MENU

About Me

I am a 4th-year PhD student at MIT CSAIL, advised by Prof. Mengjia Yan. My research interest lies in computer architecture and security, with a particular focus on mitigating microarchitectural side-channel attacks. I am especially interested in applying formal methods and programming language principles to advance security analysis and design comprehensive defense mechanisms against microarchitectural vulnerabilities.

Before joining MIT, I earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Michigan. I also hold a bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Education

2022 - Present
Ph.D. Student in Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2020 - 2022
B.S.E. in Computer Science
University of Michigan
2018 - 2022
B.E. in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Interests

  • Computer Architecture and Security

  • Side-Channel Mitigation

  • Formal Methods and Programming Languages

    • Awards & Scholarships

    EECS MathWorks Fellowship
    2025
    Ho-Ching and Han-Ching Fund Award
    2025
    Presidential Graduate Fellowship Award
    2022
    CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Honorable Mention
    2022
    MICRO-54 ACM Student Research Competition First Place Winner
    2021
    Roger King Scholarship
    2021
    SJTU Undergraduate Excellent Scholarship
    2020
    Fuda Scholarship
    2019
    SJTU Undergraduate Excellent Scholarship
    2019

    Selected Research

    Securing Cryptographic Software via Typed Assembly Language
    Shixin Song*,
    Tingzhen Dong*,
    Kosi Nwabueze,
    Julian Zanders,
    Andres Erbsen,
    Adam Chlipala,
    Mengjia Yan
    2023 - 2025
    The ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2025
    #side-channel mitigation
    #information-flow security
    #typed assembly language

    Presented a transformation framework that rewrites cryptographic assembly programs to separate secret and public stack data, facilitating secure speculation using hardware taint tracking.

    pdf
    Oreo: Protecting ASLR Against Microarchitectural Attacks
    Shixin Song,
    Joseph Zhang,
    Mengjia Yan
    2022 - 2024
    The Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025
    #aslr
    #side-channel mitigation

    Presented a software-hardware co-design mitigation that strengthens ASLR against microarchitectural side-channel attacks.

    pdf
    Thermometer: Profile-Guided BTB Replacement for Data Center Applications
    Shixin Song,
    Tanvir Ahmed Khan,
    Sara Mahdizadeh Shahri,
    Akshitha Sriraman,
    Niranjan K Soundararajan,
    Sreenivas Subramoney,
    Daniel A. Jiménez,
    Heiner Litz,
    Baris Kasikci
    2021 - 2022
    International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) 2022
    #cpu
    #optimization

    Presented a novel BTB replacement policy that achieves near-ideal frontend processor performance for data center applications.

    pdf
    Enabling Early Hardware Development for Futuristic Data Center Applications
    2021 - 2022
    #hardware counter profiling
    #compiler

    Characterized widely-used data center applications (e.g. MySQL, MongoDB, FFmpeg, Nginx) and predicted how these applications might evolve in the future to enable suitable hardware development early on.