STAM Center Celebrates Multiple Graduations!

The Secure, Trusted, and Assured Microelectronics Center is proud to announce the graduation of Peter Moore and Anees Ahmad, two master’s students whose research tackled some of the most pressing challenges in modern computing: systems security and data privacy.

Peter’s work focused on memory safe systems. Despite decades of mitigation efforts, memory corruption flaws remain among the most dangerous weaknesses in today’s systems. His thesis explored the use of capability-based architectures for native memory safety and what it would take to build a capability-aware operating system, analyzing how core operating system responsibilities could be redesigned to provide stronger, more measurable security guarantees. Peter’s work contributes to ongoing efforts to eliminate entire classes of memory-related vulnerabilities at the system level.

Anees’ research explored a different but equally critical challenge: privacy-preserving but verifiable computation. He explored the Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), a cryptographic verification technique which shows enormous potential, but comes with high performance costs. To mitigate the adoption challenge in ZKPs, Anees architected and built frameworks for acceleration of various protocols in real-world low-power FPGA environments.

Together, Peter and Anees’ work highlights the breadth of research supported by the center across the application, system software, and hardware levels in the security and privacy domains. The STAM center congratulates them on earning their master’s degrees and looks forward to seeing the impact of their work in the years ahead.