Muhammad Shoaib, a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia, won the Best Poster Award at the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) Symposium 2025. 

Shoaib’s poster, “Vulnerability Detection in Enterprise Settings Using Proof-of-Concept (PoC) Codes,” was among 40 posters from students across Virginia. 

“The Student Poster Presentations are a consistent highlight every year because they showcase the amazing talent from Virginia’s universities,” said Luiz DaSilva, CCI executive director. “Our students are working on addressing important cybersecurity problems.”

Competition was especially tough at the fourth annual symposium, said Mayukh Roy Chowdhury, a CCI Hub postdoctoral researcher who led the review committee. Shoaib emerged the winner because his poster had a well-defined problem statement with concrete results supporting the claims and he gave an excellent presentation, Roy Chowdhury said. 

What inspired Shoaib’s research?

“During collaborative projects in UVA’s DART Lab, we noticed a recurring gap: enterprises patch vulnerabilities slowly because the volume is overwhelming,” Shoaib said. “Academic scanners often miss environment-specific attack paths, while vendor tools treat PoC exploits as an afterthought. Because Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs) mirror the exact logic attackers would use, we realized they can be converted into robust threat-detection signatures.”

Shoaib’s goals after earning his Ph.D.

“I plan to keep one foot in research and one in deployment,” Shoaib said. “Immediately after graduation I am aiming for a research-driven security role where I can apply what I have learned at UVA to strengthen real-world defenses. Ultimately, I hope to lead an applied-security lab that partners with vendors and open-source communities to translate state-of-the-art methods into deployable protections, shortening the window between vulnerability disclosure and effective defense.”

 

Contact Michele McDonald, mmcdonald@vt.edu, for more information.