Manaar Alam

Post-Doctoral Associate
Modern Microprocessors Architecture Lab
Center for Cyber Security
New York University Abu Dhabi
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

  alam [dot] manaar [at] nyu [dot] edu

Research Interest:

I am a Post-Doctoral Associate at New York University Abu Dhabi in the Center for Cyber Security. I am currently working with Prof. Michail Maniatakos. I obtained a Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 2022 under the supervision of Prof. Debdeep Mukhopadhyay.

I am a member of the Modern Microprocessor Architectures Lab and my primary research interests mainly lie in the confluence of Deep Learning and Security. I have recently been working with infamous Backdoor Attacks in collaborative Federated Learning environments. I have previously worked in employing Deep Learning techniques in the field of Hardware and System Security, and also designing robust countermeasures against different attacks on Deep Learning implementations. I am also interested in various security aspects of Deep Learning techniques like fault-resistance, privacy leakages, adversarial attacks, model-extraction, etc. My other research interests include analyzing physical side-channel leakages from secured cryptographic implementations through micro-architectures, power consumption, etc.

I have been a Visiting Research Assistant in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University Singapore from August 2017 to January 2018, where I worked with Dr. Thambipillai Srikanthan and Dr. Siew-Kei Lam.

I greatly appreciate the following organizations for their generous fellowship support during the course of my Ph.D.

  • IBM Research India.
  • Department of Higher Education, MHRD, Government of India.
  • The Chatterjee Group.

Download My CV

Awards and Honours

  • 3rd Best Poster Award at SPACE 2020.
  • 2nd Best Presentation Award in Applied Research Competition at CSAW 2019.
  • Best Student Paper Award at CARDIS 2019.
  • IBM PhD Fellowship Award for the Academic Year 2019-20.
  • DSCI Excellence Award as a team - felicitated by Bharat Chamber of Commerce.
  • 3rd Best Poster Award in Young Researcher's Forum at SPACE 2018.
  • Finalist of Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship India 2017 and 2019.
  • 2nd Best Hardware Demo Award in Embedded Security Challenge at CSAW 2016.
  • National Merit-cum-Means Scholarship awarded by WBMDFC from 2009 to 2013.
  • National Merit Scholarship awarded by Govt. of India for being in the top 20 position in Higher Secondary Board Examination in 2009.

Invited Talks

  1. VLSID'22 Artificial Intelligence in Security: Potential to Make and Break a Secure Connected World
    35th International Conference on VLSI Design (VLSID), Virtual, February 2022.
    Co-Speaker: Prof. Debdeep Mukhopadhyay.
  2. IIT Kharagpur In-situ Extraction of Randomness from Computer Architecture
    Workshop on Cyber Physical System Security (CPSS), Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, December 2019.
  3. IIT Kharagpur Early Detection of Anomaly using Side-Channel: Statistics and Learning
    Workshop on Advanced Side Channel Evaluation of Hardware Security (ASCEHS), Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, July 2018.

Professional Service

Reviewer of Journals

  • IEEE ESL, IEEE TIFS, IEEE TVLSI, ACM TECS, ACM JETC, IACR TCHES, IET TRIT

Reviewer of Conferences

  • CARDIS, CCS, DAC, DATE, ICCAD, Indocrypt, NDSS, NeurIPS, S&P, SPACE, TrustCom, Usenix Security, VLSI-SoC

Reviewer of Workshops
  • COSADE, CPSS, TopinHES, WOOT

Competitions

  1. IIT Kanpur Cyber Security Awareness Week - Applied Research Competition in India (2019), Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India. [Secured 2nd Place]
  2. HOST'18 Hardware Demo (2018), IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), Virginia, United States. [Reached Final Round]
  3. IIT Kanpur Cyber Security Awareness Week - Embedded Security Challenge in India (2016), Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India. [Secured 2nd Place]
  4. IIT Bombay International Championship for Artificial Intelligence & Networking (2015), Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India. [Secured 2nd Place]
  5. IIT Bombay National Round of Indo-US Robo League (2015), Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India. [Reached Pre-Final Round]

Teaching Assistant

  • Autumn'15 Computer Programming Lab, Data Structures Lab
  • Spring'16 Computer Programming Lab, Algorithm Design & Analysis Lab
  • Spring'17 Programming and Data Structures Laboratory
  • Spring'18 Foundation of Algorithm Design and Machine Learning
  • Autumn'18 Autumn'19 Cryptography and Network Security
  • Spring'19 Spring'20 High Performance Computer Architecture
  • Autumn'20 Programming and Data Structures (Theory)

