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Dr. Saxena will be receiving the Dean’s Excellence in Mentorship Award at the April 2017 ceremony.
A mentor is not just an educator. A mentor is a person who inspires and motivates. A mentor is committed to excellence. The Dean’s Excellence in Mentorship Award recognizes full-time regular UAB faculty members who have demonstrated exceptional accomplishments as mentors of graduate students and/or postdoctoral fellows.
Congratulations!

SMASheD: Sniffing and Manipulating Android Sensor Data for Offensive Purposes.
Manar Mohamed, Babins Shrestha and Nitesh Saxena
In IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), 2016.
Top journal. Extension of our CODASPY’16 paper. Also see: https://androidsmashed.wordpress.com/
 
 

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Manar Mohamed and Babins Shrestha recently finished their PhD degrees doing some excellent work. Babins is joining VISA as a Senior Information Security Analyst, and Manar will be joining the instructional faculty of Computer Science at the Temple University. Both graduated rather quickly, in nearly 4 years.
Congratulations to the newly hooded doctors and best wishes for the great times ahead of you. You will be missed!

 

Research finds novel defense against sophisticated smartphone keyloggers, by Tiffany Westry:
https://www.uab.edu/news/innovation/item/7575-research-finds-novel-defense-against-sophisticated-smartphone-keyloggers
In this work, we have developed a practical defense against smartphone touchstroke logging attacks, which may become a serious problem in the near future (just like keyloggers in the realm of traditional computers). The paper was presented at a premier venue on mobile and wireless security, WiSec, later this summer.

The SPIES team has two papers accepted to ACSAC. Great conference, and an acceptance rate of  only 22.8% (48/210).

1. Gametrics: Towards Attack-Resilient Behavioral Authentication with Simple Cognitive Games
   Manar Mohamed and Nitesh Saxena
   In Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), December 2016.
2. Theft-Resilient Mobile Payments: Transparently Authenticating NFC Users with Tapping Gesture Biometrics
   Babins Shrestha, Manar Mohamed, Sandeep Tamrakar and Nitesh Saxena
   In Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), December 2016

 

The Sounds of the Phones: Dangers of Zero-Effort Second Factor Login based on Ambient Audio. Babins Shrestha, Maliheh Shirvanian, Prakash Shrestha and Nitesh Saxena. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), October 2016.
Fierce competition: only 16% papers accepted (137 out of 831).
 
 

SPIES lab has two papers accepted to WiSec, 2016, a premium venue for mobile and wireless security research.

• Slogger: Smashing Motion-based Touchstroke Logging with Transparent System Noise
  Prakash Shrestha, Manar Mohamed and Nitesh Saxena
  ACM Conference on Wireless Network Security (WiSec), July 2016
• Vibreaker: Securing Vibrational Pairing with Deliberate Acoustic Noise
  S Abhishek Anand, and Nitesh Saxena
  ACM Conference on Wireless Network Security (WiSec), July 2016

UAB CIS is currently hiring an instructional faculty member (open to all ranks and many core CS areas).
https://cis.uab.edu/faculty-employment-opportunities/

Neural Markers of Cybersecurity: An fMRI Study of Phishing, and Malware Warnings
Ajaya Neupane, Nitesh Saxena, Jose O Maximo, and Rajesh K Kana
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), to appear, 2016.