Wassim Itani

George Mason University, Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty Member

Beirut Arab University, Electrical and Computer, Faculty Member

University of Houston - Victoria, Computer Science, Faculty Member

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David Seamon

Kansas State University

Kaan Yagmurlu

University of Virginia

Alan Chamberlain

University of Nottingham

Joseph Shalhoub

Imperial College London

Ricardo Montero

Universidad Autónoma de Occidente

Pilar Biel Ibáñez

University of Zaragoza

Bohar Singh

PTU

Ahmed El-Agwany

Alexandria University

Pat Tobin

Dublin Institute of Technology

kiran dcse Gndu

Guru Nanak Dev University Amritsar

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Papers by Wassim Itani

Automated physiological data acquisition in ICU using a novel sensor bed implementation

Ever since it gained prominence IoT has been center stage being used for everything from industri... more Ever since it gained prominence IoT has been center stage being used for everything from industrial and athlete performance monitoring to medical application. With all the push toward miniaturization researchers have yet to produce a device that is both compact and capable of multiple parameter detection for hospital settings. We therefore present in this work an idea of a compact sensor bed capable of monitoring multiple parameters at once per sensor node continuously while enabling security and privacy by maintaining end to end encryption between source and sink. Since, the sensor nodes are battery powered we are also going to display results of the most common ones in use today with a discussion on selecting the best one to extend sensor life.

SPECSA: a scalable, policy-driven, extensible, and customizable security architecture for wireless enterprise applications

IEEE International Conference on Performance, Computing, and Communications, 2004, Feb 22, 2005

This paper presents SPECSA, a new, optimized, policy-driven security architecture for wireless en... more This paper presents SPECSA, a new, optimized, policy-driven security architecture for wireless enterprise applications. SPECSA is scalable, extensible, flexible, and customizable. It supports end-to-end client authentication, data integrity and confidentiality between wireless clients and enterprise servers. The security services provided by SPECSA are customized and controlled by an easily configurable security policy that specifies several security-related attributes, classifies network data

Stride

International Journal of Dependable and Trustworthy Information Systems, 2010

This paper presents STRIDE: a Secure framework for modeling Trust-pRIvacy tradDEoffs in distribut... more This paper presents STRIDE: a Secure framework for modeling Trust-pRIvacy tradDEoffs in distributed computing environments. STRIDE aims at achieving the right privacy-trust tradeoff among distributed systems entities. This is done by establishing a set of secure mechanisms for quantifying the privacy loss and the corresponding trust gain required by a given network transaction. The privacy-trust quantification process allows the service requestor and provider to create the required trust levels necessary for executing the transaction while minimizing the privacy loss incurred. Moreover, STRIDE supports communication anonymity by associating each communicating entity with an administrative group. In this way, the identification information of the communicating entities is anonymously masked by the identification of their respective groups. The confidentiality, authenticity and integrity of data communication are ensured using appropriate cryptographic mechanisms. Moreover, data sent between groups is saved from dissemination by a self-destruction process. STRIDE provides a context-aware model supporting agents with various privacy-trust characteristics and behaviors. The system is implemented on the Java-based Aglets platform.

Wireless Body Sensor Networks

IGI Global eBooks, 2019

In this paper, the authors provide a detailed overview and technical discussion and analysis of t... more In this paper, the authors provide a detailed overview and technical discussion and analysis of the latest research trends in securing body sensor networks. The core of this work aims at: (1) identifying the resource limitations and energy challenges of this category of wireless sensor networks, (2) considering the life-critical applications and emergency contexts that are encompassed by body sensor network services, and (3) studying the effect of these peculiarities on the design and implementation of rigorous and efficient security algorithms and protocols. The survey discusses the main advancements in the design of body sensor network cryptographic services (key generation and management, authentication, confidentiality, integrity, and privacy) and sheds the light on the prominent developments achieved in the field of securing body sensor network data in Cloud computing architectures. The elastic virtualization mechanisms employed in the Cloud, as well as the lucrative computing and storage resources available, makes the integration of body sensor network applications, and Cloud platforms a natural choice that is packed with various security and privacy challenges. The work presented in this paper focuses on Cloud privacy and integrity mechanisms that rely on tamper-proof hardware and energy-efficient cryptographic data structures that are proving to be well-suited for operation in untrusted Cloud environments. This paper also examines two crucial design patterns that lie at the crux of any successful body sensor network deployment which are represented in: (1) attaining the right balance between the degree, complexity, span, and strength of the cryptographic operations employed and the energy resources they consume. (2) Achieving a feasible tradeoff between the privacy of the human subject wearing the body sensor network and the safety of this subject. This is done by a careful analysis of the medical status of the subject and other context-related information to control the degree of disclosure of sensitive medical data. The paper concludes by presenting a practical overview of the cryptographic support in the main body sensor network development frameworks such and TinyOS and SPINE and introduces a set of generalized guideline patterns and recommendations for designing and implementing cryptographic protocols in body sensor network environments.

