Sushant Dinesh

I am a PhD candidate 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:

I am always looking for motivated undergraduate and graduate students to work with. If you’re interested please reach out to me at: sushantd at berkeley.edu

Publications

  • H-HOUDINI: Scalable Invariant Learning
    🏅Best Paper Award
    Sushant Dinesh, Yongye Zhu, Christopher W. Fletcher.
    In ASPLOS’25: 30th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, 2025.
    [paper] [code] [doi] [bib]

  • 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] [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]

Mentoring

I’ve had the pleasure of mentoring a great group of students:

  • Anish Dhanashekar (Undergrad, UC Berkeley, Spring’25-)
  • Anto Kam (Undergrad, UC Berkeley, Fall’23-)
  • Ian McLellan (Undergrad, UC Berkeley, Fall’23-)
  • Ananya Gahalaut (Undergrad, UIUC, URAP’22)
  • Aman Luthra (Undergrad, UIUC, Fall’22)
  • Maya Vishwanathan (High school, Summer’22)

Service

  • 2026: ASPLOS’26 (ERC)
  • 2025: CCS’25 (PC)

Teaching

During my PhD I’ve been a TA for: