About Me
Hi, I am a PhD candidate at EPFL, Switzerland, since fall 2021, working on confidential computing for RISC-V, advised by Prof. Edouard Bugnion and Prof. Thomas Bourgeat. My primary research interests lie in RISC-V Physical Memory Protection technology (PMP) and RISC-V firmware. In 2024, I interned with the Security department at IBM Research, Zurich where I worked on enhancing the security of context switches across security domains by leveraging the formal specification of the RISC-V ISA written in the Sail domain specific language to formally specify architectures. Prior to my PhD, I completed my master's from IIT Kanpur, India conducting research on hardware cache prefetching, advised by Dr. Biswabandan Panda. In 2021, I also interned at Intel Labs, Bangalore for six months where I worked with Dr. Niranjan Soundararajan on optimizing different aspects of the processor pipeline. Find more about my research here and my CV here.
Publications and Patents
Save what must be saved: Secure Context Switching with Sailor.
USENIX Security 2025
Neelu S. Kalani, Thomas Bourgeat, Guerney D. H. Hunt, and Wojciech Ozga
KISV @ SOSP 2024
Charly Castes, Neelu S. Kalani, Sofia Saltovskaia, Noé Terrier, Abel Vexina Wilkinson and Edouard Bugnion
Creating Trust by Abolishing Hierarchies.
HotOS 2023
Charly Castes, Adrien Ghosn, Neelu S. Kalani, Yuchen Qian, Marios Kogias, Mathias Payer and Edouard Bugnion
A RISC-V Extension to Minimize Privileges of Enclave Runtimes.
SysTEX @ EuroSys 2023
Neelu S. Kalani and Edouard Bugnion
Embracing Homogeneity in Root of Trust Establishment.
SysDW @ SOSP 2023
Neelu S. Kalani
Caching based on Branch Instructions in a Processor.
US Patent US2023/0103206A1
Niranjan Soundararajan, Sreenivas Subramoney, Neelu S. Kalani, Vishal Gupta
Selective provisioning of supplementary micro-operation cache resources.
US Patent US2023/0418757A1
Niranjan Soundararajan, Sreenivas Subramoney, Vishal Gupta, Neelu S. Kalani
Instruction Criticality based Energy-efficient Hardware Data Prefetching.
IEEE CAL 2021
Neelu S. Kalani and Biswabandan Panda
Run-Jump-Run: Bouquet of Instruction Pointer Jumpers for High Performance Instruction Prefetching.
IPC @ ISCA 2020
Vishal Gupta, Neelu S. Kalani and Biswabandan Panda
Mentoring Students
Custom ISA Extension for Privileged Software Isolation
Student: Youssef Mansour, Summer@EPFL Internship, 2025
Performance and Security of RISC-V Security Primitives
Student: Mohamed Anas Ennahir, Summer in the Lab Internship, 2025
On Software-based solutions for Dynamic Root of Trust on RISC-V
Student: Alexandre Meïer Doukhan, Masters Project, 2024
Firmware Vrtualization with Mirage
Student: Abel Vexina Wilkinson, Masters Project, 2024
Establishing Dynamic Root of Trust for RISC-V
Student: Alexandre Meïer Doukhan, Bachelor Thesis, 2023
Providing Remote Attestation for Trust Domains
Student: Pavle Janevski, Summer@EPFL Internship, 2023
Teaching
The following is a list of the courses I’ve TAed so far. My teaching duties generally revolve around conducting interactive exercise sessions, conducting lab sessions, and preparing quizzes/exercises, etc.
Computer Security, EPFL
Prof. Carmela Troncoso (Fall 2023) and Prof. Edouard Bugnion (Fall 2022)
Advanced Topics on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, EPFL
Prof. Carmela Troncoso (Spring 2023, Spring 2024) and Dr. Theresa Stadler (Spring 2025)
Fundamentals of Computing (Head TA), IIT Kanpur
Prof. Debadatta Mishra (Spring 2021) and Prof. Piyush Rai (Fall 2019)
Computer Architecture , IIT Kanpur
Prof. Biswabandan Panda (Spring 2020)
Invited Talks
The following is a list of the talks I’ve given so far. I’ve also put the links to the slides/posters in case you are interested. 😄
Confidential Computing and Trusted Boot
IBM Research, Zurich and Oracle, Zurich (Dec 2024)
Secure Dyanmic Root of Trust with FlashPoint
Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) Europe 2024 (I won the fellowship ☺️)
A RISC-V Extension to Minimize Privileges of Enclave Runtimes
SysTEX @ EuroSys 2023
Embracing Homogeneity in Root of Trust Establishment
Lightning Talk at SysDW @ SOSP 2023
Putting the Spotlight on Root of Trust
Workshop focused on New Software Abstractions for Hardware Security Technology held at Monte Verità, Ascona, 2023
Instruction Criticality-based Energy-efficient Hardware Data Prefetching
ACM Student Research Competition @ MICRO 2021 (I won the 2nd prize ☺️)
Run-Jump-Run: Bouquet of Instruction Pointer Jumpers for High Performance Instruction Prefetching
Poster at CWWMCA @ MICRO 2020
Time for Consonant Memory Wall Killers
Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) India 2020 Finalist Talk
Extra-curricular
EPFL graduate student association member (called EPIC)
2022-2024.
Volunteer for winter school
Conducted a demo and lab session for the computer architecture winter school 2020 (CAWS) on the ChampSim simulator.
Hobbies
I enjoy watching Netflix and reading. When I was younger (don’t we all miss those days), I used to write sort of a philosophical blog. 😁
Contact
Email: neelu.kalani@epfl.ch
Office: INN 235 at EPFL Campus, Lausanne, Switzerland