evan Johnson, Aidan Denlinger, Craig Disselkoen, Conrad Watt, Bryan Parno, Marco Patrignani, Marco Vassena, and Deian Stefan. 2023. MSWasm: Soundly Enforcing Memory-Safe Execution of Unsafe Code. Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 7, POPL, Article 15 (January 2023), 30 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3571208

Research

• Pandora

  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 microarchitectural 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