Prashant Anantharaman

My goal is to understand how software truly works, and how to make it more resilient to a wide range of exploits, including zero-click attacks. I work at the intersection of computer security and privacy and formal methods to create tools that build better software and holistically test them.

Before joining the University of South Carolina in August 2026, I was a Senior Security Researcher at Narf Industries, where I led DARPA and ARPA-H projects on protocol parsing, differential testing, and healthcare interoperability. I earned my Ph.D. at Dartmouth College in 2022, advised by Sean W. Smith and Sergey Bratus, and spent three summers at SRI International.

The CyberSoul Research Group is recruiting two fully funded Ph.D. students (intended start: Spring or Fall 2027) and postdoctoral researchers. Position flyer with instructions on how to apply.

Research

Systems security, network security, and the Internet of Things. Concretely:

Differential fuzzing to find discrepancies between implementations
Using formal methods to build usable, correct-by-construction, high-performance parser toolkits
High-fidelity, low-level tracing of operating systems, bootloaders, and applications to characterize and reverse engineer their behavior.

Publications

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 · doi
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. 11th LangSec Workshop, IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops, May 2025 · Best Paper Award · doi
Prashant Anantharaman, Rebecca ".bx" Shapiro, Vishnupriya Varadharaju, Michael E. Locasto. A Study of Interoperability in Electronic Health Record Software. Workshop on Cybersecurity in Healthcare (HealthSec '24), October 2024 · Best Presentation Award · doi
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. 9th LangSec Workshop, IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops, May 2023 · doi

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

Teaching

Fall 2026: ITEC 541: Network Intrusion Detection and Prevention

Service

Organizing Committee

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

Program Committee

2025–26: ACM Healthcare Cybersecurity Workshop (HealthSec), co-located with ACSAC
2020–23: International Conference on Internet Monitoring and Protection (ICIMP)

Reviewer

2023, 2025: Elsevier Pervasive and Mobile Computing
2021–23: IEEE IoT World Forum
2020: IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
2018: IEEE SmartGridComm
2017: LangSec Workshop

Contact

Email: prashant [at] sc [dot] edu
Office: Room 1313, IBM Innovation Center
Office hours: By appointment — email me.
Department: Integrated Information Technology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC
Encrypted: Encrypt anything sensitive with my GPG key.
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