University of North Texas 
As technology continues to advance, developers across the U.S. need to make sure security is advancing alongside their programs and machines. Seemaparevez Shaik (’23 M.S.) is one such student making sure the future of 3D printers stays secure.
“When I decided to work on 3D printers, I needed to know how 3D printers actually function,” Shaik says. “I was able to easily use the ones UNT has available at The Spark to really learn how they work.”
Thanks to work from students like Shaik, the University of North Texas has been recognized once again by the U.S. National Security Agency with the five-year renewal of its designation as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Research. The designation, which UNT first earned in 2012, recognizes institutions that include cybersecurity into their doctoral curricula and whose research can strengthen the nation’s cyber defense. This latest renewal runs through 2029. UNT is one of five universities in Texas to have earned the honor and only 28 universities nationally to have the designation approved for more than 15 years in a row. UNT will formally receive the designation award from NSA and Department of Defense senior management at a ceremony in April.
“Through our research at UNT, we can prepare our students to be leaders in the field and help prepare our nation against malicious attacks.”
-Ram Dantu, director of UNT’s Center for Information and Cyber Security
The recognition comes on the heels of a recent grant to UNT cybersecurity experts from the Department of Defense and NSA into for overhauling its hiring process for cybersecurity positions. It’s also the second designation renewal from the NSA that UNT has received in the last year. UNT also is a National Center for Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense, which recognizes the university’s commitment to not only cybersecurity research, but also academic courses, institutional practices and community engagement.
“All of our cybersecurity work is connected,” says Ram Dantu, director of UNT’s Center for Information and Cyber Security, which aims to advance information and computer security with faculty experts from the College of Engineering, College of Information and G. Brint Ryan College of Business. “Through our research at UNT, we can prepare our students to be leaders in the field and help prepare our nation against malicious attacks.”
To be named a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Research, UNT must demonstrate some of the cybersecurity research projects from faculty and from its 84 graduate students focusing on cybersecurity. While security is already its own form of programming, their research shows that it can be broken down to even more specialized topics.
Secure Manufacturing
Seemaparevez Shaik is pursuing her Ph.D. in computer science and engineering while focusing on additive manufacturing. Additive manufacturing is printing an object with either a filament 3D printer or with a powder and laser machine to make a metal object.
“I’m focusing on the G-Code file which has all the instructions for the printer. It tells the printer what to make, what X, Y and Z-coordinates to use, and what temperatures to use,” Shaik says.
Shaik studies the possible vulnerabilities in the connection between printers and a user’s computer. For example, if a 3D printer is connected to a Wi-Fi system, she looks at what ways a bad actor could infiltrate the system and corrupt the G-code file holding the printer’s instructions.
“Even large companies like Tesla are using additive manufacturing now,” Shaik says. “If someone manipulates the files for an engine part that could lead to a malfunction in the entire car which could put the driver at risk.”
Part of her research requires Shaik to hack into the connections herself. She’s intercepted the network between a computer and machine to add extra lines to a build or caused continuous interruptions that caused a printer to miss instructions altogether.
As Shaik examines the vulnerabilities, she’s also building a large language model, a form of artificial intelligence, based on her data. The goal is to be able to detect those intrusions when they occur and send a warning message to the user.
“My vision is to train it from scratch on a huge set of G-Code files of different shape designs. Then I’ll tell it what the valid commands are for a G-code and which ones wouldn’t be repeated. Eventually, it would be able to tell if a file is invalid and send a warning message to the user.”
Safe Drones
Burak Tufekci (’24 Ph.D.), who graduated in Fall 2024, keeps his eyes on the skies with his research into drone security both inside and out.
“Everyone is going to be using drones in the future. We’ve seen companies deploy them for things like package delivery to pesticide control,” Tufekci says. “Imagine if someone malicious could take control of a drone carrying hazardous chemicals.”
For his research, Tufekci created a machine learning-based intrusion detection system for drones. To do this, he built his own drone similar to commercially available ones to gather hacking data. He then created flight data through real-time tests at Discovery Park’s recently opened UNT Advanced Air Mobility test facility, the largest of its kind in Texas.
“I needed to create the data myself,” he says. “For example, I would recreate different types of GPS spoofing attacks and feed that data to the system. The algorithm would pick up the patterns in that data that would let it determine if a future intrusion is a GPS spoofing attack or not.”
Tufekci’s research also focused on internal operational security systems that could catch glitches. For this, the system uses a technique called long short-term memory which allows the system to look at past flight data and compare it to incoming data. If the two differ, then it would know to flag an issue.
“If you expect a drone to do the same thing every time you press a certain button, it needs to do that action. You don’t want it to suddenly fall to the ground. This system is meant to warn of any possible issues before they can happen.”
While building the systems, Tufekci also made sure to keep their usefulness and efficiency in mind.
“Something we continuously tested while building the system was energy consumption. Some drones have a flight time of 30 or 45 minutes. Our goal is to ensure the system can detect intrusions without getting in the way of a drone’s mission,” Tufekci says.
Looking Ahead
As some students work on current problems, others are preparing for future technology that could revolutionize cybersecurity. Julie Germain (’97 M.S.) is studying quantum computing, a future stage of computing that uses quantum mechanics — a scientific theory that describes the behavior of nature at an atomic and subatomic scale.
Physics on the atomic scale works differently than what humans are used to observing. For example, computer transistors decide when electrons go through a passage for a computer function. However, on the atomic scale, electrons could use something called quantum tunneling to pass through a transistor despite it being closed. So as computer parts get smaller, developers need to begin using quantum mechanics to make the parts work.
The smallest unit of information in a computer is a bit. Commercially available computers that are in use today by the average user use bits with the values of either 1or 0. Quantum computers, however, use qubits that have an infinite number of possible values. A qubit can be any of those values simultaneously until it’s called for a computer function. This allows a quantum computer to parse more information at higher speeds.
“Let’s you say you have a 2048-bit prime number as a password, something exceedingly long. The only reason our security works today is not because I can’t guess it, but because it would take too long to guess it,” Germain says. “With quantum computing, I could guess that password, or any password not made through quantum computing, in just a few seconds.”
Germain uses a technique called reset and reuse which allows her to minimize the number of bits needed to perform a complex operation. That allows her to cut down algorithms for quantum computing into something smaller that could run today.
“Everyone is saying ‘in 10 years, this is what the software will be capable of in 20 years,’” Germain says. “But I come from an engineering background, and wanted to know what I could do today.”
Germain says her research of making quantum computing happen sooner helps governments prepare for that future.
“If everybody thinks it could happen in eight years, but I figure it out in four, then the government should be thinking about replacing their system in four years not eight,” Germain says. “My research can help them define the worst-case scenario now and how soon they need to be prepared for it.”