Research Area

Security & Privacy

Security and privacy research connects formal verification, language-based security, web privacy, usable consent systems, privacy-preserving machine learning, and trustworthy public-interest systems.

Research Themes

What the group works on

Formal methods and protocol verification Language-based security and information flow Web privacy and browser consent management Privacy-preserving and fair machine learning Secure embedded and public-interest computing systems

Faculty

People shaping this area

Abhishek Bichhawat

Assistant Professor

Language-based security, formal verification, web security, usable privacy, and policy enforcement.

Manisha Padala

Assistant Professor

Fair and federated learning, differential privacy, strategic clients, and secure distributed ML systems.

Rajat Moona

Professor and Director

Embedded systems, smart cards, RFID, secure access systems, VLSI, and public-scale trusted computing.

Selected Publications

Recent Publications

Johnny Can't Revoke Consent Either: Measuring Compliance of Consent Revocation on the Web

PETS 2025 - web privacy and consent revocation compliance.

Least Privilege Access for Persistent Storage Mechanisms in Web Browsers

WWW 2025 - browser storage and least-privilege web security.

Fall-Through Semantics for Mitigating Timing-Based Side Channel Leaks

FSTTCS 2025 - semantics and side-channel mitigation.

DY*: A Modular Symbolic Verification Framework for Executable Cryptographic Protocol Code

IEEE EuroS&P 2021 - verified cryptographic protocol code.

Projects & Outputs

Representative Projects

Understanding and Ensuring the Privacy of User Data

SERB project led by Abhishek Bichhawat.

Verifying Security Properties of Group Messaging Protocols

CEFIPRA international project led by Abhishek Bichhawat.

Towards a Private yet Functional Web: Designing a Usable and Privacy-compliant Consent Management Framework for Online Browsing

ANRF Advanced Research Grant led by Abhishek Bichhawat.

Fair Federated Learning Framework in the Presence of Heterogeneous, Strategic, and Malicious Clients

ANRF early-career project led by Manisha Padala.