Latest News

• [Jan 7, 2026] Let's welcome Isaiah Brown to ReACT lab team. He is currently a MS student within the Computer Sceince prgoram at TTU. He will be working on Cyber Security/Social Media research.  

• [Sep 23, 2025] We are excited to share that our paper titled "Explainable but Vulnerable: Adversarial Attacks on XAI Explanation in Cybersecurity Application" has just been accepted at the 7th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Privacy, and Security in Intelligent Systems and Application (IEEE TPS 2025), which is scheduled to happen Nov 11-14, 2025 in Pittsburgh, PA. Congratulations to my PhD student Maraz Mia for yet another successful publication! 

• [August 11, 2025] Warm welcome to Ryan Thornton for joining the MS in CS program at TTU and working in collaboration with ReACT lab. He is conducting research towards developing Privacy-aware LLM integrated chatbots to prevent sensitive data leakage.   

• [August 11, 2025] Warm welcome to Sindu Chitraju for joining the ReACT lab as a CS MS student to conduct her research in Usable Security and AI-Assisted Cybersecurity domain.  

• [June 23, 2025] We are excited to share that our paper titled "Characterizing Event-themed Malicious Web Campaigns: A Case Study on War-themed Websites" has just been accepted at the 22nd Annual Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST 2025), which is scheduled to happen in Fredericton, Canada. Congratulations to my PhD student Maraz Mia who worked relentlessly as the student lead, and our collaborators Dr. Shouhuai Xu (from UCCS) & Dr. Tariqul Islam (from Syracuse University) who greatly supported this research project. 

• [June 5, 2025] Congratulations to Seyed Mohammad Sanjari on successfully presenting our research paper titled "SmishViz: Towards A Graph-based Visualization System for Monitoring and Characterizing Ongoing Smishing Threats," at the 15th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security (ACM CODASPY 2025) in Pittsburgh, PA. The paper is freely available to read from the ACM digital library (pdf). 

• [May 12, 2025] Congratulations to Seyed Mohammad Sanjari on presenting our research poster "Few-Shot Learning Method for SMS Phishing Detection and Explanation Using SLMs" at the prestigious 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P 2025) in San Fransisco, CA. 

• [May 1, 2025] I am trilled to share that we have received a $9.7K grant from Tennessee Technology Advancement Consortium (TTAC) to develop a proof-of-concept on Smish Campaign Characterization and Monitoring tool during the summer of 2025. 

• [April 28, 2025] Congratulations to Seyed Mohammad Sanjari on receiving the 1,000$ student travel grant for attending the 15th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security (ACM CODASPY 2025). He is also going to present a full-paper on tackling the SMS Phishing threats on June 5, 2025. 

• [April 25, 2025] Excited to share that our research poster titled "Few-Shot Learning Method for SMS Phishing Detection and Explanation Using SLMs" has been accepted for presentation at the 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P 2025) happening in San Fransisco, CA. Congratulations to Seyed Mohammad Sanjari and our collaborator Dr. Jesse Roberts.  

• [April 24, 2025] Congratulations to my PhD student Maraz Mia for receiving the Best PhD Poster in Computer Science during the Research and Creative Inquiry Day 2025 at Tennessee Tech University. That is a great example set by Maraz for others to follow!   

• [April 7, 2025] Congratulations to my PhD student Seyed Mohammad Sanjari for receiving the prestigious 46th IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy 2025's (IEEE S&P 2025) student travel grant award of 1500$. This year only 26 applications (11.87%) have been accepted out of the 219 submissions, which is again a testament of our (ReACT Lab) commitment for conducting high quality and impactful cybersecurity research. He is also planning to present a poster on our ongoing ground-breaking research on tackling the SMS phishing threats through pre-trained large and small language models. 

• [Feb 28, 2025] Congratulations to our lab alumni Ashfak Md. Shibli for receiving the Tennessee Tech College of Engineering Eminence Award 2025 in Masters of Science Best Paper category for his paper "AbuseGPT: Abuse of Generative AI ChatBots to Create Smishing Campaigns" published in the IEEE International Symposium on Digital Forensics and Security (ISDFS) 2024. This recognition would inspire us to publish more innovative and groundbreaking research from our lab in the future!  

