I am a motivated second year Ph.D. student at The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM. I started my Ph.D. program in Fall 2024. I am very passionate about cybersecurity, with penetration testing being one of my favorite fields. For that reason, you will find me playing a lot on Hack the Box.

Research

I am working as a Research Assistant, advised by Prof. Afsah Anwar at UNM. As an RA, my main research focus is mobile security in Virtual Private Networks (VPN). In this research, I focus on identifying security concerns within VPN applications. Moreover, I am actively engaged with the cybersecurity community at UNM, where I lead a cybersecurity group that actively participates in CTF competitions.

Updates

• September 2025: Gave a colloquium talk at the University of New Mexico, presenting my research on VPN security.
• September 2025: Paper accepted at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2026 conference, see you in San Diego!
• May 2025: Started a CTF group at UNM, come and join us!
• March 2025: Gave a guest lecture at the University of New Mexico on “Introduction to Penetration Testing”.
• September 2024: Visited the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for a research collaboration.
• August 2024: Attended USENIX Security 24 conference.
• August 2024: Started the Ph.D. program in Computer Science at UNM.
• December 2023: Obtained 1st place in the Tracer Fire workshop held during the ACSAC conference in Austin, Texas.
• December 2023: Won a conferenship award to attend the ACSAC Conference 2023 held in Austin, Texas.
• August 2023: Joined the BeyondDefense Lab directed by Dr. Afsah Anwar.
• January 2023: Started studying a Master of Science in Computer Science at The University of New Mexico.
• July 2022: Joined the information security team at the National Bank for an internship.
• January 2022: Started a one-semester exchange program at The University of New Mexico.