Rate My Professor Adil Ahmad

Adil Ahmad is an Assistant Professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence within the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, joining the faculty in the fall of 2022. He earned his PhD in computer science from Purdue University in 2022 under advisors Pedro Fonseca and Byoungyoung Lee, following a bachelor's degree in computer science from Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan. Prior to his appointment at ASU, Ahmad completed internships at Microsoft Research with Sangho Lee and Marcus Peinado, and at NEC Laboratories America with Chung Hwan Kim.

Ahmad's research specializes in computer security, systems, and architecture, focusing on protecting sensitive computations such as machine learning models and genomic data from powerful adversaries. He leverages hardware-assisted trusted execution environments like Intel SGX, addressing their limitations in protection and usability, and develops principles to fortify critical system software including operating systems and hypervisors. His influential publications appear in top-tier conferences, including "OBLIVIATE: A Data Oblivious Filesystem for Intel SGX" (NDSS 2018), "Obfuscuro: A Commodity Obfuscation Engine on Intel SGX" (NDSS 2019), "Hardlog: Practical Tamper-Proof System Auditing using a Novel Audit Device" (IEEE S&P 2022), "Veil: A Protected Services Framework for Confidential Virtual Machines" (ASPLOS 2023), "An Extensible Orchestration and Protection Framework for Confidential Cloud Computing" (USENIX OSDI 2023), and "The HitchHiker's Guide to High-Assurance System Observability Protection with Fast Permission Switches" (ACM CCS 2024). Ahmad has received the 2024 US Department of Defense DEPSCoR Award and a 2024 Google ExploreCSR award with collaborators to advance AI research opportunities for underserved students. He teaches courses such as CSE 330: Operating Systems, serves on graduate committees, and is affiliated with ASU's Center for Cybersecurity and Trusted Foundations.