• [Feb 17, 2025] Another acceptance on the same day! 🥳 Excited to share that our collaborative work titled "Adaptive Intrusion Detection with PPO and Zero Trust Continuous Verification," has been accepted for the IEEE SouthEastCon 2025. Congratulations to all the collaborators. 

• [Feb 17, 2025] We are excited to share that our paper titled "SmishViz: Towards A Graph-based Visualization System for Monitoring and Characterizing Ongoing Smishing Threats," has just been accepted as a full-paper for ACM CODASPY 2025 (acceptance rate ~24%). Congratulations to all the co-authors and collaborators- Seyed Mohammad Sanjari, Ashfak Md Shibli, Maraz Mia, and Dr. Maanak Gupta. This work is a testament that we (ReACT lab) dedicate ourselves to investigate real-world problems and provide efforts to make everyday communication more safer and secure. We hope to attend the CODSAPY 2025 conference this summer in Pittsburgh, PA and happy to connect with if you are also attending!   

• [Jan 31, 2025] We are excited to announce that the Call For Paper for the 5th ACM Workshop on Secure and Trustworthy Cyber Physical Systems (SaT-CPS 2025)  is now open. Please submit your unpublished research papers in our peer-reviewed workshop. This workshop is co-located with 15th ACM CODASPY conference happening in Pittsburgh, PA on June 6, 2025. The accepted papers will be published as the workshop proceedings and will be available through ACM digital library. The workshop plans to include key note session, invited talks, and cutting-edge research discussion from distinguished researcher in the field from both academia and industry. Paper submission deadline is Feb 21 (AoE), 2025!   

• [Jan 21, 2025] Warm welcome to Marlana Hatcher for joining the ReACT lab as a TTU SFS PhD student to conduct her research in Trustworthy AI for Cybersecurity.  

• [Jan 16, 2025] Warm welcome to Elijah Beatty, who has joined our ReACT lab as a TTU senior fast-track SFS student to conduct his research in Cybersecurity and AI.

• [Dec 20, 2024] Maraz has virtually presented our paper titled "Can Features for Phishing URL Detection Be Trusted Across Diverse Datasets? A Case Study with Explainable AI" at the 11th International Conference on Networking, Systems, and Security (NSysS 2024). 

• [Dec 9, 2024] Maraz has virtually presented our paper titled "Visually Analyze SHAP Plots to Diagnose Misclassifications in ML-based Intrusion Detection" at the 4th Machine Learning for Cybersecurity workshop co-located with 2024 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (IEEE ICDM) conference.  

• [November 4, 2024] Excited to share that our paper titled "Can Features for Phishing URL Detection Be Trusted Across Diverse Datasets? A Case Study with Explainable AI" has been accepted as a regular paper for presentation in the 11th International Conference on Networking, Systems, and Security (NSysS 2024), Khulna, Bangladesh. Shout out for the student authors Maraz Mia (PhD student) and Darius Derakhshan (Undergrad student) (Darius's first peer-reviewed paper, yay!). 

• [October 9, 2024] Excited to share that our paper titled "Visually Analyze SHAP Plots to Diagnose Misclassifications in ML-based Intrusion Detection" has been accepted as a regular paper for presentation in the 4th Machine Learning for Cybersecurity workshop co-located with the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (IEEE ICDM-MLC). Congratulations to all the co-authors.   

• [July 30, 2024] Excited to share that our paper titled "Securing Proof of Stake Blockchains: Leveraging Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Detecting and Mitigating Malicious Nodes," has been accepted for presentation at 2024 IEEE Global Communications Conference: Communication & Information Systems Security (Globecom 2024).  Congratulations to all the co-authors 😁😁😁

• [July 5, 2024] Happy and excited to share that Tennessee Tech has recently been approved for a $295,000 NSF grant from the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) CyberTraining program for our project titled "Collaborative Research: CyberTraining: Implementation: Small: Training AI-skilled and Fairness-aware Research Workforce for Cloud Infrastructure Cybersecurity". This is my first NSF grant as a Co-PI. Congratulations to the PI and other CO-PI's of this project. For more details of the project, you can visit the NSF award page link here. 

