AmaniJ. Dworkin

Amani Dworkin is a cybersecurity researcher, nonprofit co-founder, and Division I student-athlete whose work brings together AI, adversarial security, and public accountability. He is a Presidential Scholar and Dean's List honoree at DePaul University, where he is earning a B.S. in Cybersecurity while being an award-winning collegiate athlete. He graduated from high school a year early as an Honors Society member, an NAACP Scholar, and a recipient of the National African American Academic Recognition Award.

Amani co-founded The Obsidia Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that publishes rigorously cited case studies of the most consequential cybersecurity incidents on public record. As Lead Technical Author, he wrote the organization's inaugural study on the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, mapped to MITRE ATT&CK for ICS. He also built a companion tabletop exercise on NIST CSF 2.0 that organizations can use to test their own readiness. He sets Obsidia's evidence standard and leads review for its ten-member advisory board.

His independent research tackles one of the hardest open problems in AI security: building phishing defenses that hold up against attackers who adapt. He designed and built ICC (Isolated Criteria Code), an original architecture in which the AI model never reads attacker-controlled text. He evaluates it head-to-head against competing designs using prompt injection, AI-personalized phishing, and business email compromise. His evaluations weigh how often attacks succeed against how often legitimate email is wrongly blocked, because a defense that disrupts real business is unusable.

This research grew out of GhostGuard, the AI-powered phishing detection app Amani created and published. GhostGuard holds a five-star App Store rating, detonates suspicious links in a sandboxed environment, and turns technical threat signals into plain-language verdicts anyone can act on.

Amani brings the same rigor to professional engagements. As a security contractor, he designed and ran an authorized phishing simulation against an organization's full executive leadership, and his load testing uncovered a denial-of-service exposure. Leadership adopted his remediation recommendations. He has also designed and implemented complex Cisco network infrastructures, including a large-scale nationwide configuration project. He holds certifications in Google AI Essentials and from the University of Michigan's Nexus program, which he earned as its youngest-ever recipient.

Beyond technology, Amani has a longstanding commitment to the arts and to service. For more than a decade, he organized and performed in charity piano and violin concerts that raised over $10,000 for charitable causes, and he was recognized as the highest-ranking student in his studio.