Education

• PhD, Computer Science @ University of Washington
  • September 2022 – now
• Master of Science, Computer Science @ North Carolina State University
  • August 2019 – May 2021, graduated with a 4.0.
  • Graduate minor in electrical engineering, specializing in system architectures and hardware security.
  • (Thesis) Side Channel Attacks on Real-World Devices: A Case Study on Apple iPhones.
• Bachelor of Science, Computer Science @ Kennesaw State University
  • August 2016 – May 2019, graduated with a 3.85.

Work Experience

• Currently: PhD student @ Security and Privacy Lab, UW
• Embedded Software Engineer @ KCF Technologies
  • September 2021 – July 2022
  • Led design and development of operating system (OS), firmware, and various security technologies for an ARM-based networking product. This included implementation of critical features such as secure boot, as well as initial steps towards a trusted execution environment.
  • Developed and enabled OS support for novel product features (edge compute, certificate management, logging and introspection).
  • Maintained all build infrastructure for this product (including CI and local builds) while keeping best security practices for these in mind.
  • Developed procedures for testing and upgrading both the userspace tooling, as well as the product’s kernel.
• Research Assistant @ HECTOR Lab, NCSU
  • January 2020 – August 2021
  • Researched side channel attacks (SCAs) on Apple iPhones — a novel, previously unexplored platform.
    • Wrote two papers on both digital and analog SCAs, involving thorough reverse-engineering of Apple’s proprietary software and hardware components.
  • Designed and built extensive custom infrastructure (now open-sourced!) to support this research, ranging from experiment control systems to massively parallelized data analysis platforms.
  • Reviewed current papers in the SCA field, staying up to date on novel attacks and defenses.

Internships

• Development Intern @ NoviSystems Inc
  • Designed and developed a resource-monitoring platform to profile a large-scale, heterogeneous distributed machine learning application.
  • Identified and fixed bugs throughout the company’s application and infrastructure stack.
  • Began work on an FPGA-based hardware acceleration platform for the machine learning application. Implemented a solution for accelerated regex matching.
• Engineering Intern @ B&R Industrial Automation
  • Used B&R’s software design tools to learn to program automated industrial systems.
  • Fixed and maintained various projects around the office, including product demos, automatic door security systems, and voltage transformers.

Invited Talks & Presentations

• 2022
  • Apple vs EMA: Webinar for hardwear.io

• 2021
  • openc8 Hardware Demo: Hardware demonstration and presentation at IEEE HOST

Media & Outreach

• 2021
  • NC State researchers develop toolkit to test vulnerabilities in Apple devices, and find one. Jason Parker with WRAL TechWire.
  • NC State researchers develop tool to test security of Apple devices. Brief interview on WRAL.
  • Security bods boost Apple iPhone hardware attack research with iTimed toolkit. Gareth Halfacree with The Register.
  • NC State researchers find security vulnerabilities with some older iPhones. Brief interview on CBS17.
  • Researchers Develop Toolkit to Test Apple Security, Find Vulnerability. Matt Shipman with NCSU.