Meet the Next Generation of Security Researchers
So far this year, five students have completed the requirements for their Ph.D. in Computer Science and are eligible for graduation. They have cumulatively published or contributed to 34 research papers during their time at Georgia Tech. When they weren’t in their labs scrutinizing lines of code or solving complex cryptographic equations on a white board, they were hacking TV’s growing avocados, and driving across the country.
Their faculty advisors hold them in high regard, and for good reason. They are graduating a nationally ranked university with the highest academic achievement in the field of computer science and cybersecurity.
Congratulations to the Class of 2025!
Meet the Graduates
Ammar Askar
A Little Bit About Ammar
Fun Fact: I once hacked my Smart TV to gain root access to it just so I could control some lights around my living room!
Favorite Moment at Georgia Tech: My favorite moment was probably attending DEFCON 2021 with my research group, SSLab. It was amazing to compete alongside the top hackers of the world and I’m grateful to my advisor Professor Taesoo for encouraging us to participate in it!
Pictured: Ammar’s Avatar
By utilizing simple debugging primitives and integrating LLMs, his work significantly improves the detection of complex bugs and streamlines their resolution across diverse programming environments. Ammar’s contributions are set to have substantial influence, especially through his development of an LLM-based concolic execution engine for the upcoming DARPA AIxCC competition in August!”
Taesoo Kim
SCP Professor and Faculty Advisor
Zhengxian He
A Little Bit About Zhengxian
Fun Fact About Me: I can spin a book on my fingertip very well.
Favorite Moment at Georgia Tech: The sunset view from CODA office after we moved our office to it!
He was able to produce strong results in a field that was moving rapidly. His experience at Georgia Tech should prepare him well for the future and we wish him success in his new role at Amazon. “
Mustaque Ahamad
USG Regents Entrepreneur Professor and Faculty Advisor
Stanislav Peceny
A Little Bit About Stan
Fun Fact About Me: When I am not diving into coral reefs or exploring new countries, I am naming avocado trees after legendary mathematicians.
Favorite Moment at Georgia Tech: On the rooftop of the sleek, high‑tech Coda building, I often found myself lost in thought, pondering research questions and crafting solutions.
With a broader vision for an optimized MPC tool chain, he designed several application-specific MPC protocols that address commonly needed tasks and tools, such as secure logistic regression, fast secure merge of sorted arrays, differential privacy and oblivious memory. Motivated by speeding up lowest-level primitives known to MPC researchers, Stan proposed a new cryptographic assumption that implies a much faster Oblivious Transfer, a basic and heavily used MPC building block.
Vladimir Kolesnikov
Profesor and Faculty Advisor
Qinge Xie
A Little Bit About Qinge
Fun Fact: I’ve heard at least 10 different pronunciations of my name, so I usually introduce myself by spelling it out: Q-I-N-G-E
Favorite Moment at Georgia Tech: It’s hard to pick one favorite moment as I genuinely enjoyed the journey. Doing a PhD usually comes with a lot of pain, but that wasn’t the case for me at Georgia Tech 
She has been productive, driven, and independent, and I’ve been very impressed by how well she has pivoted across diverse research topics. She’s done great here, and I’m excited to see her career develop moving forward.”
Frank Li
SCP & ECEAssistant Professor and Faculty Advisor
Yibin Yang
A Little Bit About Yibin
Fun Fact About Me: I’ve driven solo across the US—both from the East Coast to the West Coast and from Atlanta, GA to Madison, WI. I also once biked alone all the way to Alabama. I’m a cappuccino lover who enjoys making coffee art, and I have two lovely cats.
Favorite Moment at Georgia Tech: Hosting the Math Kangaroo competition (2024-2025) for K-12 students. Giving a guest lecture to GT Crypto Club on zero-knowledge proofs.
Yibin is extremely driven, and has indeed a rare combination of algorithmic, theoretical and systems expertise, which uniquely places him for leading the task of designing and developing fast usable crypto toolchains. Yibin earned a number of accolades in his career, including being named RSAC Security Scholar, RSA Conference, 2022, and winning a number of China national and international programming contests.
More recently, he led the paper that received ACM CCS 2023 distinguished paper award.
Vladimir Kolesnikov
Profesor and Faculty Advisor
Understanding our student’s achievements take’s more than words, it takes visualization! We made a breakdown of their research on Tableau to get the full picture of their accomplishments.
Papers listed as Pending* are still undergoing review for the publication process.
While at Georgia Tech, Our Ph.D. Graduates Published at Top Research Venues
Security research conferences are measured by various metrics in the research community.
Among those variables considered is acceptance rates. Top tier conferences are very selective with the papers they accept each year. For our purposes, we looked at the Top 20 research conferences and found that among the research completed by our five graduating Ph.D. students, nearly 80% were accepted and presented in a Tier 1, 2, or 3 conference.
Award Winning Papers
- Batchman and Robin: Batched and Non-batched Branching for Interactive ZK: 2023 CCS Distinguished Paper Award
- RUDRA: Finding Memory Safety Bugs in Rust at the Ecosystem Scale: 2021 SIGOPS Distinguished Artifact Award
Where They Published:
| Conference Name | Number of Papers | Rank* |
|---|---|---|
| ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) | 4 | #4 |
| ASIACRYPT | 4 | #12 |
| USENIX Security | 3 | #6 |
| IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) | 3 | #1 |
| IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P) | 2 | #8 |
Multidisciplinary Solutions to Societal Problems
Our five graduates partnered with researchers from across the globe and touched multiple disciplines with their work. From black holes to browser extensions, they pushed the boundaries of cybersecurity and privacy in areas beyond computing.
International Research Partners
Amazon Web Services • Arizona State University • Bar-Ilan University • Cisco Research • Citrix Systems • Google • IMDEA • KAIST • Ligero Inc. • Lund University • Massachusetts Institute of Technology • Northwestern University • Palo Alto • Polish Academy of Sciences • QI-ANXIN Technology Research Institute • Sungshin Women’s University • Tsinghua University • University of California Santa Barbara • University of Heidelberg • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign • University of Padova • University of Tennessee • University of Virginia • Visa Research
