Balaji Palanisamy

A person wearing glasses and a purple shirt

AI-generated content may be incorrect.Associate Professor

Department of Informatics & Networked Systems

School of Computing and Information

Office: 130 N. Bellefield Avenue, Room 535

Pittsburgh, PA 15260

Email: bpalan@pitt(-dot--edu)

Phone: 412.624.0232

CV

 

I am an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh. I am also an Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security. My research interest lies in Blockchains and Cybersecurity.

PhD positions: We’re always looking for self-motivated and dedicated Ph.D students. If you are interested in joining my research group, please apply to our graduate program here.


Research          Publications       Teaching         Contact

RESEARCH INTERESTS:

My research interests focus on blockchain and cybersecurity, with an emphasis on data privacy, privacy-aware computing, distributed systems, edge computing, and cloud computing. I am especially interested in tackling challenges in developing scalable, privacy-preserving distributed systems and supporting secure data sharing in untrusted computing environments.

 

RECENT PUBLICATIONS:

A full list of my publications is available in DBLP

 

·      Yijun Yuan, Na Du, Adam Lee and Balaji Palanisamy, “VRSafe: A Secure Virtual Keyboard to Mitigate Keystroke Inference in Virtual Reality”, to appear in Proc. of the 16th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy, ACM CODASPY 2026

 

·      Jingzhe Wang, Balaji Palanisamy, “SR-MPL: Single-round Fair Multiparty Lottery for Consensus”, in Proc. of the 13th IEEE International Conference on Big Data, IEEE BigData 2025

 

·      Abdulrahman Alhaidari, Balaji Palanisamy, Prashant Krishnamurthy, “On-Chain Decentralized Learning and Cost-Effective Inference for DeFi Attack Mitigation”, in Proc. of 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies, AFT 2025

 

·      Jingzhe Wang, Balaji Palanisamy, “P-EDR: Privacy-Preserving Event-Driven Data Release Using Smart Contracts”, in Proc. of 39th IFIP WG 11.3 Annual Conference on Data and Applications Security and Privacy, DBSec 2025 (Best Student Paper Award Candidate)

 

·      Ying Song, Rita Singh and Balaji Palanisamy, “Krait: Backdoor Attacks Against Graph Prompt Tuning”, in Proc. of the 3rd IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning, IEEE SaTML 2025

 

·      Abdulrahman Alhaidari, Balaji Palanisamy, Prashant Krishnamurthy, “Protecting DeFi Platforms against Non-Price Flash Loan Attacks”, in Proc. of the 15th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy, ACM CODASPY 2025

 

·      Ying Song and Balaji Palanisamy, “MAPPING: Debiasing Graph Neural Networks for Fair Node Classification with Limited Sensitive Information Leakage”, in World Wide Web Journal 2025

 

·      Chao Li, Balaji Palanisamy, Runhua Xu, Li Duan, Jiqiang Liu, Wei Wang, “How Hard is Takeover in DPoS Blockchains? Understanding the Security of Coin-based Voting Governance”, in Proc. of the 30th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2023 (Received Distinguished Paper Award)

 

 

TEACHING:

· INFSCI 2150 – Information Security & Privacy

· INFSCI 2750 – Cloud Computing

· INFSCI 1620 - Advanced Information Security & Privacy

CONTACT

Balaji Palanisamy,

School of Computing and Information

University of Pittsburgh

130 N. Bellefield Avenue,

Pittsburgh, PA 15260

Email: bpalan@pitt(-dot--edu)

Phone: 412.624.0232