About Me
I am a PhD Computer Science student at North Carolina State University advised by Dr. Anupam Das. I am a member of Wolfpack Security and Privacy Lab (WSPR) in the Computer Science department at NC State. My research interests lie in Security and Privacy in emerging technologies, such as voice interfaces and IoT. I am currently working on analyzing and mitigating privacy and security issues in smart home devices and voice assistants, which involves understanding the gap between users' mental models and system behavior. My research contribution also includes policy and compliance enforcement in smart voice assistants. I also received an en route MS in Computer Science from NC State. Previously, I graduated with a BS in Computer Science (CS) from Lahore University of Management Sciences in 2020.Publications
PriVA-C: Defending Voice Assistants from Fingerprinting Attacks.
Dilawer Ahmed, Aafaq Sabir, Ahsan Zafar,and Anupam Das.
Proceedings of the 26th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), 2026.
Analyzing Ad Prevalence, Characteristics, and Compliance in Alexa Skills
Aafaq Sabir, Abhinaya S.B., Dilawer Ahmed, and Anupam Das.
2025 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), San Francisco, CA, USA, 2025, pp. 4321-4339, doi: 10.1109/SP61157.2025.00257.
Enabling Developers, Protecting Users: Investigating Harassment and Safety in {VR}
S.B. Abhinaya, Aafaq Sabir, and Anupam Das.
In the Proceedings of the 33rd USENIX Security Symposium. August 14–16, 2024 • Philadelphia, PA, USA
Spying through Your Voice Assistants: Realistic Voice Command Fingerprinting
Dilawer Ahmed, Aafaq Sabir, and Anupam Das.
In 32nd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 23), pp. 2419-2436. 2023. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity23/presentation/ahmed-dilawer
INSPIRE: Instance-Level Privacy-Pre Serving Transformation for Vehicular Camera Videos
Zhouyu Li, Ruozhou Yu, Anupam Das, Shaohu Zhang, Huayue Gu, Xiaojian Wang, Fangtong Zhou, Aafaq Sabir, Dilawer Ahmed, and Ahsan Zafar
2023 32nd International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), Honolulu, HI, USA, 2023, pp. 1-10, doi: 10.1109/ICCCN58024.2023.10230162.
Speaker Orientation-Aware Privacy Control to Thwart Misactivation of Voice Assistants
Shaohu Zhang, Aafaq Sabir, and Anupam Das.
2023 53rd Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), Porto, Portugal, 2023, pp. 597-610, doi: 10.1109/DSN58367.2023.00061.
Hey Alexa, Who Am I Talking to?: Analyzing Users’ Perception and Awareness Regarding Third-party Alexa Skills
Aafaq Sabir, Evan Lafontaine and Anupam Das.
In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22), April 29-May 5, 2022, New Orleans, LA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517510
Analyzing the Impact and Accuracy of Facebook Activity on Facebook's Ad-Interest Inference Process.
Aafaq Sabir, Evan Lafontaine and Anupam Das.
Analyzing the Impact and Accuracy of Facebook Activity on Facebook’s Ad-Interest Inference Process. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW1, Article 76 (April 2022), 34 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3512923
Understanding People's Attitude and Concerns towards Adopting IoT Devices.
Evan Lafontaine, Aafaq Sabir, and Anupam Das.
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ’21 Extended Abstracts), 2021.
Understanding the Privacy Implications of Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads.
Ahsan Zafar, Aafaq Sabir, Dilawer Ahmed and Anupam Das.
ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS), 2021.
Professional Experience
- North Carolina State University
- Graduate Research Assistant (August 2021 – Present)
- Educative.io
- Technical Content Engineer (August 2020 – September 2021)
- Lahore University of Management
Sciences (LUMS)
- Teaching Assistant - CS 100 (2018), CS 200 (2019), CS 100 (2020)
Internship Experience
- Allthenticate (Houston, TX)
- SWE Summer Intern (May – August 2023)
Resume
Contact
Email: asabir2 at ncsu dot edu
Phone: +1 (919)-501-1591
Address: Department of Computer Science, 890 Oval Dr, Engineering Building II, Raleigh, NC