Hanqing Guo | Yao Zheng@UHM

CyberAI Innovation: Securing Artificial Intelligence Agents: A Scenario-Based Educational Platform for Future Cybersecurity Professionals

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 15:29:00 -1000

Executive Summary

AI agents that autonomously browse the web, manage email, execute code, and query databases are being deployed across federal agencies at accelerating pace. These agents create a qualitatively new attack surface: a poisoned email can cause an agent to exfiltrate files; a malicious code comment can redirect an execution pipeline; a hidden webpage instruction can hijack a browsing session. Yet cybersecurity education has not kept pace. Existing AI security tools (Lakera Gandalf, OWASP LLM labs, CTF competitions) teach only chatbot-level prompt injection, a single-turn, text-only model that does not prepare students for agent-mediated threats involving tool access, autonomous action, and multi-step reasoning chains.

This project develops AgentSec, a scenario-based educational platform that teaches undergraduate cybersecurity students to identify, exploit, and defend against threats unique to autonomous AI agents, organized into three thrusts. Thrust 1 creates the educational framework, where a trust boundary taxonomy organizes agent vulnerabilities into three progressive categories, i.e., data ingestion, tool-action, and reasoning chain boundaries. This gives students a transferable mental model. Based on the taxonomy, we design a three-module curriculum with six organization-contextualized scenarios, red-team/blue-team experiential learning cycles, and a configurable difficulty framework. Thrust 2 builds the educational technology, where we develop sandboxed environments to enable students’ interaction with real LLM-powered agents with controlled tool access, a layered assessment system with an AI tutoring agent, an instructor analytics dashboard, and a scenario authoring toolkit for community-contributed content. Thrust 3 evaluates impact through a quasi-experimental study, assessing platform quality, student learning, and workforce placement into government and industry CyberAI roles. All code will be open-source, self-hostable via Docker Compose with open-weight models, and released through CLARK for nationwide adoption.

Demo: Disrupting In-Car mmWave Sensing Through IRS Manipulation

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Secure-IRS: Defending Against Adversarial Physical-Layer Sensing in ISAC System

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

RASRE: Reflectarray and Applications in Smart Radio Environment

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -1000

Executive Summary

Reflectarray present a paradigm shift in wireless communication and sensing in mmWave and sub-THz region by offering unprecedented control over the propagation environment. Traditional wireless systems are largely at the mercy of the channel, which can be severely impaired by obstacles, fading, and interference. Reflectarray, however, introduce a new degree of freedom by enabling programmable manipulation of the wireless channel. Through precise control of the reflection and refraction properties of an array of elements, reflectarray can be used to mitigate path loss, combat fading, null interference, and shape radiation patterns, which can be used to enhancing spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, and expanding coverage. This project aims to investigate the fundamental principles of reflectarray operation, develop novel reflectarray architectures and control algorithms, and explore their applications in a wide range of wireless communication, sensing, energy transfer, and security scenarios.

Logistics

CRN

Semester ENGR196 ENGR296 ENGR396 ECE496

Spring 2025 TBD TBD TBD TBD
Personnel

Advisor Office Hours

Yao Zheng

Email with ‘’[VIP RASRE]’’ in the subject line.

See
Meeting:

Time Location

TBD HH488, Zoom
Workload

ENGR196 ENGR296 ENGR396 EE496¹ Deliverables²

$ \geq $ 3 H/W $ \geq $ 3 H/W $ \geq $ 6 H/W $ \geq $ 8 H/W

One per group

Indicate the authors of the appropriate sections.

Semester	ENGR196	ENGR296	ENGR396	ECE496
Spring 2025	TBD	TBD	TBD	TBD

Advisor	Office Hours
Yao Zheng Email with ‘’[VIP RASRE]’’ in the subject line.	See

Time	Location
TBD	HH488, Zoom

ENGR196	ENGR296	ENGR396	EE496¹	Deliverables²
$ \geq $ 3 H/W	$ \geq $ 3 H/W	$ \geq $ 6 H/W	$ \geq $ 8 H/W	One per group Indicate the authors of the appropriate sections.

Grading

General Breakdown

Category	Portion of Grade
1- Quality of project work Engagement, pursuit of knowledge necessary for project, contributions to technical progress of project, (396 and 496: contributions to management of project).	35%
2- Documentation and records Design notebook, wiki documentation, presentations, Reports.	35%
3- Teamwork and interaction Attendance to meetings, contributions to team, peer evaluations, team presentations and reports	30%

Breakdown by Deliverable

Deliverable	ENGR 196/296/396	EE496/499	Applicable Categories
Project proposal report	10%	10%	1,2,3
Preliminary design review presentation	15%	20%	1,2,3
Design notebook check	10%	5%	1,2
VIP poster session presentation	10%	15%	1,2,3
Final report draft (proofed by peers)	N/A	N/A	1,2,3
Final recorded video presentation	20%	25%	1,2,3
Final report	25%	15%	1,2,3
Design notebook final check	10%	10%	1,2

Cutoffs

A- B- C-

70% 50% 30%

A-	B-	C-
70%	50%	30%

Iterations

SEMESTER	TOPICS	DOCUMENTS
Spring, 2025	Designing 3.5GHz reflectarray with transistors

This course adheres to UH Manoa W focus requirements and ECE Department requirements. So you are required to write 4,000 words or more throughout the semester, split between the proposal and the final report. ↩︎
Reports should be uploaded to the Google Drive before the deadline. Late reports are subject to a minimum 15% reduction in grade. Presentation files (PowerPoint or PDF) should be uploaded to the Google Drive before or immediately after your presentation. ↩︎