Prashant Anantharaman's Homepage

Dr. Prashant Anantharaman joined the Integrated Information Technology (IIT) Department at the University of South Carolina in August 2026. Prior to joining USC, Dr. Anantharaman was a Senior Security Researcher at Narf Industries, where he led ARPA-H, DOE, and DARPA-funded research projects on cybersecurity. Dr. Anantharaman earned his Ph.D. from Dartmouth College, where he was co-advised by Profs. Sean Smith and Sergey Bratus, and spent three summers at SRI International.

Dr. Anantharaman’s work spans three thrusts:

Building formally verified parsers for various data formats, such as PDF, MAVLink, and IEC 61850
Differential fuzzing of implementations that follow the same specification, such as network implementations
Static analysis of binaries to identify patterns of software behavior, such as those characteristic of ransomware

His co-developed HTTP Garden project, presented at ShmooCon 2024, has led to over 150 vulnerability findings in popular HTTP implementations and more than $35,000 in bug bounties. His work on the DARPA SafeDocs program led to several fixes to the PDF 2.0 and iccMAX specifications.

Undergraduate advisees:

Research Interests

Weird Machines and Unintended Computation
Finding Parsing Discrepancies in Critical Infrastructure Protocols
Building Formally Verified Software to Prevent Classes of Vulnerabilities
Building Emulated Digital Twins to Fuzz Embedded Systems
Static Analysis Techniques for Software Understanding

Papers

Prashant Anantharaman, Vishnupriya Varadharaju, Carlos Guerrero Alvarez, Danylo Borodchuk, Aamish A. Beg, Rebecca Shapiro, Andrew Gettinger, Sean W. Smith, Michael E. Locasto.
Evaluating Interoperability of Medical Communication Protocols via Differential Testing.
Cybersecurity in Healthcare, Communications in Computer and Information Science, Springer Nature Switzerland, 2026, pp. 130–159.
Meet Udeshi, Venkata Sai Charan Putrevu, Prashanth Krishnamurthy, Prashant Anantharaman, Sean Carrick, Ramesh Karri, Farshad Khorrami.
Binary Diff Summarization Using Large Language Models.
arXiv:2509.23970, September 2025.
Prashant Anantharaman, Vishnupriya Varadharaju.
Exploring Zero-Shot Prompting for Generating Data Format Descriptions. [doi]
11th LangSec Workshop, IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops, May 2025. Best Paper Award.
Prashant Anantharaman, Rebecca ".bx" Shapiro, Vishnupriya Varadharaju, Michael E. Locasto.
A Study of Interoperability in Electronic Health Record Software. [doi]
Workshop on Cybersecurity in Healthcare (HealthSec '24), October 2024. Best Presentation Award.
Ben Kallus, Prashant Anantharaman, Michael Locasto, Sean W. Smith.
The HTTP Garden: Discovering Parsing Vulnerabilities in HTTP/1.1 Implementations by Differential Fuzzing of Request Streams.
arXiv:2405.17737, February 2024. Under submission.
Prashant Anantharaman, Robert Lathrop, Rebecca Shapiro, Michael Locasto.
PolyDoc: Surveying PDF Files from the PolySwarm Network. [doi]
9th LangSec Workshop, IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops, May 2023.

Work before 2023 is listed on Google Scholar.

Thesis

Protecting Systems From Exploits Using Language-Theoretic Security.
Ph.D. thesis, Dartmouth College, May 2022. Advisors Sean W. Smith and Sergey Bratus.

Spring 2027: ITEC 552, Linux Programming and Administration (graduate)
Fall 2026: ITEC 541, Network Intrusion Detection and Prevention (graduate)

Organizing Committee

2020–22: Local Chair, New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW)

Program Committee

2025–26: ACM Healthcare Cybersecurity Workshop (HealthSec), co-located with ACSAC
2020–26: International Conference on Internet Monitoring and Protection (ICIMP)

Reviewer

2026: Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), External Reviewer
2023–26: Elsevier Pervasive and Mobile Computing
2021–23: IEEE IoT World Forum
2020: IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
2018: IEEE SmartGridComm
2017: LangSec Workshop

Prospective Ph.D. students

I am always looking for curious, motivated Ph.D. students to work with. My group works on differential testing, formal methods for building correct parsers, and tracing and reverse engineering low-level system behavior (see the Research tab).

To join, please apply to the Ph.D. in Informatics program and email me at prashant+apply [at] sc [dot] edu to let me know you have applied. In your email, tell me what you would like to work on and which of my papers you have read, and include your transcripts.

U.S. citizens and permanent residents: I am happy to support proposals for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) and DOE graduate fellowships. U.S. citizens can also apply for the DoD National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship. If you are thinking of applying, let me know early and we can work on it together.

Current students

If you are a current (or already admitted) Ph.D. student, a master's student, or an undergraduate interested in research at UofSC, my office door is open: stop by or email me and tell me about your interests. For undergraduate research, send me your resume and a few sentences on why you want to get involved. Prior projects, a strong programming background, and curiosity about how software breaks are what I look for.