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Catherine Easdon

Catherine Easdon

Software Engineer

Catherine is a security- and privacy-minded Software Engineer with experience in risk mitigation across all layers of the tech stack, from the hardware level through to translating privacy law into code and policy. In her Master’s degree studies at the University of Bristol, she specialized in security and computer architecture, before working as a Privacy Software Engineer at Palantir and as a microarchitectural security researcher at Graz University of Technology. She joined Dynatrace in December 2020 to dive into all things Digital Business at our Graz Lab.

Authored publications

CustomProcessingUnit: Reverse Engineering and Customization of Intel Microcode

Microcode provides an abstraction layer over the instruction set to decompose complex instructions into simpler micro-operations that can be more easily implemented in hardware. It is an essential optimization to simplify the design of x86 processors. However, introducing an additional layer of software beneath the instruction set poses security a...

Pietro Borrello, Catherine Easdon, Martin Schwarzl, Roland Czerny, Michael Schwarz

| 17th IEEE Workshop on Offensive Technologies | 2023

Rapid Prototyping for Microarchitectural Attacks

In recent years, microarchitectural attacks have been demonstrated to be a powerful attack class. However, as our empirical analysis shows, there are numerous implementation challenges that hinder discovery and subsequent mitigation of these vulnerabilities. In this paper, we examine the attack development process, the features and usability of exi...

Catherine Easdon, Michael Schwarz, Martin Schwarzl, Daniel Gruss

| USENIX Association | 2022