About me
My name is Ruxandra and I'm a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at the University of Bucharest. I began my doctoral studies in October 2021 at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, initially focusing on security and computer architectures, particularly RISC-V. My interest in this field started during my master where I studied Security and Applied Logic. My master's thesis A Study on the Attacks Reproduced on RISC-V (in Romanian) explored some of the most well-known attacks and their impact on RISC-V. Building on that, the proposed PhD topic Low-level Attacks and Software Mitigations on RISC-V focused primarily on the speculative RISC-V architectures.
After a year, I decided to pause my PhD for a while. During this time, my research interests shifted a bit and I became more drawn to compiler theory. Since November 2024, under the supervision of Cristian Rusu, I've been working on a new topic Compiler Optimizations for RISC-V.
Teaching
- Computer Architecture Lab (October 2019 - February 2025)
- Data Structures Lab (February 2022 - June 2022)
- Security and Applied Logic Elements Lab - Module 2: Buffer Overflow Attacks 1 & 2 (March 2022)
Publications
- R. Bălucea and P. Irofti, Software Mitigation of RISC-V Spectre Attacks, in International Conference on Information Technology and Communications Security. Springer, 2023, pp. 51--64. (arXiv:2206.04507)
Talks
- SECITC 2023 (23 - 24 November 2023)
- LOS Seminar (16 November 2021)
Contributions
- NXP LLVM Load/Store Pair Extension for RV32 (in pending for LLVM upstreaming)
Scholarships and Awards