CSSE assistant professor to deliver keynote on security vulnerabilities at International Conference on Software Engineering
Published: Mar 27, 2025 9:25 AM
By Joe McAdory
Akond Rahman wants to bring greater attention to security vulnerabilities in configuration scripts and foster collaboration between academia and industry to ensure that security research has a tangible impact.
He’ll have his chance on May 1 when he delivers the keynote address, “Security Vulnerabilities in Configuration Scripts: Lessons Learned and Opportunities Moving Forward,” at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in Ottawa, Canada. ICSE is considered as one of the premier venues in software engineering research. There, Rahman will provide a keynote at the collocated event, the International Workshop on Software Vulnerability Management 2025.
“Just like any software artifact, these types of scripts include security vulnerabilities,” he said. “The lessons that I'm taking from the existing research, is that this domain moves very fast, and it's very important to mitigate these vulnerabilities proactively.”
Rahman acknowledged that proactive mitigation is challenging because current tools, even though they have matured, still lag when detecting specific security threats.
“That is why people who develop these configuration scripts are not fully motivated, or highly motivated, to use these existing tools to mitigate vulnerabilities,” he said.
“I want to make an impact by bringing more attention in this domain so that it's not only me and a few other folks who are working in this area, but rather multiple researchers are looking at the same problem from different perspectives,” he said. “Also, if we can trigger some industry engagement with me and with other researchers so that the research that we generate does not fall in a silo and has some collaborative impact.”
His keynote will be structured in two parts. First, an overview of his and others’ research findings in the field, and second, a discussion on lessons learned and the necessary next steps for researchers and industry professionals.
“I was pleasantly surprised when I received the invitation,” he said. “It also tells me that over the years, the work that I've done has made some impact on the community.”
Rahman’s project, “Resilient Operations for Deployment Units Used in Container Orchestration,” earned a three-year, $553,295 grant from the National Science Foundation in 2023. His research is supported by external grants that have totaled more than $4.1 million. He has published almost 30 research papers on configuration scripts since 2018, making significant contributions to the understanding and mitigation of security risks within configuration scripts, which play a pivotal role in provisioning and managing modern computing infrastructure.
Media Contact: , jem0040@auburn.edu, 334.844.3447
Akond Rahman has published almost 30 research papers on configuration scripts since 2018.
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