News

2025

• My research group has been selected as a recipient of the 2025 Google Academic Research Award. We are deeply grateful to Google Research for supporting our work.
• I was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at Purdue Computer Science in August 2025. Thank you to my mentors, colleagues, and the whole Purdue community for their support. A special thank you goes to my students, past and present; your hard work and curiosity make this career rewarding.
• I have been elected Secretary/Treasurer of ACM SIGSAC. I look forward to my service to the community, July 1, 2025.
• I am proud to congratulate two of my Ph.D. students who just graduated and are starting their new jobs in Fall 2025. Arjun Arunasalam is starting as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Knight Foundation School of Computing & Information Sciences (FIU KFSCIS), and Raymond Muller is beginning his new role as a Signal and Image Processing Engineer for Security at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
• Congratulations to Chandrika Mukherjee and all authors on receiving the Honorable Mention award for the paper Shadowed Realities: An Investigation of UI Attacks in WebXR at USENIX Security Symposium 2025.
• Congratulations to my Ph.D. students, Muslum Ozgur Ozmen and Reham Aburas, on their graduation and new faculty positions! Ozgur is heading to Arizona State University as an Assistant Professor; Reham will join American University of Sharjah as an Assistant Professor.

2024

• My research group has received an Amazon Research Award.
• Distinguished Paper award at ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2024.
• I gave a talk on Secure Autonomy for Qualcomm AI Lectures. Thank you Jonathan Petit for hosting me!
• I gave a talk at Lund University (Sweden) for the ELLIIT focus period Symposium on Security and Fault Tolerance of Cyber-Physical Systems. Thank you Martina Maggio and Mikael Asplund for hosting me!
• I gave a virtual talk at University of California Santa Cruz Baskin School of Engineering, Cyber-Physical Systems Research Center (CPSRC). Thank you Ricardo Sanfelice, Alvaro Cardenas, Daniel Fremont for hosting me.
• Congratulations to M. Ozgur Ozmen on receiving the 2024 CERIAS Diamond Award for his outstanding academic achievement.
• Congratulations to Raymond Muller on being selected for 2024 CPS Rising Stars.
• [CCS 2024] Distinguished Paper award at ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2024.
• [USENIX Security 24] Shadowed Realities: An Investigation of UI Attacks in WebXR
• [USENIX Security 24] A Systematic Study of Physical Sensor Attack Hardness
• [USENIX Security 24] VOGUES: Validation of Object Guise using Estimated Components
• [IEEE S&P 24] A Systematic Study of Physical Sensor Attack Hardness
• [IEEE S&P 24] Wear’s my Data? Understanding the Cross-Device Runtime Permission Model in Wearables
• [PETS 24] Physical Side-Channel Attacks against Intermittent Devices
• [USENIX Security 24] ATTention Please! An Investigation of the App Tracking Transparency Permission
• [USENIX Security 24] Understanding the Security and Privacy Implications of Online Toxic Content on Refugees
• [NDSS 24] The Dark Side of E-commerce: Dropshipping Abuse as a Business Model
• [VehicleSec] General Co-chair - Symposium on Vehicle Security and Privacy (VehicleSec) 2024 will be co-located with NDSS at San Diego on Feb 26, 2024 Follow @VehicleSec2024
• [SafeThings] PC Co-chair - IEEE/ACM Workshop on the Internet of Safe Things 2024 will be co-located with IEEE S&P Symposium on Mar 23, 2024 Follow @SafeThings2024

