Team
Director

Hanif Rahbari, Ph.D.
- Assistant professor of Computing and Information Sciences
- Affiliated faculty of RIT's ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute
- Affiliated faculty of Computer Engineering
- Faculty member of Electrical and Computer Engineering PhD program
- Faculty member of Computing and Information Sciences PhD program
Dr. Rahbari received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering (ECE) from the University of Arizona (UA) in 2016 in WiCON lab. He joined RIT in Spring 2018 after a brief experience as a postdoctoral associate at Virginia Tech in WiNSeR lab. He also holds a B.Sc. degree in information technology engineering and an M.Sc. degree in computer networks from Sharif University of Technology and AmirKabir University of Technology (Iran), respectively. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2023.
→ Personal Website
Office: GOL-3789 (Cybersecurity Hall)
Faraday Lab: GOL-3739
Email: hanif.rahbari@rit.edu
Ph.D. Candidates

Naureen Hoque
Education: I completed my Master's degree in Computer Science from The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), NE in 2018. Prior to joining UNL as a graduate student in 2016, I worked as a Lecturer at the Daffodil International University (Bangladesh). I received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electronic & Telecommunication Engineering from the North South University (Bangladesh).
PhD: I started my Ph.D. in Computing and Information Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in the Fall of 2019. My research interests are Security & Privacy, and Machine Learning.
Email: naureen.hoque@mail.rit.edu
Office: Cybersecurity Hall (open research space)

Siddharth Dongre
Education: I completed my Master's degree in Computing Security from Rochester Institute of Technology, NY in May 2020. Prior to that, I received my Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from Pune University, India in July 2017.
PhD: I started my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in Fall 2020. My research interests include secure spectrum sharing in 5G, Wi-Fi and radio astronomy services; beamforming in MIMO systems; and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications security.
Email: sd4767@rit.edu
Office: Cybersecurity Hall (open research space)
Ph.D. Students

Geoff Twardokus
Education: I earned the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computing Security from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in 2021. Prior to my studies at RIT, I earned two Associate of Science (A.S.) degrees, in Computer Science and in Mathematics, from Tompkins Cortland Community College in Dryden, NY.
PhD: I started my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at RIT in Fall 2021. My research interests include secure vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, security in emerging and next-generation vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technologies, post-quantum security for connected vehicles, and testbed development for wireless systems.
Email: geoff.twardokus@mail.rit.edu
Office: Cybersecurity Hall (open research space)
Undergraduate Students

Nick Geigel
Education: I pursue an accelerated dual-degree program in Computing Security at RIT with expected graduation in 2025.
Research: Introductory cybersecurity training targeted at workers in the smart manufacturing industry.
Email: nlg9323@rit.edu
Group Alumni
Geoff Twardokus
M.S. in August 2021 (Currently a Ph.D. student in the ECE program at Rochester Institute of Technology)
Geoff entered the accelerated dual-degree program in Computing Security at RIT in 2019, completing the B.S. requirements in 2020 and the M.S. requirements in 2021 under the supervision of Dr. Rahbari. His research focus was on testbed development and security in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications.
Thesis title: Intelligent Lower-Layer Denial-of-Service Attacks Against Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (available from RIT Scholar Works)
Email: gdt5762@rit.edu

Leul Berhane-Meskel
M.S. in May 2021 (Currently a Site Reliability Engineer at Grubhub, Chicago)
While a Computer Science student at RIT, Leul moved into the accelerated Master's program in Computing Security in 2019 as a BS/MS student. His research focus was on Zigbee Security.
Project title: Only as strong as the weakest [ZigBee] Touchlink
Email: lgb9445@rit.edu
Social: LinkedIn