Muhammad Ajmal Azad

About

I am an Associate Professor of Cyber Security in the Department of Computer Science at Birmingham City University.

My research focuses on network security and privacy, secure telecommunications, trustworthy connected systems, and collaborative cyber defence. I develop practical methods that help organisations verify identity, detect abuse, share threat knowledge, and preserve privacy under realistic operating constraints.

I have worked on caller identity verification, robocall and spam detection, decentralised reputation systems, Internet of Things security, federated learning, blockchain-based assurance, and zero-trust access.

Research

Telecommunication and VoIP Networks

Caller ID spoofing, robocalls, vishing, spam over Internet Telephony, behavioural modelling, and collaborative detection.

IoT and Cyber-Physical System Security

Intrusion detection, federated learning, mobile privacy, explainable security analytics, zero-trust, Cyberphysical System Security and applied AI.

Reputation and Decentralised Identity

Secure reputation aggregation, verifiable identity, privacy-aware collaboration, decentralised collaboration and security.

Trustworthy and Verifiable AI

AI Provenance & model assurance, adversarial resilience, agentic AI security, Verifiable AI, and Agentic AI with Zero-trust.

Selected Publications

  • Yifan Wang, Muhammad Ajmal Azad, Maham Zafar,Ammara Gul

    Enhancing AI Transparency in IoT Intrusion Detection Using Explainable AI Techniques

    Elsevier Internet of Things Journal (2025)

    PDF

  • Muhammad Ajmal Azad, Ali Kashif Bashir, R Muhammad Atif Azad, Syed Attique Shah

    WFL: Edge-Enabled Weighted Federated Learning for Securing Heterogenous Networks

    IEEE Communications Standards Magazine (2025)

    PDF

  • Ziad Tariq Muhammad Ali, R Muhammad Atif Azad, Muhammad Ajmal Azad, James Holyhead, Iain Rice, Ali Shariq Imran

    Random transformations to improve mitigation of query-based black-box attacks

    Elsevier Expert Systems with Applications (2025)

    PDF

  • Mahdi Safaei Yaraziz, Nader Sohrabi Safa, Muhammad Ajmal Azad

    Edge computing in IoT for smart healthcare

    Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments (2024)

    PDF

  • Muhammad Ajmal Azad, Sidra Abdullah, Junaid Arshad, Harjinder Lallie, Yussuf Hassan Ahmed

    Verify and Trust: A Multidimensional Survey of Zero-trust Security in the Age of IoT

    Elsevier Internet of Things (2024)

    PDF

Education and Qualifications

  • PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Cybersecurity) · 2026University of Porto, PortugalDissertation: Towards Mitigating Spam in VoIP
  • MEng in Electronic Engineering · 2007International Islamic University, Islamabad, PakistanDistinction, topper in the graduating classDissertation: Performance Analysis of Video over DCCP Transport Layer
  • Bachelor of Computer Science · 2004International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan
  • Certified in Cybersecurity · 2023ISC2