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Aafaq Sabir

  • PhD Student
Website
aafaqsabir.org

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Research Areas:

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Bio

Aafaq Sabir is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at NCSU supervised by Dr. Anupam Das. His research interests lie in web security and privacy. He is currently working on analyzing and mitigating security and privacy problems in smart home devices and voice assistants. His research involves understanding the gap between a user’s mental model and system behavior, detecting and regulating advertisements in smart home devices, and analyzing online tracking technology across different platforms, among other aspects. Before joining NCSU, he graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in 2020.

Publications

  • Dilawer Ahmed, Aafaq Sabir, Ahsan Zafar, and Anupam Das, PriVA-C: Defending Voice Assistants from Fingerprinting Attacks, in Proceedings of the 26th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), Jul. 2026.
  • Aafaq Sabir, Abhinaya S.B., Dilawer Ahmed, and Anupam Das, Privacy by Voice: Designing Usable Privacy Interventions for the Voice Interface, in Proceedings of the 26th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), Jul. 2026.
  • Ummay Kulsum, Aafaq Sabir, Abhinaya S.B., and Anupam Das, Beyond Metadata: Multimodal, Policy-Aware Detection of YouTube Scam Videos, in Proceedings of the 20th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), May 2026.
  • Aafaq Sabir, Abhinaya S.B., Dilawer Ahmed, and Anupam Das, Analyzing Ad Prevalence, Characteristics, and Compliance in Alexa Skills, in Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), May 2025.
  • Abhinaya S.B., Aafaq Sabir, and Anupam Das, Enabling Developers, Protecting Users: Investigating Harassment and Safety in VR, in Proceedings of the 33rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security), Aug. 2024.
  • Taufiq Islam Protick, Aafaq Sabir, S.B. Abhinaya, and Anupam Das, Unveiling Users’ Security and Privacy Concerns Regarding Smart Home IoT Products from Online Reviews, ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies, 2024.
  • Dilawer Ahmed, Aafaq Sabir, and Anupam Das, Spying through your voice assistants: Realistic voice command fingerprinting, in Proceedings of the 32nd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security), Aug. 2023.
  • Zhouyu Li, Ruozhou Yu, Anupam Das, Shaohu Zhang, Huayue Gu, Xiaojian Wang, Fangtong Zhou, Aafaq Sabir, Dilawer Ahmed, and Ahsan Zafar, INSPIRE: Instance-level Privacy-preserving Transformation for Vehicular Camera Videos, in Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), Jul. 2023.
  • Shaohu Zhang, Aafaq Sabir, and Anupam Das, Speaker Orientation-Aware Privacy Control to Thwart Misactivation of Voice Assistants, in Proceedings of the 53rd Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Network (IEEE IFIP DSN), Jun. 2023.
  • Aafaq Sabir, Evan Lafontaine, and Anupam Das, Analyzing the Impact and Accuracy of Facebook Activity on Facebook’s Ad-Interest Inference Process, in Proceedings of the ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing (CSCW), Nov. 2022.
  • Aafaq Sabir, Evan Lafontaine, and Anupam Das, Hey Alexa, Who Am I Talking to?: Analyzing Users’ Perception and Awareness Regarding Third-party Alexa Skills, in Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Apr. 2022.
  • Ahsan Zafar, Aafaq Sabir, Dilawer Ahmed, and Anupam Das, Understanding the Privacy Implications of Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads, in Proceedings of the 16th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS), Jun. 2021.
  • Evan Lafontaine, Aafaq Sabir, and Anupam Das, Understanding People’s Attitude and Concerns towardsAdopting IoT Devices, in Proceedings CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ’21 Extended Abstracts), May 2021.