aemichae [@] cs.washington.edu
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I'm a fourth-year 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 currently focus 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
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Formal methods for hardware reverse engineering
I am exploring how we can use programming languages and formal methods to build improved tools for hardware reverse engineering.
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Mitigating and formalizing microarchitectural side channels
Recent work has explored how novel microarchitectural optimizations can open new side channels in previously constant-time code. Some of these optimizations are already being implemented and resulting in new 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.
- Our tool, cio, is available on GitHub.
- [April 29, 2024] I delivered the ASPLOS 2024 talk for this paper in San Diego, CA.
- [April 15, 2024] I wrote a related blog post on instruction-centric optimizations.
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
University of Washington (Instructor)
- CSE 351: The Hardware/Software Interface (Summer 2025)
University of Washington (TA)
- CSE 351: The Hardware/Software Interface (Autumn 2024, Spring 2025)
UC San Diego (Undergraduate TA/CSE Tutor)
- CSE 20: Discrete Mathematics (Spring 2019, Fall 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 Graduate Research Fellowship. National Science Foundation, March 2023.
Corin Anderson Fellowship. Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science, University of Washington, September 2022.
Undergraduate Excellence in Research Award. UCSD Computer Science and Engineering Department, June 2022.
Summa Cum Laude. UC San Diego, December 2021.
Other
Service
- I currently act as PLSE Talks chair, coordinating weekly talks by both visitors and current lab members.
- From 2023 - 2025, I maintained the PLSE Blog, where we publish biweekly posts from students and faculty about everything from formal semantics to floating point. Check it out to learn more about what goes on in PLSE!