Blog
Long-form writing from the lab — research retrospectives, tutorials we wish we had, CTF retros, and the occasional opinion. RSS coming soon.
- 2026 · 05 · 14research notes
What we learned defending Cortex-A78 against speculative disclosure
A walkthrough of the four mitigation strategies we tried, the two that worked, and the one that broke every benchmark we cared about.
P. Patel · 12 min read - 2026 · 04 · 26ctf
PlaidCTF 2026 — full retrospective and selected writeups
How we placed 7th, what almost broke us at hour 22, and a per-challenge breakdown of the four problems we are still proud of.
Team · 20 min read - 2026 · 03 · 08lab life
On joining UTEP, building T3S, and why hardware security needs the border
A short note on the lab's first three years, the students who built it, and what working from El Paso has meant for the questions we ask.
Dr. Armanuzzaman · 6 min read - 2026 · 02 · 12tutorial
A pragmatic introduction to Mali command-stream isolation
If you understand a vertex shader and a syscall, you can understand the Tessera threat model. A tutorial we wish we had two years ago.
M. Reyes · 18 min read - 2026 · 01 · 30vuln
Three CVEs in TF-A — what the fuzzer found while we were asleep
FirmFuzz-A's nightly run produced three distinct PSCI bugs in 11 days. We walk through each one and the harnesses that surfaced them.
J. Khoury · 9 min read