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I am an Assistant Professor in the School of EECS at Washington State University (WSU). I lead the Cyber-Physical Systems Security Research Lab (CPS2RL). Before joining EECS@WSU, I held an Assistant Professor position in the School of Computing at Wichita State University from 2021-2022. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). My doctoral work focused on securing real-time systems, particularly integrating security as a first-class design principle in real-time schedulers.

My research interests broadly in building trustworthy computer systems. Current research focus includes (a) security in real-time and cyber-physical systems, Internet-of-Things, and vehicular communication networks, (b) building predictable and trustworthy machine learning models, and (c) digital agriculture cybersecurity. My recent work has evaluated various security and resiliency aspects of broader cyber-physical domains, including security in traditional and learning-enabled real-time systems, misbehavior detection in vehicular communication networks, and software-defined networking (SDN) in safety-critical systems.

  See more on my curriculum vitae and research publications.

Graduate Student Openings (Fall 2025): I look forward to hiring two PhD students who will be working on the topics related to (i) security and resiliency of real-time and CPS/IoT/V2X/edge systems, (ii) human-robot interactions, and (iii) building resource-aware ML systems. Students with prior research experience, expertise in Systems (operating systems, embedded systems programming, Linux kernel development), and significant online presence (contributing to open-source tools, active visibility on GitHub or similar platforms) are strongly encouraged to contact me.

Recent News

  • November 2024 (#2)
    Babar won the prestigious Alfred Suksdorf Memorial Scholarship from VCEA. Big congratulations!
  • November 2024 (#1)
    Our recent project on software-defined cyber-physical networks is featured in WSU Insider. [Link] [PDF]
  • September 2024
    I am invited to serve on the technical program committee of ISORC'25, RTAS'25, and VLSID'25.
  • August 2024 (#2)
    Tamim joins CPS2RL to pursue his PhD. Welcome!
  • August 2024 (#1)
    New NSF project awarded! This 3-year grant helps our team explore new software-defined networking and programmable switch technologies (e.g., P4) to enhance the reliability and safety of critical cyber-physical networks.
  • May 2024
    DeepTrustRT accepted to ECRTS'24! Congratulations, Babar!
  • March 2024
    Two papers accepted to ISORC'24: RESCUE (congrats, Zain & Mohammad) and FrameLeaker (well done, Babar).
  • February 2024 (#2)
    We published a systemization (SoK) paper on real-time security at the ACM CSUR journal. This is the first comprehensive work on systemizing the real-time security field.
  • February 2024 (#1)
    Our recent work on benchmarking language models for embedded platforms was accepted to ICPE'24. Congratulations, Babar & Souvika!
  • January 2024
    RTAutoSec (collocated with ECRTS'24) website is published!

See older news here.

Contact Info

EME B53
355 NE Spokane Street
Pullman, WA 99164-2920
[email protected]
+1 509 335 8352