I am an incoming PhD student at University of California, Berkeley working with Prof. Christopher Fletcher. I am broadly interested in developing program analysis and program synthesis based techniques to secure software against microarchitectural side-channel attacks. My work aims to understand how to develop the next-generation of security-centric programming toolflows that enable programmers to write secure (i.e., side-channel resilient) and efficient software on modern (leaky) hardware.

In 2019, I got my Masters’ from Purdue University, where I worked with Prof. Mathias Payer on binary rewriting and their applications to secure commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) software. I obtained my Bachelors’ degree in 2016 from National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal.

I’ve had the pleasure of interning at several great places:

• In Summer 2020, I interned at Microsoft Research with Patrice Godefroid on Tool-assisted interactive Pen-testing and Verification.

• In Summer 2018, I interned at GrammaTech Inc. with Dr. Vineeth Kashyap to develop techniques to identify known components, e.g., libraries, in binaries of unknown provenance.

You can reach me at: sushant.dinesh94 at gmail.com (or) sushantd at berkeley.edu

Publications

• CONJUNCT: Learning Inductive Invariants to Prove Unbounded Instruction Safety Against Microarchitectural Timing Attacks
  Sushant Dinesh, Madhusudan Parthasarathy, Christopher W. Fletcher.
  In Oakland’24: 41st IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. 2024.
  [paper] [code] [artifacts] [doi] [bib]

• SynthCT: Towards Portable Constant-Time Code
  Sushant Dinesh, Grant Garrett-Grossman, Christopher W. Fletcher.
  In NDSS’22: 28th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium. 2022.
  [paper] [code] [artifacts] [doi] [bib]

• Scalable Validation of Binary Lifters
  Sandeep Dasgupta, Sushant Dinesh, Deepan Venkatesh, Vikram S. Adve, and Christopher W. Fletcher.
  In PLDI’20: Proceedings of the 41st ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation. 2020.
  [paper] [code] [doi] [bib]

• RetroWrite: Statically Instrumenting COTS Binaries for Fuzzing and Sanitization
  Sushant Dinesh, Nathan Burow, Dongyan Xu, and Mathias Payer.
  In Oakland’20: IEEE International Symposium on Security and Privacy. 2020.
  [paper] [code] [doi] [bib] [talk]