Education
Work experience
- 2022-Now: Senior Scientist in Applied Cryptography
- Duality Technologies, Hoboken, New Jersey, US
- Conducting cutting-edge research to push the current state of the art in cryptographic secure computing to new statures. Of main interest are privacy-enhancing technologies such as fully homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computing, differential privacy, federated learning, threshold encryption, and many other techniques.
- Developing novel solutions that empower secure data sharing and collaborative computing on sensitive data among not-necessarily trustful parties ensuring compliance with most of data protection regulation acts around the world.
- Contributing to OpenFHE, a state-of-the-art open-source library for homomorphic encryption and secure multi-party computing.
- Hardware acceleration of resource-intensive cryptographic techniques using cutting-edge acceleration technologies such as multi-core CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and ASICs.
- Co-PI of DARPA’s (DPRIVE) for hardware acceleration of fully homomorphic encryption via ASICs.
- Leading Duality’s partnering efforts with hardware providers for OpenFHE acceleration.
- Building state-of-the-art SW/HW infrastructure for private machine learning with FHE in OpenFHE (SW) and ASIC-accelerated low-level FHE operations (HW).
- Building performance models to predict the execution latency of computational workloads for performance estimation.
- 2021-2022: Assistant Professor
- Rabdan Academy, Homeland Security Department, Abu Dhabi, UAE
- Taught a wide range of cybersecurity courses.
- Conducted research on Post-Quantum Cryptography,Privacy-Enhancing Technologies, Cryptographic Engineering and Machine learning for cybersecurity.
- 2018-2021: Scientist II
- A*STAR – Institute for Infocomm Research, Cybersecurity Department, One North, Singapore
- Headed the completion of more than 10 research projects of values ranging between 100K to 3.3M Singapore dollar.
- Conducted research in cutting-edge technologies for trust-worthy and privacy-preserving Machine/Deep Learning applications.
- Implementation of lattice-based cryptosystems. Focused on high-performance implementations (AVX2, AVX-512, GPUs and FPGAs) of post-quantum lattice-based cryptosystems such as LAC, NTTRU, and Kyber, and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) schemes such as BFV, BGV, CKKS and TFHE.
- Developed engagements with potential customers by conducting applied research to develop prototypes and pilots of innovative solutions of customer-defined problems.
- Applyed Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to solve real-world problems:
- Homomorphic CNNs: developing a privacy-preserving image classifier that performs inference (prediction) of CNNs on encrypted images from MNIST, CIFAR-10 and diabetic retinopathy medical images. Implemented on CPU (using SEAL) and GPU (using A*FHE).
- PrivFT (private fasttext): developing a privacy-preserving NLP text classifier based on the bag-of-words model using FHE. PrivFT can perform both training and prediction on encrypted text. Implemented on CPU (using SEAL) and GPU (using A*FHE).
- GI-FHE: developing privacy-preserving genotype imputation models that impute the missing genotypes of encrypted DNA sequences using FHE. Implemented on CPU (using SEAL).
- AML-FHE: developing a privacy-preserving anti-money laundry system that predicts illicit encrypted transactions using FHE. Implemented on CPU (using SEAL).
- CASHE: developing a privacy-preserving spacecraft conjunction analysis tool using FHE. CASHE can predict the collision probability of flying objects using encrypted orbital information. Implemented on CPU (using SEAL).
- Applyed machine learning for Cybersecurity. Developing Intrusion Detection Systems using predictive models (SVM, Logistic Regression, and CNNs).
- Authored research grants, project proposals, IPs and research articles.
- Supervised a team of scientists, engineers, and PhD students to develop FPGA-accelerated fully homomorphic encryption.
- Served as Technical Expert for the I2R Technical Expert Panel:
- Offering consultation, advice, and/or solutions to Dept/Div/Prog members on specific technical issues;
- Assisting Dept/Div/Prog members in identifying resources required to resolve the technical issues
- 2015-2018: Research Scholar & Ph.D. Candidate
- A*STAR – Data Storage Institute, One North, 138634, Singapore
- Granted the Singapore International Graduate Award (SINGA) offered by Agency of Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) to pursue PhD study in NUS in collaboration with Data Storage Institute (DSI).
- Worked on hardware accelerating of Post-Quantum Cryptography and Homomorphic Encryption.
- I proposed a generalization of the Discrete Galois Transform-based multiplication algorithm.
