Asem Ghaleb

University of British Columbia - Vancouver | UBC · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

The growth in the popularity of smart contracts has been accompanied by a rise in security attacks targeting smart contracts, which have led to financial losses of millions of dollars and erosion of trust. To enable developers discover vulnerabilities in smart contracts, several static analysis tools have been proposed. However, despite the numerou...

The execution of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain consumes gas paid for by users submitting contracts' invocation requests. A contract execution proceeds as long as the users dedicate enough gas, within the limit set by Ethereum. If insufficient gas is provided, the contract execution halts and changes made during execution get reverted....

Security attacks targeting smart contracts have been on the rise, which have led to financial loss and erosion of trust. Therefore, it is important to enable developers to discover security vulnerabilities in smart contracts before deployment. A number of static analysis tools have been developed for finding security bugs in smart contracts. Howeve...

The presentation is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WFUuEmmFea8

To date, only a small amount of research has focused on detecting ransomware at the network level, and none of the published proposals have addressed the challenges raised by the fact that an increasing number of ransomware are using encrypted channels for communication with the command and control (C&C) server, mainly, over the HTTPS protocol. Des...

The last few years have come with a sudden rise in ransomware attack incidents, causing significant financial losses to individuals, institutions and businesses. In reaction to these attacks, ransomware detection has become an important topic for research in recent years. Currently, there are two broad categories of ransomware detection techniques:...

Cloud computing endpoints security monitoring faces more challenges compared with traditional networks due to the ephemeral nature of cloud assets. Existing endpoint security monitors use agents that must be installed on every computing host or endpoint. However, as the number of monitored instances increases, agents installation, configuration and...

Existing endpoint security monitors use agents that must be installed on every computing host or endpoint. However, as the number of monitored hosts increases, agents installation, con figuration and maintenance become arduous and requires more efforts. Moreover, installed agents can increase the security threat footprint and several companies impo...

Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) is an important component in modern Industrial Control Systems (ICS) particular in Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. Disturbing the normal operation of PLCs can lead to significant damages ranging from minor annoyance to large scale incidents threatening the life of people. While most of e...

Among the various forms of malware, ransomware is currently one of the most common forms of cybercrime. Ransomware works on encrypting victim’s data or locking victim’s screen until extortionist’s demands are met usually by paying a sum of money as ransom. The prevalence of ransomware attacks continues to grow and the number of reported ransomware...

The number of reported cybersecurity incidents on SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems increased significantly in the past few years. One contributing factor is the fact that security testing of live SCADA systems is not practical as such systems are expected to be operational 24/7. Also and most importantly, conducting live sec...

A simulation environment intended to study and analyze SCADA systems security.

In this work, a spread spectrum watermarking optimization algorithm is explored for digital color images using biobjective genetic algorithms and full-frame discrete-cosine transform. The aim of optimization is to generate the trade-off curve, a.k.a. optimal Pareto points, of watermark imperceptibility and robustness. The watermark imperceptibility...