PhD, DePaul University, CTI, Chicago, USA. 2004-now
PhD, Alexandria University, Faculty of Engineering, Dept. of Computer Science and Automatic Control, Alexandria, Egypt. 2003-2004 (transferred)
MSc, Alexandria University, Faculty of Engineering, Dept. of Computer Science and Automatic Control, Alexandria, Egypt. (see publications for the thesis) 2000-2003
BSc, Alexandria University, Faculty of Engineering, Dept. of Computer Science and Automatic Control, Alexandria, Egypt. 1995-2000
Victoria College, Alexandria, Egypt. 1982-1995
General Information:
Born 1977, London UK, to two science-loving parents. Having two brothers +/- 7 years older than I am. Spent my primary/preparatory/secondary education (13 years) in the prestigious Victoria College in Alexandria. Started my studies for engineering in Alexandria University (1995-2000) with Computer Science Major, which is considered the top school in the whole country (and neighbouring countries as well, may be in whole Africa, and the Arab world). Graduate studies started 2000, and ended in 2003 with a Master's by research degree. During this period (2000-...) I have co-founded eSpace, currently a well established software development/provider name in Egypt/Middle East. After the master's degree, I enrolled into the PhD program in Alexandria University, finished two courses, got married, and then stopped as I became too busy with eSpace, and preparing to leave for completing my studies abroad. Started my PhD program at DePaul in Fall 2004-2005, and still here :)
Most of these are mentioned vaguely as I don't have the full right to reveal the exact topics.
Networks:
Covert Communications: (See my blog for informal discussions)
We are investigating ways for unconventional techniques for carrying out communications with high
degree of stealthiness. (Project Home Page (severly under construction!))
Covert Storage:
A new direction. No further information is available at the time being. Shhh!!
Network Analysis:
Analysis of network traffic information via statistical and information theoretic metrics.
Security Devices Optimization:
Optimizing the operations of classifying and filtering packets in Firewalls and IDSs
using pure software technique. Deterministic, and statistically-tuned techniques
are used
Intrusion detection and prevention: Detection on the network level using various techniques
Firewall attacks: Policy discovery, defending the firewall, neutralizing the firewall, ...
Firewall policy behavior: from
writing the policy, interaction between rules on same/different firewalls
to filtering optimization, and high level comprehension of network global
behavior.
Firewall implementation testing: Testing
Firewall implementation from a new point of view. The main application
is to test new implementations or optimizations, neither the correctness
of
filtering algorithms nor the policy itself; but their implementation and applicability of the algorithm implementation to a specific policy.
Peer selection in Peer-to-Peer networks: For optimality of streaming, downloading, and fair pricing models the user should intelligently select the most suitable set of peers that can provide him with the requested media in a reliable and fast way.
Fair Pricing Models for Maintaining QoS: Quality allocation systems need a fair pricing to maintain customer satisfaction and fair pricing independent of network state.
Number Theory:
Recursive Redundancy Sieve: A modification on the old Sieve method for practical implementation.
Parallelizing Some Number Theoretic Algorithms: Like Lucas-Lehmer Test for checking Mersenne Numbers
Cache Oblivious Number Theoretic Algorithms: Many algorithms will gain a huge boost in performance and portability if they were modified to be truly oblivious to cache structure
Personal Interests:
Number
Theory, Cryptography, Information Theory, Evolutionary Computing …
Hazem Hamed, Adel El-Atawy and Ehab Al-Shaer, "On Dynamic Optimization of Packet Matching in High Speed Firewalls", IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC) special issue on High-Speed Network Security: Architecture, Algorithms and Implementations, Vol. 24, No. 10, pp1817-1830, October 2006. [PDF][PS]
Taghrid Samak, Adel El-Atawy, Ehab Al-Shaer, and Mohamed Ismail, "A Novel Visualization Approach for Efficient Network-wide Traffic Monitoring". In the 5th IEEE Workshop on End-to-End Monitoring Techniques and Services (E2EMon'07, In conjunction with IM 2007), Munich, Germany, May 2007.
Adel El-Atawy, Taghrid Samak, Zein Wali, Ehab Al-Shaer, Sheng Li, Frank Lin, and Christopher Pham, "An Automated Framework for Validating Firewall Policy Enforcement", The eighth International Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks (Policy'07), Bologna, Italy, 2007.
Adel El-Atawy,
"Encoding and Analysis Techniques for Policy Optimization, Anomaly Detection and Information Hiding on the Internet",
PhD Proposal, September 2007.
Taghrid Samak, Adel El-Atawy, and Ehab Al-Shaer, "Using Space Filling Curves to Improve Large Scale Network Traffic Visualization", Poster, First Midwest Security Workshop (MSW'06), DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA, May 6th 2006. [PPT]
Adel El-Atawy, Taghrid Samak, Khaled Ibrahim, Hazem Hamed and Ehab Al-Shaer, "Intelligent Testing Framework for Network Security Devices", Poster, First Midwest Security Workshop (MSW'06), DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA, May 6th 2006. [PPT]
Presentations
Adel El-Atawy, Taghrid Samak, Ehab Al-Shaer, "Defending Firewalls under Attack via Early Packet Filtering", Presentation, Fifth Midwest Security Workshop (MSW'08), IUPUI, IN, USA, April 26th 2008. [PPT]
2007
Adel El-Atawy, Taghrid Samak, Ehab Al-Shaer and Hong Li, "On Using Online Traffic Statistical Matching for Optimizing Packet Filtering Performance", INFOCOM 2007, Anchorage, Alaska, USA, May 9th 2007.
