Afsah Anwar
Afsah Anwar
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I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico (UNM), Albuquerque, NM.
My primary research goal is to contribute to the understanding of malicious activity on the Internet and its impact on individuals and society. I envision facilitating a security and privacy focused technology adoption by defending against malicious applications, safe adoption of tools that assure online privacy, informed trust attribution on digital ecosystems, and secure adoption of new age communication modalities. To do so, my research banks upon malware analysis, vulnerability management, and threat intelligence to investigate the weaknesses in systems, propose new threat models, and create defense systems to thwart the changing attack vectors.
My research group (Beyond Defense Lab) at UNM utilizes such analysis techniques to contribute to the security and privacy of mobile, web, and space systems.
My students also run a CTF group (LoboSec). Feel free to join the group on discord here.
Prospective Students: Please check out this page.
Updates
Updates
January 2026: Congratulations Enrique and Ramsha for receiving the NDSS Fellowship!
January 2026: Danish has been featured by Computing Research Association (CRA)! Read more
January 2026: Our paper on privacy leaks from SMS-delivered URLs is gaining media traction. Read the full paper here.
November 2025: Paper on "Silent Subversion: Sensor Spoofing Attacks via Supply Chain Implants in Satellite Systems" accepted at The 47th IEEE Aerospace Conference 2026. This work resulted in vulnerability disclosures and has been acknowledged by NASA. Congratulations Jack!
October 2025: Our space security efforts got featured in SecurityAffairs and SCWorld. Check the Arxived version here!
September 2025: We officially registered LoboSec as a student-led CTF group at UNM. To join, please see here.
September 2025: We (Beyond Defense Lab) have been listed as a contributor to The Aerospace Corporation's Space Attack Research and Tactic Analysis (SPARTA) matrix.
September 2025: Dheeman passed his dissertation defense. Congratulations Dheeman! 🎉🎓
August 2025: NSF SaTC Medium (#2452884) awarded with Profs. Roya Ensafi (UMich) and Jed Crandall (ASU). This will support our upcoming works on VPNs.
August 2025: Paper on "MVPNalyzer : An Investigative Framework for Auditing the Security & Privacy of Mobile VPNs" accepted at NDSS 2026 on mobile VPNs. Congrats Wayne, Aaron, and Enrique!
July 2025: Paper accepted at The 47th IEE Aerospace Conference 2026 on supply chain-based malware threats to small satellites. Congrats Jack!
July 2025: LoboSec came second at Hack The Box StackSmash CTF 2025. Congratulations! 🎉
June 2025: Our novel attack vector was acknowledged by Aerospace Corporation's Space Attack Research and Tactic Analysis (SPARTA).
June 2025: Our novel attack vector on space systems was acknowledged by NASA.
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