Career Profile

Experiences

Graduate Research Assistant

Jun 2021 – May 2022
University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA
  • Designed and implemented the first secure and usable Audio Adversarial CAPTCHA system to improve the security of real-world audio CAPTCHAs against state-of-the-art Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models
  • Published and presented research at various top-tier computer security workshops and conferences

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Jan 2020 - May 2021
University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA
  • Assisted students with coding assignments and projects for the Introduction to Cyber Security (CMPS 315) course

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Aug 2019 – Dec 2019
University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA
  • Assisted students with coding assignments and projects for the Linux System Administration and Maintenance (INFX 450) course

Graduate Research Assistant

Aug 2018 – July 2019
University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA
  • Conducted research on the robustness of widely used image CAPTCHAs against current machine learning and deep learning technologies
  • Published and presented research at various top-tier computer security workshops and conferences

Projects

Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning for Minimized fNIRS Data (funded by Facebook)

  • Leading a 3-person team to develop data loaders, models, and training strategies to learn from limited fNIRS data in a Federated Learning setting
  • Implementing differential privacy and other privacy-preserving machine learning techniques to prevent the privacy leakage of training data
  • Tech stack: PyTorch, PySyft, Opacus

Deep Learning attack against the hCaptcha system

  • hCaptha system is the 2nd most widely used CAPTCHA service in the US
  • Developed a system employing deep learning models and computer vision tools to break hCaptcha
  • Evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of the system by solving hCaptcha challenges automatically from live websites with over 95% accuracy
  • Tech stack: Python, PyTorch, JavaScript, Puppeteer

Deep Learning attack against the Google's image reCAPTCHA v2

  • reCAPTCHA v2 is the most popular CAPTCHA service on the entire Internet
  • Developed a fully automated system utilizing web automation software and an object detection model to break Google’s reCAPTCHA v2 with over 83% accuracy
  • Tech stack: JavaScript, Selenium/Puppeteer, Python, TensorFlow, C, Darknet

Automated Extraction of Cyber Threat Intelligence from unstructured data

  • Developed a pipeline for scraping, preprocessing, and cleaning unstructured data from online hackers’ forums
  • Implemented both ML (Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Decision Tree, k-NN, etc.) and DL models to classify the forum posts into different threat categories. Utilized NLP and Top Modeling to uncover current cyber threats
  • Tech stack: Scikit-learn, Word2Vec, NLTK, SpaCy, Gensim, Keras

Publications

  • aaeCAPTCHA: The design and implementation of audio adversarial CAPTCHA
  • Md Imran Hossen and Xiali Hei
    2022 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), 2022.
  • A Low-Cost Attack against the hCaptcha System
  • Md Imran Hossen and Xiali Hei
    15th IEEE Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT), 2021
  • An object detection based solver for Google's image reCAPTCHA v2
  • Md Imran Hossen, Yazhou Tu, Md Fazle Rabby, Md Nazmul Islam, Hui Cao, and Xiali Hei
    23rd International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses (RAID), 2020
  • Stacked LSTM based deep recurrent neural network with kalman smoothing for blood glucose prediction
  • Md Fazle Rabby, Yazhou Tu, Md Imran Hossen, Insup Lee, Anthony S. Maida and Xiali Hei
    BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 2021

    Skills & Proficiency

    Python

    TensorFlow & PyTorch

    Scikit-learn, SpaCy, SciPy

    Numpy, Pandas & matplotlib

    Bash

    SQL

    JavaScript

    C & C++

    Linux

    Git

    Docker & Kubernetes

    Google Cloud & AWS