Year 2 Student - 2025 Cohort - Cohort 7

I graduated from Bristol with an MEng in Computer Science, and joined the CDT straight away. I'm interested in a huge range of fields, so I'm still searching for my specific topic, but I find secure software development and low-level hardware security particularly engaging - for my Master's dissertation, I reverse engineered a piece of hardware and its firmware. During my degree, I particularly enjoyed the units with a focus on cybersecurity, and I had previously spent time learning about cybersecurity concepts applied to other fields, so I chose to continue studying it.

Compiler-induced bugs in perfect software

Some types of code, such as cryptographic algorithms, must always take the same amount of time to execute, independent of the secret material used in the process - otherwise an attacker with an accurate clock could recover the keys or decrypt messages. But modern programming languages can't express this requirement, and so developers use tricks and workarounds instead. This project aims to improve the tooling available for detecting this condition, and implement a few new approaches to help eliminate it, rather than relying on unstable solutions.

Academic placement with Dan Page: planning and literature review for the project - I spent a few weeks reading and comparing papers that have been published around the topic of data-dependent execution latency and timing attacks, building up a picture of what gaps exist in the field and how I might tackle them.

Industrial placement with HP: "Cryptographic Security of an open-source implementation" - reviewing and evaluating the security guarantees and testing methodology of an open-source implementation of a post-quantum cryptographic algorithm.