Research Interests:

My broad research interests lie at the intersection of the security, and distributed systems. I am mostly interested in designing secure and fault tolerant distributed systems. My academic advisor is Dr. Adam J. Lee , and I am co-adviced by Dr. Daniel Mosse . We have previously worked together in developing security protocols for in-network data aggregation in wireless sensor networks. Currently
we are working in for DARPA F6 project. Check below for projects details.  

My previous research work (before joining CS Dept, Univ of Pitt) involved developing new stream cipher called MANAGE1 for data  encryption over CDMA wireless networks.  I have two publications and an  M.Sc. thesis as an outcome of this work.

  Recent Publications:

Marian K. Iskander, Adam J. Lee, and Daniel Mosse', "Confidentiality-Preserving and Fault-Tolerant In-Network Aggregation for Collaborative WSNs", in Proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing (CollaborateCom), October 2012.	(pdf)
Marian K. Iskander, Dave W. Wilkinson, Adam J. Lee, and Panos K.Chrysanthis, "Enforcing Policy and Data Consistency of Cloud Transactions", in Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Security and Privacy in Cloud Computing (ICDCS-SPCC), June 2011.	(pdf) (ppt)
Marian K. Iskander, Adam J. Lee, and Daniel Mosse', "Privacy and Robustness for Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks", ACM CCS 2010, Poster Session, October 2010	(pdf)
Brian Wongchaowart, Marian K. Iskander, and Sangyeun Cho, "A Content-Aware Block Placement Algorithm for Reducing PRAM Storage Bit Writes", in proceedings of 26th IEEE Symposium on Massive Storage Systems and Technologies, May 2010	(pdf) (ppt)
Marian K. Iskander, Nabil Hamdy, Tarek A. El Megeed, Ahmed M. Hamad, "MANAGE1: New Stream Cipher for Data Encryption in CDMA Wireless Networks", in proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Engineering Systems, ICCES'06, , November 2006.

 Recent Projects:

System F6 is a DARPA project that dates back to year 2007. F6 is a satellite architecture where the functional capabilities of conventional monolithic spacecraft are distributed across multiple moduels which interact through wireless links. F6 stands for (Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying Spacraft united by Information Exchange).

 

 

To learn more about this interesting project, and watch some interesting videos, go here .. Note that, F6 is an open 
 source project.

 So what are we doing in this project ?

We are part of Technical Area 3 (Information Architecture) of the F6 team. Our part in this project involves developing fault tolerant and secure communications over new hierarchical topologies that we refer to as (stack of ring topologies). In cooperation with Dr. Lenore Zuck (from University of Illinois at Chicago) we are able to verify, using formal verification methods, differnet security and fault tolerance properties of the topologies we are developing.