Allen is a Computer Engineering Ph.D. student in the CRSS/SSRC research group at UC Santa Cruz. He joined the lab as an undergraduate and started his Ph.D. program in 2019. His research interests include systems and security with a particular interest in side-channel attacks, hardware-assisted security, operating system abstractions, and microarchitectural security.

His current project is to develop a name resolver for Twizzler, an operating system for non-volatile memories, with Daniel Bittman under Ethan Miller. The purpose of the name resolver is to index objects in a namespace and allow objects to be referred to by human-readable names.