Publications

Google Scholar Profile DBLP Profile

Peer-Reviewed Journals

  1. JoC Learn from Your Faults: Leakage Assessment in Fault Attacks using Deep Learning
    Sayandeep Saha, Manaar Alam, Arnab Bag, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, and Pallab Dasgupta.
    IACR Journal of Cryptology. (To Appear)
  2. TCHES Whispering MLaaS: Exploiting Timing Channels to Compromise User Privacy in Deep Neural Networks
    Shubhi Shukla, Manaar Alam, Sarani Bhattacharya, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, and Pabitra Mitra.
    IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, Volume: 2023, Issue: 2, March 2023.
  3. TC Birds of the Same Feather Flock Together: A Dual Mode Circuit for Strong PUF-TRNG Functionalities
    Kuheli Pratihar, Urbi Chatterjee, Manaar Alam, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, and Rajat Subhra Chakraborty.
    IEEE Transactions on Computers. (To Appear)
  4. TCAD Exploring Bitslicing Architectures for Enabling FHE-assisted Machine Learning
    Soumik Sinha, Sayandeep Saha, Manaar Alam, Varun Agarwal, Ayantika Chatterjee, Anoop Mishra, Deepak Khazanchi, and Debdeep Mukhopadhyay.
    IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, Volume: 41, Issue: 11, November 2022.
  5. JETC NN-Lock: A Lightweight Authorization to Prevent IP Threats of Deep Learning Models
    Manaar Alam, Sayandeep Saha, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, and Sandip Kundu.
    ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems, Volume: 18, Issue: 3, July 2022.
  6. TRIT A Survey on Adversarial Attacks and Defences
    Anirban Chakraborty, Manaar Alam, Vishal Dey, Anupam Chattopadhyay, and Debdeep Mukhopadhyay.
    IET CAAI Transactions on Intelligence Technology, Volume: 6, Issue: 1, March 2021.
  7. TCHES RASSLE: Return Address Stack based Side-channel LEakage
    Anirban Chakraborty, Sarani Bhattacharya, Manaar Alam, Sikhar Patranabis, and Debdeep Mukhopadhyay.
    IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, Volume: 2021, Issue: 2, February 2021.
  8. JETC Victims can be Saviors: A Machine Learning based detection for Micro-Architectural Side-Channel Attacks
    Manaar Alam, Sarani Bhattacharya, and Debdeep Mukhopadhyay.
    ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems, Volume: 17, Issue: 2, January 2021.
  9. JCEN Improving Accuracy of HPC-based Malware Classification for Embedded Platforms using Gradient Descent Optimization
    Manaar Alam, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, Sai Praveen Kadiyala, Siew-Kei Lam, and Thambipillai Srikanthan.
    Springer Journal of Cryptographic Engineering, Volume: 10, Issue: 4, November 2020.
  10. JETC Neural Network-based Inherently Fault-Tolerant Hardware Cryptographic Primitives without Explicit Redundancy Checks
    Manaar Alam, Arnab Bag, Debapriya Basu Roy, Dirmanto Jap, Jakub Breier, Shivam Bhasin, and Debdeep Mukhopadhyay.
    ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems, Volume: 17, Issue: 1, September 2020.
  11. TECS LAMBDA: Lightweight Assessment of Malware for emBeddeD Architectures
    Sai Praveen Kadiyala, Manaar Alam, Yash Shrivastava, Sikhar Patranabis, Muhamed Fauzi Bin Abbas, Arnab Kumar Biswas, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, and Thambipillai Srikanthan.
    ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, Volume: 19, Issue: 4, June 2020.
  12. HASS IPA: An Instruction Profiling based Micro-Architectural Side-Channel Attack on Block Ciphers
    Manaar Alam, Sarani Bhattacharya, Sayan Sinha, Chester Rebeiro, and Debdeep Mukhopadhyay.
    Springer Journal of Hardware and Systems Security, Volume: 3, Issue: 1, March 2019.
  13. ESL Customized Instructions for Protection Against Memory Integrity Attacks
    Debapriya Basu Roy, Manaar Alam, Sarani Bhattacharya, Vidya Govindan, Francesco Regazzoni, Rajat Subhra Chakraborty, and Debdeep Mukhopadhyay.
    IEEE Embedded Systems Letters, Volume: 10, Issue: 3, September 2018.

