Computer Science PhD Student Earns Professional Honors

Charles Averill BS’23, a computer science PhD student at The University of Texas at Dallas, won the student research competition at an international conference for his solution to a longstanding cybersecurity problem.

Averill received the award at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Programming Languages Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) in June in Seoul, South Korea.

At the conference, Averill presented his method to determine whether security-critical software is vulnerable to a threat called a timing attack. A timing attack occurs when an attacker figures out a password or cryptographic key by analyzing the time it takes for software to process an input. The attack exploits the fact that the exact running time of some software depends on the values of secret data they store and process. By carefully timing the software’s speed, attackers can sometimes infer the secret data without even breaking into the computer. Vulnerability to timing attacks can be difficult to detect due to variations in how long operations take; some can be as short as nanoseconds.

Averill said it was his third time presenting research in the PLDI competition.

“I am incredibly honored and excited to receive this award,” he said. “PLDI is one of the biggest, if not the biggest conferences in my field. To win this award is just an enormous accomplishment for me. I’m so excited that it happened.”

Averill said he became interested in cybersecurity as an undergraduate computer science student when he got involved in the student-led Computer Security Group (CSG) at UT Dallas. Averill, who is now a CSG officer, has worked in several labs on campus and was a research assistant this summer in the Software Languages Security Lab at UT Dallas and the Trust Lab at Dartmouth College.

Dr. Kevin Hamlen, Louis Beecherl Jr. Distinguished Professor of computer science in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, said that Averill had to analyze binary code, which is only read by machines typically, and understand it at a deep mathematical level to develop his solution.

“Solving this problem requires a rare set of skills. I think there are very few people in the world who could have pulled it off,” said Hamlen, executive director of the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute at UT Dallas.

“Charles has been honing binary code analysis and formal mathematical logic for several years now — first as an undergraduate student at UTD and now as a graduate student, making him the perfect person to finally solve this longstanding problem,” Hamlen said. “I am proud to be Charles’ PhD advisor.”

A version of this story appeared in News Center.