Ali Al Shidhani, PhD

Smart cities are in development around the world to tackle urbanization challenges. Smart solutions are being developed to optimize scarce resources, reduce service cost, improve service quality and improve the livelihood of city residents. With smart city infrastructure getting digitized and remotely accessible, the risk of cyber security cannot be overlooked. This article describes the technical and non-technical challenges smart cities are facing with regards to cyber security attacks. The… عرض المزيد

Smart cities are in development around the world to tackle urbanization challenges. Smart solutions are being developed to optimize scarce resources, reduce service cost, improve service quality and improve the livelihood of city residents. With smart city infrastructure getting digitized and remotely accessible, the risk of cyber security cannot be overlooked. This article describes the technical and non-technical challenges smart cities are facing with regards to cyber security attacks. The article outlines design requirements that should be considered when designing a secure smart city. The requirements are overarching technical, operational, social, safety, legal and usability domains. In addition, the article proposes cyber defense maturity levels for smart cities and describes threat models relevant to each maturity level. عرض أقل

Nowadays, the heavy reliance on computer networks necessitates minimizing outage time, increasing the availability of services, and preventing network related problems. Such realization requires continuous monitoring and observation. This is not a trivial task. Thus, automatic network monitoring tools are deployed to monitor and analyze the traffic trespassing network devices. There is an increasing demand for automated network monitoring tools and selecting a suitable candidate can become a… عرض المزيد

Nowadays, the heavy reliance on computer networks necessitates minimizing outage time, increasing the availability of services, and preventing network related problems. Such realization requires continuous monitoring and observation. This is not a trivial task. Thus, automatic network monitoring tools are deployed to monitor and analyze the traffic trespassing network devices. There is an increasing demand for automated network monitoring tools and selecting a suitable candidate can become a challenging task. Some computerized network monitoring tools and systems are available, including expensive proprietary/closed-source solutions and Free Open Source Software (FOSS) systems. Three of the most popular FOSS network monitoring systems are: Nagios, OpenNMS and Zabbix. They are solid competitors to the available proprietary solutions. عرض أقل

The number of mobile phone subscription worldwide have crossed the 6.8 Billion mark. With ever increasing number of subscriber’s comes great challenges and risks. There are malicious third party apps ported on smartphones victimizing the privacy and security of innocent users. As technology is evolving, awareness and best-practice guides become crucial. This paper highlights the results of a smartphone security awareness study. The paper presents some shocking findings and outlines effective… عرض المزيد

The number of mobile phone subscription worldwide have crossed the 6.8 Billion mark. With ever increasing number of subscriber’s comes great challenges and risks. There are malicious third party apps ported on smartphones victimizing the privacy and security of innocent users. As technology is evolving, awareness and best-practice guides become crucial. This paper highlights the results of a smartphone security awareness study. The paper presents some shocking findings and outlines effective recommendations to mitigate smartphone security threats and risks. The recommendations are targeting individual end-users as well as government/private agencies that have an integral role in smartphone security awareness. عرض أقل

"Access security in heterogeneous wireless networks", in Security in Distributed and Networking Systems, Y. Xiao and Y. Pan, ed., World Scientific Publishing Co., Aug. 2007.