Dr Sharif Abuadbba

Team Leader: Distributed Systems Security

https://people.csiro.au/A/S/sharif-abuadbba

Biography

Dr Sharif Abuadbba is the Research Team Leader for Distributed Systems Security, Principal research Scientist and an Adjunct Associate Professor at UNSW Sydney. With over 14 years of experience, he has led major national and international cybersecurity projects with organisations like the Cyber Security CRC, Department of Home Affairs, and Electronics & Telecommunications Research Institute-ETRI South Korea. His impactful projects include SmartShield (NSW iAwards Winner 2022), TAPE (Australia AI Innovator – Cybersecurity Winner 2024), and ThreatModelling-GPT (NSW iAwards Merit Winner 2025), all successfully deployed in operational environments.

His work addresses critical challenges such as deepfakes, misinformation, and AI-driven cyber threats, while enabling the safe and secure adoption of emerging technologies, including AI, 6G, and digital twins. He has co-authored 70+ publications in top-tier venues (IEEE S&P, NDSS, Usenix Security, ACM CCS) and serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE TIFS. He supervised 10 PhD students (7 completions and 3 currently at UNSW, UQ, and UoA). Sharif also secured ~$3.3M in future PhD scholarships for 2025–2029, with 25% co-funding from industry partners such as Telstra, Xamplify, and Lockheed Martin Australia. Internationally, he established and maintained research collaborations with institutions in the US, Europe and Asia. These partnerships have been supported by grants, including the CSIRO-NST South Korea (2023-2025, $250K), German Research Association (~$50K), and a few other initiatives and yielded 10 accepted publications and broader recognition.

A PhD graduate from RMIT (2017), he received the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence. His startup, EyeCura, won the 2018 Eureka Innovation Award, and its cybersecurity products serve over 10,000 users. Sharif has contributed to many U.S. patents and is a member of Standards Australia’s Cybersecurity and technical contributor to AU AI Safety standards. Recognised with the CSIRO Julius Career Award (the only among two recipients from the entire CSIRO’s Data61 Business Unit (+500 scientists) in the 2022 round).

She serves as a committee member for Standards Australia (since 2022), Australia’s representative on the AI Safety Institutes Network Panel (since 2024), Associate Editor of IEEE TIFS (CORE A) 2024-2027, and Program Committee member for various (CORE A/A*) conferences such as NDSS 2026/2027 and ASIACCS 2026/2027.

Internally, Sharif support CSIRO’s culture and wellbeing as the HSR for Data61 Marsfield and site committee member (since 2020), mental health first aid officer, and HSE leadership for our group of over 90 staff and PhD students.