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Petra

Security-Aware Node Replacements and Incremental Updates in Industrial IoT Platforms

GLOBECOM 2022 - 2022 IEEE Global Communications Conference

Mitigating Rogue Node Attacks in Edge Computing

2019 2nd IEEE Middle East and North Africa COMMunications Conference (MENACOMM)

In this work, we present a secure authentication protocol for edge computing using the Software-D... more In this work, we present a secure authentication protocol for edge computing using the Software-Defined Networking platform and wireless network virtualization. The main contribution of the presented protocol lies in: (1) designing and implementing a practical solution to the security problem of rogue Fog nodes, and (2) providing the cloud service provider with exclusive control over the security configuration and specification of its leased virtual networks independent of the security mechanisms implemented by the underlying infrastructure provider. The cloud provider dynamically enforces its security policies on the communication at the network edge, therefore circumventing any possible security vulnerabilities in the underlying physical wireless infrastructure. The authentication protocol manages the trusted communication among the mobile client, the infrastructure provider, and the cloud service provider, yet confines the Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) deployment to solely the infrastructure and cloud providers. This enhances the scalability of the system and reduces the complexity of its security management and configuration. A system testbed is simulated using the Mininet emulator and the Amazon EC2 Cloud.

Nodeguard: A Virtualized Introspection Security Approach for the Modern Cloud Data Center

2022 22nd IEEE International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid)

Privacy-Aware Job Submission in the Cloud

2019 2nd IEEE Middle East and North Africa COMMunications Conference (MENACOMM), 2019

The services offered by cloud computing are provided to individuals and organizations by varied s... more The services offered by cloud computing are provided to individuals and organizations by varied shared resources which are forming the hardware layer of cloud data centers. Cloud users do not deal or interact directly with those resources, instead, they deal with the virtualized version of them, in other words, users deal with the virtualization layer which conceals to a great extent the specifics of the physical hardware layer. Based on the virtualization concept, more than one virtual machine can be co-hosted on the same physical machine. In spite of the wide range of benefits, co-hosting virtual machines on the same host comes with privacy and security threats. From one side, cloud providers are serving the virtual machines without being aware of their contents. On the other side, once cloud users submit their jobs to be serviced in the cloud, they lose their control on their jobs’ sensitive information. Thus, cloud users’ hesitation from moving to the cloud is logical since their sensitive jobs’ content leakage or misuse is possible, especially when cloud services are not designed with privacy considerations. This paper proposes an approach to make the jobs with sensitive information more secure when submitted to the cloud environment. The core idea of the approach is to request the inclusion of the privacy specification of a set of one or more provider services in the Service Level Agreement contract.

Paving the Way for Energy Efficient Cloud Data Centers: A Type-Aware Virtual Machine Placement Strategy

2017 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E), 2017

The rapid revolution of cloud computing model is accompanied by huge amounts of energy consumed b... more The rapid revolution of cloud computing model is accompanied by huge amounts of energy consumed by the cloud data centers. So, enhancing the energy efficiency of those data centers has become a major challenge. This paper tackles the problem of enhancing the energy consumption of cloud data centers by proposing a novel virtual machine placement strategy. The proposed strategy suits both static and dynamic placement process. It aims to better utilize the involved physical machines which host the virtual machines. As different types of jobs do not intensively use the compute and/or non-compute resources in the hosted physical machine, virtual machines allocated to the jobs of different types are placed on the same physical machine where possible. The paper presents a mathematical formulation of the virtual machine placement process based on the Multiple Choice Knapsack Problem which is a generalization of the classical Knapsack Problem. The performance evaluation of the proposed strategy shows that it can enhance the energy efficiency of the cloud data centers by trying to minimize the number of the involved physical machines which host the virtual machines, and by optimally utilizing the involved physical machines.

