Dylan Christensen

About Me

Hi, I'm Dylan! I'm a PhD student in Computing and Information Systems (Software and Information Systems track) at UNC Charlotte, where I work as a graduate research assistant under Dr. Meera Sridhar. My research focuses on the security of cyber-physical systems — electric vehicle charging infrastructure, smart grid and distributed energy resources, and the broader IoT ecosystem.

I do hands-on security research across the stack: building and attacking a custom hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbed with real EV chargers, smart thermostats, and programmable grid simulators; red-teaming data-processing hardware like the NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU; and developing AI-driven tooling for automated vulnerability analysis and exploit generation. The work spans network analysis, protocol reverse engineering, firmware extraction, fuzzing, and penetration testing.

My first paper, AutoPwn — an agentic-AI framework for automated code-reuse exploit generation — was accepted at CSET '25. I also serve as a teaching assistant for Secure Programming and Penetration Testing. This site showcases my research projects, technical skills, and ongoing work. Interested in collaboration or learning more? Don't hesitate to get in touch!