Doctoral student Raja Hasnain Anwar and Assistant Professor Taqi Raza showed that some expired credit cards can still be used for tap-to-pay purchases, a finding presented at USENIX Security 2026. Using two ordinary smartphones, they rewrote the... more
Doctoral student Ali Zohaib and Professor Amir Houmansadr received the 2026 Best Practical Paper Award from the Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) community for “Exposing and Circumventing SNI-based QUIC Censorship.” With... more
Contextual Agent Security, a design by Assistant Professor Eugene Bagdasarian with collaborator Lillian Tsai, is now used as a semantic policy engine in Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. The approach checks an AI agent's proposed tool... more
UMass student Katherine Zhang and Assistant Professor Pubali Datta presented “International Students and Scams: At Risk Abroad” at the 2026 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, with collaborators at Florida International University and Purdue.... more
Senior Teaching Faculty Marc Liberatore received a 2025–2026 UMass Amherst Distinguished Teaching Award, one of the university's highest honors for teaching. He is one of five faculty honorees this year and the fourth CICS faculty member to win the... more
Doctoral students Jade Sheffey and Ali Zohaib, with undergraduate computer science students Willow Taylor and Joyce Werhane, took first place for best anti-censorship tool at Jump The Wall, an invitation-only hackathon held Jan. 23–25, 2026, in... more
The Cybersecurity Institute hosted the New England Security Day (NESD) conference on 3/27/26. NESD is a one-day event to highlight security research and applied work from New England universities, labs, and industry teams. The event included a ... more
ECE doctoral students Matthew Donnelly, Wen Liang, and Meiyue Zhang, with Distinguished Professor Lixin Gao and Associate Professor Guangyu Xu, reported a reconfigurable silicon photodiode that works as a physical unclonable function for IoT... more
Associate Professor Fatima Anwar received a three-year NSF award to build FLTest, a testbed for evaluating the privacy and robustness of federated learning systems. UMass Amherst's share is $367k as part of a $1.1 million collaboration with Virginia... more
The best cybersecurity students in the world came to Rochester Institute of Technology to battle in the Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC) global finals Jan. 9-11. The event wrapped up the largest offense-based cybersecurity... more
