Amin Kharraz
Assistant ProfessorBiography
Dr. Kharraz is an Assistant Professor at the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at FIU. Dr. Kharraz is the director of systems security lab (https://theseclab.org) where he conducts research on advanced malware attacks, web and browser security. Dr. Kharraz received his Ph.D. from Northeastern University in Systems Security. He was a postdoctoral researcher for two years in Coordinated Science Lab (CSL) at the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign. Dr. Kharraz’s research has been funded by Microsoft AI Security, CITES NSF/IUCRC center, National Security Agency.
Dr. Kharraz’s research revolves around empirical systems security and privacy. An overarching theme of his research has been to enable evaluating implications of emerging technologies and their associated threats at scale. His research focuses on applying data-driven techniques to build research tools that can assist discovering those threats in a scalable and reliable manner. He has been consistently serving in the program committee of known security venues. His research on in-browser cryptojacking received the best paper award at the Web Conference (WWW) in 2019. He developed a scalable threat intelligence tool, Unveil, which analyzed more than 2 million binaries for more than two years. The output of the system has been used directly in more than 50 research papers.
Honors and Awards
- Microsoft AI Security Award for the project “WEBHASH: A Spatio-Temporal Deep Learning Approach for Detecting Social Engineering Attacks”, 2021
- Best Paper Award at The Web Conference for the paper “OUTGUARD: Detecting In-Browser Covert Cryptocurrency Mining in the Wild”, 2019
Research and Educational Interests
- Systems Security and Privacy
- Web Security
- Malicious Code Analysis
- Cyber Physical System Security
- AI-driven Resiliency and Security
Background Education
2017 Ph.D., Computer Science – Systems Security, Northeastern University
Selected Publications
- Behzad Ousat, Mohammad Ali Tofighi, Amin Kharraz, An End-to-End Analysis of Covid-Themed Scams in the Wild, The 18th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM ASIACCS 2023), Melbourne, Australia, July 2023
- Paul Murley, Zane Ma, Joshua Mason, Michael Bailey, Amin Kharraz, WebSocket Adoption and the Landscape of the Real-Time Web, The Proceedings of the 2021 World Wide Web Conference (WWW ’21), Ljubljana, Slovenia, April 2021
- Omid Mirzai, Roman Vasilenko, Engin Kirda, Long lu, Amin Kharraz, Scrutinizer:Detecting Code Reuse in Malware via Decompilation and Machine Learning, The Proceedings of the 2021 Detection of Intrusion and Malware and Vulrnerability Assessment (DIMVA), Lisboa, Portugal, July 2021
- Amin Kharraz, Zane Ma, Paul Murley, Charles Lever, Joshua Mason, Andrew Miller, Nikita Borisov, Manos Antonakakis, Michael Bailey, OUTGUARD: Detecting In-Browser Covert Cryptocurrency Mining in the Wild, In the Proceeding of The Web Conference (WWW), San Francisco CA, May 2019.
- Amin Kharraz, Wil Robertson, Engin Kirda, Surveylance: Automatically Detecting Online Survey Scams, In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), San Francisco, CA, May 2018.
- Amin Kharraz, Sajjad Arshad, Collin Muliner, William Robertson, Engin Kirda, UNVEIL: A Large-Scale, Automated Approach to Detecting Ransomware, The 25th USENIX Security Symposium 2016. Austin, Texas, August 2016.