Sherif Khattab @ CS.PITT

[Research] [Publications] [Posters] [Presentations] [Teaching] [Courses] [Software] [Links] [Calendar]

6504 Sennott Square Bldg.
Department of Computer Science
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Phone : 412-624-9955
skhattab at cs dot pitt dot edu

CV [PDF]

Sherif Khattab is a Ph.D candidate and research assistant in the NetSec group in the Department of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh. He received a Bachelor's degree in computer engineering from Cairo University in 1998 and an M.Sc. degree in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh in 2004.

Research Advisers: Rami Melhem and Daniel Mossé

Research

My research aims at solving the Denial of Service (DoS) problem by building systems that dodge attacks. Dodging is achieved using clever, unpredicted reconfigurations that facilitate attacker detection and help mitigate attack damage. The main contributions of this research are:

Proactive Server Roaming : proactively changes server locations to escape flooding attacks.
Roaming Honeypots: camouflages honeypots (decoy servers) to trap attackers.
Honeypot Back-propagation: a hop-by-hop traceback that originates at the roaming honeypots.
Honeybees: mitigates jamming attack in wireless sensor networks by combining evasion and replication.
Live Baiting: uses group-testing theory to detect service-level attackers with minimum state overhead.

Publications

Journal Papers

Sherif Khattab, Rami Melhem, Daniel Mosse', and Taieb Znati, ``Honeypot Back-propagation for Mitigating Spoofing Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks '', in Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC) Special Issue on Security in Grid and Distributed Systems, Vol 66(9), p1152-1164, September 2006, Elsevier. (Extended version of SSN’06 paper) [PDF]

C. Sangpachatanaruk, S. M. Khattab, T. Znati, R. Melhem, and D. Mosse', ``Design and Analysis of a Replicated Elusive Server Scheme for Mitigating Denial of Service Attacks'', in Journal of Systems and Software, Vol 73(1), p15-29, September 2004, Elsevier. (Extended version of ANSS'03 paper) [PS]

Conference and Workshop Papers

Sherif Khattab, Daniel Mossé, and Rami Melhem, ``Jamming Mitigation in Multi-Radio Wireless Networks: Reactive or Proactive?,'' to appear in proceedings of SECURECOMM'08 [PDF].

Sherif Khattab, Rami Melhem, and Daniel Mossé, ``Modeling of the Channel-Hopping Anti-Jamming Defense in Multi-Radio Wireless Networks,'' to appear in Proceedings of MOBIQUITOUS'08. [PDF]

Sameh Gobriel, Sherif Khattab, Daniel Mosse', and Rami Melhem, ``GroupBeat: Wireless Networks Made Reliable''. to appear in proceedings of MASS'08 (short paper).

Sherif Khattab, Sameh Gobriel, Rami Melhem, and Daniel Mossé, ``Live Baiting for Service-level DoS Attackers,'' in Proceedings of INFOCOM'08. [PDF]

Sameh Gobriel, Sherif Khattab, Daniel Mossé, Jose’ Brustoloni, and Rami Melhem, ``RideSharing: Fault Tolerant Aggregation in Sensor Networks Using Corrective Actions’’, in Proceedings of the Third Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON’06). [PDF]

José Brustoloni, Sherif Khattab, Christopher Santamaria, Brian Smyth, and Daniel Mossé, ``Integrated Scheduling of Application- and Network-Layer Tasks in Delay-Tolerant MANETs”, to appear in the 49th Annual IEEE GLOBECOM conference (GLOBECOM’06). [PDF]

Sherif Khattab, Daniel Mossé and Rami Melhem, ``Honeybees: Combining Replication and Evasion for Mitigating Base-station Jamming in Sensor Networks'', in Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Real-Time Systems (WPDRTS'06) in conjunction with IPDPS 2006, April, 2006. [PDF]

Sherif Khattab, Rami Melhem, Daniel Mossé, and Taieb Znati, ``Honeypot Back-propagation for Mitigating Spoofing Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks'', in Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Security in Systems and Networks (SSN'06) in conjunction with IPDPS 2006, April, 2006. (Best Paper Award) [PDF]

Sherif M. Khattab, Chatree Sangpachatanaruk, Daniel Mossé, Rami Melhem, and Taieb Znati, ``Roaming Honeypots for Mitigating Service-level Denial-of-Service Attacks'', in Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'04), March 2004. [PS | PDF]

