About Me

I am currently a SUNY Empire Innovation Scholar and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Stony Brook University. Before joining Stony Brook University in Fall 2022, I was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Iowa, where I was awarded the Dean's Scholar Award.
Before joining the University of Iowa in 2016, I was a post-doctoral research associate at Cylab, Carnegie Mellon University (Host: Prof. Anupam Datta>) and Purdue University (Host: Prof. Ninghui Li). I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at San Antonio under the supervision of Prof. Jianwei Niu and Prof. William H. Winsborough (deceased). I received my undergraduate education in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET).

Research

My research lies in Computer Security and Privacy. I generally use techniques from formal verification, automated reasoning, runtime verification, programming lanugages, software engineering, human-computer interaction, and measurement to solve practically-relevant computer security and privacy problems.
In the broad area of Computer Security and Privacy, I am particularly interested in problems in the software and network security domains. My current work includes addressing security and privacy problems in SSL/TLS, X.509 PKI, Cellular Network, Wi-Fi, Internet-of-Things (IoT), and Regulatory Compliance. I am also interested in solving fundamental problems in automated reasoning and formal verification.
The research of my group has been funded by both National Science Foundation (NSF) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), including a DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA). Findings of our research have resulted in enhancements in the implementations and designs of widely used protocols (e.g., 4G LTE, 5G, WPA2 enterprise) and cryptographic libraries.

Awards

Best Paper Award (Runner Up), ACM CCS'21
Best Paper Award, ACNS'20
DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), 2019
Best Paper Award, IEEE DASC'19
Best Paper Award, ACSAC'19
Distinguished Paper Award Honorable Mention, NDSS'19
CSAW North America Finalist, CSAW'17 Applied Research Competition
Best Paper Award, ACM SACMAT'12
Upsilon Pi Epsilon Programming Excellence Award, ACM ICPC World Finals

Announcements

I am currently looking for 2-3 motivated Ph.D. students to join my group starting from Fall 2023. If you are interested, please reach out to me via email. Please consult the following URL for details: https://www.cs.stonybrook.edu/admissions/Graduate-Program.
I am also looking for Stony Brook undergraduate and Masters students who are interested in doing research in computer security and privacy. If you are interested, then please drop by my office or schedule an appointment with me through email.
I am also looking for 1 Postdoc to join my group. An ideal candidate will either have strong background on (1) formal verification, automated reasoning, and/or programming languages techniquees, or (2) system security. If you are interested, then please reach out to me via email.

Publications

2022

Mitziu Echeverria and Omar Chowdhury. 2022. Demystifying the presence of cellular network attacks and misbehaviors. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 742-743. https://doi.org/10.1145/3517745.3563017

2021

Joyanta Debnath, Sze Yiu Chau, and Omar Chowdhury. 2021. On Re-engineering the X.509 PKI with Executable Specification for Better Implementation Guarantees. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1388-1404. https://doi.org/10.1145/3460120.3484793
Moosa Yahyazadeh, Sze Yiu Chau, Li Li, Man Hong Hue, Joyanta Debnath, Sheung Chiu Ip, Chun Ngai Li, Endadul Hoque, and Omar Chowdhury. 2021. Morpheus: Bringing The (PKCS) One To Meet the Oracle. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2474-2496. https://doi.org/10.1145/3460120.3485382
Syed Rafiul Hussain, Imtiaz Karim, Abdullah Al Ishtiaq, Omar Chowdhury, and Elisa Bertino. 2021. Noncompliance as Deviant Behavior: An Automated Black-box Noncompliance Checker for 4G LTE Cellular Devices. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1082-1099. https://doi.org/10.1145/3460120.3485388
Man Hong Hue, Joyanta Debnath, Kin Man Leung, Li Li, Mohsen Minaei, M. Hammad Mazhar, Kailiang Xian, Endadul Hoque, Omar Chowdhury, and Sze Yiu Chau. 2021. All your Credentials are Belong to Us: On Insecure WPA2-Enterprise Configurations. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1100-1117. https://doi.org/10.1145/3460120.3484569
S. Rahaman, H. Cai, O. H. Chowdhury and D. D. Yao, "From Theory to Code: Identifying Logical Flaws in Cryptographic Implementations in C/C++," in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, doi: 10.1109/TDSC.2021.3108031.
Meng, Baoluo, Daniel Larraz, Kit Siu, Abha Moitra, John Interrante, William Smith, Saswata Paul, Daniel Prince, Heber Herencia-Zapana, M. Fareed Arif, Moosa Yahyazadeh, Vidhya Tekken Valapil, Michael Durling, Cesare Tinelli, and Omar Chowdhury. 2021. "VERDICT: A Language and Framework for Engineering Cyber Resilient and Safe System" Systems 9, no. 1: 18. https://doi.org/10.3390/systems9010018
Mitziu Echeverria, Zeeshan Ahmed , Bincheng Wang , M. Fareed Arif , Syed Rafiul Hussain, Omar Chowdhury. 2021. PHOENIX: Device-Centric Cellular Network Protocol Monitoring using Runtime Verification. In Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2021.

Current & Prior PhD Students

Dr. Moosa Yahyazadeh (Ph.D. 2021; currently a formal verification engineer at Apple Inc.)

Mitziu Echeverria (Ph.D. candidate, The University of Iowa)

Muhammad Hammad Mazhar (Ph.D. candidate, The University of Iowa)

Joyanta Debnath (Ph.D. candidate, The University of Iowa)

Muhammad Daniyal Pirwani (Ph.D. candidate, The University of Iowa)