Hi! I’m Lucas. I grew up in the Chicagoland area and went to school at the University of Illinois– Urbana Champaign (UIUC) where I graduated with a B.S. in computer engineering in 2019. UIUC has always been a top-5 school, and as of 2019 has been ranked #3 in CompE according to U.S News college ranking. I am very proud of where I came from and will talk your ear off about it.
During my undergrad I loved anything and everything security, where I was an avid bug bounty hunter (through which I paid a couple months rent once!) and did hardware security research under Chris Fletcher. I am published* and have done offensive research on CPU side-channels under him. I was also a TA for ECE411 in Spring 2019, the capstone processor design course at UIUC.
My main career interest is in hardware security, but also security as a whole (having a background in application security). I believe security at the hardware level is becoming more and more critical, and I want to keep building performant secure hardware. While this may be an oxymoron to some, it is one that I believe is incredibly rewarding.
I am currently at Qualcomm after Nuvia was acquired. Prior to that I was at SiFive where I was building out the security verification infrastructure. I hope to ensure nothing like this ever happens again, using my offensive security expertise.
Currently not actively pursuing other opportunities, and thus my resume has not been updated since probably December 2021.
* Paper also recognized in IEEE Micro Top Picks Special Issue, 2020
More about me
Favorite activity/ies: Hiking, reading, video games
Favorite book(s): A Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde; Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
My proudest moment: Technically, I would say a tie between my first paper acceptance, and the first bug bounty I achieved. Non-technically, when I ran a marathon in 3:36.
Fun Fact: I can move my ears. I have only met 2 other people that could do that.
Other random interests: Video game speedruns, cooking, rock climbing, wine, podcasts, door design