Peer-Reviewed Conferences

  1. AfricaCrypt'22 TransNet: Shift Invariant Transformer Network for Side Channel Analysis
    Suvadeep Hajra, Sayandeep Saha, Manaar Alam, and Debdeep Mukhopadhyay.
    13th International Conference on Cryptology, AfricaCrypt 2022, Fes, Morocco, July 18-20, 2022.
  2. ISQED'21 Deep Learning assisted Cross-Family Profiled Side-Channel Attacks using Transfer Learning
    Dhruv Thapar, Manaar Alam, and Debdeep Mukhopadhyay.
    22nd International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design, Virtual, April 7-9, 2021.
  3. SOCC'20 HARDY: Hardware Based Analysis for malwaRe Detection in Embedded sYstems
    Sai Praveen Kadiyala, Mohit Garg, Manaar Alam, Hau Ngo, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay and Thambipillai Srikanthan.
    33rd IEEE International System-on-Chip Conference, Virtual, September 8-11, 2020.
  4. ATS'19 Deep Learning based Diagnostics for Rowhammer Protection of DRAM Chips
    Anirban Chakraborty, Manaar Alam and Debdeep Mukhopadhyay.
    28th IEEE Asian Test Symposium, Kolkata, India, December 10-13, 2019.
  5. CARDIS'19 In-situ Extraction of Randomness from Computer Architecture through Hardware Performance Counters
    Manaar Alam, Astikey Singh, Sarani Bhattacharya, Kuheli Pratihar and Debdeep Mukhopadhyay.
    18th Smart Card Research and Advanced Application Conference, Prague, Czech Republic, November 11-13, 2019. [Best Paper Award]
  6. DAC'19 How Secure are Deep Learning Algorithms from Side-Channel based Reverse Engineering?
    Manaar Alam and Debdeep Mukhopadhyay.
    56th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, Las Vegas, United States of America, June 2-6, 2019.
  7. HOST'19 RATAFIA: Ransomware Analysis using Time And Frequency Informed Autoencoders
    Manaar Alam, Sarani Bhattacharya, Swastika Dutta, Sayan Sinha, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, and Anupam Chattopadhyay.
    12th IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust, McLean, United States of America, May 6-10, 2019.
  8. ASP-DAC'19 A 0.16pJ/bit Recurrent Neural Network Based PUF for Enhanced Machine Learning Attack Resistance
    Nimesh Kirit Shah, Manaar Alam, Durga Prasad Sahoo, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, and Arindam Basu.
    24th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference, Tokyo, Japan, January 21-24, 2019.
  9. SPACE'17 Tackling the Time-Defence: An Instruction Count Based Micro-architectural Side-Channel Attack on Block Ciphers
    Manaar Alam, Sarani Bhattacharya, and Debdeep Mukhopadhyay.
    7th International Conference on Security, Privacy, and Applied Cryptography Engineering, Goa, India, December 13-17, 2017.
  10. MEMOCODE'16 SmashClean: A hardware level mitigation to stack smashing attacks in OpenRISC
    Manaar Alam, Debapriya Basu Roy, Sarani Bhattacharya, Vidya Govindan, Rajat Subhra Chakraborty, and Debdeep Mukhopadhyay.
    14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Formal Methods and Models for System Design, Kanpur, India, November 18-20, 2016.
  11. RAIT'16 A novel parallel search technique for optimization
    Manaar Alam, Soumyajit Chatterjee, and Haider Banka.
    3rd International Conference on Recent Advances in Information Technology, Dhanbad, India, March 3-5, 2016.

Peer-Reviewed Workshops

  1. AIHWS@ACNS'21 A Good Anvil Fears No Hammer: Automated Rowhammer Detection using Unsupervised Deep Learning
    Anirban Chakraborty, Manaar Alam, and Debdeep Mukhopadhyay.
    2nd Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Hardware Security (co-located with Applied Cryptography and Network Security 2021), Virtual, June 21, 2021.
  2. Kangacrypt@Asiacrypt'18 RAPPER: Ransomware Prevention via Performance Counters
    Manaar Alam, Sayan Sinha, Sarani Bhattacharya, Swastika Dutta, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, and Anupam Chattopadhyay.
    Australian Workshop on Offensive Cryptography (co-located with Asiacrypt 2018), Adelaide, Australia, December 7-9, 2018.
  3. PROOFS@CHES'18 Side-Channel Assisted Malware Classifier with Gradient Descent Correction for Embedded Platforms
    Manaar Alam, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, Sai Praveen Kadiyala, Siew-Kei Lam, and Thambipillai Srikanthan.
    7th International Workshop on Security Proofs for Embedded Systems (co-located with Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems 2018), Amsterdam, Netherlands, September 13, 2018.

Patents

  • Indian A System for Detecting Ransomware in a Computer System and a Method Thereof
    Manaar Alam, Sarani Bhattacharya, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, and Anupam Chattopadhyay.
    Indian Patent, Patent No.: IN201831045833A, Filed: December 4, 2018, Published: June 12, 2020.

Poster Presentations

  1. SPACE'20 Using Rowhammer for Fault Analysis of Block Ciphers and a Mitigation Technique thereof
    POSTER: 10th International Conference on Security, Privacy, and Applied Cryptography Engineering (SPACE), December 2020, Virtual. [3rd Best Poster Award]
  2. DAC'19 How Secure are Deep Learning Algorithms from Side-Channel based Reverse Engineering?
    POSTER: ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), June 2019, United States of America.
  3. DAC'19 Enhancing Fault Tolerance of Neural Networks for Security-Critical Applications
    POSTER: ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), June 2019, United States of America.
  4. SPACE'18 Detecting Malware and Ransomware using Hardware Performance Counters
    POSTER: 8th International Conference on Security, Privacy, and Applied Cryptography Engineering (SPACE), December 2018, India. [3rd Best Poster Award]
  5. HOST'18 Detecting Malware and Ransomware using Hardware Performance Counters
    POSTER: IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), May 2018, United States of America.
  6. SICW'17 LAMBDA: Lightweight Assesment of Malware for emBeddeD Architectures
    POSTER: Singapore International Cyber Week (SICW), September 2017, Singapore.
  7. CSAW'16 SmashClean: A Hardware level mitigation to stack smashing attacks in OpenRISC
    POSTER: Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW), November 2016, India.

Postal Address

Manaar Alam,
A1-172I, Center for Cyber Security,
New York University Abu Dhabi,
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

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