Amit Choudhari

PhD Student · CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

I am a PhD student at CISPA in the System Security group, advised by Prof. Christian Rossow. I work on microarchitectural and systems security, with recent work on secure in-memory computing, malicious SmartNICs, and undocumented CPU prefetchers.

Before starting my PhD, I spent several years at Qualcomm working on ARM TrustZone- and hypervisor-based security. I particularly enjoy reverse-engineering undocumented CPU behavior, especially hardware prefetchers.

Open to research and R&D roles beginning in 2027 in systems, microarchitecture, and hardware security.

Research interests

Microarchitectural security

Side channels, undocumented CPU behavior, hardware prefetchers, and low-level reverse engineering.

Systems security

Linux kernel security, trusted execution, hypervisors, and hardware–software isolation.

Network & accelerator security

SmartNICs, processing-in-memory systems, embedded platforms, and their interaction with host software.

Tools & platforms: C/C++, Python, Linux kernel, ARM TrustZone/TEE, hypervisors, RISC-V, TPM attestation, UPMEM PIM, SmartNICs, GDB/JTAG.

Publications & patent

2026USENIX Security

Memclave: Secure In-Memory Enclave for Untrusted Hosts

Amit Choudhari, Fabian van Rissenbeck, Christian Rossow

Protects code and data on commodity UPMEM PIM using a TPM-attested hypervisor and an in-PIM trusted loader.

2025ESORICS

NICraft: Malicious NIC Firmware-Based Cache Side-Channel Attack

Amit Choudhari, Shorya Kumar, Christian Rossow

Shows how malicious NIC firmware can use Linux IP reassembly to mount host cache side channels, including keystroke-activity detection at 96% precision.

2023ACM CCS

FetchBench: Systematic Identification and Characterization of Proprietary Prefetchers

Till Schlüter, Amit Choudhari, Lorenz Hetterich, Leon Trampert, Hamed Nemati, Ahmad Ibrahim, Michael Schwarz, Christian Rossow, Nils Ole Tippenhauer

Characterizes undocumented prefetchers across 19 ARM and x86-64 CPUs and uncovers a replay-based prefetcher on Cortex-A72.

2022ASHES @ CCS

SpecDefender: Transient Execution Attack Defender Using Performance Counters

Amit Choudhari, Sylvain Guilley, Khaled Karray

Detects Spectre activity with hardware performance counters and restarts the application with Spectre defenses when an attack is detected.

2021NICS

CRYScanner: Finding Cryptographic Libraries Misuse

Amit Choudhari, Sylvain Guilley, Khaled Karray

Detects cryptographic-library misuse, including unsafe API call sequences and parameters.

2021U.S. Patent Application

Enhanced User Privacy of Sensitive Data on a User Data Input Display

Amit Pravin Choudhari, Basant Kumar, Rajesh Yadav

U.S. Patent Application Publication US 2021/0303737 A1 · Sep 2021.

Experience

CISPA

PhD Researcher · Systems & Microarchitectural Security

CPU/prefetcher reverse engineering, Linux kernel mechanisms, side channels, and secure PIM with Prof. Christian Rossow. Mentored two bachelor's thesis students.

ETH Zurich

Academic Guest

RISC-V security work protecting userspace applications from higher-privileged software.

Secure-IC

Master's Research

Cryptographic-library misuse analysis and dynamic detection/mitigation of Spectre attacks.

Qualcomm

Senior Software Engineer · TrustZone / Platform Security

Led an Alipay face-authentication project and a two-member engineering team; built TrustZone/hypervisor isolation for secure camera, UI, and protected input/display paths.

embedUR Systems

Embedded Software Engineer · Wireless Networking

Embedded networking features and Qualcomm Atheros network-driver work for wireless controllers and access points.

IIT Madras

Research Associate · Secure Embedded Systems

DRDO secure-tablet platform with U-Boot secure boot, TEE, tamper protection, device drivers, and hardware bring-up/debugging.

Education

2022—presentPhD, Systems Security

CISPA

2020—22MSc, Cyber-Physical Systems

École Polytechnique (IP Paris) · Full Scholarship

2009—13BE, Electronics Engineering

Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology (Mumbai University)