Introduction

I am a senior principal researcher in the Office of the CTO, Azure for Operators at Microsoft. My research focuses on building trusted and secure systems, but I am interested in all aspects of systems research.

I am very proud when my research has impact in practice. Over the years, together with my colleagues, I have been fortunate to:

• influence the DRAM industry to start addressing the threat of Rowhamer attacks.
• ship a cloud service used by 20+ million users.
• build the reference implementation of the firmware TPM.
• build one of the first face recognition-based payment systems, six years before Amazon Go was launched.

Prior to coming to Microsoft, I was a faculty member of the Computer Science Department at the University of Toronto. I received my Ph.D. from the Computer Science & Engineering department at the University of Washington. I am an ACM Distinguished Member.

The good folks at Microsoft Research recorded a podcast with me on Rowhamer and wrote a blog post on my work and background.

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News

• 2021-06:

  I hope Panopticon will influence the DRAM industry to fix their Rowhammer problem. No more excuses!
  Watch our presentation or read our paper on Panopticon. We also open-sourced a simple simulator targeting DDR5 DRAM (GitHub link).
• 2021-05:

  After coming up with an awesome title for our HotOS paper, Kevin outdid himself and turned his presentation into poetry!
  (YouTube link)
• 2021-03:

  JEDEC published two whitepapers on Rowhamer [1,2]. This is a first for JEDEC. Good for them!
• 2021-03:

  Our work on a secure platform for voice assistants' extensions has been accepted to MobiSys 2021.
  Alexa! send kudos to my colleagues at UC Irvine, MJ and Ardalan.

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Recent Publications

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Recent Service

• DRAMSec 2021: Program Committee co-chair.
• OSDI 2021: External Review Committee member.