Security Assessment of ARM Desktop CPUs

Reverse-engineering Snapdragon X Elite microarchitecture to mount side-channel attacks.

Advisor: Prof. Daniel Genkin, Georgia Tech  ·  Aug 2024 – Apr 2025

Worked toward mounting side-channel attacks by reverse-engineering ARM-based Snapdragon desktop CPUs.

  • Reverse-engineered microarchitectural components such as prefetchers and the Return Stack Buffer (RSB) using custom kernel modules on Snapdragon X Elite processors.
  • Targeted attacks including RSB-based Spectre.