Modini Ayyagari

About Me

Hello, I am Modini Ayyagari, a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University, advised by Dr. Aydin Aysu at the Hardware Cyberthreat Research (HECTOR) Lab.

My research focuses on hardware security, with particular interest in physical side-channel analysis, fault attacks, and secure hardware design for cryptographic and AI/ML systems. I am especially interested in understanding how physical side-channels can play a dual role in modern semiconductor security: as offensive tools for extracting sensitive information and as defensive mechanisms for improving the trustworthiness and resilience of AI/ML hardware.

Through my doctoral research, I work at the intersection of security, computer architecture, digital design, and machine learning hardware. My current interests include side-channel leakage analysis, fault-injection attacks, hardware-assisted security mechanisms, and the security evaluation of AI/ML accelerators and cryptographic implementations.

Before beginning my Ph.D., I worked for 4.5 years as an RTL Design Engineer at Infineon Technologies. During this time, I developed soft IPs for CPU subsystems, cryptographic accelerators, memory controllers, data transfer engines, and machine learning accelerators. This industry experience gave me a strong foundation in RTL design, microarchitecture, digital systems, and hardware development flows, which now informs my research in building and evaluating secure computing systems.

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