Security Researcher · PhD Student at Penn State
Every embedded system runs on a quiet bargain. The driver believes the sensor. The application believes the driver. The firmware believes the bus, the bootloader, and whatever configuration it was handed at startup. Nobody signed that bargain and nobody audits it, but everything the system does depends on it holding.
I spent six years on the building side. Real-time control and embedded software in C and C++, integrated onto hardware where the output moved something physical, from flight controllers to production automotive software. I learned where the assumptions live, because whenever a system failed on me, that is where the failure was hiding. Not in the code that computed. In the code that believed.
Now I study what happens when someone breaks the bargain on purpose. Every embedded system trusts more than it verifies. My research asks what an attacker can do with the difference.
I am a PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering at Penn State, in PSecLab within the Institute for Networking and Security Research, advised by Arslan Khan.
What firmware accepts from a peripheral, driver or bus on its own say-so, and what an adversary on that wire, from MAVLink to a field bus, is then able to assert.
Well-formed settings that pass every validity check and still change what the system does.
Rehosting, emulation and fuzzing, so behaviour can be explored across many configurations and inputs rather than one board at a time.
Isolation, privilege boundaries, and what actually belongs inside the trusted computing base.
Where neither the language nor the hardware offers help, and what mitigations actually cost at runtime.
Estimation and control designed against noise, exposed instead to malice.
