Education
Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester NY
Major: Masters of Computer Engineering (May 2022)
GPA: 3.68
Relevant Classes:
- Circuits I and II (Lab)
- Digital Electronics (Lab)
- Digital IC Design (Lab)
- Reconfigurable Computing (Lab)
- Embedded Systems and RTOS (Lab)
- Digital Systems Design I and II (Lab)
- Computer Organization and Computer Architecture
- Multiple Processor Systems (Lab)
- High Performance Computing (Lab)
- Data and Communication Networks
- Digital Signal Processing
- Integrated Digital Electronics (Lab)
- Introduction to Cryptography
- Post-Quantum Cryptography
- Hardware/Software Cryptography Applications
- Multidisciplinary Senior Design
Projects
I have a list of my projects and a writeup for each one on my projects page.
Research
Memory Protection with Cached Authentication Trees
The Master's Thesis for my Computer Engineering degree touches on the memory security of modern embedded systems. As technology gets more advanced, the use of embedded systems in the Internet of Things (IoT) is growing at a rapid rate. Many of these embedded systems are critical to the operation of the system at a whole, and may contain or process sensitive data. In a lot of cases, these embedded devices are not physically secure, and can be access by a malicious individual with little effort. Once given physical access, reading and writing to exposed memory bus lines becomes trivial.
One of the ways to defend against memory read attacks is to encrypt data-in-motion before it leaves the CPU. However; this still leaves the system memory open to write attacks. Defending against a memory write attack is achieved by authenticating all memory within the RAM. This authentication is done by the CPU to ensure all memory traveling to/from the RAM is verified before being used for execution.
The work done in the thesis focuses on the creation of a customized memory controller that both encrypts (via AES) and authenticates all data before sending it to the system memory. The memory controller uses the AXI protocol to send and receive data directly from a Zynq-7000 FPGA. A few authenticated memory controller designs exists; however, the performance loss while using one of the these controllers can be quite substantial. In an attempt to mitigate these performance impacts, this research focuses on adding an authentication request cache. The largest performance issues stem from the creation of an authentication scheme request. These requests are used to find the proper location in memory, as well as the key used to authentication the data. Caching some of these requests will help reduce the amount of stall cycles that occur while trying to fetch data from memory. The performance of the system is benchmarked using a customized build of PetaLinux, which allows for the performance of real-world workflows to be tested and profiled.
I'm not sure about the technicalities behind sharing my thesis proposal and code, so I haven't included either of them here. If you're curious and would like to see them, let me know and I'll find out what I can do :)
Employment
Block, Inc.
- Date: June 2022 - Present
- Position: Firmware Engineer
- Job Description: Firmware Engineer building Square point of sales devices.
MindGlyph
- Date: January 2021 - Present
- Position: Lead Embedded Software Developer
- Company Type: Part-time startup
- Job Description: Managing and developing all embedded software required for retail eInk price tag solution. This includes inter-tag networking with a BLE mesh network, and "master tag" communication over WiFi. This solution takes advantage of multiple IoT protocols, such as MQTT and Kafka for data ingestion and streaming. Despite the advance features of the firmware, it's incredibly stable, self error correcting, and very power efficient.
Bose
- Date: January 2020 - August 2020
- Position: Embedded Firmware Engineer (Co-op)
- Job Description: Wrote ultra low-power firmware for capacitive touch sensing and IMU processing chip used within consumer electronics devices. This included capturing and filtering data from the capactive touch sensor to determine user gestures, then sending results to the main MCU via I2C. Since this work included end user facing control systems, I worked closely with members of the UI team to run user trials for gesture control feedback.
Telog Instruments
- Date: May 2019 - August 2019
- Position: Electrical Engineering Intern (Co-op)
- Job Description: Helped develop embedded circuit board test fixture, and worked on PC application for operating test fixture and reporting errors. The PC interfaced with the test fixture using an FTDI USB-HID to GPIO and I2C chip. The testing software was able to communicate with the board using both BLE and RS-232. The board's firmware could be automatically queried and updated via the same application for rapid testing and deployment.
References available upon request