Hi, I'm Leon!

I'm a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Princeton University, advised by Prof. Amit Levy in the SNS Research Group.

I also closely collaborate with Prof. Mae Milano. My research focus lies on the intersection of secure and resource-constrained operating systems and programming languages.

Here are some things I've worked on:

In my current project, Omniglot, I explore how to enable safe interactions between Rust and foreign programming languages. We have developed a research prototype that is able to safely integrate untrusted libraries into a Rust application, by combining memory isolation with a set of static and runtime checks. The Omniglot research paper is to set to appear in OSDI'25. In the meantime, you can read the USENIX ;login: article about it.
I am a core-team member of and contributor to the Tock operating system. It features quite a few interesting concepts and targets microcontrollers with upwards of 64kB RAM. It works on ARM Cortex-M and RISC-V platforms. You should go check it out!
To develop FPGA designs I'm using LiteX, a free and open system-on-chip framework. Previously, I contributed a 10 Gigabit Ethernet datapath in the LiteEth IP core and added support for XGMII-interfaced PHYs, which I have since ported to Verilog.
Occasionally, I find myself hacking on my Linux distribution and package manager of choice, NixOS / Nix. I built its security.sudo.extraRules module, among other infrastructure.

Whenever there's time, I like to tinker with electronics, networking hardware and servers. I'm especially interested in applications of the Rust programming language, for example in embedded systems. My main area of interest is developing secure, interconnected embedded systems.

News:

June 2025: We've published a USENIX ;login: article on Omniglot ahead of OSDI'25! It introduces one of Omniglot's motivating examples and one of its core mechanisms.

June 2025: I am presenting Omniglot at the 19th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation in Boston, MA. In our paper, we explore how Rust can safely interact with untrusted foreign libraries. I will also be presenting a poster on this work.