About me


Fun facts

  What did you do before Purdue? I was a fairly mediocre undergraduate student of computer science at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. With a bucket-load of luck, fairly mediocre undergraduate students should make decent college professors!

  Where did you grow up? I was born in Lahore (Pakistan), but I spent most of my childhood in West and East Africa. I stayed in Benin for the longest period of time, but lived in Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, and Kenya for extended periods too.

  What is your favorite sport? It is considered blasphemy when you are from the sub-continent and not a die-hard fan of an obscure sport called cricket. I am no blasphemer.

  What is your favorite font? I am a sucker for the comic family of fonts. My current favorite is the comic mono.

Updates from my PhD days (for nostalgic purposes)

  • Presented Hardlog at IEEE S&P 2022 -- May 24, 2022

  • Accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position at Arizona State University (ASU). A huge thanks to everyone who supported my job search. Super-excited! -- April 27, 2022

  • Hardlog, a secure auditing framework for enterprise machines, will appear at IEEE S&P 2022! -- March 4, 2022

  • Submitted my recent PhD work on side-channel attack prevention at a top-tier conference. -- October 1, 2021

  • Completed my internship at Microsoft Research. I submitted my internship work at a top-tier conference -- September 15, 2021

  • Honored to be invited to preview the Operating Systems sessions at USENIX ATC and USENIX OSDI 2021 -- July 15, 2021

  • Began my internship at Microsoft Research Redmond under Sangho Lee and Marcus Peinado -- May 13, 2021

  • Presented Kard at ACM ASPLOS 2021 -- April 23, 2021

  • Presented Chancel at ISOC NDSS 2021 -- Feb 27, 2021

  • Chancel, an efficient sandbox for multi-client adversarial programs, will appear at ISOC NDSS 2021! -- Dec 22, 2020

  • Kard, a lightweight data race detector, will appear at ACM ASPLOS 2021! -- November 22, 2020

  • Invited to talk at the Microsoft Research Cryptography Colloquium on efficient side-channel secure storage in trusted execution environments (e.g., Intel SGX) -- November 3, 2020

  • Began my internship at Microsoft Research Redmond under Sangho Lee -- May 13, 2019

  • Presented Obfuscuro at ISOC NDSS 2019 -- Feb 27, 2019

  • Obfuscuro, a system commoditizing obfuscation using Intel SGX, will appear at NDSS 2019! -- November 6, 2019

  • Began my internship at NEC Labs under Chung Hwan Kim -- May 7, 2019

  • My undergraduate thesis on preventing mass internet surveillance through compelled certificate attacks was accepted at SecureComm 2018! April 6, 2018

  • Presented Obliviate at ISOC NDSS 2018 -- Feb 22, 2018

  • Invited to give a talk at the CERIAS Security Seminar on securing file systems in trusted hardware -- Feb 14, 2018

  • Obliviate, an side-channel-free filesystem compatible with Intel SGX, will appear at NDSS 2018! -- November 26, 2017