STCCS: Segmented Time Controlled Count-Min Sketch

2020 ITU Kaleidoscope: Industry-Driven Digital Transformation (ITU K), 2020

IoT is a concept consisting of many components powered by different techniques and technologies. ... more IoT is a concept consisting of many components powered by different techniques and technologies. However, due to computation restrictions, encryption algorithms had to be adapted, often at the expense of lower data security levels and strength. To maintain data privacy between source and sink we present in this paper a data sketching algorithm that utilizes bandwidth by providing a summary of the data to the cloud. The input data stream goes through a hashing algorithm which produces a hexadecimal representation of the data before going through the sketching algorithm. At the algorithm the data is categorized and the corresponding hash cell value updated. Note is also taken of the arrival time of the data considered anomalous to allow the manager to take corrective action if it is deduced that the periodic appearance of the information is successive in nature.

Power management in virtualized data centers: state of the art

Journal of Cloud Computing, 2016

Cloud computing is an emerging technology in the field of computing that provides access to a wid... more Cloud computing is an emerging technology in the field of computing that provides access to a wide range of shared resources. The rapid growth of cloud computing has led to establishing numerous data centers around the world. As data centers consume huge amounts of power, enhancing their power efficiency has become a major challenge in cloud computing. This paper surveys previous studies and researches that aimed to improve power efficiency of virtualized data centers. This survey is a valuable guide for researchers in the field of power efficiency in virtualized data centers following the cloud computing model.

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Smart GIS-based organ and blood donation system

2021 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC), 2021

The advancement in medical technology lead to the controlled monitoring of patients in recovery o... more The advancement in medical technology lead to the controlled monitoring of patients in recovery or at home even for patients with dementia. With all this progress the procedure for selecting viable donors remains for the most part unchanged. As such we present in this paper our idea which we will discuss in detail. The donor and patient will be filtered on a set of parameters before being listed as candidates. Rather than wasting time looking for potential matches, donors' locations are tracked and select candidates will be contacted with the patient details.

Bio-mimetic approach in digital artificial neuro-science

2016 3rd International Conference on Advances in Computational Tools for Engineering Applications (ACTEA), 2016

This paper presents a new field of artificial neuro-science, providing a group of mathematical re... more This paper presents a new field of artificial neuro-science, providing a group of mathematical relations and functional algorithms used to operate and improve Digital Artificial Neural Network models. It introduces all the main properties and characteristics of the digital artificial neurons by providing a modern platform of design and implementation of these intelligent artificial organisms. The modern digital design is initialized by a reservation of memory registers to hold the inputs, outputs and weights. A sequence of binary equivalence comparison operations of the inputs and weights is executed to deliver the required outputs as declared. This novel process provides a mere design and learning road-map to the designer, leading to a massive practice in artificial neural networks.

Advanced Biomimetic Cells Architecture for Parallel Operations in Artificial Intelligence

2019 Fourth International Conference on Advances in Computational Tools for Engineering Applications (ACTEA), 2019

Am Anfang der Konzeption des Studienganges "Applied History" stand eine &ewisse Frustration über ... more Am Anfang der Konzeption des Studienganges "Applied History" stand eine &ewisse Frustration über die öffentliche Wahrnehmung unseres Faches -und dessen Realmanen darauf. Einige subjektive Beobachtungen zu diese m Thema müssen vorausgeschickt werden. . . "Geschichte" findet weitgehend in zwei voneinander getrennten DIskursenstatt. Der e1l1e 1st der akademische Fachdiskurs, jener der nationalen und internationalen SClentlfic communltles; hier geht es -w ie in jeder ordentlichen Wissenschaft -~ornehmlich um Spezialfragen; geschneben und geredet w ird in einer Sprache, die Vielleicht 111cht ganz so hermetisch Ist wie etwa d~e der Lin guisten, der Soziologe n oder der Physiker, aber doch häufig eher den Ausschluss als die Inte<>rati on einer breiteren Offentlichkeit zum Ziel zu haben schell1t. Den eUlen mag es emfach nich~ liegen, sich öffentlich zu produzi~ren, die anderen bet reiben "Grundlagenforschung" oder bearbeiten F ragen , die für eine große Offentlichkeit tatsächlIch unll1teressant smd, obwohl der Fachmann oder die Fachfrau ihnen ihre Bedeutung nicht absp rechen wird. Weit jenseits der Räume, in denen die meisten professionellen Historikerinnen und Historiker wohnen, treibt "Geschichte" unbekümm ert Ihr Wesen. In der offenthchen Sphare zeIgt sie sich als vielfältiges, irisierend es Gebilde. Historische Romane, Filme -mal: denke allem an die Renaissance der "Sandalenfilme" -und histo' rische Ausstellungen finden em großes PublIkum (was, zumindest, Indiz ist für das Interesse, das dem Ge g. enstand entgegeng.ebracht wird); historische The men we rden med ial aufbereitet, häufig -und mcht ell1mal zu ungunstlgen Sendezenen _ von den großen TV-S tationen ausgestrahlt oder von Zeitungen und Magazinen publiziert. Geschätzt wird die Erzählung von vergangenen Dll1gen vo n b renen Kreisen offensIchtlich vor alle m als unterhaltsames Spektakel. Geschichte macht Spaß, sie ist interessant .. Die Beschäftigung mit historischen Themen entspannt, man kann sich -: wie beim Golf spIelen ode r einem guten G las Wein -beim G espräch üb er d ie Vergangenheit von den Muhen ell1es sehr <>ege nwä rtigen Alltags erholen. Dazu ma<> ein breit gefächertes Spektrum weitere r Moti-

