About Me
I am an incoming Postdoctoral Researcher at Purdue University within CERIAS, working with Prof. Dongyan Xu. I recently earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I was part of the i-DASH Lab led by Prof. Gang Wang.
My research lies at the intersection of binary analysis, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. As a computer scientist, my goal is to narrow the widening gap between the demand for reverse engineering and our capacity to perform it at scale. I approach this by building tools that automate and assist security analysts in performing quick and effective security analysis.
Please download my CV for more information on my background and publications!
News
- July 2026: Gave an invited talk at the DHS S&T Cybersecurity Community of Interest.
- June 2026: Our paper “Generative active adaptation for drifting and imbalanced network intrusion detection” was accepted at CoNEXT 2026!
- June 2026: Successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation!
- April 2026: Accepted a postdoctoral research position at Purdue University within CERIAS and the ACTION AI Institute, working with Prof. Dongyan Xu. I will be starting in October 2026!
- April 2026: Gave an invited talk at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).
- February 2026: Gave an invited talk at George Washington University (GWU).
- October 2025: Participated in the SAIL 2025 Summit for AI Institute Leadership.
- July 2025: Our UIUC team (PurpCorn-PLAN) advanced to the finals and won the Amazon Nova AI Challenge!
- May 2025: Passed my Prelim Exam and presented our work at IEEE S&P 2025!
- April 2025: 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 iMentor!
- October 2023: Joined the ACTION 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 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
- Gupta, R., Liu, S., Zhang, X., Zhang, R., Benkraouda, H., Hu, X., Cao, P., Feamster, N., Nahrstedt, K. “Generative active adaptation for drifting and imbalanced network intrusion detection.” In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies, 2026. [CoNEXT]
- 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
- Summit for AI Institutes Leadership Student Travel Grant – SAIL ’25
- 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