Alexandra E. Michael

Contact

aemichae [at] cs [dot] washington [dot] edu

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About me

I am a fifth-year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Washington. I work with David Kohlbrenner and Dan Grossman in the Security and Privacy and PLSE labs, respectively.

My research focuses on using formal methods to specify and build (formally) sound solutions to security challenges in emerging and black-box systems, such as novel hardware optimizations and AI agents. Examples include formally specifying and verifying software-based defenses against against novel and proposed microarchitectural side channels.

I recently spent summer 2026 as an intern at IBM's Security Research Department, where I worked with Fred Araujo and Teryl Taylor on security for AI agents.

I earned my B.S. in Computer Science from UC San Diego, where I worked with Deian Stefan on memory safety for WebAssembly.

Research

• 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.

• 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

Instructor of Record (UW)

Teaching Assistant (UW)

Undergraduate TA/CSE Tutor (UCSD)

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.

Misc

Service (2026)

Blog posts

Outside the PhD