About Me
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I am part of the i-DASH Lab lead by Prof. Gang Wang.
My research interests lie at the intersection of binary analysis, artificial intelligence, and human factors, with a focus on IoT devices. My goal as a computer scientist is to advance security analysis tools. Specifically, I aim to build tools that automate and assist security analysts in performing quick and effective security analysis.
Download my CV for more info!
News
- July 2025: Our UIUC team (PurpCorn-PLAN) advances to the finals and wins the Amazon Nova AI Challenge!
- May 2025: I passed my Prelim Exam and presented our work at IEEE S&P 2025!
- April 2025: I presented our work at WiCys 2025 and won the Graduate Poster Award!
- September 2024: Our paper “You Can’t Judge a Binary by Its Header: Data-Code Separation for Non-Standard ARM Binaries using Pseudo Labels” was accepted at IEEE S&P 2025!
- March 2024: Our Paper “VeriSMS: A Message Verification System for Inclusive Patient Outreach against Phishing Attacks.” was accepted at CHI 2024!
- November 2023: Excited to share our work at CPSIoTSec 2023 and be part of be part of iMentor!
- October 2023: Joined the ACTION’s Student Council!
- August 2023: Our Paper “Towards PLC- Specific Binary Analysis Tools: An Investigation of Codesys-Compiled PLC Software Applications.” was accepted at CPSIoTSec 2023!
- August 2023: Excited to join the Grainger College of Engineering Diversity Ambassadors.
- March 2023: Our paper “Everybody’s Got ML, Tell Me What Else You Have: Practitioners’ Perception of ML-Based Security Tools and Explanations.” was accepted at IEEE S&P 2023!
- April 2022: Had a great time presenting my research to The Aerospace Corporation research teams!
- April 2022: Passed my Qualifying Exam!
- October 2021: Our paper (in collaboration with the The Aerospace Corporation) “Image Reconstruction Attacks on Distributed Machine Learning Models” was accepted at DistributedML!.
- March 2021: Our paper “FaceHack: Attacking Facial Recognition Systems using Malicious Facial Characteristics.” was accepted at IEEE TBIOM!
- November 2020: Our paper “ICSFuzz: Manipulating I/Os and Repurposing Binary Code to Enable Instrumented Fuzzing in ICS Control Applications” was accepted at USENIX 2021!
- August 2020: Joined the CS Ph.D. program at UIUC!
- February 2020: Our paper “I came, I saw, I hacked: Automated Generation of Process-independent Attacks for Industrial Control Systems” was accepted at AsiaCCS 2020!
- December 2019: Our paper “SNIFU: Secure Network Interception for Firmware Updates in Legacy PLCs” was accepted at VTS 2020!
- August 2018: Joined the Center for Cyber Security at NYU Abu-Dhabi as a research assistant.
Publications
- Liu, J., Diwan, N., Wang, Z., Zhai, H., Zhou, X., Nguyen, K. A., Yu, T., Wahed, M., Deng, Y., Benkraouda, H., Wei, Y., Zhang, L., Lourentzou, I., Wang, G. “PurpCode: Reasoning for Safer Code Generation.” In Proceedings of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025. [NeurIPS] [PDF] [Model/Dataset] 🥇 Winner of Amazon Nova AI Challenge 2025
- Benkraouda, H., Diwan, N., Wang, G. “You Can’t Judge a Binary by Its Header: Data-Code Separation for Non-Standard ARM Binaries using Pseudo Labels.” In Proceedings of the 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2025. [IEEE S&P][PDF][Code] 🥇 Winner of WiCyS Research Poster Award 2025
- Wang, C., Jia, Z., Benkraouda, H., Zevnik, C., Heuermann, N., Foulger, R., Handler, J., Wang, G. “VeriSMS: A Message Verification System for Inclusive Patient Outreach against Phishing Attacks.” In Proceedings of ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2024. [CHI] [PDF]
- Benkraouda, H., Agrawal, A., Tychalas, D., Sazos, M., Maniatakos, M. 2023. “Towards PLC-Specific Binary Analysis Tools: An Investigation of Codesys-Compiled PLC Software Applications.” In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on CPS&IoT Security and Privacy, 2023. [CPSIoTSec co-located with CCS] [PDF]
- Mink, J., Benkraouda, H., Yang, L., Ciptadi, A., Ahmadzadeh, A., Votipka, D., Wang, G. “Everybody’s Got ML, Tell Me What Else You Have: Practitioners’ Perception of ML-Based Security Tools and Explanations.” In Proceedings of the 44th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2023. [IEEE S&P] [PDF]
- Tychalas, D., Benkraouda, H., Maniatakos, M. “ICSFuzz: Manipulating I/Os and Repurposing Binary Code to Enable Instrumented Fuzzing in ICS Control Applications.” In Proceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium, 2021. [USENIX Security] [PDF] [Code]
- Benkraouda, H. and Qian, J. and Hung Tran, H., Kaplan, B. “Attacks on Visualization-Based Malware Detection: Balancing Effectiveness and Executability.” In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Deployable Machine Learning for Security Defense, 2021. [MLHat co-located with SIGKDD] [PDF]
- Sarkar, E., Benkraouda, H., Maniatakos, M. “FaceHack: Attacking Facial Recognition Systems using Malicious Facial Characteristics.” In IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science, 2021. [IEEE T-BIOM] [PDF]
- Benkraouda, H., Nahrstedt, K. “Image Reconstruction Attacks on Distributed Machine Learning Models.” In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Distributed Machine Learning, 2021. [DistributedML co-located with CoNext] [PDF]
- Sarkar, E., Benkraouda, H., Maniatakos, M. “On Process-independent Automated Generation of Attacks on Industrial Control Systems.” In Proceedings of the 15th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2020. [AsiaCCS] [PDF]
- Benkraouda, H., Chakkantakath, M., Keliris, A., Maniatakos, M. “SNIFU: Secure Network Interception for Firmware Updates in Legacy PLCs.” In Proceedings of The 38th IEEE VLSI Test Symposium, 2020. [VTS] [PDF]
- Barka, E., Kerrache, C., Benkraouda, H., Shuaib, K., Ahmad, F., Kurugollu, F. “Towards a trusted unmanned aerial system using blockchain (BUAS) for the protection of critical infrastructure.” In Wiley Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies, 2019. [ETT] [PDF]
Honors & Awards
- Amazon Nova AI Challenge: Trusted AI (1st Place)
- Research Poster Award (1st Place) – WiCyS ’25
- WiCyS Student Scholarship – WiCyS ’25
- iMentor Workshop Travel Grant – CCS ’23
- ACM CCS Student Travel Grant – CCS ’23
- Grainger Engineering Diversity Ambassadors Scholarship – ’23 – ’25
- ACM CCS Student Travel Grant – CCS ’22
- Illinois Cyber Security Scholars Program (ICSSP) ’21 – Declined
- IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Student Travel Grant ’21
- ACM SIGSOFT CAPS – ICSE 21
- NYU Merit based Scholarship Award
- United Arab Emirates University Honors Graduate
- Sheikh Mohamed Ben Zayed’s Scholar