Ahmed Najeeb

Hi! I'm a PhD student at the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where I'm a member of the PLATSEC Lab advised by Dr. Billy Brumley.

My research focuses on hardware side-channel attacks, particularly microarchitectural side channels. I'm fascinated by how seemingly secure software can be compromised due to design decisions in the underlying hardware. These vulnerabilities often stem not from software bugs, but from the intricate interactions between software and hardware features like caches, speculative execution, and branch predictors. I'm passionate about building defenses against such attacks and strongly believe in security by design—the idea that systems should be secure from the ground up. Side-channel vulnerabilities challenge this ideal in complex and intellectually rich ways, and I'm excited to work on solutions at the intersection of hardware and software.