Umar Iqbal

Pronouns: He/him/his

Assistant Professor

Computer Science & Engineering

Office
McKelvey Hall, Room 1033

Education

PhD, University of Iowa, 2021
BS, National University of Computer & Emerging Sciences, Pakistan, 2013

Expertise

Computer security and privacy

Research

Umar Iqbal's research interests are in computer security and privacy. His research focuses on bringing transparency and control in computing systems to empower users, platforms, and regulators to improve user privacy and security. His current focus areas include AI system security, web privacy and security, and technology policy.

Biography

Professor Iqbal joined the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Washington University in Fall 2023. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Washington. He is a recipient of ACM IMC Best Paper Award (2023), Caspar Bowden Runner-Up Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (2024), CRA/NSF Computing Innovation Fellowship (2021), and the University of Iowa Research Excellence Award (2021).

In the News

Umar Iqbal, Ning Zhang and doctoral student Yuhao Wu and their collaborators have developed IsolateGPT, a method that keeps external tools isolated from each other while still running in a large language model system and mitigating security risks. (Credit: iStock photo)

Traditional computer security principles can help develop secure agentic systems

Umar Iqbal, collaborators develop IsolateGPT to make LLM-based agents more secure.

02.17.2025

The Amazon Echo smart speaker and Alexa assistant offer convenience in exchange for your data. Umar Iqbal is bringing transparency to how Amazon uses smart speaker interactions for targeted advertising. (Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash)

Your smart speaker data is used in ways that you might not expect

Umar Iqbal and collaborators developed a framework to measure data collection, sharing and use by smart speaker platforms.

10.26.2023

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