I’m Michael Tompkins (frqmod), a CS PhD candidate at Arizona State University studying cybersecurity with a passion for education and mentorship.

News

• Aug 2026 - Teaching CSE466 at ASU on pwn.college.
• Aug 2026 - Helping lead DEFCON Academy at DEFCON 34.
• Apr 2026 - Helped lead DEFCON Academy at the first DEFCON Singapore.
• Aug 2025 - Co-taught CSE466 at ASU on pwn.college.
• Aug 2025 - Helped lead DEFCON Academy at DEFCON 33
• Nov 2024 - CSAW CTF champion with Shellphish.

Research

My research focuses on the intersection of cybersecurity education and AI/LLM tooling, specifically on understanding how students utilize these tools and what their pedagogical implications are. It builds on my passion for teaching and belief that AI-integrated tools can add value for both educators and students. As a member of the SEFCOM research lab at ASU I do most of my research on pwn.college, an open-source cybersecurity platform focused on teaching by doing where students solve ctf-inspired challenges that progressively introduce new concepts.

Publications

• Michael Tompkins, Nihaarika Agarwal, Robert Wasinger, Connor Nelson, Daniel Votipka, Yan Shoshitaishvili, and Jaron Mink. “Do Newer Models Make Better Tutors?: Characterizing Real-World Failures of AI Tutors in Higher Education Across Two Years, Two Prompts, and Five Models.” ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE TS), 2027. To appear.

• Michael Tompkins, Nihaarika Agarwal, Ananta Soneji, Robert Wasinger, Connor Nelson, Kevin Leach, Rakibul Hasan, Adam Doupé, Daniel Votipka, Yan Shoshitaishvili, and Jaron Mink. “Do Hackers Dream of Electric Teachers?: A Large-Scale, In-Situ Measurement of Cybersecurity Student Behaviors and Educational Performance with AI Tutors.” ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2026. DOI

• Arvind S. Raj, Wil Gibbs, Fangzhou Dong, Jayakrishna Menon Vadayath, Michael Tompkins, Steven Wirsz, Yibo Liu, Zhenghao Hu, Chang Zhu, Gokulkrishna Praveen Menon, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Adam Doupé, Ruoyu Wang, Yan Shoshitaishvili, and Tiffany Bao. “Fuzz to the Future: Uncovering Occluded Future Vulnerabilities via Robust Fuzzing.” ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2024. PDF · bibtex · DOI

One additional paper is currently under submission.

Lectures

• Nov 2025 - CSE466 Kernel Security
• Nov 2025 - CSE466 Race Conditions
• Sep 2025 - CSE466 Reverse Engineering Demo
• Sep 2025 - CSE466 Reverse Engineering
• Sep 2025 - CSE466 Return Oriented Programming
• Aug 2025 - CSE466 Program Security

Contact

Email is the best way to contact me:

$ python3 -c 'print("ved.domqrf@em"[::-1])'