July 18, 2023
The Department of Computer Science will add several new faculty members during the 2023-2024 academic year, filling both tenure-track and fixed-term faculty positions with a variety of research backgrounds. This is the first of our new faculty profiles for the year.
Andrew Kwong joined the department as an assistant professor, beginning in the fall semester. He recently completed a doctorate from the Computer Science and Engineering Division at the University of Michigan. Prior to that, he earned an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz, double-majoring in computer science and mathematics.
Andrew’s primary research focus is in hardware security at the intersection of software, hardware, and applied cryptography. His dissertation applied software-based side-channel attacks to hardware vulnerabilities in order to highlight potential attack vectors against the security and proper function of popular systems. He has worked on mitigation techniques for a number of exploits, including row hammer and speculative execution attacks. His work deals with real-world systems and has resulted in security upgrades to millions of computers via kernel patches, countermeasures in popular software libraries, and CPU microcode updates. His research has been featured in Ars Technica, Wired, ZDNet, The Register, and other popular media outlets.
Andrew will contribute to the department’s experience in hardware security, cryptography, and operating systems, and his ability to reverse engineer attacks and harden protocols will provide collaboration opportunities with industry as well as academia.