Degrees

• Postdoctoral Fellowship, Carnegie Mellon University
• Ph.D. Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering and the National Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance of Canada

About

Personal Faculty Website

Dr. Elias Bou-Harb is currently the director of the Cyber Center For Security and Analytics at UTSA, where he leads university-wide innovative cyber security research, development and training initiatives. He is also an associate professor at the Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security specializing in operational cyber security and data science as applicable to national security challenges. Previously, he was a senior research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)  where he contributed to federally-funded projects related to critical infrastructure security and worked closely with the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). He is also a permanent research scientist at the National Cyber Forensic and Training Alliance ( NCFTA) of Canada, an international organization which focuses on the investigation of cyber-crimes impacting citizens and businesses.

Dr. Bou-Harb holds a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, which was executed in collaboration with Public Safety Canada, Industry Canada and NCFTA Canada. His research and development activities and interests focus on operational cyber security, attacks’ detection and characterization, malware investigation, cyber security for critical infrastructure and big data and analytics.

Dr. Bou-Harb has authored more than 80 refereed publications in leading security and data science venues, has acquired state and federal cyber security research grants valued at more than $4M and is the recipient of 5 best research paper awards, including the prestigious ACM’s best digital forensics research paper.

Research Interests

• Operational cyber security
• Cyber forensics
• Critical infrastructure security
• Empirical Data analytics
• Digital investigation
• Network Security
• Network Management

Selected Publications

• “ChargePrint: A Framework for Internet-Scale Discovery and Security Analysis of EV Charging Management Systems.” with T. Nasr, S. Torabi, C. Fachkha, and C. Assi, In Proceedings of the Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) Symposium, 2023
• “EVOLIoT: A Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning Framework for Detecting and Characterizing Evolving IoT Malware Variants,” with M. Dib, S. Torabi, N. Bouguila, C. Assi, In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS), 2022, pp. 452-466.
• “INC: In-Network Classification of Botnet Propagation at Line Rate.” with K. Friday, E. Kfoury, J. Crichigno, In European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS), 2022, pp. 551-569, Springer, Cham.
• “Interpretable federated transformer log learning for cloud threat forensics.” with G. De La Torre Parra, L. Selvera, J. Khoury, H. Irzarry, P. Rad, In Proceedings of the Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) Symposium, 2022.
• “P4DDPI: Securing P4-Programmable Data Plane Networks via DNS Deep Packet Inspection,” with A. AlSabeh, E. Kfoury, J. Crichigno, In Proceedings of the 2022 Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium, 2022, 1ś7.
• “A Security Assessment of HTTP/2 Usage in 5G Service Based Architecture.” with N. Wehbe, H.A., Alameddine, M. Pourzandi, C. Assi, IEEE Communications Magazine, 2022, pp. 1-7.
• “Sanitizing the iot cyber security posture: An operational cti feed backed up by internet measurements,” with M.S. Pour, and D. Watson, In 2021 51st Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2021, pp. 497-506, IEEE.
• “HoneyComb: A Darknet-Centric Proactive Deception Technique For Curating IoT Malware Forensic Artifacts,” with M.S. Pour, J. Khoury, In NOMS 2022-2022 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium, 2022, pp. 1-9. IEEE.
• “On Ransomware Family Attribution Using Pre-Attack Paranoia Activities,” with R.M.A. Molina, S. Torabi, K. Sarieddine, N. Bouguila, C. Assi, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, Vol. 19, No.1, 2021, pp.19-36.
• “Demystifying IoT security: An exhaustive survey on IoT vulnerabilities and a first empirical look on Internet-scale IoT exploitations,” with N. Neshenko, J. Crichigno, J. Kaddoum, G. Kaddoum, N. Ghani IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, Vol. 21, No. 3, 2019, pp.2702-2733.
• “Inferring and Investigating IoT-Generated Scanning Campaigns Targeting a Large Network Telescope,” with S. Torabi, C. Assi, E.M.B. Karbab, A. Boukhtouta and M. Debbabi, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing.
• “A Collaborative Security Framework for Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networks,” with C. Miranda, G. Kaddoum, S. Garg and K. Kaur, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Vol. 15, pp. 2602-2615.
• “On Data-Driven Curation, Learning, and Analysis for Inferring Evolving Internet-of-Things (I0T) Botnets in the Wild,” with M. S. Pour, A. Mangino, K. Friday, M. Rathbun and F. Iqbal, Computers and Security, Vol. 91, p. 101707.
• “A Big Data-Enabled Consolidated Framework for Energy Efficient Software Defined Data Centers in IoT Setups,” with Kuljeet Kaur, Sahil Garg, Georges Kaddoum and Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 2019, pp. 99:1-1, DOI:10.1109/TII.2019.2939573.
• “Theoretic Derivations of Scan Detection Operating on Darknet Traffic,” with Morteza Safaei Pour, Computer Communications, 2019, DOI:10.1016/j.comcom.2019.08.014.
• “Decentralized Distribution of PCP Mappings over Blockchain for End-to-End Secure Direct Communications,” with Elie F. Kfoury, Jose Gomez, Jorge Crichigno and David Khoury,  IEEE Access, 2019, PP(99), DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2934049.
• “A Review of Recent Advances and Security Challenges in Emerging E-Enabled Aircraft Systems,” with Farooq Shaikh, Mohamad Rahouti, Nasir Ghani, Kaiqi Xiong and Jamal Haque, IEEE Access, 2019, PP(99), DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2916617.
• “Demystifying IoT Security: An Exhaustive Survey on IoT Vulnerabilities and a First Empirical Look on Internet-scale IoT Exploitations,” with Nataliia Neshenko, Jorge Crichigno, Georges Kaddoum and Nasir Ghani, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 2019.
• “Survey of Attack Projection, Prediction, and Forecasting in Cyber Security,” with Martin Husák, Jana Koma´rkova and Pavel Celeda, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 2018, PP(99), DOI:10.1109/COMST.2018.2871866.
• “Big Data Sanitization and Cyber Situational Awareness: A Network Telescope Perspective,” with Martin Husak, Mourad Debbabi and Chadi Assi, IEEE Transactions on Big Data,  2017, PP(99):1-1, DOI:10.1109/TBDATA.2017.2723398.
• “CSC-Detector: A System to Infer Large-Scale Probing Campaigns,” with Chadi Assi and Mourad Debbabi. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2016, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp.1-1, DOI:10.1109/TDSC.2016.2593441.
• “A Novel Cyber Security Capability: Inferring Internet-scale Infections by Correlating Malware and Probing Activities,” with Mourad Debbabi and Chadi Assi,  Computer Networks, 2015, Vol. 94, DOI:10.1016/j.comnet.2015.11.004.
• “Multidimensional Investigation of Source Port 0 Probing,” with Nour-Eddine Lakhdari, Hamad Binsalleeh and Mourad Debbabi, Digital Investigation, 2014, Vol. 11, S114–S123, DOI:10.1016/j.diin.2014.05.012.
• “Communication Security for Smart Grid Distribution Networks,” with Claude Fachkha, Makan Pourzandi, Mourad Debbabi and Chadi Assi, IEEE Communications Magazine, 2013, Vol. 51, No. 1, pp. 42-49, DOI:10.1109/MCOM.2013.6400437.