Andrew Plotner's Website

About Me

Hi! I'm Andrew Plotner, a

Fresh graduate with a Master's in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Unversity of Michigan, aiming to hopefully start a PhD program in Fall 2026
Security enthusiast, with a particular fondness for hardware side channels
Lover of rain and nature
Avid fan of rougelite video games in nearly all forms :)

I have an unusally wide range of experience, ranging from embedded system design to security to computer architecture to even quantum computing architecture! In all of the above subjects, I exhausted the university's course offerings (both at the undergraduate and postgraduate level) and performed related research projects. See below for some cool stuff I've done with my skills.

Links

My GitHub
My LinkedIn

Skills

Languages

C++ (extensive experience)
C (extensive experience as applied to embedded system firmware)
SystemVerilog
Bash
Python
Javascript (some)

Development tools

git (extensive experience)
Linux command-line usage (extensive experience)
macOS advanced usage
Linux system administration
XCode
VSCode

Misc

Embedded system design
Electronic lab equipment usage (Oscilloscope, function generator, power supply, etc)
Soldering (both through-hole and SMD)
Computer Networking, down to layer-2 Ethernet
Reverse-engineering of compiled binaries
Exploitation of vulnerable web systems
Experience with embedded system security, both offensively and defensively
Working knowledge of quantum computing algorithms
Knowledge of the state-of-the-art in quantum error correction and breadth of quantum techologies

Cool Things I've Done and Can Talk About (Project Portfolio)

MITRE ECTF 2025

MITRE, a leading organization in the field of computer security, hosted a nation-wide security competition called the ECTF (Embedded Capture the Flag) in 2025 that I participated in as part of the University of Michigan's cyber security team. We placed 3rd overall in the nation, out of over 100 participating teams, with my contributions having played a substantial role towards making this possible :)
Read More for details of the competition and some cool securiuty attack writeups!

Magic Wifi - Fall 2022

Magic Wifi is an embedded systems project I completed in the Fall term of 2022, representing one of the three so-called "Major Design Experience"s I'd complete in my undergraduate curriculum

It creates a link between two devices that enables the connected devices to operate as though there's an unbroken Ethernet cable between them,
with the Ethernet traffic actually being flexibly and dynamically tunneled over either wifi (high-bandwidth, low-range) or LoRa (high range, low-bandwidth) as appropriate.

RISCV Processor - Winter 2022

For the University of Michigan's Computer Architecture course, we designed and implemented a full RISC-V cpu from scratch using SystemVerilog

It has some cool functionality: 3-way superscalar, R10K-style register renaming, external interrupt support, etc...

Etterna

I am a rhythm game enthusiast and have played many in the genre, including one called "Etterna".

Many years ago, I filed a bug report after an update led to the game no longer working on my computer.
After digging into the code myself, I discovered what the issue was and made a PR that fixed it.
Ever since then, I've been contributing to the project in my free time, and remain as the only active macOS developer for the game. As of the time of writing this, I've created over 60 pull requests that were merged into the main branch of the repository, many of which fixed game-breaking bugs.

This Site!

This site is running on an unmanaged VPS I'm renting from DigitalOcean.
It's currently just a simple nginx server serving hand-written html pages, but I've got some cool ideas in the work.
Make sure to check back later for site 2.0 ;)