As an avid amateur photographer, Arun Kanuparthi greatly appreciated the chance to study in New York City, where there are always interesting things to capture for posterity. “If one shot doesn’t work out, you learn to try another angle,” he has said, “and that’s something to keep in mind while doing technology research too; you have to examine problems from different perspectives.”
Kanuparthi, who earned a doctoral degree in electrical engineering in 2013, could often be found in the Offensive Security, Incident Response, and Internet Security (OSIRIS) Lab, where students were called upon to analyze and understand how attackers take advantage of real systems. He also served as a research assistant – focusing on making integrated circuits more impervious to hacking, foiling malicious hardware Trojans, and securing emerging memory technologies – and took part in CSAW, the largest student-run cybersecurity competition in the world. Those experiences served him well: directly after earning his Ph.D., he joined Intel, one of the world’s largest chip makers. “People may not think much about hardware security,” he has said, “but it is an absolutely vital part of cybersecurity.”