Ben Nassi

Dr. Ben Nassi is a faculty member at the Fleischman Faculty of Engineering, Tel Aviv University since 2025 and a Black Hat board member (Asia & Europe) since 2022. He was previously a research fellow at the Technion’s Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell Tech (hosted by Tom Ristenpart), and earned his PhD at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (supervised by Yuval Elovici).

• Research Focus: Security of Large Language Model (LLM) applications, side-channel attacks, cryptanalysis via optical signals, and security/privacy of IoT and autonomous systems.
• Key Contributions: Lamphone (sound recovery from light bulbs), Glowworm attack (speech recovery from power LEDs), Game of Drones (detecting spying drones), Phantom of the ADAS (split-second phantom attacks on autonomous vehicles), and Piping Botnet (IoT smart irrigation system exploitation).

Scientific Awards:

• Pwnie Award for Best Cryptographic Attack (2023)
• Best Demo Award (AutoSec'21)
• CSAW'19 and CSAW'20 Runner-up
• BGU Dean Award for Excellence in Ph.D. (2023)
• Mid. Way Negev-Faran Scholarship (2023)
• SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Award Nomination (2023)

Media Recognition: Work featured in Wired, Forbes, Ars Technica, The Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, and Two Minute Paper, with YouTube videos amassing ~600K views.