Nazmus Shakib Sayom

PhD Researcher University of Utah
Nazmus Shakib Sayom
CPS Security
email sayom.shakib@utah.edu
location Salt Lake City, UT
focus Cyber-Physical Systems Security
advisor Dr. Luis Antonio Garcia
office Room 3115, MEB
Resume

Current Research

Property-Guided Falsification for CPS Control Stacks

Drone Flight Trajectory Analysis
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Developing automated techniques to discover security violations in cyber-physical systems by building property-scoped reductions of control logic and physical dynamics. This research focuses on accelerating violation discovery through targeted analysis of critical system properties, with validation on industry-standard platforms like PX4 and ArduPilot to bridge the gap between theoretical verification and practical autonomous system security.

Figure 1: Flight trajectory analysis demonstrating normal versus low battery emergency descent patterns in simulated drone systems

Safety Policy Verification in Multi-Robot Systems

Investigating the formalization and verification of safety policies in distributed multi-robot environments where multiple stakeholders operate with varying roles, permissions, and operational constraints. The work involves developing formal frameworks for modeling role-based permission constraints, analyzing policy conflicts, and implementing runtime monitoring systems for applications like autonomous vehicle fleets and drone swarms.

Research Focus

3 Active Projects
2024 PhD Started

Falsification

CPS Control Stacks

Verification

Multi-Robot Safety

Reverse Engineering

Binary analysis for CPS

Property-Guided Falsification for CPS Control Stacks

Approach

Developing property-scoped reductions of control logic and physical dynamics to accelerate violation discovery in cyber-physical systems. The research focuses on creating efficient methods that can validate counterexamples on industry-standard platforms.

Platforms

PX4 Autopilot
ArduPilot
SITL Simulation
Hardware-in-the-Loop

Impact

This work aims to bridge the gap between theoretical verification methods and practical autonomous system validation, enabling faster detection of safety-critical vulnerabilities.

Safety Policy Verification in Multi-Robot Systems

Challenge

Formalizing safety policies for multi-stakeholder robot systems where different entities have varying roles, permissions, and constraints that must be verified at runtime.

Methods

Policy Conflict Analysis
Runtime Monitoring
Distributed Consensus
Formal Specification

Applications

The research enables safe coordination in scenarios like autonomous vehicle fleets, drone swarms, and industrial robot networks with multiple operators.

Reverse Engineering

Focus

Vulnerability discovery through binary analysis and reverse engineering, aided by cyber-physical surrogate modeling to guide input generation and state exploration for CPS targets.

Techniques

Static Analysis
Dynamic Instrumentation
Symbolic Execution
Firmware Emulation
Protocol Analysis

Tooling

Ghidra
QEMU / Unicorn for emulation
AFL++/LibFuzzer with model-guided inputs

Selected Publications

Property-Guided Cyber-Physical Reduction and Surrogation for Safety Analysis in Robotic Vehicles

Nazmus Shakib Sayom and Luis A. Garcia. In Proceedings of the 3rd EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in Cyber-Physical Systems and Smart Vehicles (EAI SmartSP 2025), Salt Lake City, UT, USA, December 2025. Springer LNICST.

Property-guided co-reduction isolates only the controller logic and physical dynamics needed for a safety property, then fuzzes the resulting surrogate to find robotic-vehicle violations without full-system simulation.

arXiv PDF Conference

Career Timeline

Aug 2024 – Present

PhD in Computer Science

University of Utah

Conducting doctoral research on cyber-physical systems security, developing falsification techniques and safety verification methods for autonomous systems.

Research CPS Security Formal Methods
Jan 2023 – Jul 2024

Linux Developer

meldCX, Dhaka (Remote)
  • Built embedded Linux distributions for ARM platforms using Yocto, with OTA update and security hardening for fintech-grade reliability.
  • Developed multi-threaded Linux services in C/C++ and Python to securely expose device driver functions over the network, simplifying integration for applications.
  • Worked with QA and hardware vendors on driver development, benchmarking, and system stability improvements.
Embedded Linux Yocto C/C++ Python Kernel Development ARM Docker Security Hardening
Jan 2022 – Dec 2022

Lecturer

Daffodil International University

Taught Operating Systems, Embedded Systems, and Computer Fundamentals. Co-authored conference papers in deep learning and secured research funding.

Teaching Research Deep Learning
Apr 2021 – Dec 2021

Senior Software Engineer

HelloTask Platform Ltd.

Led design and development of jobs platform for blue-collar workers. Built IVR broadcasting system for users without internet access.

Leadership Platform Development Accessibility
Jun 2020 – Mar 2021

Embedded Systems Engineer

HelloTask Platform Ltd.

Prototyped self-checkout store network and centralized advertising delivery platform using IoT and computer vision analytics.

IoT Computer Vision Prototyping
2017 – 2020

B.Sc. Computer Science & Engineering

American International University-Bangladesh

Graduated Summa Cum Laude with CGPA 3.96/4.00. Completed thesis on disaster victim tracking and rescue support systems.

Summa Cum Laude Emergency Systems IoT

Projects

Buggy Drone flight trajectory simulation
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CPS Security Research

Buggy Drone

Research testbed for reproducing a low-battery parachute deployment flaw using a PyBullet drone simulation, SCRBE surrogate execution, and STL-guided fuzzing.

Research PyBullet SCRBE Fuzzing STL
OpenGaze Project
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Computer Vision API

OpenGaze

RESTful web API service for OpenFace facial behavior analysis, providing eye-gaze and head-pose data for research applications.

FastAPI OpenCV Computer Vision
DePen Project
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Embedded Systems

DePen

Raspberry Pi Zero powered optical text scanner using computer vision for OCR operations and word definition lookup.

Raspberry Pi OpenCV Tesseract
TALK-E Project
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RF Communication

TALK-E

Long-range multi-channel walkie-talkie system with custom pre-amplification for emergency communication scenarios.

Arduino nRF24L01 RF
Dancing Bees Project
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Data Visualization

Dancing Bees

Python-based trajectory visualization tool for analyzing honey-bee flight patterns from annotated video frames.

Python OpenCV Visualization
Disaster victim tracking system
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Undergraduate Thesis

Disaster Victim Tracking System

Comprehensive emergency response system utilizing multi-layer communications including ESP32, LoRaWAN, BLE, and GSM for resilient search-and-rescue operations.

IoT LoRaWAN Emergency Systems Multi-layer Communication

Let's Connect

Available for research collaborations

Email

sayom.shakib@utah.edu

Research discussions and collaborations

GitHub

github.com/nsssayom

Open source projects and contributions

Google Scholar

View Publications

Publications and citations

LinkedIn

linkedin.com/in/nsssayom

Professional network and career updates

Open to Collaboration

Open to collaboration on CPS Security and Safety, Reverse Engineering and related works. Also open for internship opportunities. Feel free to reach out!