• [June 27, 2024] I am serving as a PC member for the Conference on Applied Machine Learning in Information Security (CAMLIS 2024) this year, which is scheduled on October 24-25, 2024 in Arlington, Virginia. Please consider submitting your high-quality AI-ML-Sec related manuscripts in this conference either as full-paper or extended abstracts category. Paper submission deadline is extended until July 10, 2024. 

• [June 20, 2024] Hosted ACM SaTCPS workshop (co-located with ACM CODASPY 2024) as a co-chair for the first time. We have been enlighted by some great presentation and keynote session. If you are interested Cyber Physical System security research, check out the list of accepted papers at workshop webpage.

• [June 6, 2024] Excited to share that our paper titled "Maximizing Blockchain Performance: Mitigating Conflicting Transactions Through Parallelism and Dependency Management," has been accepted as REGULAR PAPER for presenting at the 7th IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain 2024) in Copenhagen, Denmark. The acceptance rate for this conference has been 18.9%!!! Congratulations to all the co-authors! 😁😁😁

• [May 20, 2024] We have presented our poster titled "Use of LLM-based Generative AI Chatbots for Smishing Attacks and Defenses" at the poster session of IEEE SP 2024 in San Fransisco. If you want to read it or disucss with us about potential collaboration on this research please find the poster pdf here.

• [May 13, 2024] Excited to share that our poster titled "Use of LLM-based Generative AI Chatbots for Smishing Attacks and Defenses" has been accepted in the IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2024 conference. If you are joining the conference in San Fransisco, I will be happy to connect and chat.  

• [May 9.-10 2024] Attending the NSF SaTC Aspiring PI workshop in UChicago campus. It has been a great enriching experience to meet and learn from so many aspiring peers, experienced PIs, and NSF progam managers. 

• [May 7, 2024] Congratulations to Ashfak Md Shibli on behalf of ReACT Lab at TTU for successfully defending his MS Thesis. He is the first student to graduate from our group at Tennessee Tech. He is graduating with a MS in Computer Science degree where he worked on "Smishing Attacks and Defense Mechanisms" research to push forward the state-of-the-art. Best wishes to him for his future endeavors.    

• [May 6, 2024] Just attended the ALAMOSE project Faculty Workshop at Auburn University that was led by Akond Rahman (AU), Hossain Shahriar (UWF), and Fan Wu (Tuskegee University). This educational project will certainly shape the Security education experience for DevOps to develop more secure software systems. 

• [March 30, 2024] I am excited to share that I am invited to attend the 2024 NSF SaTC Aspiring PI Workshop jointly organized by Blase Ur (UChicago), Christina Garman (Purdue), and Chris Kanich (UIC), which will take place in the University of Chicago campus on May 9-10, 2024. If you are attending the workshop in-person, try to connect and chat during the event. I am looking forward to connecting with this great community of researchers!

• [Feb 10, 2024] Excited to share that our paper titled "AbuseGPT: Abuse of Generative AI ChatBots to Create Smishing Campaigns" has been accepted for publication at the IEEE 12th International Symposium for Digital Forensics and Security (ISDFS 2024) conference. Congratulations to all the co-authors. 

• [Jan 8, 2024] Excited to share that our research paper titled "MRL-PoS: A Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning based Proof of Stake Consensus Algorithm for Blockchain" has been published and received the BEST PAPER award in IEEE CCWC 2024. Congratulations to all the co-authors. 

• [Jan 7, 2024] Excited to share that our research poster titled "ConChain: A Scheme for Contention-free and Attack Resilient BlockChain" has been published in IEEE CCNC 2024.  Congratulations to all the co-authors.  

• [Jan 1, 2024] I will be serving as the Co-chair for the ACM workshop on Secure and Trustworthy Cyber Physical Systems 2024 (co-located with ACM CODASPY). Please consider submitting your unpublished and high quality research papers in ACM SaT-CPS workshop.  

• [Oct 16, 2023] I will be serving as the Publicity Chair of the 6th International Conference on Science of Cyber Security (SciSec 2024), which is scheduled to happen on August 14-16, 2024 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Please consider submitting your high-quality original work in this esteemed Springer conference. Paper submission deadline is on April 7, 2024. For more information please visit the SciSec conference website.    

