Welcome to the Software Engineering and Cybersecurity Research Team (SECReT) at the Idaho State University, established in 2022.

Our research in software engineering and cybersecurity fights software bugs and security vulnerabilities using program code analysis and manipulation while also taking into account the human factors that affect software quality. Our research methodology involves static (and dynamic) program analysis, source code manipulation, sentiment analysis, machine learning, empirical studies, prototype development, and evaluations.

To enumerate, our research interests include (but not limited to) the following.

Software Security
Usable Security & HCI
Software Quality Assurance
Program Analysis
Program Comprehension
Affective Computing
Empirical Software Engineering
Applied AI and Machine Learning

Software

Engineering and

Cybersecurity

Research

Team

News

06/03/2025 Our paper entitled "Trick or Treat: A Study of Human Detection of Manipulative Tactics in Phishing Emails" has been accepted at SENSEI 2025.
05/30/2025 Our paper entitled "An Empirical Study on the Evolution and Vulnerabilities of Maven Artifacts" has been accepted at CSCE 2025.
05/27/2025 Champa and Rabbi both received the Summer Research/Creative Activity Grant from ISU Graduate School.
05/02/2025 Dr. Zibran has been awarded with the NASA EPSCoR Faculty Fellowship.
04/29/2025 Our paper "Faster Releases, Fewer Risks: A Study on Maven Artifact Vulnerabilities and Lifecycle Management" received the Best Paper Award at the MSR 2025 mining challenge track.
04/29/2025 Champa received the Distinguished Junior Reviewer Award at MSR 2025 in Ottawa, Canada.
04/11/2025 Champa won the "Student Employee of the Year 2025" runner up award from the ISU Career Center. Congratulations Champa!
03/19/2025 Rabbi received the Best Oral Presentation Award in Engineering, Physical, & Mathematical Sciences at the ISU Research and Creative Works Symposium.
02/24/2025 Our paper entitled "The Popularity Paradox: Insights into Vulnerabilities and Updates in Maven Ecosystem" has been accepted at ICoSSE 2025.
02/21/2025 Our paper entitled "GreekNet: Handwritten Greek Alphabet Recognition Using Explainable Parallel CNN with Attention Mechanisms" has been accepted at ICMI 2025.
02/11/2025 Champa receives the ACM SIGSOFT CAPS Award. Congratulations, Champa!
02/11/2025 Champa and Rabbi represented ISU at the state-wide 3MT (three-minutes thesis) competition at Idaho Falls, 2025.
02/11/2025 Champa and Rabbi have been awarded Conference and Research Travel Grants from the Graduate School, ISU. Congratulations to both!
02/11/2025 Dr. Zibran is invited at the Idaho Academic Leadership Academy to be held in Boise during June 9-13, 2025.
01/28/2025 Dr. Zibran is nominated for the Distinguished Service Award at ISU.
01/12/2025 Seven papers of ours have been accepted at the mining challenge track of MSR 2025.
01/06/2025 Our paper entitled "Dealing with Dependency: How Dependencies Shape Release Frequency in the Maven Ecosystem" is accepted at ICoSSE 2025.
12/13/2024 Two papers entitled "Security and Privacy for LLMs and LMMs Across Key Sectors: A Literature Survey" and "Password Security in Practice: An Appraisal Using Users' Perception and Machine Learning" are accepted at ITNG 2025.
12/03/2024 Dr. Zibran has been selected as an Honorable Mention for the 2025 Better Scientific Software (BSSw) Fellowship Program, which includes travel support to the US-RSE (United States Research Software Engineer) conference in Philadelphia, PA in October 2025.
11/21/2024 Our paper entitled "Claim vs. Capability: A Comparative Analysis of the SBOM Generation Tools for Rust Projects, " has been accepted at ACM SAC 2025.
11/14/2024 Champa and Rabbi secured the 2nd and 3rd Place respectively at 8th university-wide annual Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition at ISU.
08/19/2024 Dr. Rajshakhar Paul joins our team as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Welcome aboard Dr. Paul!
