Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science, Dartmouth College (2022)
• M.S., Computer Science, Dartmouth College (2017)
• B.E., Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering Guindy, Chennai, India (2015)

Background

Dr. Prashant Anantharaman joined the Integrated Information Technology (IIT) Department at the University of South Carolina in August 2026. Prior to joining USC, Dr. Anantharaman was a Senior Security Researcher at Narf Industries, where he led ARPA-H, DOE, and DARPA-funded research projects on cybersecurity. Dr. Anantharaman earned his Ph.D. from Dartmouth College, where he was co-advised by Profs. Sean Smith and Sergey Bratus.

Dr. Anantharaman’s work spans three thrusts: (1) building formally verified parsers for various data formats, such as PDF, MAVLink, and IEC 61850, (2) differential fuzzing of implementations that follow the same specification, such as network implementations, and (3) static analysis of binaries to identify patterns of software behavior, such as those characteristic of ransomware. His co-developed HTTP Garden project, presented at ShmooCon 2024, has led to over 150 vulnerability findings in popular HTTP implementations and more than $35,000 in bug bounties. His work on the DARPA SafeDocs program led to several fixes to the PDF 2.0 and iccMAX specifications.

Research Interests

• Weird Machines and Unintended Computation
• Finding Parsing Discrepancies in Critical Infrastructure Protocols
• Building Formally Verified Software to Prevent Classes of Vulnerabilities
• Building Emulated Digital Twins to Fuzz Embedded Systems
• Static Analysis Techniques for Software Understanding

Teaching

• ITEC 541 Network Intrusion Detection and Prevention
• ITEC 552 Linux Programming and Administration