• [August 31, 2023] I have given a talk on my research direction during the CS Graduate Club session titled "Engaging Research Discussion with New CS Faculty".

• [August 17, 2023] Fall 2023 semester has begun. Welcome to all the students whoever is taking my CSC4585/5585 class! 

• [August 7, 2023] I have attended the NFO (New Faculty Orientation) at TTU on August 7, 2023. 

• [August 1, 2023] I have officially joined Tennessee Technological University as a tenure-track assistant professor of Computer Science from August 1, 2023. I am looking forward to working with some great students.  

• [July 31, 2023] My first MS student (Jacob Villemagne) at Appalachian State University got his MS degree in Computer Science this summer and presented his MS project in the CS Thesis/Project presentation day. Congratulations to Jacob for the successful completion of his degree and setting a very high work ethics 👏👏👏. I wish him good luck for his future endeavors! He has got a job through Defense Contractor position in Huntsville, AL.  

• [July 8, 2023] I am looking for one(two) highly motivated PhD student to come work with me in solving exciting Cybersecurity problem. These are fully-funded PhD positions that cover tuition and competitive monthly stipends as graduate assistantship. You can review the details of the PhD program and admission requirements here. Please check out the application portal for deadlines and other information. If you are interested in my research (review my Research section first) as a prospective or current student in the TenTech's Engineering PhD program (CS Track), then let's chat more about it. Positions are open for as early as Spring 2024 semester now!!! 

• [July 1, 2023] I am joining Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, TN as a tenure-track assistant professor starting this Fall 2023 semester. 

• [June 30, 2023] I have resigned from my current full-time position at AppState. I will still continue to work on my summer appointments, which will end by July 31st. It has been a short but memorable journey for me at AppState. I am sad that I have to leave some awesome colleagues and friends around at AppState and Boone area! 😢😢😢 

• [April 22, 2023] I am attending the ACM SIGSAC CODASPY 2023 in-person conference in Charlotte, NC on April 24-26, 2023. 

• [Feb 28, 2023] I am attending the ICCWS (International Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security) 2023 in Towson, Maryland on 9-10 March, 2023. If you are attending as well, I would love to connect and chat.  

• [Feb 9, 2023] Our US Patent application #US20230042816 titled "METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR BLOCKCHAIN-BASED CYBER SECURITY MANAGEMENT "  has been published  recently and can be found here. 

• [January 15, 2023] I am forming a Cybersecurity and Trustworthiness (CyTrust) research group @AppState in the Computer Science Department from Spring 2023.

• [December 6, 2022] I will be attending my Doctoral Hooding Ceremony at UT San Antonio, TX in December 2022.

• [December 1, 2022] I will be serving as a program committee member at the ACM SaT-CPS 2023 workshop co-located with ACM CODASY '23. 

• [November 3, 2022] I am excited to share that my summer grant writing application  for An Automated Decision-Support System Framework for Quantifying Malicious Websites with Explanations has been approved for the 2023 Summer Stipend for Writing A Grant (SWAG) Program (details here)

• [Nov 1, 2022] I am looking for a motivated graduate/undergraduate student interested to work in exciting Cybersecurity research projects in one or more of the following directions from Spring 2023: Application of AI/ML in security, prediction & detection of malicious actors, automation in security, explaining malicious website detection/classification, and human factors in security (hired).

• [Oct 13, 2022] I have given an invited talk on "Cybersecurity Research and Teaching at AppState" at the Computer Science ASCII club meeting.

• [October 4, 2022] I have presented our recently accepted paper "Supporting Law-enforcement to cope with Blacklisted Website: Framework and Case Study" virtually at the IEEE CNS 2022 conference on October 4, 2022.

• [September 1, 2022] I am excited to share that our recent paper "Supporting Law-enforcement to cope with Blacklisted Website: Framework and Case Study" has been accepted for publication at the IEEE CNS 2022 conference, which will take place in Austin, TX from October 3-5, 2022. 

• [July 5, 2022] I have defended my PhD Dissertation titled "Defending Against Malicious Websites: Themed Threats, Detection, and Law-enforcement" on July 5th, 2022.

• [May 15, 2022] I am joining Appalachian State University (AppState) in Boone, North Carolina in Fall 2022. 

Get in touch at mpritom[at]tntech.edu