Contact

aemichae [@] cs.washington.edu

GitHub: aemichael

Google Scholar

LinkedIn: aemichael

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.

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, 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 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.