About Me

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Engineering at Iowa State University (ISU), expected to graduate in June 2026. I work as a Graduate Research Assistant in the MAIS Lab under the supervision of Dr. Berk Gulmezoglu.

My research explores how artificial intelligence can both expose and defend against side-channel attacks, working at the intersection of computer architecture and cybersecurity to make computing systems more secure without sacrificing performance. I investigate microarchitectural and software-level attack vectors — focusing on side-channel and speculative execution vulnerabilities — while also developing deep learning-based defenses against such attacks.

Research Interests

• Dynamic Frequency Side-Channel Attacks: I introduced DF-SCA, demonstrating that CPU dynamic frequency scaling leaks sensitive information across isolation boundaries, and extended this to fingerprint modern sandbox environments (e.g., V8, Cloudflare Workers).
• Side-Channel Attacks in Cloud & Serverless Systems: I investigate new leakage pathways in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and serverless cloud systems, exposing how isolation mechanisms can be bypassed.
• Machine Learning-Based Detection & Evasion: I build deep learning-based detectors for microarchitectural attacks and develop adversarial evasion techniques to systematically defeat them.
• Website Fingerprinting Attacks & Defenses: I study how attackers profile web browsing behavior via shared microarchitectural resources and develop defenses such as DefWeb.
• LLM-Assisted Security Evaluation: I am developing uGen, a multi-agent retrieval-augmented system that autonomously generates, tests, and refines end-to-end microarchitectural attack code using large language models.

Recent News

• Apr. 2025: Invited talk at the University of Lübeck, Germany — “Exploiting Dynamic Frequency: Side-Channel Attacks and Evasion in Modern Systems”
• 2025–2026: Recipient of the Takano Fellowship Graduate Research Fellowship (~$60K), Iowa State University
• May–Aug. 2025: Research Administration Intern at CoMFRE and Iowa Water Center, Iowa State University
• Nov. 2024–Apr. 2025: Research Intern at Telefónica Innovación Digital, Barcelona, Spain — worked on microarchitectural side-channel attacks in serverless cloud environments
• Oct. 2024: Invited talk at CAE-R Symposium, St. Louis — “Dynamic Frequency-Based Side-Channel Attacks on Modern Computing Environments”
• Dec. 2024: Paper published in IEEE JETCAS — “Systematical Evasion From Learning-Based Microarchitectural Attack Detection Tools”
• Jul. 2024: Presented at IEEE EuroS&P 2024 in Vienna, Austria
• Aug. 2024: Completed M.Eng. in Computer Engineering, Iowa State University