CV
Education
- Ph.D in Computer Science, Stanford University, 2025 (expected)
- B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics, Middlebury College, 2020
Honors & Awards
- Graduated Salutatorian and Summa Cum Laude (Middlebury College)
- Won Phi Beta Kappa prize (Middlebury College)
- Phi Beta Kappa junior inductee (Middlebury College)
- Timothy T. Huang Award in Computer Science (Middlebury College)
Professional Experience
- Winter 2021 - present: Ph.D Research Assistant, Stanford University
- Advisor: Caroline Trippel
- Researching hardware security and formal methods
- Project: Leakage Containment Models
- Implemented tool that statically detects Spectre v1 and v4 leakage in C programs
- Analyzed the crypto library libsodium for Spectre vulnerabilities
- Developed a general, theoretical framework (LCM) that underpins leakage detection tool
- Approach outperforms existing tools for Spectre vulnerability analysis
- Spring 2021: Ph.D Research Assistant, Stanford University
- Worked with Philip Levis as part of Stanford’s rotational program
- Researched virtualization of distributed energy resources
- Fall 2020: Ph.D Research Assistant, Stanford University
- Worked with Dawson Engler as part of Stanford’s rotational program
- Researched memory checkers in embedded systems
- Summer 2017, Fall 2017, Summer 2018: Computer Vision Research Assistant, Middlebury College
- Supervisor: Daniel Scharstein
Skills
- Programming Languages: C, C++, x86 assembly, Python, bash, Verilog, Java, Swift
- Programming Environments: macOS, Linux, FreeBSD
- Tools:
- Reverse engineering and debugging: IDA Pro, gdb
- Building & source control: make, CMake, git
- Virtualization: Docker, VirtualBox
- Formal methods: Z3, SMT-LIB
Publications
Axiomatic Hardware-Software Contracts for Security
Nicholas Mosier, Hanna Lachnitt, Hamed Nemati, and Caroline Trippel. Axiomatic hardware-software contracts for security. In Proceedings of the 49th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ISCA ’22, page 72–86, New York, NY, USA, 2022. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3470496.3527412
Software Defined Grid Energy Storage
Sonia Martin, Nicholas Mosier, Obi Nnorom Jr., Yancheng Ou, Liana Patel, Oskar Triebe, Gustavo Cezar, Philip Levis, and Ram Rajagopal. Software defined grid energy storage. In The 9th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (BuildSys ’22), November 9–10, 2022, Boston, MA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, page 218-227. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563357.3564082
Serberus: Protecting Cryptographic Code from Spectres at Compile-Time
N. Mosier, H. Nemati, J. Mitchell and C. Trippel, Serberus: Protecting Cryptographic Code from Spectres at Compile-Time, in 2024 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), San Francisco, CA, USA, 2024 pp. 48-48. doi: 10.1109/SP54263.2024.00048
Analyzing and Exploiting Branch Mispredictions in Microcode
Nicholas Mosier, Hamed Nemati, John C. Mitchell, Caroline Trippel. Analyzing and exploiting branch mispredictions in microcode, arXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2501.12890
Talks
ROP with a 2nd Stack, or This Exploit is a Recursive Fibonacci Sequence Generator
Talk at BSidesLV 2019, Las Vegas, Nevada
Axiomatic Hardware-Software Contracts
Talk at ISCA 2022, New York City, New York
Serberus: Comprehensive Spectre Mitigations for Constant-Time Code
Talk at Stanford Engineering Computer Forum Security Workshop, Stanford, California
Hardware-Software Codesign for Mitigating Spectre
Talk and position paper at PLARCH 2023, Orlando, Florida