About Me

I am a second year Ph.D. student at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. My research interests are in program analysis, program synthesis, and applying techniques from these domains to secure software against microarchitectural side-channel attacks.

In 2019, I got my Masters’ from Purdue University, where I worked with Prof. Mathias Payer on binary analysis, static binary rewriting, and their applications to secure commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) and legacy binaries. 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) sdinesh2 at illinois.edu

Publications

2020

• 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]

Other Interests

Apart from research:

• I enjoy security capture-the-flag competitions (CTFs) especially reverse-engineering and exploitation,
• Music: I play guitar and enjoy prog music,
• Computer Games: I’ve played Dota2 from a long time, more recently I enjoy roguelike games.