About
Eugene is an Assistant Professor at
UMass Amherst CICS. Eugene's work focuses on security and privacy in emerging AI-based
systems and agents under real-life conditions and attacks.
He also spends time at Google working on contextual integrity
and privacy-conscious agents.
He completed his PhD at
Cornell Tech
advised by
Vitaly
Shmatikov
and
Deborah
Estrin. Eugene's research was recognized by
Apple Scholars in AI/ML
and
Digital Life Initiative
fellowships, and Usenix Security Distinguished Paper
Award. He received an engineering degree from
Baumanka
and worked at Cisco as a quality engineer before going to
grad school.
Eugene grew up in
Tashkent
and plays water polo.
Announcement 1:
I am looking for PhD students (apply) and post-docs to work on attacks on LLM agents and generative
models. Please reach out over email and fill the form!
Announcement 2: We are running a
seminar CS 692PA
on Privacy and Security for GenAI models, please sign up if you are
interested.
Research
Security: He worked on backdoor
attacks in
federated learning
and proposed frameworks
Backdoors101
and
Mithridates, and an
attack
on generative language models covered by
VentureBeat
and
The Economist. He studied
vulnerabilities in multi-modal and agentic systems:
instruction
injections,
adversarial
illusions
and adding
biases to
text-to-image models. He recently did an OverThink attack on reasoning models.
Privacy: Eugene worked on the
Air Gap
privacy protection for AI Agents and
Contextual Integrity. He worked on aspects of differential privacy including
fairness
trade-offs,
applications to
location
heatmaps, and tokenization
methods
for private federated learning. Additionally he helped to build the
Ancile
system that enforces use-based privacy of user data.
PhD students: Abhinav
Kumar.
Recent collaborators:
Amir Houmansadr,
Shlomo Zilberstein,
Brian Levine,
Kyle Wray,
Ali Naseh,
Jaechul Roh,
Dzung Pham,
June Jeong,
and many others.
Teaching
Courses
CS 360:
Intro to Security, SP 25.
CS 692PA: Seminar on Privacy and Security for GenAI models,
FA'24, SP'25, FA'25
CS 690: Trustworthy and Responsible AI, FA'25 (link TBD)
Service
Academic Service
Program Committees:
- ACM CCS'24, '23
- IEEE S&P (Oakland)'25
Workshop Organizer:
Broadening Participation
Eugene co-organizes
PLAIR
(Pioneer Leaders in AI and Robotics), an outreach program
that introduces high school students across Western Massachusetts to
the world of robotics and AI safety. Please reach out if you are
interested in joining.
