Pradyumna Shome

Home Institution
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year Participated
2020

Year in School
Undergraduate

REU Faculty Mentor
Christopher W. Fletcher

Research Area Interest
Architecture, Compilers, and Parallel Computing

Project Title

Biography & Research Abstract

Abstract:

Recent attacks on processor optimizations, such as Spectre and Meltdown, have created universal read gadgets by exploiting the side-effects of speculative execution and out-of-order execution. These gadgets allow adversaries to leak program memory. Our aim is to study side-channel attacks and existing defenses. We hope that this work encourages people to treat security as a first-class citizen when proposing optimizations. Furthermore, by introducing a taxonomy, we intend to simplify reasoning about security concerns.

Bio:

Pradyumna is a rising senior majoring in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with interests in security, privacy, systems, and CS education. On campus, he's been involved in research, teaching, and the student community. He currently works on security research at the FPSG, where he studies microarchitectural side-channel attacks. He is a lead course assistant for Illinois CS 241: System Programming. In the past, he's helped organize HackIllinois and the Reflections | Projections technology conference. His industry experience comes through software engineering internships at Salesforce and Virtusa. He will be interning at Facebook this fall, working on privacy and data use.