David's Homepage

About

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Irvine.

My interests span a wide range of complex computational systems. Recently, I started looking into systems for self-supervised representation learning and perceptual processing to push the limits of agent-based automation, for example, as applied to problems in the software engineering and safety domain. However, I am also interested in advancing our understanding of cognition and learning and tackling instabilities and failure modes of learning systems. In the past, I worked on compilers, operating systems, and hardware security research, including automated bug finding, memory-corruption attacks and defenses, sidechannel mitigations, as well as remote-fault injection, enabling adversaries to exploit systems even in the absence of software bugs.

Projects and Publications

The full list of publications is here. I have occasionally acted as an external reviewer to several conferences and journals (including IEEE S&P, IEEE TDSC, NDSS, and ACM CCS). Some recent project examples:

Estimating Stack Frame Sizes using Transformers (ACM CCS'21 - AISec Workshop) in Stripped and Optimized Binaries (AMD64 and AArch64)
Camera Calibration (Comma.ai Challenge 2021) using Convolutional Neural Networks
V0LTpwn (USENIX Security 2020) (remote-fault injection from software on x86 that breaks SGX)
NoJITsu (NDSS 2020 & BH20) (data-only attack against interpreters in JIT engines)
K-Miner (NDSS 2018) (a static analysis framework to uncover memory corruption in Linux at scale)

CV

since '19	Postdoctoral Researcher at the Secure Systems and Software Laboratory of Professor Michael Franz
'16 to '19	Research Assistant and PhD student at the System Security Lab of Professor Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi
'14 to '16	Computer Science (M.Sc.), focus on InfoSec, at TU Darmstadt
'13 to '14	developed trade-workflow and performance-analysis tools at 360T for their OTC/FX-trading platform
'10 to '13	Computer Science (B.Sc.) at HSRM
'09 to '10	studied Mathematics at Gutenberg Universität