Allison Randal @allison@muon.social

I suppose it has a lot to do with my preference for working in openly collaborative communities and non-profit organizations. While that trend started for software in the '70s (don't forget BSD) and '80s, and is now so common we can't imagine a world without it, historically there hasn't been a lot of that in hardware. But that's changing, and open hardware today is every bit as exciting as #opensource in the '00s.

It isn't even really a change of interests for me, I had a soldering iron in my hands at the age of 3, and was designing simple circuits before I was 10.

That doesn't mean I'm not working on #opensource anymore, in fact, the two interest areas are very deeply connected. We can't have secure and reliable software if the underlying hardware is violating confidentiality and correctness all over the place.

My PhD dissertation was three alternative approaches to eliminating entire classes of speculation-related vulnerabilities, both the currently known variants and future-proofing against future variants that haven't been discovered/reported yet.

My focus for the past few years has been microarchitecture security, specifically the speculative execution vulnerabilities (Spectre, Meltdown, etc). It started as PhD work at the University of Cambridge, but has grown beyond that, into a working group at riscv.org, and a fun new job. #introduction

I've never been a particularly active Twitter user, so the barrier to exit is minimal.