News

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:

• • 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

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.

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 25^th 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 25^th ACM Web Conference (WWW), April 2025.

• 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

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.

• An In-Depth Analysis of Password Managers and Two-Factor Authentication Tools
  Mohamed Jubur, Prakash Shreshtha, and Nitesh Saxena
  In ACM Computing Surveys, 2024

• BPSniff: Continuously Surveilling Private Blood Pressure Information in the Metaverse via Unrestricted Inbuilt Motion Sensors
  Zhengkun Ye, Ahmed Tanvir Mahdad, Yan Wang, Cong Shi, Yingying Chen, Nitesh Saxena
  In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P; Oakland), May 2025.

• Misinformation Research Needs Ecological Validity
  James Crum, Cara Spencer, Emily Doherty, Erin Richardson, Sage Sherman, Amy W. Hays, Nitesh Saxena, Richard E. Niemeyer, Allison P. Anderson, Marta Čeko & Leanne Hirshfield
  In Nature Human Behaviour, Oct 2024.

A warm welcome to two new members of the SPIES Lab, starting their PhD degrees in Fall 2024.

1. Mahbub Alam
2. Shaykh Siddique (co-advised with Irfan Khan)