2023

• I’m so proud of my first Ph.D. student, Habiba Farrukh, who successfully defended her thesis. Habiba will join UC Irvine as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science. Congratulations Habiba!
• [ACSAC 23] Can Large Language Models Provide Security & Privacy Advice? Measuring the Ability of LLMs to Refute Misconceptions
• [CS Distinguished Speaker] I gave a talk at the University of Virginia. Thank you Tianhao Wang, Adwait Jog, and David Evans for hosting me!
• [Keynote Speaker] I gave a talk at Workshop on Security and Privacy of Sensing Systems (Sensors S&P) colocated with ACM SenSys. Thank you Luis Garcia and Fatima Anwar for hosting me!
• [T-IFS] I joined the Associate Editor team of IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (T-IFS)
• Excited to be a part of the new NSF AI Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and OperatioN (ACTION) (led by Giovanni Vigna) with a great team of colleagues.
• Excited to be part of the multi-university transportation center focusing on cybersecurity sponsored by the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT).
• Congratulations to Raymond Muller on receiving the Graduate Teaching Award from Purdue Computer Science Department.
• Congratulations to Raymond Muller on receiving the X-Force Fellowship through the National Security Innovation Network to solve national security problems in collaboration with the U.S. military.
• [USENIX Security 23] Discovering Adversarial Driving Maneuvers against Autonomous Vehicles
• [USENIX Security 23] LocIn: Inferring Semantic Location from Spatial Maps in Mixed Realitys
• [USENIX Security 23] ZBCAN: A Zero-Byte CAN Defense System
• [USENIX Security 23] That Person Moves Like A Car: Misclassification Attack Detection for Autonomous Systems using Spatiotemporal Consistency
• [USENIX Security 23] PatchVerif: Discovering Faulty Patches in Robotic Vehicles
• [IEEE S&P 23] One Key to Rule Them All: Secure Group Pairing for Heterogeneous IoT Devices
• [PETS 23] iStelan: Disclosing Sensitive User Information by Mobile Magnetometer from Finger Touches
• [NDSS 23] Evasion Attacks and Defenses on Smart Home Physical Event Verification
• [VehicleSec 23] Rethinking Secure Pairing in Drone Swarms (Position Paper)

2022

• [2022] I and Prof. Xu received funding with the CISCO.
• [Google ASPIRE 2022] Our team led by me and Prof. Bianchi won Google ASPIRE Award.
• [CCS 22] Discovering IoT Physical Channel Vulnerabilities
• [CCS 22] Physical Hijacking Attacks against Object Trackers
• Two papers and two demos are accepted to AutoSec 22.
• Two journal papers are accepted to ACM Transcations on Internet of Things (TIOT) 22.
• [IEEE S&P 22] PGPatch: Policy-Guided Logic Bug Patching for Robotic Vehicles
• [USENIX Security 22] SARA: Secure Android Remote Authorization
• The AutoSec (Automotive & Autonomous Vehicle Security) Workshop will be hosted with NDSS again in 2022! Follow @autosec_conf
• I’ve earned NSF CAREER Award.
• [USENIX Security 22] Behind the Tube: Exploitative Monetization of Content on YouTube

2021

• I’ve received funding with the Rolls-Royce Cybersecurity Technology Research Network.
• [Google ASPIRE 2021] Our team led by me and Prof. Bianchi won Google ASPIRE Award.
• [SafeThings 21] On the Safety Implications of Misordered Events and Commands in IoT Systems
• [PETS 21] Real-time Analysis of Privacy-(un)aware IoT Applications
• [NDSS 21] PGFUZZ: Policy-Guided Fuzzing for Robotic Vehicles
• [USENIX Security 21] Exposing New Vulnerabilities of Error Handling Mechanism in CAN
• [USENIX Security 21] ATLAS: A Sequence-based Learning Approach for Attack Investigation
• [KDD 21] What do you see? Evaluation of XAI Interpretability through Neural Backdoors
• [ICML-FL 21] New Metrics to Evaluate the Performance and Fairness of Personalized FL
• [IEEE SecDev 21] Towards Improving Container Security by Preventing Runtime Escapes
• [NDSS 21] Evading Voltage-Based Intrusion Detection on Automotive CAN
• [UbiComp 21] S3: Side-channel Attack on Stylus Pencil Through Sensors
• [IoTDI 21] Sentinel: A Robust IDS for IoT Networks Using Kernel-Level System Information