Distributed and Intelligent Secure Applications (DisAPP) lab at Texas Tech University

DisAPP Laboratory

The DisAPP Lab at Texas Tech University focuses on research at the intersection of security, privacy, and distributed intelligence. Our work spans a range of application domains, including healthcare, smart grids, critical infrastructure, and other networked systems. We actively collaborate with research groups both within Texas Tech and at other institutions. Our long-term vision is to advance research and education in secure and responsible AI, ultimately establishing a center of excellence in West Texas that attracts students, faculty, and investment.

Research interests 

News* 

• [Faculty] 10/25-3/26 Dr. Salman will serve as the program chair of the IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for IoT and Microelectronics (SaTC) 2026. 

• [Paper] 10/25  Our paper on poisoning attacks in LLM has been accepted to ICMI 2026 (to be presented in April 2026). 

• [Paper] 10/25 A new paper on "Hierarchical Federated Learning: Approaches, Applications and Open Challenges" has been accepted for publication at IEEE Access

• [Paper] 10/25 A new paper on "FedECPA: An Efficient Countermeasure Against Scaling-based Model Poisoning Attacks in Blockchain-based Federated Learning" has been accepted for publication at Sensors.

• [Students] 5/25 Congratulations to Rukayat Olapojoe for winning the Graduate Student Research Support Award at TTU. Thanks TTU's Graduate School

• [Paper] 7/25 Our paper on XAI-guided inversion attacks has been accepted for publication in the IEEE AIBThings 2025.  

• [Paper] 7/25 Our paper on Hierarchical Federated Learning for Smart Grids was presented at the IEEE SmartNets 2025 conference.

• [Students] 5/25 Congratulations to Rukayat Olapojoe, who has been selected as a Trailblazers in Engineering Fellow by Purdue University. She will be joining other late-stage PhD student candidates and postdocs in a three-day, fully funded workshop to prepare her for a future faculty position in engineering. 

• [Paper] 4/25 Our paper on GradualDiff-Fed, a Federated Learning Specialized Framework for Large Language Models, has been presented at the IEEE ICMI 2025 conference. 

• [Paper] 2/25 Our paper on model inversion attacks in smart grids has been presented at the IEEE SaTC 2025 conference.

• [Faculty] 1/25-2/25 Salman has been the program chair of the IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for IoT and Microelectronics (SaTC) 2025. 

*This list was compiled in summer 2025, based on news that began in early 2025.