I am an assistant professor in the CSE Departmant at PennState. I am also part of the Institute for Networking and Security Research. I graduated from Purdue University, where i was part of FRIENDS and PurSec labs under the guidance of Prof. Dongyan Xu and Prof. Dave (Jing) Tian. Other than that I also work closely with Prof. Antonio Bianchi.
My research focuses on advancing the fields of systems and security by exploring innovative architectures and uncovering critical security vulnerabilities in confidential computing and operating systems. I specialize in resource-constrained environments, particularly embedded systems, which power a wide range of critical domains, including automotive, industrial control systems, and robotics. My goal is to develop secure by design, efficient solutions that drive the future of these cutting-edge technologies.
Working on embedded systems security and program analysis technologies.
Worked on enhahcing Qualcomm's Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) OS (QSEE/QTEE)
Worked on design and rework of Nucleus RTOS for Industry 4.0.
Worked on the design and development of Mentor Embedded Hypervisor.
Developed POC for various systems mostly inclined to concentrated solar energy such as heliostats, parabolic troughs and fresnels.
Ruoyu Wu, Muqi Zou, Arslan Khan, Taegyu Kim, Dongyan Xu, Dave (Jing) Tian, Antonio Bianchi, NeuroScope: Reverse Engineering Deep Neural Network on Edge Devices using Dynamic Analysis. 34th USENIX Security Symposium (Security’25), Seattle, WA, August 2025. Paper
Muqi Zou, Arslan Khan, Ruoyu Wu, Han Gao, Antonio Bianchi, and Dave (Jing) Tian. D-Helix: A Generic Decompiler Testing Framework Using Symbolic Differentiation. 33rd USENIX Security Symposium (Security’24), Philadelphia, PA, USA, August 2024. Paper
Syed Ghazanfar Abbas, Muslum Ozgur Ozmen, Abdulellah Alsaheel, Arslan Khan, Z. Berkay Celik, and Dongyan Xu. SAIN: Improving ICS Attack Detection Sensitivity via State-Aware Invariants. 33rd USENIX Security Symposium (Security’24), Philadelphia, PA, USA, August 2024. Paper
Arslan Khan, Muqi Zou, Kyungtae Kim, Dongyan Xu, Antonio Bianchi, and Dave Jing Tian. “Fuzzing SGX Enclaves via Host Program Mutations”. In: 2023 IEEE 8th European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P). 2023. Paper
Arslan Khan, Dongyan Xu, and Dave Jing Tian. “EC: Embedded Systems Compartmentalization via Intra-Kernel Isolation”. In: 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P). 2023. Paper
Arslan Khan, Dongyan Xu, and Dave Jing Tian. “Low-Cost Privilege Separation with Compile Time Compartmentalization for Embedded Systems”. In: 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P). 2023. Paper
Arslan Khan, Joseph I. Choi, Dave Jing Tian, Tyler Ward, Kevin R. B. Butler, Patrick Traynor, John M. Shea, and Tan F. Wong. “Privacy-Preserving Localization using Enclaves”. In: 2021 IEEE 12th Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communication Conference (UEMCON). Best Presentation Award. 2021, pp. 0269–0278. Paper
Arslan Khan, Hyungsub Kim, Byoungyoung Lee, Dongyan Xu, Antonio Bianchi, and Dave Jing Tian. “M2MON: Building an MMIO-based Security Reference Monitor for Unmanned Vehicles.” In: USENIX Security Symposium. 2021, pp. 285–302. Paper
Pieces is a highly programmable language-agnostic automatic program compartmentalization framework. Pieces can be programmed to partition programs based on various criteria, including methods of isolation between compartments.
Security Enhahnced FreeRTOS (SeRTOS) is a security enhahnced version of the famous RTOS, FreeRTOS. It has compile time privilege separation and other cool security features.
Organized the security reading group at Purdue and managed research logistics for PURSEC.
Organized various activities for the graduate student association and computer science department.
Part of the Ombuds Services program at Purdue Graduate School.
Part of the Diversity Task Force at Purdue CS.
Part of the faculty search/recruitment process at Purdue CS.
Apart from being a security researcher, i like to travel and hike. I've visited most of Northeren Pakistan and various places around the US. When forced indoors, I like to play games (I have achieved ELO of 1700+ on Age Of Empires using unconventional methods), learn new instruments and play with synthesizers. Here's some music i've written over the years.