Michael Rooney

PurSec Lab, Purdue University

August 2024 - Present

While on the FIRE program, I have been tasked as the primary engineer in charge of developing co-simulation platforms for systems-under-test (SUTs) in order to facilitate the reverse engineering and exploitation of the SUTs. Specifically, I performed firmware reverse engineering and leveraged slice-based execution to hook execution of the firmware at the HAL-level and faithfully emulate the true behavior of the SUT. Additionally, I created a time-synchronization bridge between the QEMU simulation of the firmware and the physical simulation, Gazebo, to provide our security researchers with a rapidly-reusable environment to test cyber-physical vulnerability hypotheses. My research experience on this project has been invaluable and we are currently working on making this work more automated and generalizable.

USMA EECS Department

August 2023 - May 2024

During this capstone project, I was able to transition much of my research from the previous year and a half and apply it to a real-world application. My role was to develop a system that would be able to detect anomalies in the smart grid in real-time leveraging a linear state estimator that I had written using the Rust programming language the semester prior. While performing linear state estimation on the power grid data in real-time (82 measurements every 16.67ms), I was also in charge of developing an operator interface that would allow the user to view the state of the system and the anomalies that were detected.