Adversarial information ecosystems
Influence operations, misinformation, coordinated manipulation, platform auditing, and information integrity.
Cyber Security and Privacy · Florida International University
CaSPR Lab
Security, privacy, and information integrity research for adversarial online environments.
We build systems and measurement methods that help people understand, resist, and recover control from manipulation, censorship, fraud, and abuse. Our work combines AI, applied cryptography, systems engineering, and user studies.
Lab focus
Defenses for users and systems under asymmetric power
CaSPR studies how platforms, governments, coordinated networks, and adversarial services shape digital environments. We design audits, defenses, protocols, and user-facing tools that make harmful behavior visible and give users practical ways to protect their autonomy, privacy, and security.
Research themes
What we work on
Censorship resistance
Plausibly deniable storage, covert communication, blockchain-based access, and systems for constrained environments.
Online fraud and abuse
Search-rank fraud, app-market manipulation, sockpuppet behavior, social-network abuse, and deceptive promotion.
Human-centered security
User studies, protective interfaces, mobile authentication, privacy-preserving systems, and practical control mechanisms.
Selected projects
Current and recent work
Influence operations
IO-X: Detecting content-duplicating influence operations on X/Twitter
Platform-scale methods for finding coordinated content duplication, identifying manipulating accounts, and attributing influence operations.
Censorship + misinformation
Cooperative dynamics of censorship, misinformation, and influence operations
Mixed-methods research on how people experience censorship, false information, and manipulation across the Global South and the U.S.
Plausible deniability
INVISILINE: Invisible plausibly deniable storage
Storage mechanisms designed to protect sensitive data under coercive inspection and adversarial access.
Gaming + censorship
Censorship and evasion through online gaming
Empirical and systems work studying how online games are censored and how gaming ecosystems can support censorship evasion.
Fraud + abuse
Search-rank fraud and online abuse detection
Measurement and defense systems for app-market fraud, deceptive promotion, abusive social accounts, and manipulation in online services.
Authentication + privacy
Mobile authentication, liveness verification, and private geosocial systems
Earlier CaSPR systems for camera-based authentication, mobile-video liveness verification, fitness-tracker security, and geosocial privacy.
Selected publications
Recent representative papers
ACM WWW 2026
IO-X: Detecting and Attributing Content-Duplicating Influence Operations on X (Twitter)
Ashfaq Ali Shafin, Md. Nahid Siddique, Bogdan Carbunar.
ACM CSCW / PACMHCI 2025
Cooperative Dynamics of Censorship, Misinformation, and Influence Operations
Zaid Hakami, Yuzhou Feng, Bogdan Carbunar.
IEEE S&P 2024
INVISILINE: Invisible Plausibly-Deniable Storage
Sandeep Pinjala, Bogdan Carbunar, Anrin Chakraborti, Radu Sion.
USENIX Security 2023
A Study of China's Censorship and Its Evasion Through the Lens of Online Gaming
Yuzhou Feng, Ruyu Zhai, Radu Sion, Bogdan Carbunar.
USENIX Security 2023
Strategies and Vulnerabilities of Participants in Venezuelan Influence Operations
Rubén Recabarren, Bogdan Carbunar, Nestor Hernandez, Ashfaq Ali Shafin.
People
Lab members and alumni
Faculty
- Bogdan Carbunar, Director
Ph.D. students
Ph.D. alumni
- Ashfaq Ali Shafin, Ph.D. 2026
- Zaid Hakami, Ph.D. 2026
- Yuzhou (Aaron) Feng, Ph.D. 2025
- Rubén Recabarren, Ph.D. 2021 — Facebook
- Nestor G. Hernandez, Ph.D. 2020 — MathWorks
- Mozhgan Azimpourkivi, Ph.D. 2019 — Bloomberg LP
- Sajedul Talukder, Ph.D. 2019 — Edinboro University
- Md Mizanur Rahman, Ph.D. 2018 — Amazon
- Mahmudur Rahman, Ph.D. 2015 — IBM Watson
M.S. alumni
- George Burri, M.S. — Jive Software
- Madhusudan Banik, M.S. — Eden Rock Communications
Prospective students
Interested in joining CaSPR?
We are interested in motivated students who want to work on security, privacy, information integrity, censorship resistance, online abuse, applied AI for platform auditing, and human-centered defenses. Prospective Ph.D. students should apply through FIU and contact Bogdan Carbunar with a brief description of their research interests.