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Job Classification in Cloud Computing: The Classification Effects on Energy Efficiency

2015 IEEE/ACM 8th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC), 2015

One of the recent and major challenges in cloud computing is to enhance the energy efficiency in ... more One of the recent and major challenges in cloud computing is to enhance the energy efficiency in cloud data centers. Such enhancements can be done by improving the resource allocation and management algorithms. In this paper, a model that identifies common patterns for the jobs submitted to the cloud is proposed. This model is able to predict the type of the job submitted, and accordingly, the set of users' jobs is classified into four subsets. Each subset contains jobs that have similar requirements. In addition to the jobs' common pattern and requirements, the users' history is considered in the jobs' type prediction model. The goal of job classification is to find a way to propose useful strategy that helps improve energy efficiency. Following the process of jobs' classification, the best fit virtual machine is allocated to each job. Then, the virtual machines are placed to the physical machines according to a novel strategy called Mixed Type Placement strategy. The core idea of the proposed strategy is to place virtual machines of the jobs of different types in the same physical machine whenever possible, based on Knapsack Problem. This is because different types of jobs do not intensively use the same compute or storage resources in the physical machine. This strategy reduces the number of active physical machines which leads to major reduction in the total energy consumption in the data center. A simulation of the results shows that the presented strategy outperforms both Genetic Algorithm and Round Robin from an energy efficiency perspective.

Biomimetic Cells: A New Frontier in Brain Informatics

2018 IEEE International Multidisciplinary Conference on Engineering Technology (IMCET), 2018

This paper introduces a new imitation of neurons cells, based on the latest discoveries in neuros... more This paper introduces a new imitation of neurons cells, based on the latest discoveries in neuroscience. After reobserving the latest revelations in the field of biological neurons, the conventional artificial models has proven strong potentials in image processing and pattern classification, but remains far from presenting a modern imitation of natural intelligent organisms. A Biomimetic cell design is thus proposed with a combination of registers to hold the inputs, outputs, and weights as information codes. These cells use binary equivalence gates to compare the inputs to the weights and deliver the required outputs. The abstraction model provided renders the training process highly simplistic, which speeds up the design phase and opens the way towards a new dimension in artificial intelligence.

Enags

Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Internet of things, Data and Cloud Computing, 2017

Cloud computing plays a significant role in today's network computing by delivering virtualiz... more Cloud computing plays a significant role in today's network computing by delivering virtualized resources as pay-as-you-go services over the Internet. However, the growing demand drastically increases the energy consumption of data centers, which has become a prominent problem. Hence, energy efficient solutions are required to minimize system power consumption and increase the availability of computational resources and obviously reduce the operational expenses. In this paper we present ENAGS (Energy and Network-Aware Genetic Scheduling algorithm) to minimize the energy consumption of servers and reduce the network traffic. The proposed algorithm takes into account communication dependencies among VMs and computational requirements of tasks to improve communication performance and minimize the energy consumption by maximizing the resource utilization. Our experimental results show that the proposed ENAGS algorithm can reduce data center energy consumption as well as network traffic by approximately 38% compared to other placement algorithms.

