Tutorials
Important dates
• Tutorial proposals due: June 27, 2016
• Notification of acceptance: July 28, 2016
• Tutorial slides due: September 28, 2016
Approved Tutorials
Tutorial 1: Identity related threats, vulnerabilities, and risk mitigation in online social networks Privacy in OSN
Organizer: Dr. Leila Bahri, University of Insubria in Italy.
Abstract: Identity management in the realms of Online Social Networks (OSNs) is one of the most critical elements in discussing their security. The ability to reliably identify a profile on an OSN is the first building block towards ensuring the protection of both the users (and their data), and the OSN provider's resources and reputation. Unfortunately, this ability is not easily achieved, and/or is not provided in today's major OSNs. The looseness in obtaining a digital identity (i.e., a profile) on an OSN, where only a valid email account is required, facilitates their joining as open socializing platforms, but also makes them exposed to identity related attacks and threats. As a matter of fact, the percentage of fake accounts existing in today's major OSNs is continuously increasing regardless of the efforts put into detecting them, and is reported to have increased from 5.5% in 2012 to about 12% in 2015 on Facebook (according to Statisticbrain.com website).
There is a huge body of work in the area of detecting fake accounts in OSNs, mostly under the research topic known as Sybil detection. However, Sybil accounts are getting more sophisticated and are moving towards getting social: Sybil accounts target misleading as many honest users as possible into befriending them, gaining as such their trust in the network and looking as good profiles to detection mechanisms. Moreover, when Sybils succeed at befriending honest users, the privacy of these latters is at stake as personal information that is supposed to be shared with real friends becomes available to fake entities that might have malicious intentions (such as spreading malware, engaging in sexual embarrassment or child abuse activities, etc.).
This tutorial is meant to initiate the audience to the topic of Sybil detection and identity related threats and concerns in OSNs. A synthesis of the related literature will shed the light on the main adopted techniques and on the main challenges facing this research field. The main focus would be on user-centric and community-sourced identity validation techniques, as a promising approach to face the social Sybil threats. The main goal would be to open new research directions and questions under this important area.
Biography: Leila Bahri has been a Marie-Curie research fellow under the European Commission funded project iSocial, where she has worked on designing privacy preserving services and access control models for decentralized online social networks. Her main research work during her PhD was on decentralized privacy preserving services for online social networks, mostly as related to identity management and validation in a user-centric and community-sourced fashions.
After holding the position of an associate research fellow at a privacy security and trust lab at the university of Insubria in Italy, she is preparing to move to the city of Istanbul, where she will be pursuing a post-doc research position at the Cryprography, Security and Trust lab at Ko University. Her research interests are on privacy and trust in the social web and her current work is on accountable, transparent, and user-centric social computing. She has collaborated with other research groups mostly from KTH University in Stockholm/Sweden, and from the University of Texas at Dallas in the USA.
Tutorial 2: Using the Cloud for Teaching and Research
Organizer: Dr. Khaled Salah, Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research, EAU.
Abstract: The cloud can be a highly attractive computing utility to conduct hands-on lab exercises and research experiments. In academia, the cloud can offer instructors and students (whether local or at a distance) on-demand, dedicated, isolated, unlimited, and easily configurable machines. Such an approach has clear advantages over access to machines in a classic lab setting. In this tutorial, we show how existing cloud services and infrastructure can be harnessed in general to facilitate teaching and research. The tutorial will offer numerous live demos and hands-on activities for participants on how to access and manage the cloud resources, setup student accounts, build and bake Linux and Windows instances, and design a variety of cloud-based lab exercises and research experiments for many topics related to computer networks, cybersecurity, HPC, and Big Data.
Presenter Biography: Khaled Salah is an associate professor in the Computer Engineering Department, Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research (KUSTAR). He received the B.S. degree in Computer Engineering with a minor in Computer Science from Iowa State University, USA, in 1990, the M.S. degree in Computer Systems Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology, USA, in 1994, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the same institution in 2000. Khaled has been teaching graduate and undergraduate courses and has over 135 publications in the areas of cloud computing, computer and network security, operating systems, and computer networks. Khaled has been using the cloud for teaching and research for four years and had given a number of public talks, tutorials, and seminars on cloud computing. His paper presentation “Harnessing the Cloud for Teaching Cybersecurity” at the ACM SIGCSE 2014 conference was well attended and received. A major extension of this paper has been published in IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies. Publication is under review for how to use the cloud for conducting HPC research, and running cloud-based computer networks laboratory exercises. Khaled has been the program chair for IEEE CloudNA 2015 and CloudNA 2016 http://www.ieee-cloudna.org
More on information can be found at: http://www.kustar.ac.ae/pages/dr-khaled-hamed-salah
Tutorial 3: ZigBee Wireless Sensor and Control Network
Organizer: Dr. Ata Elahi, Southern Connecticut State University, USA
Abstract: Applications of Wireless Sensor and Control Networks are growing fast such as automation process, IoT, chemical plants, refineries, and commercial buildings. As a result, the market for wireless sensor and control networks is rapidly expanding. Furthermore, according to a new market research report, it will be a $3.8 billion industry by the year 2017. To accommodate this burgeoning technology, numerous standards are being developed for wireless sensor and control networking such as SP100.11 (Wireless Systems for Automation) by the Industrial Standard for Automation (ISA), Wireless HART (Highway Addressable Remote Transducer) by the HART organization, IPv6 over Low Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) by IETF (the Internet Engineering Task Force) and ZigBee by the ZigBee alliance.
Presenter Biography: Dr. Ata Elahi is a professor of Computer Science at Southern Connecticut State University in the USA. Dr. Elahi received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Mississippi State University in 1982. He is the author of the following textbooks:
- ARM Assembly Language with Hardware Experiments", Springer, 2015
- ZigBee Wireless Sensor and Control Network, published by Prentice Hall, 2010
- Data, Network & Internet Communications Technology, published by Thomson Learning 2006
- Network Communication Technology, published by Delmar Thomson learning 2001
Dr. Elahi has presented tutorials and workshops on ZigBee Technology at several conferences and corporations.