News

Payton Walker defended his PhD. Real impactful work, even including hard negative results. 3 years in the PhD program 10+ papers, including several top-tiers @ EuroS&P, Mobicom, ACSAC, ASIACCS, etc. Will next be at MITRE’s National Security Accelerator Program. He is SPIES Lab’s 11th PhD graduate. Congratulations! Who is next?

• Human Brains Can’t Detect Fake News: A Neuro-Cognitive Study of Textual Disinformation Susceptibility
  Cagri Arisoy, Anuradha Mandal and Nitesh Saxena
  In the International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST), 2022
  [pdf]
• Mobile Mental Health Apps: Alternative Intervention or Intrusion?
  Shalini Saini, Dhiral Panjwani, Nitesh Saxena
  In the International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST), 2022
  [pdf]

• Defending against Thru-barrier Stealthy Voice Attacks via Cross-Domain Sensing on Phoneme Sounds
  Cong Shi, Tianming Zhao, Wenjin Zhang, Ahmed Tanvir Mahdad, Zhengkun Ye, Yan Wang, Nitesh Saxena and Yingying Chen
  In the 42^nd IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), July 2022

Predatory Medicine: Exploring and Measuring the Vulnerability of Medical AI to Predatory Science
Shalini Saini, Nitesh Saxena.
In The Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning (CHIL), April 2022.

• SoK: Your Mind Tells a Lot About You: On the Privacy Leakage   via Brainwave Devices
  Anuradha Mandal and Nitesh Saxena
  In the 15th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec), May 2022
• BiasHacker: Voice Command Disruption by Exploiting Speaker Biases in Automatic Speech Recognition
  Payton Walker, Nathan McClaran, Zihao Zheng, Nitesh Saxena and Guofei Gu
  In the 15th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec), May 2022

• Laser Meager Listener: A Scientific Exploration of Laser-based Speech Eavesdropping in Commercial User Space
  Payton Walker and Nitesh Saxena
  In the 7th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), June 2022.

• Hearing Check Failed: Using Laser Vibrometry to Analyze the Potential for Hard Disk Drives to Eavesdrop Speech Vibrations
  Payton Walker, Nitesh Saxena, S. Abhishek Anand, Tzipora Halevi and Shalini Saini
  In the 17th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIA CCS), May/June 2022

The lab welcomes three new PhD students:

• Jimmy Dani (since Spring 2022)
• Md Mojibur Rahman Redoy Akanda (since Spring 2022)
• Md Imanul Huq (since Spring 2022)

Dr. Saxena is offering a brand new special topics course for graduate students, CSCE 689: Secure Authentication Systems, in Spring 2022.  This is a research-centered course covering a wide variety of authentication techniques, and the strengths and pitfalls of these techniques. Student groups will be presenting research papers, and pursuing a practical project on a topic of their interest relevant to authentication, with the potential to convert these projects into research publications depending on their merit. No exams! Please consider enrolling for the course and learn about some cool research in one of the most important areas of cybersecurity — authentication breaks are often used as a stepping stone for many other devastating cyber attacks (e.g., the SolarWinds and Twitter hacks of 2020). For any questions, please free to reach out to Dr. Saxena: nsaxena@tamu.edu.

• Gummy Browsers: Targeted Browser Spoofing against State-of-the-Art Fingerprinting Techniques
  Zengrui Liu,  Prakash Shrestha and Nitesh Saxena
  In International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS), June  2022.
• Beware of Your Vibrating Devices! Vibrational Relay Attacks on Zero-Effort Deauthentication
  Prakash Shrestha and Nitesh Saxena.
  In International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS), June  2022.