I am an assistant professor in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence (SCAI) at Arizona State University (ASU). My research interests broadly lie within the domains of computer security, systems, and architecture. My research goal is to protect sensitive data from powerful adversaries. To this end, I routinely leverage hardware-assisted trusted execution environments while addressing their fundamental limitations in terms of protection and usability. I also design new principles to strengthen critical system software (like operating systems and hypervisors) on a computer.

Before joining ASU, I spent many enjoyable years obtaining a PhD from Purdue (go boilermakers!), where I was extremely fortunate to work with Pedro Fonseca and Byoungyoung Lee. During my PhD, I greatly enjoyed interning at Microsoft Research and NEC Labs, where I worked with Sangho Lee, Marcus Peinado, and Chung Hwan Kim.

❗ I am looking to hire PhD students for exciting systems and security research projects. If you are interested in working in this area, please reach out through email.
⚠️ I do not hire students as graders or TAs for a class, if they have not previously taken the class.

Recent Updates

  • Invited to serve in the program committee of ISOC NDSS 2024 Poster Session. Please submit your best posters!

  • Invited to serve in the program committee of ISOC Workshop on Artificial Intelligence System with Confidential Computing (AISCC) 2024. This is a new workshop (collocated with ISOC NDSS 2024) to promote Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. Please submit your best work!

  • Invited to serve in the program committee of USENIX Security 2024. Please submit your best work!

  • Veil was accepted to appear at ACM ASPLOS 2024! Stay tuned for the paper PDF and artifact.

  • Presented eOPF at USENIX OSDI 2023 in Boston. Thank you all for the amazing questions and discussion!

  • OmniLog was accepted to appear at USENIX Security 2023! This work calls for a rethink of audit system designs in modern computers to address (a) the limited collection of system logs relevant to forensic analysis of kernel exploits and (b) the tampering of collected logs. Congratulations to Aniket and all my collaborators.

  • eOPF was accepted to appear at USENIX OSDI 2023! In this work, we design a trustworthy and extensible software layer to complement the hardware capabilities of a widely-used confidential computing technology (Intel SGX) with strong cloud orchestration and side-channel defense features.

  • Rebooting the Advanced Operating Systems course at SCAI in Spring 2023. Please refer to the link for details.

  • Prof. Hasti Seifi and I are co-designing the first ASU SCAI Outreach Workshop in 2023/2024! Please stay tuned for further information and website details.

Selected Publications (... All)

   Veil: A Protected Services Framework for Confidential Virtual Machines [paper]

     A. Ahmad, B. Ou, X. Zhang, and P. Fonseca (ACM ASPLOS 2024)

   Rethinking System Audit Architectures for High Event Coverage and Synchronous Log Availability [paper]

     V. Gandhi, S. Bannerjee, A. Agarwal, A. Ahmad, S. Lee, and M. Peinado (USENIX Security 2023)

   An Extensible Orchestration and Protection Framework for Confidential Cloud Computing [paper]

     A. Ahmad, A. Shultz, B. Lee, and P. Fonseca (USENIX OSDI 2023)

   HardLog: Practical Tamper-Proof System Auditing Using a Novel Audit Device [paper | slides | code]

     A. Ahmad, S. Lee, and M. Peinado (IEEE S&P 2022)

Selected Service

  • NSF Panel on Hardware Security (2024).

  • Program committee of USENIX Security 2024, ISOC NDSS 2024 (poster), ISOC AISSC 2024 (workshop co-located with ISOC NDSS 2024).

  • Reviewer for ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS) 2023

  • Chaired the session "Verification for Security" at IEEE S&P 2022

  • Previewed the sessions on "Operating system" at USENIX ATC and USENIX OSDI 2021

  • External reviewer for IEEE S&P 2022, ACM SoCC 2022, and USENIX ATC 2022