Adel El-Atawy, "On Using Online Traffic Statistical Matching for Optimizing Packet Filtering Performance", DePaul University, CTI, MNLAB, Networking Seminar, May 4th, 2007
Adel El-Atawy, Taghrid Samak, Zein Wali, Ehab Al-Shaer, Sheng Li, Frank Lin, and Christopher Pham, "An Automated Framework for Validating Firewall Policy Enforcement", Third Midwest Security Workshop (MSW'07), Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, April 21st 2007
Taghrid Samak, Adel El-Atawy and Ehab Al-Shaer, "Firewall Policy Reconstruction via Active probing: An Attacker's View", Presentation, Second Midwest Security Workshop (MSW'06), UIUC, IL, USA, September 30th 2006. [PPT]
Adel El-Atawy, Hazem Hamed and Ehab Al-Shaer, "Adaptive Statistical Optimization Techniques For Firewall Packet Filtering", Presentation, First Midwest Security Workshop (MSW'06), DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA, May 6th 2006. [PPT]
2005
Adel El-Atawy, "Information Theoretic Analysis", DePaul University, CTI, MNLAB, Networking Seminar, April 22nd, Spring 2005.
Adel El-Atawy, "Optimal Peer Selection for Downloading/Streaming over P2P Networks", DePaul University, CTI, MNLAB, Networking Seminar, March 11th, Winter 2005.[PPT]
ACM Member since 2000
IEEE Member since 2005
UPE Honor Society Member (DePaul Chapter)
ESANA (Egyptian Student Association of North America, DePaul Chapter), President 07/08, Secretary 08/09 ESANA, Executive Committee Member (Science Officer) 2008
In this project, we investigate, design and fully implement a framework where firewalls can be tested. The firewalls are tested using real traffic that is chosen to test the firewall with minimal redundancy. The project involves universal policy representation, policy generation, and independent-packets selection. This work is funded by Cisco, and has resulted in more than one publication (see publications section, and below). The project includes the following main modules:
We developed a grammar that can accommodate, almost all firewall standards.
The grammar is annotated with contextual interpretation in order to support any ACL structure.
Firewall Policy Compilation
A compiler that can digest actual policies, based on the above mentioned grammar.
The intermediate representation is completely homogeneous,
and any changes to the firewall standard will not affect any further modules (not even this module).
Policy Generator
This component is capable of generating policies that follows the grammar provided.
The generation is highly tunable to attain high degree of coverage.
There is no limit on the policy size, thousands over thousands of syntactically and semantically different rules are generated
Risk Analyzer of Policy Interaction Patterns
Responsible for analyzing the policy, and identify points of risk.
Some interactions can be complex for the firewall, and careful analysis is automatically performed to assess the complexity of every area in the addressable packet space.
Smart Packet Selection
Packets are selected that will cover every decision path in the firewall filtering module.
By analyzing the policy, we are able to generate the minium number of packets that will exhaust all the possible cases the firewall might face using the current policy.
Firewall Administration Component
Responsible for communicating with the firewall, and upload the policy, query information, etc.
Adel El-Atawy, Taghrid Samak, Zein Wali, Ehab Al-Shaer, Sheng Li, Frank Lin, and Christopher Pham, "An Automated Framework for Validating Firewall Policy Enforcement", The eighth International Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks (Policy'07), Bologna, Italy, 2007. [PDF]
Adel El-Atawy, Taghrid Samak, Zein Wali, Ehab Al-Shaer, and Sheng Li, "An Automated Framework for Validating Firewall Policy Enforcement", Technical Report, DePaul University, CTI 07-002, March 2007. [PDF][PS]
Adel El-Atawy, Taghrid Samak, Zein Wali, Ehab Al-Shaer, Sheng Li, Frank Lin, and Christopher Pham, "An Automated Framework for Validating Firewall Policy Enforcement", Third Midwest Security Workshop (MSW'07), Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, April 21st 2007
Adel El-Atawy, Khaled Ibrahim, Hazem Hamed and Ehab Al-Shaer, "Policy Segmentation for Intelligent Firewall Testing", First Workshop on Secure Network Protocols (NPSec'05, In conjunction with ICNP 2005), Boston, MA, USA, November 2005. [PS][PDF][HTML](not CR)
The longest project I have been working on. Actually, it started for a short time before my arrival at DePaul. Hazem Hamed had started investigating better structures that exploit the patterns used for
writing policies. We worked together on the first techniques: FV-AT (Field Value-Alphabet Tree), and the FV-SC (Field Value Set Cover). Successful we were: INFOCOM'06, JSAC'06. Later on, I worked with Taghrid Samak on another set of techniques: PS-ST, PS-SL, PBER. The first two were published in INFOCOM'07, and the next is still under preperation and submission.
