We’re excited to introduce the AI Spies News Channel, where the latest updates, insights, and breakthroughs from the SPIES research lab are transformed into engaging, media-style stories generated fully using AI (after necessary reviews and corrections by SPIES researchers).
News
Paper accepted to WiSec 2025
“Alexa, Is Dynamic Content Safe?” Understanding the risks of Dynamic Content
Nathan McClaran, Payton Walker, Zhao Zheng, Yangyong Zhang, Nitesh Saxena and Guofei Gu
In the 15th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec), June/July 2025.
SPIES Lab’s Secure Messaging Work Features in News
SPIES Lab led by Dr. Nitesh Saxena investigates secure messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp. While end-to-end encryption protects messages, vulnerabilities exist, such as “man-in-the-middle” attacks and user error in group chat. The lab aims to enhance security through improved verification tools, design changes, and encrypted keyboards, while also addressing challenges like cross-device syncing and AI integration.
Spy Vs. Spy: Texas A&M Researchers Work To Secure Messaging, Texas A&M University Division of Marketing and Communications
SPIES Lab Student to Start as an Assistant Professor
SPIES Lab graduating student, Ahmed Tanvir Mahdad,will be starting as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Ohio University in their
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science this Fall 2025.
In a crowded job market heavily “skewed” by AI candidates, Tanvir had over a dozen Zoom interviews and about half a dozen on-site interviews at R1 universities, leading to multiple offers in hand. He carefully chose Ohio University as his employer considering multiple factors, the key being striking a balance between the (perceived) prospects of growth and quality of life.
Tanvir will be the SPIES Lab’s 5th PhD student graduating from TAMU who is taking up an academic position (7th graduating student since moving to TAMU in 2021, and 17th graduating PhD student overall). Congratulations!
Dr. Saxena’s Primer on Secure Communications in News Media
Secure communications and end-to-encryption is all over the news in light of the recent use of this technology underlying national security matters by the US government. The SPIES lab has been doing extensive work in this area and leading the nation on this forefront. Dr. Saxena recently gave a video interview to the Associated Press Spotlight breaking down end-to-end encryption in simple terms. The devil is in details, as he said, so for more info check out our research or reach to Dr. Saxena.
What is ‘classified’ information? What are ‘secure’ communications? Here’s a primer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mar 31, 2025
Examples of other news outlets covering the interview:
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- The Lincoln Journal Star
- The Eagle
- The Daily Progress
- St-Louis Post-Dispatch
- ABC Alaska
- Fox News
- FOX 26 News
- FOX 33 News
- Fox 34 News
- Fox 4 News
- Fox 6 News
- Fox 8 News
- Good Morning Wyoming
- K2 News
- News @ 9
- Twin States News
Dr. Saxena recognized with the Dean’s Excellence Award!
Congratulations to Dr. Saxena for being recognized with the College of Engineering Dean’s Excellence Award. This is the most prestigious award for tenure-track and tenured faculty members within Engineering Faculty Awards, who excel in all three pillars of academics — research, teaching and service. College of Engineering at Texas A&M University is a top 10 Engineering college within the nation housing 15 top-tier departments with world-class faculty.
Dr. Saxena appointed as the Senior Area Editor, IEEE TIFS
Dr. Saxena has been appointed as the Senior Area Editor of IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS). TIFS is one of the most reputed journals in the area of security. Dr. Saxena earlier served as an Editor of TIFS from 2013-16, in its inception years.
2 Full Papers Accepted to WWW 2025
The SPIES lab will have 2 full papers presented at the WebConf (WWW) 2025. Only 409 papers were accepted out of 2062 submissions (acceptance rate of merely 19.8%).
- The First Early Evidence of the Use of Browser Fingerprinting for Online Tracking
Zengrui Liu, Jimmy Dani, Yinzhi Cao, Shujiang Wu, Nitesh Saxena
In the 25th ACM Web Conference (WWW), April 2025. - Broken Access: On the Challenges of Screen Reader Assisted Two-Factor and Passwordless Authentication
Md Mojibur Rahman Redoy Akanda, Ahmed Tanvir Mahdad, Nitesh Saxena
In the 25th ACM Web Conference (WWW), April 2025.
Journal paper accepted to IEEE TMC
- Usability and Security Analysis of the Compare-and-Confirm Method in Mobile Push-Based Two-Factor Authentication
Mohammed Jubur, Nitesh Saxena and Faheem Reegu
In IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), 2024
New post-doctoral researcher joins the lab
Aftab Hussain recently joined the SPIES lab as a post-doctoral researcher. Welcome on-board!
Aftab Hussain is an
incoming Post Doctoral Researcher at Texas A&M University, having recently completed his PhD defense at the University of Houston. He works on improving the security and reliability of large language models (LLMs) for source code, and his PhD dissertation is on Trojan Detection in LLMs of Code. His PhD research has been funded by a Cybersecurity Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education. He has recently presented his research at reputable venues in software engineering and AI, such as AIWare at FSE 2024 and SeT LLM at ICLR 2024. Aftab holds a Master’s degree from the University of California, Irvine in Software Engineering, where he published in top software engineering and security conferences such as ASPLOS and USENIX ATC.