Amro Awad
Biography
Amro Awad joined the ECE Department of NC State University in Fall 2020. Before joining NC State, he was an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida (UCF) for three years. Prior to joining academia, he was a senior member of technical staff (SMTS) at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM. He has earned his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from NC State in 2016. Dr. Awad had several research stints at government and industrial research labs, such as AMD Research, Los Alamos National Lab, HP Labs, and Air Force Research Laboratory. He holds six U.S. patents and has several pending.
His research has been published in the most prestigious computer architecture conferences, such as ISCA, MICRO, ASPLOS, and HPCA. His research group has been funded by DARPA, Sandia National Laboratories, NSF, Naval Surface Warfare Center, and Air Force Research Lab. His research interests include secure hardware architectures, memory systems, and system-level integration of emerging technologies.
Education
-
Ph.D.
2016
Computer Engineering
North Carolina State University, Raleigh -
Master's
Computer Engineering
North Carolina State University, Raleigh -
Bachelor's
2011
Jordan University of Science and Technology
Computer Engineering
Research Focus
Recent Publications
- A Keylogging Inference Attack on Air-Tapping Keyboards in Virtual Environments (2022)
- ARES: Persistently Secure Non-Volatile Memory with Processor-transparent and Hardware-friendly Integrity Verification and Metadata Recovery (2022)
- ATHENA: Enabling Codesign for Next-Generation AI/ML Architectures (2022)
- Adaptive Security Support for Heterogeneous Memory on GPUs (2022)
- DirectNVM: Hardware-accelerated NVMe SSDs for High-performance Embedded Computing (2022)
- Eris: Fault Injection and Tracking Framework for Reliability Analysis of Open-Source Hardware (2022)
- Filesystem Encryption or Direct-Access for NVM Filesystems? Let's Have Both! (2022)
- High-Fidelity Model Extraction Attacks via Remote Power Monitors (2022)
- Horus: Persistent Security for Extended Persistence-Domain Memory Systems (2022)
- Minerva: Rethinking Secure Architectures for the Era of Fabric-Attached Memory Architectures (2022)
Recent News

NC State Announces 2022-23 Goodnight Early Career Innovators
Posted on March 29, 2023 | Filed Under: Faculty
NC State announced its 2022-23 class of Goodnight Early Career Innovators today. This program recognizes and rewards promising NC State early-career faculty whose scholarship is in STEM or STEM education. The 25 faculty selected will receiv …

New Technique Offers Faster Security for Non-Volatile Memory Tech
Posted on April 6, 2022 | Filed Under: Research
Researchers used a hybrid hardware-software approach to improve file system security for NVMs.

NC State Faculty Members Awarded Funded Research for Secure Virtualization
Posted on September 20, 2021 | Filed Under: Research
The Office of Naval Research has granted Amro Awad and Aydin Aysu—both assistant professors of electrical and computer engineering at NC State—research funding to discover more secure virtualization techniques in hardware accelerators.