Author: wilsonbj

Ragib Hasan, Ph.D., director of the UAB’s Secure and Trustworthy computing lab, is featured in Inc.’s story, Digital Forensics: A Billion-Dollar Market in the Making. Hasan talks about the challenges facing data detectives and the ways technology can assist law-enforcement, help secure corporate, military and national institutions and protect the food and medicine supply chain.

Hasan is particularly interested in cloud computing, which has not been adopted widely by industries that require a high level of security — such as health care and defense — because the technology cannot be held accountable and does not comply with data-protection regulations. Hasan is working to change that by finding ways to leverage provenance — the history of data, applications and cloud state — as a first-class property of clouds.

His SECRETLab is a part of UAB’s Center for Information Assurance and Joint Forensics Research, a multidisciplinary research center created by the Department of Computer and Information Sciences and the Department of Justice Sciences.

Read the Inc. story online.

Title: `Who, When, and Where?’ Location Proof Assertion for Mobile Devices

Authors: Rasib Khan, Shams Zawoad, Md Munirul Haque and Ragib Hasan

Venue: DBSEC 2014 Vienna, Austria, July 14-16, 2014.

Title: “SecP2PSIP: A Distributed Overlay Architecture for Secure P2PSIP”

Authors: Rasib Khan and Ragib Hasan,

Venue: The 3rd ASE International Conference on Cyber Security 2014, Stanford. CA, USA, May  27-31, 2014.

Amit Dutta has been awarded as the recipient of the College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Graduate Student (Masters) in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences.

Dr. Ragib Hasan, Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Sciences, and the founder of UAB SECRETLab, has been awarded a 2014 NSF CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

The NSF CAREER Award is the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award. It supports junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the missions of their organizations. Selection for the award is based on two criteria: innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and community service demonstrated through scientific leadership, education or community outreach.

Dr. Hasan has received the CAREER award for his proposal “CAREER: Secure and Trustworthy Provenance for Accountable Clouds”, CNS-1351038.

The $485,000 award will support two graduate students for the next 5 years.

Media Coverage:

UAB News1: Four UAB assistant professors recognized by the National Science Foundation

UAB News2: Hasan to make cloud computing more secure

Three papers from SECRETLab got accepted in IEEE Cloud 2014.

1. Shahid Noor, Md. Haque, and Ragib Hasan, “CellCloud: A Novel Cost Effective Formation of Mobile Cloud Based on Bidding Incentives”, To appear at the 7th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, June 27 – July 2, 2014, Alaska, USA.

2. Shams Zawoad, Md. Haque, Ragib Hasan, and Gary Warner, “CURLA: Cloud-Based Spam URL Analyzer for Very Large Datasets“, To appear at the 7th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, June 27 – July 2, 2014, Alaska, USA.

3. Abu Awal Md Shoeb, Ragib Hasan, Md. Haque, and Meng Hu,  ”A Comparative Study on I/O Performance between Compute and Storage Optimized Instances of Amazon EC2″. In Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (IEEE Cloud), Work in Progress Track, June 27 – July 2, 2014, Alaska, USA.

Md Munirul Haque, Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed, Ferdaus Kawsar, Md Adibuzzaman, Md Miftah Uddin, Richard Love, Ragib Hasan, Rumana Dowla, and Reza Salim, “Barriers for Breast Cancer (BC) Patients in Rural Bangladesh: Design and Deployment of a Mobile based Solution” in Proceedings of the 20th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2014), August 7 – 10, Savannah, Georgia.

Abstract: Here, we present the findings of our field study conducted on 39 breast cancer patients in rural Bangladesh. Lack of motivation to go to health centers on patients’ side due to financial, social and transportation hazards result in inadequate data for proper assessment. In this scenario a mobile phone based remote symptom monitoring system (RSMS) with inspirational videos can serve the purpose of both patients and doctors. Based on the results of extensive field studies we have designed, developed and deployed e-ESAS – the first mobile based RSMS for rural context. Along with the detail need assessment of such a system, we describe the evolution of e-ESAS and the deployment results. The findings show how e-ESAS addresses several challenges faced by patients and doctors, and positively impact their lives.

Rasib Khan, Shams Zawoad, Md. Haque, and Ragib Hasan, “OTIT: Towards Secure Provenance Modeling for Location Proofs“, in Proceedings of the 9th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS), Kyoto, Japan, June 2014.

Our work on Secure Location Provenance has been accepted at the 9th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS), Kyoto, Japan, June 2014.

Abstract : Personal mobile devices and location based services are gaining popularity every day. Since the location based services are often customized based on the location information, it is important to securely generate, preserve, and validate the claim of presence at a given location at a given time as well as location provenance – the history of locations for a mobile device user over a given time period. Location provenance needs to imply secure and chronological ordering of location proofs, which can be successfully verified at a later time. Otherwise, the location based services can be easily spoofed by falsified location history. In this paper, we present OTIT – a model for designing secure location provenance. We formalized the features and characteristics for the domain of secure location provenance schemes, using formal propositional logic and logical proofs. We also present several schemes which can be used in various modes to provide secure location provenance services. Based on the characteristics defined in OTIT, we have analyzed different schemes to show their adherence to the desired features of secure location provenance. Furthermore, we present experimental results on the performance of the various schemes, in terms of time and storage, to show a comparative applicability analysis. We posit that OTIT will serve as a comprehensive benchmark framework to evaluate the models for secure location provenance.

A poster on “Interaction Provenance Model for Unified Authentication Factors in Service Oriented Computing” by Dr. Ragib Hasan and Rasib Khan has been accepted at the Fourth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (ACM CODASPY) 2014.

Article on Flooding Attack Protection Architecture in Clouds accepted at the International Journal of Cloud Computing 2014.