~/sacred-heart/cybersecurity$whoami
Assistant Professor of CybersecuritySchool of Computing & Engineering, Sacred Heart University
ResearchingResearching: AI for cybersecurity, metadata-resistant messaging, data quality and IoT security, Android collusion detection, explainable email defense
I am an Assistant Professor of Cybersecurity at Sacred Heart University. My research connects artificial intelligence, data quality, mobile and IoT security, and privacy-preserving communication. I teach undergraduate and graduate computing and cybersecurity courses, with an emphasis on practical exercises, secure system design, and evidence-based security decisions.
Email[email protected]
Routes each real message through a tree of decoy traffic so an observer cannot tell who the recipient is. The paper measures recipient privacy as entropy and models the communication overhead and token incentives of different routing choices.
Recipient entropy in simulation
CY-212 / ITI-212
Students build accessible, responsive web applications with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, server-side code, SQL, Git and UNIX workflows. Security is part of the build from the start: forms, authentication, sessions, database access and deployment are all done with secure practices.
CY-221
An introduction to security principles, assets, threats, risk, human factors, identity and incident response. Practical cases train students to explain security decisions to both technical and nontechnical audiences.
CY-410
Brings together threat modeling, secure architecture, identity and access control, vulnerability management, cryptography, monitoring, incident response, and software and mobile security. Students apply them in hands-on labs and a final project.
CY-424
Examines AI both as a defensive tool and as an attack surface. Topics include adversarial machine learning, security of LLM applications, risks of retrieval-augmented generation and agents, software supply chains, cloud identity, post-quantum migration and critical infrastructure.
Six papers that represent the main lines of my research. The full list is organized by year and type.
2026
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy (ICISSP 2026), Vol. 2, pp. 431–438
Routes each real message through a tree of decoy traffic so an observer cannot tell who the recipient is. The paper measures recipient privacy as entropy and models the communication overhead and token incentives of different routing choices.
2024
ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality, 16(3), Article 15, pp. 1–24
Chooses which sensors and instruments to rely on by weighing the quality of their data together with the security of the devices that produce it.
2023
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 49(5), pp. 3241–3260
Tests how accurately automated methods can curate and characterize published vulnerability reports, work that security analysts otherwise do by hand.
2021
IEEE Systems Journal, 15(2), pp. 2058–2065
Combines the quality of smartphone sensor data with the security state of the device into a single evaluation that data consumers can act on.
2020
2020 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), pp. 1–8
Applies recurrent neural networks to detect Android apps that act in collusion, coordinating with each other to get around the boundaries that keep apps apart.
2020
2020 IEEE 6th World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT), pp. 1–6
Represents IoT sensors, their characteristics and their relationships as a knowledge graph, so the quality of the data they deliver can be estimated automatically.
Outstanding Student Paper AwardDOI: 10.1109/WF-IoT48130.2020.9221091
Each theme below lists the question, the method, what has come out of it so far and where it stands.
G.H.O.S.T. studies how graph-based routing and decoy traffic can obscure message recipients. The research models privacy through entropy and examines the communication overhead and token incentives associated with different routing choices. The public repository contains simulation code and results accompanying the ICISSP 2026 paper.
This work runs in two directions: using machine learning to detect and characterize threats, and studying the threats that AI-enabled systems themselves face.
I investigate how data quality and security can be evaluated together in mobile and IoT systems. This work develops evaluation frameworks and sensor-selection methods that account for both the usefulness of data and the security of the systems that produce it.
Collusion attacks happen when two or more apps coordinate, each staying within its own permissions, so that together they get around the boundaries that are supposed to keep them apart. This work detects that coordination and evaluates the security of Android devices.
Ongoing work explores hybrid and explainable AI approaches to business email compromise detection, with attention to social engineering, message context, and explanations that help people evaluate alerts.
Public repositories, described by what they actually contain.
Python simulations and CSV results accompanying the ICISSP 2026 paper: entropy measurements, an intersection-attack experiment, modeled latency and saturation, communication overhead, and token economics.
Simulation artifacts only. The repository does not contain a deployed messaging network or an Ethereum smart-contract implementation.
Educational authentication examples in Python and Java: registration, salted password hashing, login, logout and session handling, with a small Flask API, browser pages and unit test examples.
Built for studying authentication design, not for production use. It hashes passwords with salted SHA-256, stores users in a local JSON file and keeps sessions in memory without expiry.
2022 – 2027
Increasing Perseverance and Retention of Computing and Engineering Students Through Service
National Science Foundation. Co-Principal Investigator. Education and student retention.
2021 – 2022
Security Evaluation and Improvement of the Personal Cyberinfrastructure with New Tools and Education Development
CRDF Global. Co-Principal Investigator. Security research and education.
2020 – 2021
Self-Learning Capabilities for Mission-Oriented Data Quality and Security Assurance in Military IoT Systems
U.S. Military Academy / Department of Defense. Co-Principal Investigator. Data quality and IoT security research.
Owen Weissman presented a privacy-messenger project at Sacred Heart's 2025 Academic Festival. That work fed into G.H.O.S.T., which was published at ICISSP 2026 with Owen as a coauthor.
Students interested in research in these areas are welcome to email me to talk about their interests.
March 2026
Session chair, Security Testing
ICISSP 2026
January 2025
How AI Can Be Used to Enhance Your Cybersecurity
BrightTALK webinar
2024 – 2025
Faculty Presidential Seminar participant
Sacred Heart University
Ongoing
Artificial Intelligence Committee
Sacred Heart University, with curriculum and accreditation work
Ongoing
Public talks on cybersecurity and privacy
Local libraries and media appearances
March 2018
Data Quality and Security Evaluation Framework, with Leon Reznik
Trusted CI webinar
I joined the School of Computing & Engineering at Sacred Heart University in 2021. I received my Ph.D. in Computing and Information Sciences from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2020, where my dissertation developed an integrated framework for evaluating data quality and security on mobile devices.
As a postdoctoral research scientist at RIT, I worked on automated vulnerability intelligence: using machine learning and expert systems to curate and characterize vulnerability reports. Before my doctoral studies I built software for Android, Windows and embedded systems, including leading an embedded development team.
2021 – present
Assistant Professor of Cybersecurity
Sacred Heart University, School of Computing & Engineering
2020 – 2021
Postdoctoral Research Scientist
Rochester Institute of Technology. Automated vulnerability intelligence
2016 – 2020
Ph.D. student and research assistant
Rochester Institute of Technology. Advisor: Dr. Leon Reznik
2013 – 2015
Embedded team leader
Dynamo Development. Android, Windows and embedded software
2020
Ph.D., Computing and Information Sciences
Rochester Institute of Technology
2007
Master's degree, Electronic Systems
National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”
2005
Bachelor's degree, Electronic Systems
National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”
Outside work I repair and build electronics, operate as a licensed GMRS radio user, bake pizza and cook over an open fire, and spend weekends hiking and camping around New England.
The quickest way to reach me is by email. You can also use the form, which sends a message to my inbox.