Other Interests

Selected Publications

Nguyen Linh Bao Nguyen, Wanlun Ma, Viet Vo, Alsharif Abuadbba, Minghong Fang, Jun Zhang, Yang Xiang, “Five Queries Are Enough: Query-Efficient and Surrogate-Free Membership Inference Attacks on RAG via Entailment”, Usenix Security 2026. (CORE A*)
Feng, Xinguo, Zhongkui Ma, Zihan Wang, Alsharif Abuadbba, and Guangdong Bai. "Mitigating gradient inversion risks in language models via token obfuscation." ACM ASIACCS 2026. (CORE A)
Sultan, Nazatul Haque, Yan Bo, Yansong Gao, Seyit Camtepe, Arash Mahboubi, Hang Thanh Bui, Aufeef Chauhan et al. "Setup Once, Secure Always: A Single-Setup Secure Federated Learning Aggregation Protocol with Forward and Backward Secrecy for Dynamic Users." ACM ASIACCS 2025. (CORE A)
Ma, Hua, Alsharif Abuadbba, Yansong Gao, Hyoungshick Kim, and Surya Nepal. "Comprehensive Evaluation of Cloaking Backdoor Attacks on Object Detector in Real-World.", ACM ASIACCS 2025. (CORE A)
Zhibo Xu, Shangqi Lai, Xiaoning Liu, Alsharif Abuadbba, Xingliang Yuan, Xun Yi, "OblivGNN: Oblivious Inference on Transductive and Inductive Graph Neural Network", USENIX Security Symposium 2024. (CORE A*)
Hua Ma, Shang Wang, Yansong Gao, Zhi Zhang, Huming Qiu, Minhui Xue, Alsharif Abuadbba, Anmin Fu, Surya Nepal, Derek Abbott, "Watch Out! Simple Horizontal Class Backdoors Can Trivially Evade Defenses", ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2024. (CORE A*)
Gao, Yansong, Huming Qiu, Zhi Zhang, Binghui Wang, Hua Ma, Alsharif Abuadbba, Minhui Xue, Anmin Fu, and Surya Nepal. "DeepTheft: Stealing DNN Model Architectures through Power Side Channel." IEEE S&P (2024). (CORE A*)
Mousavi, Zahra, Chadni Islam, Kristen Moore, Alsharif Abuadbba, and Muhammad Ali Babar. "An Investigation into Misuse of Java Security APIs by Large Language Models." ACM ASIACCS (2024). (CORE A)
Buchholz, Erik, Alsharif Abuadbba, Shuo Wang, Surya Nepal, and Salil S. Kanhere. "SoK: Can Trajectory Generation Combine Privacy and Utility?." 24th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2024). (CORE A)
Park, Seonhye, Alsharif Abuadbba, Shuo Wang, Kristen Moore, Yansong Gao, Hyoungshick Kim, and Surya Nepal. "DeepTaster: Adversarial Perturbation-Based Fingerprinting to Identify Proprietary Dataset Use in Deep Neural Networks." In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, pp. 535-549. 2023. (CORE A)
Qiu, Huming, Hua Ma, Zhi Zhang, Alsharif Abuadbba, Wei Kang, Anmin Fu, and Yansong Gao. "Towards a critical evaluation of robustness for deep learning backdoor countermeasures." IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (2023).
Li, Yinshan, Hua Ma, Zhi Zhang, Yansong Gao, Alsharif Abuadbba, Minhui Xue, Anmin Fu, Yifeng Zheng, Said F. Al-Sarawi, and Derek Abbott. "NTD: Non-Transferability enabled Deep Learning Backdoor Detection." IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (2023).
Wang, Shuo, Alsharif Abuadbba, Sidharth Agarwal, Kristen Moore, Ruoxi Sun, Minhui Xue, Surya Nepal, Seyit Camtepe, and Salil Kanhere. "PublicCheck: Public Integrity Verification for Services of Run-time Deep Models." In 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), pp. 1239-1256. IEEE Computer Society, 2023. (CORE A*)
Shuo Wang, Mahathir Almashor, Alsharif Abuadbba, Ruoxi Sun, Minhui Xue, Calvin Wang , Raj Gaire, Surya Nepal, Seyit Camtepe, “DOITRUST: Dissecting On-chain Compromised Internet Domains via Graph Learning”. Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium (2023). (CORE A*)
Buchholz, Erik, Alsharif Abuadbba, Shuo Wang, Surya Nepal, and Salil Subhash Kanhere. "Reconstruction Attack on Differential Private Trajectory Protection Mechanisms." In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, pp. 279-292. 2022. (Top Security venue)
Kashapov, Amir, Tingmin Wu, Alsharif Abuadbba, and Carsten Rudolph. "Email Summarization to Assist Users in Phishing Identification." In Proceedings of the17 ACM AsiaCCS, pp. 1234-1236. (2022) (Core A).
Wang, Shuo, Surya Nepal, Alsharif Abuadbba, Carsten Rudolph, and Marthie Grobler. "Adversarial Detection by Latent Style Transformations." IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (2022) (Core A).

Academic Qualifications

2017

PhD in Computer Science (Cybersecurity) with presigious VC award of Research Excellence
RMIT University, Australia
2013

Master of Computer Science with Honour Distinction, GPA 4/4
RMIT University, Australia

Achievements and Awards

2025-2025

Collaboration Reward, for strategic partnership with SKKU university South Korea, CISPA Germany, Virginia Tech USA in the area of Deepfake (Further Together)
Software and Computational Systems Program, CSIRO's Data61
2025-2025

Customer First, for successful delivery of TAPE project to WA DGov with Tech Transfer (Make it Real)
Software and Computational Systems Program, CSIRO's Data61
2025-2025

NSW iAwards Merit Winner, for ThreatModelling-GPT with Cybersecurity CRC and National Australia Bank
Australian Information Industry Asssociation (AIIA)
2024-2024

Customer First Reward, for 6G Security and Privacy with Home Affairs (Trusted)
Software and Computational Systems Program, CSIRO's Data61
2024-2024

