QEC'26
Beyond the Quantum Promise: A Security Analysis of Classical Control in QKD
2026 IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering
Ali Hamza Malik
Provable Security for Emerging Systems
PhD student at University of Massachusetts Amherst working on quantum computers and quantum systems, focusing on security aspects.
Researching formal analysis of quantum protocols to uncover security vulnerabilities and develop automated verification techniques.
About Me
Hi, I am PhD student @ University of Massachusetts Amherst. I work on quantum computers and quantum systems, focusing on security aspect with Dr. Muhammad Taqi Raza in Khwarizmi Lab.
Before joining UMass, I completed my Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering (BSEE) from National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan in 2023.
I am engaged in the examination of quantum protocols pertaining to network communication, focusing on conducting formal analyses to uncover security vulnerabilities. My research endeavors lay the groundwork for devising efficient techniques to automate protocol analysis, ensuring the security guarantees provided by these protocols.
Research Interests
Formal methods and security analysis
Systematic analysis of large-scale deployed systems, modeling protocol stacks against their specifications to uncover access-control and trust-boundary gaps the specification never states
Reliability of large language models
Making behavioral properties verifiable, from whether a thinking trace reflects the computation behind an answer to whether single-call guarantees survive multi-step agentic trajectories
Quantum and post-quantum security
Where quantum and post-quantum deployments break at the classical boundary, in control planes, key management, and migration paths, rather than in the cryptographic primitive itself
Experience
Graduate Research Assistant
September 2023 - Present
Khwarizmi Lab, University of Massachusetts Amherst • Amherst, MA
- Built a verification framework to analyze quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols; identified four new vulnerabilities arising from quantum-classical interactions
- Applied formal analysis to U.S. ACH banking systems to uncover security vulnerabilities in the access control and authorization of ACH direct payments
Undergraduate Research Assistant
September 2022 - July 2023
Communication Systems and Networks Lab, NUST
- Collaborated in the design and implementation of an event-driven coordination protocol for multi-agent aerial swarms on Raspberry Pi companion computers with Pixhawk/ArduPilot flight controllers
- Designed and optimized leader-follower formation control (flock, line, helical) with dynamic reconfiguration, achieving under 2 min formation-switching latency
- Engineered a mesh networking stack (IEEE 802.11, UDP/TCP, MAVLink) to enable fault-tolerant communication for control coordination in real-time (under 100 ms latency)
Hardware Security Intern
June 2022 - September 2022
IC Design Lab, NUST
- Led the design of ENIGMA, a Python framework that automatically inserts logic-locking defenses into hardware designs, protecting IP designs from unauthorized use and reverse engineering
- Designed a parametrized key-insertion system (64-256 bits) with user-defined cell libraries to analyze the impact of logic obfuscation on a chip's area, delay, and power
Machine Learning Intern
June 2021 - September 2021
TUKL Deep Learning Lab, NUST
- Implemented an automated pipeline to extract, structure, and preprocess raw court documents
- Fine-tuned Transformer-based models for court-case outcome prediction achieving 83% accuracy
Selected Publications
publications in reversed chronological order.