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Bio
I'm Kevin Loughlin (pronounced Lock-lin, but I think my efforts are futile at this point), a Software Engineer at Google. I work on the Trusted Execution Platforms team, designing and optimizing trusted execution environment (TEE) solutions to provide stronger security alongside high performance. I’m an open-source contributor to Linux and Oak stage0 firmware for TEE support.
I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) from the University of Michigan, where I was advised by Baris Kasikci (now at the University of Washington). My dissertation research was at the intersection of hardware-software co-design, reliability, and security. In particular, my work focused on creating efficient mitigations for microarchitectural exploits such as Spectre and Rowhammer. I am grateful to have been supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Google PhD Fellowship.
Before UMich, I received my bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Harvard University, where I worked with James Mickens. When I'm not coding, I enjoy playing and watching soccer, skiing, playing music, traveling, and speaking foreign languages like French and Spanish.
News
- September 2023: I have started a new full-time position as a Software Engineer at Google in Sunnyvale, California!
- August 2023: I defended my Ph.D. dissertation Mitigating Microarchitectural Vulnerabilities to Improve Cloud Security and Reliability. Thank you to the many people who have made grad school such a wonderful experience!
- July 2023: Siloz: Leveraging DRAM Isolation Domains to Prevent Inter-VM Rowhammer is accepted to appear at SOSP '23.
- November 2022: I am honored to receive the 1st-place presentation award in the 2022 University of Michigan CSE Graduate Student Honors Competition. Thank you to the department!
- May 2022: I am thrilled to begin a research internship with Google's Chip Implementation and Infrastructure (CI2) team under the mentorship of Shobha Vasudevan and Joe Wenjie Jiang.
- March 2022: MOESI-prime: Preventing Coherence-Induced Hammering in Commodity Workloads is accepted to appear at ISCA '22.
- February 2022: Our short paper on Software-Defined Memory Controllers is accepted to appear in the Wild and Crazy Ideas (WACI) session at ASPLOS '22.
- November 2021: Debugging in the Brave New World of Reconfigurable Hardware is accepted to appear at ASPLOS '22.
- September 2021: I am honored to receive a Google PhD Fellowship in Privacy and Security. Thanks Google!
- June 2021: I am excited to begin my second research internship at Microsoft, this time with the Office of the CTO team in Azure for Operators (AFO OCTO). I am working on enhancing DRAM for 5G workloads under the mentorship of Alec Wolman.
- April 2021: Stop! Hammer Time: Rethinking Our Approach to Rowhammer Mitigations is accepted to appear at HotOS '21. Our (rhyming!) presentation video is available here.
- September 2020: DOLMA: Securing Speculation with the Principle of Transient Non-Observability is accepted to appear at USENIX Security '21. Code available here.
- June 2020: I am excited to be interning with the Mobility and Networking Research (MNR) Group at Microsoft Research. I am working on Project STEMA under the mentorship of Stefan Saroiu.
- March 2020: I am honored to receive an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Thanks NSF!
- January 2020: NDA is selected as an IEEE Micro Top Picks 2020 Honorable Mention.
- January 2020: A Hypervisor for Shared-Memory FPGA Platforms is accepted to appear at ASPLOS '20.
- July 2019: NDA: Preventing Speculative Execution Attacks at Their Source is accepted to appear at MICRO '19.