Collaboration Reward, for securing for Next Gen PhD Program, 12 PhDs, 4 universities, 11 industry partners (Further Together)
Software and Computational Systems Program, CSIRO's Data61
2024-2024

Customer First Reward, for 6G Security and Privacy with Home Affairs (Trusted)
Software and Computational Systems Program, CSIRO's Data61
2024-2024

Australian AI Innovator – Cybersecurity for TAPE project with Cybersecurity CRC and WA DGov
Momentum Media, Australian AI Awards
2023-2023

HSE Reward for Leadership during HSE incident (People First)
Software and Computational Systems Program, CSIRO's Data61
2023-2023

Science Excellence Reward for Smartshield Project
Software and Computational Systems Program, CSIRO's Data61
2022-2025

Julius Career Award
CSIRO
2022-2022

NSW iAwards 2022 winner for Smartshield project with Cybersecurity CRC and WA DGov
Australian Information Industry Asssociation (AIIA)
2020-2021

Collaboration Reward, for helping in securing two major CSCRC projects, Smartshield and DECAAS (Further Together)
CSIRO's Data61
2019-2020

DSS group high achievement award
CSIRO's Data61
2018-2018

Eureka international Innovation award for creative startup
Eureka international
2018-2018

RMIT prestigious VC award of PhD Research Excellence in Technology
RMIT University
2015-2016

CSIT HDR Student Publications Awards
RMIT University
2014-2014

Nominated for the student of the year in state of Victoria Australia
RMIT University
2013-2014

Best-graduated Master student of Computer Science
RMIT University

Current Roles

Project Leader (2026-now)
AI Assurance (funded by the department of Defence)
Team Leader, Distributed Systems Security (2023-now) | CSIRO's Data61
Lead team of scientists and engineers | Lead Projects & Carry out impactful research | Other leadership activites
Project Leader (2023-2025)
AI/ML Spectrum Management, Adversarial Radio Characterisation (funded by the deparment of Home Affairs)
Project Leader (2023-2025)
Collaborative Intelligence for AI Generated Code Security (funded by CSIRO-NST South Korea MoU project)
Project Co-Leader (2022-2025)
Strategic combating Deepfake and Disinformation
Project Leader (2022-2024)
Threat Automation and Prioritisation of Email Alerts (funded by Cybersecurity CRC and Western Australia Digital Government, Department of the Premier and Cabinet DGov)
Project Leader (2023-2024)
ThreatModelling-GPT (funded by Cybersecurity CRC and National Australia Bank NAB)
Project Co-Leader (2022-2023)
Safe Protocols for Future Telecom (funded by the deparment of Home Affairs)
Project Leader (2019-2022)
Smartshield: AI powered anti-phishing System (funded by Cybersecurity CRC and Western Australia Digital Government, Department of the Premier and Cabinet DGov)

Grants

2025-2029

2 Industry PhD iPHD (400,000$ from CSIRO, 100,000$ from Nullify) with UNSW Univeristy
2025-2029

1 Industry PhD iPHD (200,000$ from CSIRO, 50,000$ from Lockheed Martin Australia) with University of Adeliade
2025-2029

1 Industry PhD iPHD (200,000$ from CSIRO, 50,000$ from Xamplify Services Australia) with University of Melbourne
2025-2029

1 Industry PhD iPHD (200,000$ from CSIRO, 50,000$ from ANRF Research & Consultancy ) with RMIT University
2025-2029

Next Gen PhD Program (12 PhDs, 4 universities, 11 industry partners)
2024-2028

2 Industry PhD iPHD (400,000$ from CSIRO, 100,000$ from Telstra) with CSU Univeristy
2023-2025

CSIRO-NST MoU project ($250,000) with SKKU University and ETRI South Korea
2020-2023

1 PhD scholarship (200,000$), Cybersecurity CRC
2020-2023

PhD scholarship (114,000$), CSIRO's Data61
2020-2021

2 Honour scholarship (20,000$), Cybersecurity CRC
2019-2022

Smart Shield : AI based anti-phishing systems project (1M$), Cybersecurity CRC
2019-2022

Deception As a Service project (1.2M$), Cybersecurity CRC
2019-2021

3 vacation student scholarships (30,000$), Cybersecurity CRC

Community and Corporate Citizenship

2020-Now

Health and Safety Respresentative, Data61 at CSIRO Marsfield Site
2020-Now

CSIRO Marsfield Site Committee Member
2021-Now

Mental Health First Aider at CSIRO Marsfield site