08/01/2024 Our paper entitled "Deep Enough? On the Effectiveness of Deep Learning in Phishing Email Detection," has been accepted at AIBThings 2024.
06/27/2024 Our paper entitled "Revolutionizing Crop Leaf Disease Detection: A Novel Ensemble Learning Framework Using Customized EfficientNets" received the 3rd Best Paper Award at ISPR 2024.
05/24/2024 Dr. Zibran delivered a keynote speech at ICAETA 2024.
05/14/2024 Our poster presented by Costain Nachuma won the Best Poster Award at i-ETC 2024 hosted by the Utah State University. Congratulations Costain!
05/07/2024 A paper entitled "Revolutionizing Crop Leaf Disease Detection: A Novel Ensemble Learning Framework Using Customized EfficientNets" has been accepted at ISPR 2024.
04/20/2024 Dr. Zibran presented a keynote speech at ICoSSE 2024.
04/08/2024 Two papers, "Analyzing ChatGPT Assistance in Programming" and "Illustration or Illusion? Reassessing the Use of Machine Learning in Phishing Email Detection", have been accepted at SERA 2024.
04/05/2024 Rabbi won "2nd runner-up for Student Employee of the Year 2024" award from the ISU Career Center. Congratulations Rabbi!
03/29/2024 A paper entitled "Autonomous Surveillance Breakthrough by Implementing Facial Recognition in Dog Robots" has been accepted at i-ETC 2024.
03/13/2024 Costain has won the award for the Best Oral Presentation in Engineering, Physical, & Mathematical Sciences at the ISU Research and Creative Works Symposium. Congratulations, Costain!
02/21/2024 A paper entitled "Breaking the Mold: ViT-CNN Fusion for Enhanced Glaucoma Prediction Using Machine Learning Classifiers in OCT Images" has been accepted at ICAISC 2024.
02/15/2024 A paper entitled "Curated Datasets and Feature Analysis for Phishing Email Detection with Machine Learning" has been accepted at ICMI 2024.
02/15/2024 A paper entitled "Improving Source Code with Assistance from AI - A Pilot Case Study with ChatGPT" has been accepted at ICICT 2024.
02/07/2024 A paper entitled "Why Phishing Emails Escape Detection: A Closer Look at the Failure Points" has been accepted at ISDFS 2024.
01/23/2024 A paper entitled "A Quantitative Analysis of Quality and Consistency in AI-generated Code" has been accepted at ICoSSE 2024.
01/19/2024 Two of our papers, "AI Writes, We Analyze: The ChatGPT Python Code Saga" and "ChatGPT in Action: Analyzing Its Use in Software Development", have been accepted at MSR 2024!
01/12/2024 Our paper, "A Four-Dimension Gold Standard Dataset for Opinion Mining in Software Engineering", has been accepted at MSR 2024!
12/22/2023 Champa and Rabbi have been awarded MS degrees in Computer Science. Congratulations to both!
12/07/2023 Dr. Zibran received the Fall 2023 CPI Supervisor of the Semester runner-up award among 70+ nominations.
11/24/2023 Our paper titled "SBOM Generation Tools Under Microscope: A Focus on the npm Ecosystem" has been accepted at ACM SAC 2024.
11/09/2023 Champa presented her research at 7th annual ISU Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition.
08/01/2023 Costain Nachuma joins our team as a PhD student. Welcome aboard Costain!
08/01/2023 Arifa Islam Champa has been named the Career Path Intern for the month of August! Congratulations Champa!
06/23/2023 Our research has been featured in a local newspaper!
06/20/2023 Our research, "Insights into Female Contributions in Open-Source Projects", has been featured in Idaho State University news!
05/24/2023 Champa and Rabbi presented two papers at SERA 2023 in Orlando, Florida.
05/16/2023 Dr. Zibran presented a paper at MSR 2023 in Melbourne, Australia.
03/27/2023 Two of our papers have been accepted at SERA 2023!
03/15/2023 Champa and Rabbi presented two research posters at the ISU Graduate Research Symposium 2023.
03/07/2023 Our paper has been accepted at MSR Mining Challenge 2023!
02/22/2023 TechGuide has published a short interview with Dr. Zibran about the importance of a software engineering degree.