I build autonomous, self-correcting systems that defend against remote intrusions with minimal data or training. Since 2007, my work involved various aspects of system security, starting with hardening the system memory to give applications a solid security foundation, and designing methods for intrusion detection planning, live detection and mitigation, and adaptive system configuration. My work has grown in three further directions. The first is model-agnostic federated learning, where systems collaborate by aggregating predictions rather than training parameters. The second is the human side of security, studying cross-cultural implications of smishing attacks in collaboration with Alex Bardas of the University of Kansas. Finally, in collaboration with Sadegh Torabi, we study the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) as zero-shot classifiers for finding security vulnerabilities.

I am an Associate Professor and former Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Kuwait University. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, where I focused on building high-assurance models for secure systems. I am a senior member of the ACM and IEEE.

I authored an open-source book on Python programming, freely available here, and have supervised several graduate theses and innovative student projects in AI, privacy, and cloud systems.

Open to research collaboration and consulting on network security and intrusion detection for web-based systems.