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
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 has been acknowledged by NASA.
October 2025: Our space security efforts got featured in SecurityAffairs and SCWorld. Check the work 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 satellite systems was acknowledged by NASA. Congratulations Jack!
May 2025: Paper accepted at ACM Web Science (WebSci 2025) on Russian Censorship through the Lens of Time Series Analysis. Congrats Dheeman!
May 2025: Paper accepted at The 5th Intelligent Cybersecurity Conference (ICSC 2025) on LLaVul: A Multimodal LLM for Interpretable Vulnerability Reasoning about Source Code. Congrats Ala and Mike!
April 2025: Dr. Abusnaina (Meta) visited and shared his experiences his experiences with us at Beyond Defense Lab.
February 2025: Dr. Saad (X, formerly Twitter) shared his research and experiences with students at UNM.
December 2024: Muhammad Danish has been recognized by Computing Research Association (CRA) among undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities for his outstanding potential in computing research. He was featured by UNM newsroom. Congratulations Danish!
December 2024: Our paper at WISE 2024 won the best paper award!
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