I am looking to recruit motivated PhD students to join my lab for Fall'25! This will be a fully funded position! If you are interested in working with me, please send me an email at <kafle@usf.edu>.

I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of South Florida. I completed my PhD in Computer Science from William & Mary under the advisorship of Prof. Adwait Nadkarni. I was one of the founding members of the Secure Platforms Lab (SPL).

My research seeks to understand the security and privacy risks in diverse consumer-oriented software systems (e.g., Internet-of-things or IoT, Android, Online Political Campaigning) and develop practical solutions to identify the threats and automate their prevention. Given the diverse and disjointed nature of these systems, the focus of my research is to formulate tractable, consumer-oriented security and privacy research questions, combine a range of well-established techniques to analyze and identify the problems, and finally, design and build tools to prevent such problems.

Over my research career, my work has identified and demonstrated novel attacks (CODASPY’19 Best Paper), identified the prevalence of security and privacy threats at a large scale (CCS’22, IEEE S&P’24), and built targeted security tools and frameworks (USENIX’18, USENIX’22, CCS’22, IEEE S&P’24).

Recent News

  • August, 2024 Joined the CSE department at University of South Florida as a tenure-track Assistant Professor!
  • June, 2024 I was invited to Ballotpedia's 'On the Ballot' podcast to discuss on the topic of "Personal data and the privacy gaps of political campaigns". Listen to the episode here!
  • February, 2024 I will participate in the 2024 Science Policy & Advocacy for Research Competition (SPARC) series, conducted by the Universities Research Association (URA)!
  • December 18, 2023 Our paper, “Practical Integrity Validation in the Smart Home with HomeEndorser” has been accepted to the ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec), 2024! [preprint]
  • December 6, 2023 My experiences at the CRA LiSPI workshop, and how the workshop can potentially benefit other PhD students like me has been published in the CRA policy blog.
  • November 16-17, 2023 I participated in the CRA Leadership in Science Policy Institute (LiSPI) workshop as a student volunteer. The workshop is an excellent opportunity to learn about how science policy works at the federal level and how we can contribute as computer researchers.
  • October 27, 2023 Our paper, “Understanding the Privacy Practices of Political Campaigns: A Perspective from the 2020 US Election Websites” has been accepted to the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2024! [pdf]
  • October 10, 2023 Presented poster titled Expanding Computer Science Learning Opportunities in K-12 Instruction in Virginia Schools at VASEM Summit 2023!
  • October 10, 2023 Presented Poster titled Security and Privacy in the Smart Home Ecosystem at VASEM Summit 2023!
  • August 30, 2023 End of COVES fellowship.
  • July 20, 2023 Our paper, "Helion":" Enabling Natural Testing of Smart Homes" has been accepted to the tool demo track at the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering 2023! [pdf]
  • July 20, 2023 Our paper, "MASC":" A Tool for Mutation-based Evaluation of Static Crypto-API Misuse Detectors" has been accepted to the tool demo track at the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering 2023! [pdf]
  • May 24, 2023: Started work as a COVES fellow at the Virginia Department of Education (VDoE) on a project titled Expanding Computer Science Learning Opportunities in K-12 Instruction in Virginia Schools.
  • April 17, 2023: Won the best poster award at the CCI Symposium 2023!
  • April 17, 2023: Presented a poster on the privacy practices of election campaign websites at the CCI Symposium .
  • April 3, 2023: I have been selected as the 2023 Commonwealth of Virginia Engineering and Science (COVES) Policy Fellow! Work begins at the end of May.
  • August 26, 2022: Our paper, Understanding IoT Security from a Market-Scale Perspective has been accepted to the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2022!
  • August 12, 2022: Completed internship at IBM Research.
  • May 23, 2022: I started as a Security and Privacy Grad Intern at IBM Research.
    • --Full List--