Center for Configuration Analytics and Automation

Distinguished Career Professor @  Carnegie Mellon University

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Information Network Institute and Faculty Member of CyLab,
College of Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University  
Office:Pittsburgh, INI Building, Office# 125
Office Phone: (412) 268-7899 (Office)
Email: <MyFirstNanem>@cmu.edu
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                                                7,200 downloads since 2013               4,700 downloads since 2014           4100 downloads sicne 2016                   8100 downloads sicne 2019 ​
Teaching
Research
Publications
Contributions
​Projects & Tools
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Professional Services
Students & Supervision
Biography: Dr. Al-Shaer is a Distinguished Career Professor at INI and Faculty Member of CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Al-Shaer has more than two decades as a researcher and educators in the field of Cybersecurity. Prior joining CMU, Dr.  Al-Shaer was Professor and the Founding Director of CyberDNA and NSF Cybersecurity Analytics and Automation  (CCAA) centers in the University of North Carolina Charlotte from 2009-2020.
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His area of research expertise includes (1) formal methods for security configuration verification, synthesis and hardening of enterprise, SDN, IoT and smart grid systems, (2) adaptive & automated cyber defense, (3) cyber and cyber-psychical resilience,
(4) data-driven cybersecurity analytics, and (5) cyber agility for attack deterrence and deception. Dr. Al-Shaer has edited/co-edited more than 9 books and book chapters, published more than 200 refereed journals and conferences papers in his area, and graduated more than 15 PhD students, who are working as tenure/tenure-track professors in academic institutions and researchers in industry lab.

He was designated by the Department of Defense (DoD) as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) on security analytics and automation in 2011, and he was awarded the IBM Faculty Award in 2012, and UNC Charlotte Faculty Research Award in 2013.  During his academic career, Prof. Al-Shaer received more than $20M research funding from government agencies including NSF, NSA, DARPA, ARO, ARL, AFRL, ONR, and industry including IBM, Cisco, Intel, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, BB&T, DTCC, Duke Energy, CIS, RTI, and others.

Dr. Al-Shaer was the ARO Autonomous Cyber Deception Workshop in 2018, General Chair of ACM Computer and Communication in 2009 and 2010, NSF Workshop in Assurable and Usable Security Configuration in 2008. Dr. Al-Shaer was also the Program Committee Chair for many conferences and workshops including ACM/IEEE SafeConfig 2013 and 2015, IEEE Integrated Management (IM) 2007, IEEE POLICY 2008. Al-Shaer has two accepted patents and several submitted ones. He also has lead several technology transfer projects. He is also an advisory board member for leading companies in cybersecurity automation. 

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Education: Ph.D. Computer Science; Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA (1998), Master of Science in Computer Science from Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA (1993), and BSc in Computer Engineering from KFUPM, Saudi Arabia in (1990). 

Honors and Recognition
  • Featured as DoD Subject Matter Expert in the area of Cybersecurity Configuration Analytics and Automation in DoD Information Assurance Newsletter, October 2011.
  • Received IBM Research Faculty Award, 2013.
  • Awarded the Faculty Research University Award at UNC Charlotte in 2014.
  • Received ACM and IEEE Distinguished Service Professional Awards in 2009, 2010.
  • Featured Old Dominion University Distinguished Alumni Award in 2003
  • NASA scholarship award (during my PhD) in 1995-1998.
Accomplishments Highlights
  • Published 9 books and more than 200 referred publications many of which well-cited research work in data-driven and formal-driven cybersecurity, 3 patents and many technology transfer projects.
  • Establishing, and directing  the NSF Industry/University Collaborative Research Center on Cybersecurity Analytics and Automation (CCAA and Center of Cyber Defense and Network Assurability (CyberDNA) .
  • Funding: Awarded, as a PI or Co-PI, ~ $17,821,000 of research funding of which he was the lead/solely PI for ~$8,100,000.
  • Three Patents & number of Technology Transfers projects: AFRL (IP Mutation), Cisco (INSPEC), Intel (Firewall Policy Advisor), Duke Energy (Threat Analyzer),  RSA booth# 
    Graduated 11 PhD students; 6 of them are tenure-track professors, and 5 are in the industry