- I devised designs, architectures, and implementations of three post-quantum cryptosystems: subset sum-PKC, LWE-PKC and Ring-LWE-PKC.
- I devised designs, architectures, and implementations of two RNS variants of the BFV FHE scheme known as BEHZ and HPS providing about 2 orders of magnitude performance speedup compared with CPU implementations.
- I scaled my BFV GPU crypto-processor to target multi-GPU clusters providing near linear speedup scalability with the increased number of GPUs.
- I wrote my Ph.D. thesis on PRACTICAL POST-QUANTUM CRYPTOGRAPHY & FULLY HOMOMORPHIC ENCRYPTION ON GRAPHICS PROCESSORS: DESIGN & PERFORMANCE EVALUATION.
- 2011-2014: Lecturer
- Taif University, College of Computers and Information Technology, Taif, Saudi Arabia
- Taught undergraduate computer engineering courses.
- Responsible for the design, development, and maintenance of the CIT website.
- Involved in ABET accreditation and preparation of Assessment Course Files.
- 2008-2011: Sr. Telecommunications Engineer
- Globitel, Amman, Jordan
- Development of Intelligent Traffic Steering (ITS). ITS is a roaming traffic redirection system in GSM mobile networks. GSM network operators establish roaming service agreements with each other such that low charging rates (from operator perspective) are incurred by the service provider in the visited country. ITS is a solution that encourages/forces roaming subscribers to register on preferred operators.
Technologies used: GSM, SS7, Dialogic Telephony Cards, C++, Oracle. - Development of Collect Call. Collect Call is a service that allows the calling party to place a call at the callee’s expense.
Technologies used: GSM, Java, Oracle, Diameter Charging Protocol. - Applied clean code practices and design patterns to develop readable, maintainable and scalable code for core roaming-based solutions.
- Ensured quality with unit and integration tests.
- Improving code quality using solid design principles, and SDLC process.
- Designed and implemented GSM-based Roaming solutions using GSM, CAMEL, SS7, SIP, C/C++, Java, Pthreads, Berkeley Sockets, Perl, Oracle, OTL, OCI/OCCI, PL/SQL, MySQL, MS SQL Server, XML, and web services technologies on Windows and Unix platforms.
- Redesigned applications’ data model to support multiple platforms, resulting in greater efficiency, versatility and interoperability.
- Redesigned applications’ business logic for shared-memory/NUMA platforms.
- 2008-2008: Teaching Assistant
- 2007-2007: Intern - Support Engineer
- Cairo-Amman Bank, IT Department, Amman, Jordan
- Internship program towards the partial fulfillment of Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering degree
- Worked in the IT department on different technical tasks related to networking and system administration.
Leadership / Awards / Honors
- 09/2023, Honorary Token from Sabancı University. Selected as one of the instructors for the enCRYPTON Summer School on cryptography and security.
- 06/2022, Rabdan Academy Recognition for Distinguished Researchers, for making significant research contributions to the fields of safety, security, defence, emergency and crisis management, Rabdan Academy, Abu Dhabi, UAE.
- 05/2022, Invited Speaker: Fully Homomorphic Encryption on GPUs: Design, Implementation & Performance Evaluation, NVIDIA, USA.
- 02/2020, RIE2020 Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering (AME) (Award A19E3b0099). Awarded a grant of 9.9 million SGD for a project on privacy-preserving computing.
- 10/2021, Invited Speaker: Privacy-Preserving Computing, at Cyber Wales Cluster Webinar in the Middle East, UAE.
- 07/2020, Invited Speaker: Trustless Computing on Encrypted data, NCR, Singapore.
- 08/2017, Outstanding Technical Oral Presentation award, the 2017 ECE GSS, National University of Signapore. Recognized for delivering an excellent presentation at the ECE Graduate Student Symposium.
- 12/2015, Student Travel Grant Award. Awarded a travel grant to attend and present a paper at the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) in California, USA.
- 01/2015, Singapore International Graduate Award (SINGA) PhD Scholarship, by A*STAR. Full scholarship awarded to pursue a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore.
- 12/2014, Honorary Shield from Taif University. Honored for training and leading the robotics team in the Student Talents Club.
- 08/2010, Thank you letter from Globitel. Appreciated for demonstrating accountability, initiative, and result orientation in a software development projects.
- 02/2009, MSc Scholarship, Jordan University of Science and Technology. Scholarship awarded to pursue MSc in Computer Engineering at the Jordan University of Science and Technology.
