Mengjia Yan

Mengjia Yan is an assistant professor and the Homer A. Burnell Career Development Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. Her research interests include computer architecture and security, with a focus on side channel attacks and defenses. Yan received a BS in computer science from Zhejiang University, China. and a PhD in computer science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Yan has received several awards for work and conference papers, including an NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award.

Selected Publications

• Cook, J., Behrens, J., Drean, J., Yan, M. (2022). There’s Always a Bigger Fish: A Clarifying Analysis of a Machine-Learning-Assisted Side-Channel Attack. International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA).
• Qi, Z., Feng, Q., Cheng, Y., Yan, M., Li, P., Yin, H., Wei, T. (2021). SpecTaint: Speculative Taint Analysis for Discovering Spectre Gadgets. Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS).
• Bourgeat, T., Drean, J., Yang, Y., Tsai, L., Emer, J., Yan, M. (2020). CaSA: End-to-end Quantitative Security Analysis of Randomly Mapped Caches. 53rd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO).
• Zhao, Z., Ji, H., Yan, M., Yu, J., Fletcher, C. W., Morrison, A., Marinov, D., Torrellas, J. (2020). Speculation Invariance (InvarSpec): Faster Safe Execution Through Program Analysis. 53rd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO).
• Yan, M., Fletcher, C. W., Torrellas, J. (2020). Cache Telepathy: Leveraging Shared Resource Attacks to Learn DNN Architectures. USENIX Security.