Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering

Facilities

Consultancy Services

The Department of Information Systems and Security provides consultancy services to interested entities from the public and private sectors. Provided services are in the areas of:

• Enterprise System Security
• Big Data Analytics and Privacy
• Cloud Computing Infrastructure and Services
• Information Technology Feasibility Studies
• IT Infrastructure
• System Performance and Evaluations
• Security Vulnerability Studies
• E-Health
• E-Learning

For any additional information, please contact the Chair of the Department of Information Systems and Security, Prof. Khaled Shuaib at: k.shuaib@uaeu.ac.ae.

• External Collaboration
• Faculty Research Projects
• Student Project

During the summer of 2017. Dr. Ezedin, and associate professor at CIT, visited the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2) at the University of Maryland, College Park. During his visit, which lasted for 3 weeks, he was hosted by Professor John Baras, who is a recognized leader in the field of Network security; security and information assurance in wireless networks, and in trust and trust models. Dr. Ezedin participated in some of the current projects/research activities with members of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center. These research activities were related to Internet of Things (IoT) Security.  More specifically, Dr. Ezedin explored possible research collapration with Dr. Baras and his research associates about how to address security issues in the three IoT layers and how to establish trust between physical entities (devices) within the IoT environment while focusing on utilizing the new communication network paradigm, known as Software Defined Network (SDN).   AS a results of the visit, we were able to establish strong collaboration link, as we “jointly” applied for an external grant and we are currently working on the writing and submitting of a research paper.

 

Dr. Mohammed Adel Serhani Research Collaboration Visit to The University of New South Wales

Dr. Mohammed Adel Serhani, an Associate Professor from the Department of Information Systems and Security, visited the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia during Summer 2017. During the visit, Dr. Adel was involved with researchers from the host institution in different projects in the area of Service Computing, Cloud Computing, and Big data. Dr. Adel attended and participated in the series of organized research seminars held during the visit time. As a result of the visit, a joint research project with researchers from the UNSW has been started. Dr. Adel appreciates the opportunity and support from the UAEU allowing him to be involved in such experience and highly recommends this kind of research collaboration initiatives with top ranked universities.  

 

Health Monitoring System for Modeling Individual Exposure to Environmental Triggers of Asthma Episodes in the United Arab Emirates

Primary Investigator: Dr. Shayma Alkobaisi

This is an ICT funded project with collaborators from the US including prominent researchers in the fields of mathematics, computer science and engineering. This AED 2,700,000 research grant was for two years. Specifically, this interdisciplinary project supports general public health by developing a health care management system that reduces the cost, effort, and time spent in traditional visits to hospitals, and provides intelligent information that might be useful for improving public health care strategies. The proposed system collects and analyzes patients and environmental data in order to derive conclusions that will help in providing better insight into causes of environmental triggered diseases such as asthma.

Secure Communication Architecture for Thwarting UTM Attacks

Primary Investigator: Prof.  Zouheir Trabelsi

Recent network architectures utilize many types of security appliances to combat blended attacks. However, managing multiple separate security appliances can be overwhelming, inefficient and expensive. Thus, multiple security features are needed to be integrated into a unified security architecture resulting in a Unified Threat Management system (UTM). In today’s existing UTM systems, whenever a security feature is needed, the corresponding module is just “attached or added on”. This approach of adding on may reduce the UTM performance dramatically, especially when security features such as IDS/IPS are enabled. This research project’s objective is to provide a complete UTM security architecture with unified communication solutions between the different modules to enhance UTM performance. The proposed algorithmic architecture firstly utilizes splay tree filters and pattern-matching algorithms to eliminate redundant checks on the same packet header fields and hence enhance packet filtering and deep packet inspection (DPI) performance. Specifically, the proposed mechanism uses network traffic statistics to dynamically optimize the order of the splay tree filters, allowing early acceptance and rejection of network packets. In addition, DPI signature rules are reordered according to their matching frequencies, allowing early packets acceptance. Secondly, it enhances UTM stateful inspection to optimize the management of different modules session tables. Thirdly, it investigates possible attacks on session tables and provide solutions to defend against these attacks. Finally, it studies the effect of DoS attacks targeting different UTM rule positions, as well as it investigates the profound effect of DoS attacks (with and without payload) on UTM performance. A prototype of the proposed architecture will be implemented and evaluated using real network traffic.

 

HelpMeBreathe

Four senior students from the CIT developed a web-based system called HelpMeBreathe. The system’s objective is to help in better understanding environmental triggers of asthma attacks in UAE at an individual level. HelpMeBreathe is a useful tool for assisting decision makers, such as physicians, in making better decisions that are data driven in order to manage asthma in the UAE. Moreover, the system warns asthma patients if the weather in their area may cause any difficulty in breathing or could trigger an asthma attack, thus giving them the ability to move away and control their asthma. The students who developed the system are Alia Al rayssi, Mahra Al Marar, Alyazia Alkhaili and Reem Al Dhaheri. They were supervised by Dr. Shayma Alkobaisi and Miss. Hoda Amer. Their work resulted in a research paper that was published and presented in the 9^th International Conference on Health Informatics, Italy, June 2017.

 

Academic Programs

Faculty

Note: If calling from outside the UAEU organization, dial (+971 3 713) before the extension.

General Enquiries

Thank you for your interest in the Information Systems and Security Department. We welcome your query and encourage you to contact us using the information below:

United Arab Emirates University,
College of Information Technology
P.O.Box: 15551, Al Ain, UAE

Phone: + 971 3 713 5506 / 5603  
Fax: +971 3 713 6901