Rizwan is an Associate Professor (formerly Reader) in the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security (SCCS) and Director of Employability in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Surrey. He was awarded the prestigious Clinton Bedogni Prize 2025 for his outstanding contributions to the field of Cyber Security, making a significant impact.

He is also an Honorary Academic in the School of Computer Science at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Prior to this, he was a Senior Lecturer (above the bar) at the University of Auckland, which he joined in 2015. Earlier in his career, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at international research institutes, including the Center for IT-Security, Privacy, and Accountability (CISPA) at Saarland University in Germany and CREATE-NET (an international research centre) in Trento (Italy), where he also served as a Researcher.

He received his PhD degree in ICT (Security and Privacy) from the University of Trento, Italy in 2013. As part of his PhD programme, he was Stanford Research Institute (SRI) Fellow at SRI International, California, USA. He obtained his MSc degree in Computer Science and Engineering - Information Security Technology from the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), The Netherlands in 2009 and carried out his research as a Master Thesis Student at the Ericsson Research Eurolab, Germany. He also worked as a Software Engineer at international software companies.

Throughout his career, he received several awards, including the Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence, Best Paper Award at TrustCom 2018, Highly Commended Paper at ITNAC 2017, and Best Paper Award at FiCloud 2015.