Postdoctoral Researcher
Istiaque Ahmed
I build secure, privacy-preserving systems — from low-latency guardrails for large language models to decentralized identity backed by zero-knowledge proofs.
ICT Convergence Research Center, Kumoh National Institute of Technology, Korea
Visiting Researcher, Graduate School of Informatics, Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan
Research areas
Four threads that keep meeting in the middle: trust, identity and verification.
Security of AI systems
LLM prompt safety and guardrails, agentic AI, self-sovereign identity for AI agents, and explainable AI for security decisions.
LLM and generative model architectures
A newer direction: building LLMs rather than only defending them — autoregressive language model architectures and diffusion-based generative models, and how each behaves once deployed.
Privacy-preserving identity
Self-sovereign identity, decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, eKYC, zero-knowledge circuits and secure multi-party computation.
Blockchain and secure communication
Consensus algorithms, smart-contract security, post-quantum-safe design, Web3 and decentralized application infrastructure.
Selected work
Four papers that best describe what I do.
Software and systems
Research that ships as working code.
AgentRed
Open-source red-teaming framework for automated security evaluation of AI agents: prompt injection, tool misuse, sensitive-data leakage and system-prompt leakage.
github.com →LessonQ
Learning management system built and operated in Bangladesh, covering course delivery, enrolment and assessment. Project lead.
2026Blockchain test infrastructure
Private Ethereum and Bitcoin networks on AWS with a block explorer, a customised Uniswap V2/V3 deployment, a faucet dApp and ERC-20/721/1155 reference tokens, built at INFONET Lab, GIST.
2022–2023Education
Informatics in Japan, computer science in Bangladesh.
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Ph.D. in Informatics
Graduate School of Informatics, Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan. Dissertation on a privacy-preserving decentralized eKYC framework using SSI, DIDs and zero-knowledge proofs.
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M.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering
University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh. Supervised by Prof. Md. Rokanujjaman.
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B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering
University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh. Supervised by Prof. Md. Rokanujjaman.
Experience
Research, teaching and engineering across Japan, Korea and Bangladesh since 2015.
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Postdoctoral Researcher
ICT Convergence Research Center, Kumoh National Institute of Technology, Korea.
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Visiting Researcher
Graduate School of Informatics, Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan.
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Research Scientist
Blockchain Economy Research Center and INFONET Laboratory, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Korea.
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Senior Software Engineer
RedDevs Ltd., Bangladesh. Led development teams and multi-developer project delivery.
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Lecturer and Guest Lecturer
Pundra University of Science & Technology, Bangladesh Army University of Science and Technology, and the National Academy for Computer Training and Research, Bangladesh.
Collaborators and mentors
The people this work has been built with, across Japan, Korea, Singapore and Bangladesh.
Supervisors and mentors
Doctoral supervisor
Prof. Tadashi Nakano
Graduate School of Informatics, Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan.
Doctoral supervisor
Prof. Thi Hong Tran
Graduate School of Informatics, Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan.
Doctoral co-supervisor
Dr. Kentaroh Toyoda
Senior Scientist, A*STAR, and Director of GenAI Security Research, AIFT Enterprise, Singapore.
Former research supervisor
Prof. Heung-No Lee
INFONET Laboratory, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Republic of Korea.
B.Sc. and M.Sc. supervisor
Prof. Md. Rokanujjaman
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh.
Research collaborators
eKYC, SSI and DID
Prof. Shoji Kasahara
Large-scale Systems Management Laboratory, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan.
Co-supervision
Prof. Md Sadek Ferdous
BRAC University, Bangladesh. Joint supervision of B.Sc. and M.Sc. thesis students.
Co-supervision
Prof. Shamim Ahmad
University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh. Joint supervision producing peer-reviewed publications.
Frequent co-authors
Counted across all 28 publications. Numbers are joint papers.
Recent news
- Joined the ICT Convergence Research Center at Kumoh National Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral researcher.
- Appointed visiting researcher at the Graduate School of Informatics, Osaka Metropolitan University.
- Ph.D. in Informatics conferred by Osaka Metropolitan University, with an Outstanding Researcher nomination as convocation representative.
- Reflex-Guard, a low-latency guardrail for LLM prompt safety, released as a preprint on arXiv.
- Session chair at the 30th Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications, Osaka.
Looking for a collaborator?
I work on AI agent security, verifiable credentials and privacy-preserving identity, and co-supervise thesis students at two universities. If any of that overlaps with your work, get in touch.