Publications

  •    Proof of Authorized Human Interaction for Voice AI Agents (To Appear)

             Isabella Lenz, Franziska Vollmer, Adil Ahmad, and Visar Berisha
             ACM AI Leadership Summit, 2026

  •    You Shall Not Pass into Ring-0! A User Privacy-Friendly Anti-Cheat Architecture for Personal Computers (To Appear)

             Santosh Gokul Narayan, Giovanni Paladino, Chuqi Zhang, Sangho Lee, Zhenkai Liang, and Adil Ahmad
             ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2026

  •    Shoot the Honey, Cloak the Player: Towards Zero-Runtime-Overhead Proactive Defense and Detection for Visual Game Cheating (To Appear)

             Jianing Wang, Chuqi Zhang, Yuancheng Jiang, Adil Ahmad, and Shanqing Guo
             ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2026

  •    Reducio: Optimized Confidential Serverless Cloud Deployments for Enterprise Customers

             Vikram Ramaswamy, Chuqi Zhang, and Adil Ahmad
             arXiv, 2026

  •    Efficient Fine-Grained Kernel Auditing using Augmented Reference Behavior Analysis and Virtualized Selective Tracing [paper]

             Chuqi Zhang, Spencer Faith, Feras Al-Qassas, Theodorus Wensan Februanto, Zhenkai Liang, and Adil Ahmad
             IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), 2026

  •    Erebor: A Drop-In Sandbox Solution for Private Data Processing in Untrusted Confidential Virtual Machines [paper | slides | code]

             Chuqi Zhang, Rahul Priolkar, Yuancheng Jiang, Yuan Xiao, Mona Vij, Zhenkai Liang, and Adil Ahmad
             ACM EuroSys Conference (EuroSys), 2025

  •    Towards Trusted Extensible Device Measurement and Management via Intra-Firmware Privilege Isolation [paper]

             Chuqi Zhang, Bonan Ruan, Vikram Ramaswamy, Zhenkai Liang, and Adil Ahmad
             ACM Workshop on Operating System Research for Connected Intelligence (WOSCI) (co-located with EuroSYS), 2025

  •    Poster: Towards a Lightweight Kernel Data Race Detector

             Rahul Priolkar, Chuqi Zhang, and Adil Ahmad
             ISOC Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2025

  •    Secure Data Analytics in Apache Spark with Fine-grained Policy Enforcement and Isolated Execution [paper]

             Byeongwook Kim, Jaewon Hur, Adil Ahmad, and Byoungyoung Lee
             ISOC Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2025

  •    The HitchHiker's Guide to High-Assurance System Observability Protection with Fast Permission Switches [paper | slides | code]

             Chuqi Zhang, Jun Zeng, Yiming Zhang, Adil Ahmad, Fengwei Zhang, Hai Jin, and Zhenkai Liang
             ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2024

             Adil Ahmad, Botong Ou, Congyu Liu, Xiaokuan Zhang, and Pedro Fonseca
             ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages (ASPLOS), 2023
                [* Presented at ACM ASPLOS 2024 in San Diego, CA]

  •    Rethinking System Audit Architectures for High Event Coverage and Synchronous Log Availability [paper]

             Varun Gandhi, Sarbartha Bannerjee, Aniket Agarwal, Adil Ahmad, Sangho Lee, and Marcus Peinado
             USENIX Security Symposium (Security), 2023

  •    An Extensible Orchestration and Protection Framework for Confidential Cloud Computing [paper]

             Adil Ahmad, Alex Shultz, Byoungyoung Lee, and Pedro Fonseca
             USENIX Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), 2023

  •    HardLog: Practical Tamper-Proof System Auditing Using a Novel Audit Device [paper | slides | code]

             Adil Ahmad, Sangho Lee, and Marcus Peinado
             IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), 2022

  •    Chancel: Efficient Multi-client Isolation Under Adversarial Programs [paper | slides]

             Adil Ahmad, Juhee Kim, Jaebaek Seo, Insik Shin, Pedro Fonseca, and Byoungyoung Lee
             ISOC Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2021

  •    Kard: Lightweight Data Race Detection with Per-thread Memory Protection [paper | slides | abstract]

             Adil Ahmad, Sangho Lee, Pedro Fonseca, and Byoungyoung Lee
             ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages (ASPLOS), 2021

  •    Shard: Fine-grained Kernel Specialization with Context-aware Hardening [paper | code]

             Muhammad Abubakar, Adil Ahmad, Pedro Fonseca, and Dongyan Xu
             Usenix Security Symposium (Security), 2021

  •    BlackMirror: Preventing Wallhacks in 3D Online FPS Games [paper | slides]

             Seounghyun Park, Adil Ahmad, and Byoungyoung Lee
             ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2020

  •    Trustore: Side-Channel Resistant Storage for SGX using Intel Hybrid CPU-FPGA [paper | slides]

             Hyunyoung Oh, Adil Ahmad, Seounghyun Park, Byoungyoung Lee, and Yunheung Park
             ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2020

  •    A Tale of Two Trees: One Writes, and Other Reads. Optimized Oblivious Accesses to Large-Scale Blockchains [paper | code]

             Duc V. Le, Lizzy Tengana Hurtado, Adil Ahmad, Mohsen Minaei, Byoungyoung Lee, and Aniket Kate
             Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), 2020

  •    Obfuscuro: A Commodity Obfuscation Engine on Intel SGX [paper | slides | code]

             Adil Ahmad, Byunggill Joe, Yuan Xiao, Yinqian Zhang, Insik Shin and Byoungyoung Lee
             ISOC Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2019
               [* co-first authors]

  •    Obliviate: A Data Oblivious File System for Intel SGX [paper | slides]

             Adil Ahmad, Kyungtae Kim, Muhammad Ihsanulhaq Sarfaraz and Byoungyoung Lee
             ISOC Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2018

  •    Detecting and Defending against Compelled Certificate Attacks using Origin-Bound CAPTCHAs [paper]

             Adil Ahmad, Faizan Ahmad, Lei Wei, Vinod Yegneswaran and Fareed Zaffar
             International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm), 2018

Theses

  •    Towards Observable and Trustworthy System Foundations for Intelligent Cloud Infrastructures

             Chuqi Zhang
             PhD Thesis, 2026

  •    Hybrid LLM-Powered Analysis for Kernel-Driver Boundary Detection

             Zi-You Tseng
             MS Thesis, 2026

  •    Efficient Attack Provenance Via a User-Space Auditing Framework

             Feras Al-Qassas
             MS Thesis, 2025

  •    A Virtualization-Based Private and Secure Video Game Architecture for Personal Computers

             Santosh Gokul Narayan
             MS Thesis, 2025

  •    Detecting Specification Mismatches using Machine Learning-Based Analysis of CPU Manuals

             Rachel Guzman
             MS Thesis, 2024

  •    Defeating Critical Threats to Cloud User Data in Trusted Execution Environments [paper]

             Adil Ahmad
             PhD Thesis