Mahmood Sharif

Mahmood Sharif

Senior Lecturer

About


Hi!

I’m a Senior Lecturer (≈ Assistant Professor) in the School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, where I lead the PLUS research group. My research interests are in the areas of computer security and privacy, machine learning, and human factors.

Prior to joining Tel Aviv University, I spent roughly two years with VMware’s and NortonLifeLock’s research groups. I received my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, where I was a member of CyLab and CUPS. I received my B.Sc. (via the Etgar/“Challenge” program) and M.Sc. (summa cum laude) degrees in Computer Science from the University of Haifa.

If you’re interested in joining our group, please do reach out.

IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML)

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IEEE Security and Privacy 2024

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Publications

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Yukiko Sawaya, Sarah Lu, Takamasa Isohara, Mahmood Sharif. "A High Coverage Cybersecurity Scale Predictive of User Behavior." USENIX Security Symposium. 2024. To appear.

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Matan Ben-Tov, Daniel Deutch, Nave Frost, Mahmood Sharif. "CaFA: Cost-aware, Feasible Attacks With Database Constraints Against Neural Tabular Classifiers." IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P). 2024. To appear.

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Mahmood Sharif, Pubali Datta, Andy Riddle, Kim Westfall, Adam Bates, Vijay Ganti, Matthew Lentz, David Ott. "DrSec: Flexible Distributed Representations for Efficient Endpoint Security." IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P). 2024. To appear.

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Weiran Lin, Keane Lucas, Neo Eyal, Lujo Bauer, Michael K. Reiter, Mahmood Sharif. "Group-based Robustness: A General Framework for Customized Robustness in the Real World." ISOC Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). 2024.

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Amit Cohen, Mahmood Sharif. "Accessorize in the Dark: A Security Analysis of Near-Infrared Face Recognition." European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS). 2023.

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Keane Lucas, Samruddhi Pai, Weiran Lin, Lujo Bauer, Michael K. Reiter, Mahmood Sharif. "Adversarial Training for Raw-Binary Malware Classifiers." USENIX Security Symposium. 2023.

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Arnav Chakravarthy, Nina Narodytska, Asmitha Rathis, Marius Vilcu, Mahmood Sharif, Gagandeep Singh. "Property-Driven Evaluation of RL-Controllers in Self-Driving Datacenters." Workshop on Challenges in Deploying and monitoring Machine Learning Systems (DMML@NeurIPS). 2022.

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Haoze Wu, Clark Barrett, Mahmood Sharif, Nina Narodytska, Gagandeep Singh. "Scalable Verification of GNN-based Job Schedulers." International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA). 2022.

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Daniel Kats, Mahmood Sharif. ""I Have No Idea What a Social Bot Is": On Users' Perceptions of Social Bots and Ability to Detect Them." International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI). 2022.

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Weiran Lin, Keane Lucas, Lujo Bauer, Michael K. Reiter, Mahmood Sharif. "Constrained Gradient Descent: A Powerful and Principled Evasion Attack Against Neural Networks." International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). 2022.

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Keane Lucas, Mahmood Sharif, Lujo Bauer, Michael K. Reiter, Saurabh Shintre. "Malware Makeover: Breaking ML-based Static Analysis by Modifying Executable Bytes." Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (AsiaCCS). 2021.

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Camille Cobb, Milijana Surbatovich, Anna Kawakami, Mahmood Sharif, Lujo Bauer, Anupam Das, Limin Jia. "How Risky Are Real Users' IFTTT Applets?." Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). 2020.

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Molly Davies, Daniel Marino, Amelia Nash, Kevin A. Roundy, Mahmood Sharif, Acar Tamersoy. "Training Older Adults to Resist Scams with Fraud Bingo and Scam-Detection Challenges." Designing Interactions for the Ageing Populations Workshop at CHI. 2020.

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Mahmood Sharif, Lujo Bauer, Michael K. Reiter. "$n$-ML: Mitigating Adversarial Examples via Ensembles of Topologically Manipulated Classifiers." arXiv pre-print. 2019.

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Mahmood Sharif. "Practical Inference-Time Attacks Against Machine-Learning Systems and a Defense Against Them." Carnegie Mellon University. 2019.

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Mahmood Sharif, Sruti Bhagavatula, Lujo Bauer, Michael K. Reiter. "A General Framework for Adversarial Examples with Objectives." ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS). 2019.

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Mahmood Sharif, Kevin A. Roundy, Matteo Dellamico, Christopher Gates, Daniel Kats, Lujo Bauer, Nicolas Christin. "A Field Study of Computer-Security Perceptions Using Anti-Virus Customer-Support Chats." ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). 2019.

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Joshua Tan, Mahmood Sharif, Sruti Bhagavatula, Matthias Beckerle, Lujo Bauer, Michelle Mazurek. "Comparing Hypothetical and Realistic Privacy Valuations." Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES). 2018.

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Mahmood Sharif, Jumpei Urakawa, Nicolas Christin, Ayumu Kubota, Akira Yamada. "Predicting Impending Exposure to Malicious Content from User Behavior." ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS). 2018.

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Mahmood Sharif, Lujo Bauer, Michael K. Reiter. "On the Suitability of $L_p$-norms for Creating and Preventing Adversarial Examples." The Bright and Dark Sides of Computer Vision: Challenges and Opportunities for Privacy and Security (CVPRW). 2018.

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William Melicher, Anupam Das, Mahmood Sharif, Lujo Bauer, Limin Jia. "Riding Out DOMsday: Toward Detecting and Preventing DOM Cross-Site Scripting." ISOC Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). 2018.

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Zachary Weinberg, Mahmood Sharif, Janos Szurdi, Nicolas Christin. "Topics of Controversy: An Empirical Analysis of Web Censorship Lists." Annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS). 2017.

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Yukiko Sawaya, Mahmood Sharif, Nicolas Christin, Ayumu Kubota, Akihiro Nakarai, Akira Yamada. "Self-Confidence Trumps Knowledge: A Cross-Cultural Study of Security Behavior." ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). 2017. Equal contribution by the first two authors.

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Mahmood Sharif, Sruti Bhagavatula, Lujo Bauer, Michael K. Reiter. "Accessorize to a Crime: Real and Stealthy Attacks on State-of-the-Art Face Recognition." ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS). 2016.

PDF Code Talk

William Melicher, Mahmood Sharif, Joshua Tan, Lujo Bauer, Mihai Christodorescu, Pedro G. Leon. "(Do Not) Track Me Sometimes: Users' Contextual Preferences for Web Tracking." Annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS). 2016.

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Service

I have/had the pleasure to serve on the following program committees:

  • European Workshop on Usable Security: 2018, 2019.
  • Financial Cryptography and Data Security: 2022.
  • IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML): 2024.
  • IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P): 2024.
  • IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) Student PC: 2018.
  • International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI): 2024.
  • Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium: 2021, 2022, 2023.
  • USENIX Security Symposium: 2022, 2023.
  • Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test: 2019.
  • Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom: 2018, 2019.
  • Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society: 2018.
  • Workshop on Towards Trustworthy ML: 2020.

Press

Our research was covered by several sources, including:
Motherboard (Vice), the Guardian, NPR, the Verge, MIT Technology Review, RSA Conference, the Tartan, Security Magazine, the New York Times, and the Economist.

Misc

I enjoy playing different kinds of sports (mainly soccer, but also squash, basketball, volleyball, softball, and others). Feel free to send me a challenge or invite me to join a game sometime. :-)

Contact

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