Omar Alrawi

Omar Alrawi is a cybersecurity researcher specializing in software security, malware analysis, and IoT security. He received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2023, with a focus on empirical methods to assess and defend against vulnerabilities in large-scale systems.

• Education:
  • PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology (2023)
  • Master’s of Information Security from Purdue University (2009)
  • Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics from Purdue University (2007)

His research involves combining network and program analysis to study IoT malware lifecycles, cloud-based mobile backends, DNS traffic for malware detection, and compiler provenance for binary-level security. He has developed practical tools like Zelos Binary Emulation and contributed to open-source repositories.

Selected publications include studies at top venues such as NDSS, CCS, USENIX Security, and IEEE S&P, with a focus on IoT malware behavior, cloud security, and automated classification. His work has been recognized with awards like the President Fellowship (2016-2020) and multiple Demo Day first-place honors.

• Scientific Awards:
  • CSAW’19 Applied Research Competition Finalist
  • Create-X Launch Participant and Finalist (2019)
  • $4,000 First Place in Cyber Security Demo Day (Research Track) - 2019
  • $4,000 First Place in Institute for Information Security & Privacy Demo Day (Best Idea) - 2018
  • $5,000 President Fellowship - 2016-2020

Omar has also released the largest IoT malware corpora to support community research and continues to advance tools for dynamic and static malware analysis through projects like BadThings.info and YourThings.