Adam
Hastings

I am a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University in the Department of Computer Science. I work in the areas of systems and security and am advised by Simha Sethumadhavan.

My Ph.D. has focused on methods and mechanisms to improve security from the ground-up through secure systems and hardware. I started my Ph.D. trying to leverage in-line cache compression to accelerate system checkpointing. This led to (unpublished) work on an encryption-based Rowhammer defense; the technique didn't pan out but it led to an important conclusion: it doesn't matter how many defenses researchers design if they never get built in real products!

Since then, my research has grappled with this question: What can technologists do to improve security when the roadblocks are not just technical ones? This has been a multi-pronged approach: I first needed to understand the tradeoffs between performance and security, so I conducted experiments that measure how much users value performance. To do this, I developed software that had study participants decide between money and performance with real-world consequences. Later, I delved into how regulation might kickstart security adoption in systems. Our proposal asks systems to spend a fraction of execution cycles on security but lets product vendors themselves figure out how this budget should be spent. To make such a proposal enforceable, I trained a neural network that estimates real-time security overhead based on on-chip hardware events (i.e. HPC data). I also did some industry internships that focused on embedded systems security, authentication, and applied cryptography. I am currently working on modeling cyberinsurance as a mechanism to improve security adoption.

I am currently on the job market! Please reach out if you'd like to chat.

Email: <my last name>@cs.columbia.edu