Virtualized network views for localizing misbehaving sources in SDN data planes

2017 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), 2017

In this paper, we present VISKA, a Cloud security service for detecting malicious switching eleme... more In this paper, we present VISKA, a Cloud security service for detecting malicious switching elements in software defined networking (SDN) environments. VISKA leverages network virtualization and secure probabilistic sketching to isolate misbehaving switches in the underlying SDN network data plane. The main contribution lies in utilizing network virtualization in SDN environments to dynamically isolate parts of the data plane and check their forwarding behavior. This is achieved by applying a set of focused packet probing and sketching mechanisms on virtualized network views mapped to these data plane partitions instead of focusing the security mechanisms on the whole physical network. VISKA flexibly analyzes the network behavior of the granular virtual views and recursively partitions these views to reduce the problem size in order to localize abnormal/malicious network switching units. A test bed prototype implementation is realized on the OpenVirtex SDN network virtualization platform. The experimental analysis corroborated the algorithm's convergence property using the linear and FatTree topologies with SDN network sizes of up to 250 switching units.

Job Submission in the Cloud : Energy Aware Approaches

Cloud computing model offers various types of services. These services are delivered by providing... more Cloud computing model offers various types of services. These services are delivered by providing an access to a wide range of shared resources which are hosted in cloud data centers. Data centers consume large amounts of energy. One of the recent challenges in this model is to enhance the energy efficiency in these data centers. This paper tackles the problem of enhancing the energy consumption of cloud data centers by proposing three energy aware approaches. Each approach includes its innovative job classification model and its novel VM placement strategy. The job classification model classifies cloud users' jobs before serving these jobs. The model identifies common patterns for the submitted jobs and predicts their types, and accordingly, the set of users' jobs is classified into subsets. Each subset contains jobs that have similar requirements. The goal of job classification is to find a way to propose a useful strategy that helps improve energy efficiency. Based on the process of jobs' classification, the best fit virtual machine is allocated to each job. Then, the VM placement strategy place the VM on a selected physical machine. The goal of the proposed placement strategy is to better utilize the involved physical machines which serve the users' jobs. As different types of jobs do not intensively use the compute and/or non-compute resources in the hosted physical machine, virtual machines allocated to the jobs of different types are placed on the same physical machine where possible. The placement process is based on a Multiple Choice Knapsack Problem which is a generalization of the classical Knapsack Problem. The proposed approaches enhance the energy efficiency of the cloud data centers by minimizing the number of the involved physical machines which serve the jobs, and by optimally utilizing the involved physical machines. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches and compare which is better, the CloudSim simulator is used with a real workload trace to simulate the cloud computing environment.

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Automated physiological data acquisition in ICU using a novel sensor bed implementation

SPECSA: a scalable, policy-driven, extensible, and customizable security architecture for wireless enterprise applications

IEEE International Conference on Performance, Computing, and Communications, 2004, Feb 22, 2005

Stride

International Journal of Dependable and Trustworthy Information Systems, 2010

Wireless Body Sensor Networks

IGI Global eBooks, 2019

Download

Petra

Security-Aware Node Replacements and Incremental Updates in Industrial IoT Platforms

GLOBECOM 2022 - 2022 IEEE Global Communications Conference

Mitigating Rogue Node Attacks in Edge Computing

2019 2nd IEEE Middle East and North Africa COMMunications Conference (MENACOMM)

Nodeguard: A Virtualized Introspection Security Approach for the Modern Cloud Data Center

2022 22nd IEEE International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid)

Privacy-Aware Job Submission in the Cloud

2019 2nd IEEE Middle East and North Africa COMMunications Conference (MENACOMM), 2019

Paving the Way for Energy Efficient Cloud Data Centers: A Type-Aware Virtual Machine Placement Strategy

2017 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E), 2017

STCCS: Segmented Time Controlled Count-Min Sketch

2020 ITU Kaleidoscope: Industry-Driven Digital Transformation (ITU K), 2020

Power management in virtualized data centers: state of the art

Journal of Cloud Computing, 2016

Download

Smart GIS-based organ and blood donation system

2021 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC), 2021

Bio-mimetic approach in digital artificial neuro-science

2016 3rd International Conference on Advances in Computational Tools for Engineering Applications (ACTEA), 2016

Advanced Biomimetic Cells Architecture for Parallel Operations in Artificial Intelligence

2019 Fourth International Conference on Advances in Computational Tools for Engineering Applications (ACTEA), 2019

Download

Job Classification in Cloud Computing: The Classification Effects on Energy Efficiency

2015 IEEE/ACM 8th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC), 2015

Biomimetic Cells: A New Frontier in Brain Informatics

2018 IEEE International Multidisciplinary Conference on Engineering Technology (IMCET), 2018

Enags

Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Internet of things, Data and Cloud Computing, 2017

Virtualized network views for localizing misbehaving sources in SDN data planes

2017 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), 2017

Job Submission in the Cloud : Energy Aware Approaches

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Wassim Itani

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