CyLab Seminar: David Kohlbrenner

February 02, 2026

12:00 p.m. ET

Zoom or Panther Hollow Conference Room, CIC 4105

David Kohlbrenner

*Please note: this CyLab seminar is open only to partners and Carnegie Mellon University faculty, students, and staff.

Speaker:
David Kohlbrenner
Assistant Professor
University of Washington

Talk Title:
Software security to transistor physics and back

Abstract:
Sadly, our computers are physical objects with physical limitations. One such limitation is that transistors themselves do not have static behavior and experience a variety of aging behaviors.

From a security perspective, this aging has some interesting properties: aging behaviors are dependent on usage, and aging behavior can cause failures in digital logic. In this talk, I will discuss our ongoing security work on both data recovery and faults on cloud systems using transistor aging.

Bio:
David is an Assistant Professor in the Paul G. Allen School at the University of Washington and co-directs the Security and Privacy Research Lab.

His research focuses on understanding and mitigating security risks to software that arise from hardware design. Projects with his collaborators include discovering novel side-channel mechanisms from CPU frequency (Hertzbleed) to prefetchers (Augury), and verifiable mitigations for side channels. He is also a lead on the RISC-V based Keystone TEE Framework project. See dkohlbre.com.

David's work has been recognized with an IEEE Micro Top Pick, two Top Picks in HES, and Pwnie awards. Previously, he co-founded the embedded security company Somerset Recon, and was a member of Carnegie Mellon's PPP CTF team.

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