Nader Sehatbakhsh


Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Office: Boelter Hall, 6731-G
Email: nsehat [at] ucla [dot] edu
Lab Webpage

I'm looking for highly-motivated students (Undergraduate, MS, Ph.D., and Postdoc students). To find out how you can join our team, or if you are a UCLA student and want to do research, please see this page.

About Me


I run the Secure Systems and Architectures (SsysArch) research lab at UCLA. My research interest is in the broad area of Security and Privacy with emphasis on hardware support for security and privacy. Specifically, I'm interested in computer architecture, IoT Security, embedded/cyber-physical systems, side-channels, trusted computing and hardware enclaves, and security and privacy in machine learning. I'm affiliated with the Computer Engineering Lab in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at UCLA.
    Prior to joining to UCLA, I was a PhD student at the School of Computer Science in Georgia Tech working with Professor Milos Prvulovic and Professor Alenka Zajic where I worked on Securing Computing Systems by Mitigating and Leveraging Side-Channels. I earned my PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2020. Before that, I earned my B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran in 2013. I joined UCLA since July 2020.


Recent Publications


For the complete list, please visit my Google Scholar page and our research lab's Publications page.


Active Projects


For the complete list of current and past projects, please visit our research lab's Projects page.

  • New Lightweight Methods and Systems for Trustworthy and Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning.
  • Pre-Silicon Physical and Digital Side-Channel Modeling.
  • Secure and Private Internet of Trillion Collaborative Things.
  • New Attacks and Defenses for Microarchitectural Side-Channels.
  • Architecting the Next Generation of Secure Chiplet-Based Systems.
  • Side-Channel for Good.

Selected Awards


  • NSF CAREER Award, 2024.
  • Cisco Research Award, 2022.
  • UCLA Samueli Jumior Faculty Fellow Award, 2021.
  • Best Paper Nominee, HPCA, 2020.
  • Best Paper Award, MICRO, 2016.

Teaching


Full list can be found here.

  • ECE M116C/CS 151B: Computer Architecture (F24, F23, F22).
  • ECE 202C: Secure and Trustworthy Edge Computing Systems (IoT Security) (W25, W24, S23).
  • ECE M117/ CS M138: Secure Computer Systems (W23, S22).

Service


Organizing Committee
  • General Co-Chair, SafeThings, 2025.
  • Poster Co-Chair, SenSys, 2025.
  • Lightning Talk Chair, ASPLOS, 2024.
Program Committee
  • NDSS, 2023-Current.
  • CCS, 2023-Current.
  • MICRO, 2019-Current.
  • ISCA, 2020-Current.
  • HPCA, 2022-Current.
  • SenSys, 2023-2024.
  • ICCAD, 2022-Current.
Journal Reviewer
  • IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2019-Current.
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 2020-Current.
  • IEEE Transactions on Computers, 2018-2021.
  • IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I, 2019-2021.
  • ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems, 2020.

Students


For the complete list of my current and past students, please visit our research lab's People page.

Following is the current list of my PhD advisees.

  • Justin Feng (2021- )
  • Fatemeh Arkannezhad (2022- )
  • Hossein Khalili (2023- )
  • Fan Zhang (2024- )
  • Dao Xian (Samuel) Ding (2024- )