Selected Publications  (samples from our work)
  1. Ashiqur Rahman and Ehab Al-Shaer, Automated Synthesis of Distributed Network Access Controls: A Formal Framework with Refinement, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDC), Issue 99, June 2017.
  2. Ashiqur Rahman, M. Hossein Manshaei, Ehab Al-Shaer, M. Shehab, Secure and Private Data Aggregation for Energy Consumption Scheduling in Smart Grids. IEEE Transaction of Dependable Secure Computing (TDSC). 14 (2): 221-234, 2017.
  3. Muhammad Qasim Ali, Ehab Al-Shaer, Randomization-Based Intrusion Detection System for Advanced Metering Infrastructure. ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC), 18(2): 7 (2015).
  4. Qi Duan, Jafar Haadi Jafarian and Ehab Al-Shaer, An Effective Address Mutation Approach for Disrupting Reconnaissance Attacks, IEEE Transactions on Forensics and Security (TIFFS), Issue: 12, December 2015.
  5. Qi Duan, Ehab Al-Shaer, Adel Atawy, A Novel Class of Robust Covert Channels Using  Out-of-order Packets, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 14(2):116-129, June 2015.
  6. Muhammad Qasim Ali, Ehab Al-Shaer, Hassan Khan and Syed Ali Khayam, “Automated Anomaly Detector Adaptation using Adaptive Threshold Tuning”, ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC), Volume 15 Issue 4, pp. 17:1--17:30, April 2013.
  7. Qi Duan and Ehab Al-Shaer, Traffic-Aware Dynamic Firewall Policy Management: Techniques and Applications, IEEE Communications Magazine, Volume: 51, Number: 7, July 2013
  8. Ehab Al-Shaer, Adel El-Atawy and Taghrid Samak, Automated Pseudo-live Testing of Firewall Configuration Enforcement, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), Issue: 3, Volume: 27, April 2009. 
  9. Hazem Hamed, Adel El-Atawy and Ehab Al-Shaer, On Dynamic Optimization of Packet Matching in High Speed Firewalls. In IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol. 24, Issue 10, Oct. 2006 Pages: 1817 - 1830.
  10. Ehab Al-Shaer, Albert G. Greenberg, Charles R. Kalmanek, David A. Maltz, T. S. Eugene Ng and Geoffrey G. Xie, New Frontiers in Internet Network Management, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Issue: 5, Number: 39, Pages: 37-39, July 2009.
  11. Ehab Al-Shaer and Hazem Hamed, “Taxonomy of Conflicts in Network Security Policies.” In IEEE Communications Magazine, Volume 44, Issue 3, March 2006 Pages: 134 - 141
  12. Ghaith Husari, Ehab Al-Shaer, Mohiuddin Ahmed, Bei-Tseng Chu, Xi Niu, “TTPDrill: Automatic And Accurate Extraction of Threat Actions From Unstructured Text of CTI Sources”, Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) 2017
  13. Jafar Haadi Jafarian, Amirreza Niakanlahiji, Ehab Al-Shaer, Qi Duan, “Multi-dimensional Host Identity Anonymization for Defeating Skilled Attackers, “MTD '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Workshop on Moving Target Defense (MTD '16), October 2016.
  14. Haadi Jafarian, Qi Duan and Ehab Al-Shaer, “Adversary-aware IP Address Randomization for Proactive Agility against Sophisticated Attackers”, IEEE INFOCOM 2015 (19% acceptance rate).
  15. Fida Gilani, Ehab Al-Shaer, Samantha Lo, Qi Duan, Mostafa Ammar and Ellen W. Zegura, Agile Virtualized Infrastructure to Proactively Defend Against Cyber Attacks, IEEE INFOCOM 2015.
  16. Muhammad Qasim Ali and Ehab Al-Shaer, Configuration-based IDS for Advanced Metering Infrastructure, ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’13), November 2013.
  17. Jafar Haadi Jafarian, Ehab Al-Shaer and Qi Duan, Formal Approach for Route Agility Against Persistent Attackers, The 18th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS’13), UK, September 2013 (acceptance rate 15%).
  18. Mohammad Ashiqur Rahman and Ehab Al-Shaer, A Formal Framework for Network Security Design Synthesis, In the 33rd IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS’13), July 2013 (Acceptance rate 12%).
  19. Mohammad Rahman and Ehab Al-Shaer, ConfigSynth: A Formal Framework for Optimal Network Security Design, NDSS 2013 (Short).
  20. Mohammad Ashiqur Rahman, Ehab Al-Shaer and Rajesh G. Kavasseri, Impact Analysis of Topology Poisoning Attacks on Economic Operation of the Smart Power Grid, The 34th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS’14), July 2014 (12% acceptance rate)
  21. Mohammad Ashiqur Rahman and Ehab Al-Shaer, “Formal Analysis for Dependable Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition in Smart Grids”, IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN’16), June 2016.
  22. Mohammad Ashiqur Rahman, Ehab Al-Shaer and Rajesh G. Kavasseri, Security Threat Analytics and Countermeasure Synthesis for Power System State Estimation, The 44th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN’14), June 2014 (20% acceptance rate)
  23. Mohammad Rahman, Ehab Al-Shaer and Rajesh Kavasseri, Formal Model of the Impact of Stealthy Attacks on Optimal Power Flow in Power Grids, ACM International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS’14), 2014.
  24. Ashiq Rahman, Ehab Al-Shaer, Bera Padmalochan, SmartAnalyzer: A Noninvasive Security Threat Analyzer for AMI Smart Grid, IEEE INFOCOM 2012, March 2012. (Acceptance rate 17%)
  25. Adel El-Atawy, Ehab Al-Shaer, Tung Tran and Raouf Boutaba, Adaptive Early Packet Filtering for Protecting Firewalls against DoS Attacks, IEEE INFOCOM 2009, April 2009 (19% acceptance rate).
  26. Adel El-Atawy and Ehab Al-Shaer, Building Covert Channels over the Packet Reordering Phenomenon, IEEE INFOCOM 2009, Brazil, April 2009 (19% acceptance rate).
  27. Ehab Al-Shaer, Will Marrero, Adel El-Atawy and Khalid Al-Badawi, “Network Security Configuration in A Box: End-to-End Security Configuration Verification “, IEEE International Conference in Network Protocols (ICNP’ 09), October, 2009 (18% acceptance rate).
  28. Adel El-Atawy, Taghrid Samak, Ehab Al-Shaer, and Hong Li "On Using Online Traffic Statistical Matching for Optimizing Packet Filtering Performance", In IEEE INFOCOM'2007, May 2007 (Acceptance rate 17%)
  29. Yonghe Yan, Adel El-Atawy and Ehab Al-Shaer "Ranking-based Optimal Resource Allocation in Peer-to-Peer Networks", In IEEE INFOCOM'2007, May 2007 (Acceptance rate 17%)
  30. Hazem Hamed, Adel El-Atawy and Ehab Al-Shaer, “Adaptive Statistical Optimization Techniques for Firewall Packet Filtering.” In IEEE INFOCOM'2006, April 2006. (Acceptance rate 16%)
  31. Ehab Al-Shaer and Hazem Hamed, “Anomaly Discovery in Distributed Firewalls”, IEEE INFOCOM 2004, Honk Kong, March 2004 (Acceptance rate 16 %)