Muntashir Al-Islam

(a.k.a. Muntashir Akon)
Ph.D Student, University of California, Riverside
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
465 Winston Chung Hall, Riverside, CA 92521
Email: malis002@ucr.edu, muntashirakon@riseup.net

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I am a Ph.D. student at University of California, Riverside, advised by Dr. Heng Yin. Before that, I was a Software Engineer at Divine Companion Inc. I earned my B.Sc. degree from Rajshahi University of Engineering & Technology (RUET) in October 2022. I’ve also been contributing to various open source projects since 2015.

My interest predominantly lies in improving privacy, security as well as usability of smart devices, Android devices, in particular. At present, I do this by developing and contributing to open source and community-driven software or tools that help the users of these devices improve their privacy and user experience. This is achieved by analysing and integrating modern and attractive user interface with privacy and security considerations and trade-offs, adaptive threat modelling, use of “hidden API”, reproducible builds, transparency in the decision making with active presence of the users, and targeting a wide range of audience of different backgrounds without diminishing usability. I also have interests in related concepts such as keychain, SSL pinning, E2EE, fingerprinting, sandboxing, process isolation, federation, TEE, baseband modem, and BLE.

My formal research included the development of an efficient tool for bioinformatics to generate phylogenetic trees, namely ADACT, which involved development of a web application with attractive user interface and features such as user management, parameter tuning and the development of a RESTful API. In my undergraduate thesis, I attempted to find an efficient model that identifies the optimum values for oral glucose metabolism in non-diabetic patients.

I maintain and contribute to a number of projects that largely promotes my interests, that is, privacy, security and usability. Among them, App Manager is, by far, the biggest project (~200K LOC, ~300 contributors) that I maintain. It also utilises other libraries and projects that I maintain separately for App Manager as well as the open source community. Of them, Android Debloat List aims at cataloguing useless system apps that often threaten users’ privacy and security, Android Libraries at cataloguing popularly used libraries to help users’ threat model regarding the use of proprietary libraries, and LibADB Android at granting privileged access to user apps which isn’t possible in a normal setting. Of late, I’ve developed Captive Portal Controller to address the connectivity issues in Android discovered by Mullvad.net when VPN is enabled. I also write personal blogs featuring privacy and security.

I am also involved in several clubs and voluntary organizations such as Wikimedia Bangladesh, Society for the Popularisation of Science, Bangladesh where I helped arrange seminars, training sessions, olympiads, meetups, and other events. Recently, I have founded App Manager Community with the aim of increasing community involvement in the App Manager project to make it more sustainable, improve usability and spread privacy awareness.

Publications

Peer-Reviewed Journals

  1. Mujtahid Akon, Muntashir Akon, Mohimenul Kabir, M Saifur Rahman, and M Sohel Rahman. ADACT: A tool for analysing (dis) similarity among nucleotide and protein sequences using minimal and relative absent words. Bioinformatics 37, 10 (2021), 1468–1470. 10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa853 [PDF]

Selected Projects

Honors and Awards

2022‐2025 © Muntashir Al-Islam. CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.