Sherif M. Khattab, Chatree Sangpachatanaruk, Rami Melhem, Daniel Mossé, and Taieb Znati, ``Proactive Server Roaming for Mitigating Denial-of-Service Attacks'', in Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Information Technology: Research and Education (ITRE'03), August 2003. [PS | PDF]

C. Sangpachatanaruk, S. M. Khattab, T. Znati, R. Melhem, and D. Mossé, ``A Simulation Study of the Proactive Server Roaming for Mitigating Denial of Service Attacks'',in Proceedings of the 36th Annual Simulation Symposium 2003 (ANSS'03), March 2003. [PS | PDF]

Technical Reports

Sherif Khattab, Sameh Gobriel, Rami Melhem, and Daniel Mossé, ``Live Baiting for Service-level DoS Attackers'', Technical Report TR-07-152, Department of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh, November 2007. [PDF]

Sherif M. Khattab, Chatree Sangpachatanaruk, Rami Melhem, Daniel Mossé, and Taieb Znati, ``Honeypot Back-propagation for Mitigating Spoofing Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks'', Technical Report TR-04-111, Department of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh, September 2004.[PS | [PDF]

Under Submission

Sameh Gobriel, Sherif Khattab, Daniel Mossé, and Rami Melhem, ``GroupBeat: Wireless Networks Made Reliable''.

Sameh Gobriel, Sherif Khattab, Daniel Mossé, and Rami Melhem, ``On Link Quality Estimation and Fault-Tolerant Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks''.

Sherif M. Khattab, Chatree Sangpachatanaruk, Daniel Mossé, Rami Melhem, and Taieb Znati, ``Roaming Honeypots for Mitigating Service-level Denial-of-Service Attacks'', under journal submission. (Extended version of ICDCS'04 paper) [PDF]

Teaching

@PITT

CS 1541 Introduction to Computer Architecture (Fall 2001)

@Cairo University

Teaching Assistant (1998-2001)
Data Structures, File Structures, Computer Networks, Operating Systems, Computer Architecture, Digital Design, C/C++,
Software Engineering, Database Concepts, and Distributed Databases.

Presentations

Live Baiting for Service-level DoS Attackers (at INFOCOM'08) [PPT]
Integrated Scheduling of Application- and Network-layer Tasks in Delay-Tolerant MANETs (at Globecom'06) [PPT]
Mitigating Base-station Jamming in Sensor Networks (at WPDRTS'06) [PPT]
Security Issues of Wireless Sensor and Ad-hoc Networks [PPT]
The R Project (statistical package) [PPT]
Honeypot Backpropagation: Mitigating Denial-of-Service Attacks (at SSN'06). [PDF]
Temperature-Aware Load Balancing. [PDF]
Mitigating The Blackhole Problem in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks [PPT]
Overview of Content Delivery Networks [PPT]
Roaming Honeypots for Mitigating Denial-of-Service Attacks
Brief Overview [PPT]
Presentation at CERT. [PPT]
PhD Proposal Defense [PPT]
CS Research Competition 2008. [PPT]
CS Research Competition 2007. [PDF]
CS Research Competition 2006. [PDF]
Proactive Server Roaming (at ITRE'03) [PPT]
Trust Management in Wireless Networks (at S-CITI workshop 2005) [PPT]

Coursework

Spring 2006
CS 3150 Randomness and Computation
Fall 2005:
CS 3410 Advanced Topics in Computer Architecture
Spring 2005:
CS 3521 Advanced Topics in Sensing And Ubiquitous Computing
Spring 2004:
TELCOM 2120   Network Performance
TELCOM 2820   Cryptography
CMU 18-173       Network Security
Spring 2003:
CS 2510   Computer Operating Systems
CS 3510   Advanced Topics in Operating Systems
CS 2910   MS Project
Fall 2002:
CS 2520   High Speed Wide Area Networks
CS 3150   Advanced Topics in Design and Analysis of Algorithms
CS 3520   Advanced Topics in Computer Networks
Spring 2002:
CS 2150   Design and Analysis of Algorithms
CS 3530   Advanced Topics in Distributed and Real-Time Systems
CS 2002   Research Experience in Computer Science
                 (with Prof. RamiMelhem in Network Security and Prof. Patchrawat Uthaisombut in Algorithms and Game Theory)
Fall 2001:
CS 2210   Compiler Design
CS 2410   Computer Architecture
CS 2001   Research Topics in Computer Science