Shixin Song

Shixin Song is a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science who focuses on security in modern computing systems. Her research tackles the growing threat of microarchitectural side-channel attacks—vulnerabilities in hardware that can leak sensitive information despite existing software protections. Shixin focuses on strengthening operating systems and cryptographic software through rigorous, hardware-aware solutions. She developed Oreo, a software-hardware co-design that protects address space layout randomization by restructuring the virtual-physical memory interface and minimizing the exposure of sensitive data to side-channel attacks. In parallel, she is designing an assembly-level transformation framework that enables secure speculative execution in cryptographic libraries by accurately separating secret and public data. As a MathWorks Fellow, she will focus on enhancing MathWorks Polyspace’s static code analysis tools by extending their threat model beyond memory safety to include microarchitectural side-channel vulnerabilities. Her work could advance secure system design across both industry and academia, paving the way for more robust protections in everyday computing systems.