Mohamed Tarek Ibn Ziad Hassan

Mohamed Tarek Ibn Ziad Hassan

PhD

Columbia University

Welcome!

I obtained my PhD from the Computer Science Department at Columbia University in 2022. During my PhD, I worked on hardware-software co-design for practical memory safety under the supervision of Prof. Simha Sethumadhavan. My work have been recognized with an IEEE Micro Top Pick Honorable Mention (among all top-tier Computer Architecture Conference papers) in 2019 and a Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (North America) in 2020.

Before joining Columbia, I worked as a teaching assistant in the Department of Computer and Systems Engineering, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt and a part-time Software development engineer at the ESD division, Mentor Graphics Egypt (a Siemens Business). During my M.Sc. studies, I worked on using homomorphic encryption for secure data computations, under the supervision of Dr. Yousra Alkabani and Dr. Hassan Bedour.

Interests

  • Systems security
  • Microarchitecture design
  • Hardware support for security

Education

  • Ph.D in Computer Science, 2022

    Columbia University

  • M.Phil in Computer Science, 2020

    Columbia University

  • M.Sc in Computer Science, 2019

    Columbia University

  • M.Sc in Computer Engineering, 2017

    Ain Shams University

  • B.Sc in Computer & Systems Engineering, 2014

    Ain Shams University

News

  • April 2022: I have successfully defended my PhD dissertation!
  • March 2022: I will be serving on the External Review Committee (ERC) for ASPLOS 2023.
  • February 2022: I will be serving on the Program Committee (PC) for IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2023.
  • September 2021: Our work, “Securing Resource-Constrained Processors with Name Confusion", will appear as Work-in-progress at the 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Secure and Private Execution Environment Design (SEED'21)!
  • August 2021: Our paper, “ EPI: Efficient Pointer Integrity For Securing Embedded Systems”, is accepted at the 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Secure and Private Execution Environment Design (SEED'21)!
  • June 2021: I presented my work on No-FAT [ Video] and ZeRØ [ Video] at ISCA 2021!
  • June 2021: I am spending the summer as a research intern at NVIDIA’s Architecture Research Group!
  • April 2021: I presented my work on mitigating pointer integrtiy attacks at HotSoS 2021 [ Slides] [ Video]
  • March 2021: I have successfully passed my Ph.D. Proposal Exam!
  • March 2021: I will be presenting my work on mitigating pointer integrtiy attacks at HotSoS 2021 in April!
  • March 2021: Two papers accepted to ISCA 2021! More details to follow.
  • February 2021: I gave a virtual talk at Columbia University about “Systems Security: Why is Memory Safety Still a Concern?” and what it’s like to be a PhD student! The talk recording can be found here.
  • November 2020: Our 2020 Virtual LLVM Developers’ Meeting talk, “Stateless Permutation of Application Memory with LLVM” is now available!
  • August 2020: I am extremely honored to receive the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2020 for our proposal, “Practical Software Security on Heterogeneous System on Chips”.
  • August 2020: I will be presenting my work on mitigating software_ & hardware_ memory safety errors using LLVM for C programs at the 2020 Virtual LLVM Developers’ Meeting in October!
  • May 2020: I am spending the summer as an engineering intern at Qualcomm Product Security Initiative (QPSI)!
  • April 2020: I have successfully passed my Ph.D. Candidacy Exam! The exam syllabus and slides can be found here.
  • April 2020: We make it to the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) Finalist 2020 with our proposal “Practical Security for Heterogeneous Systems”. (Acceptance rate 42/188 = 22.3%). Good luck to all the finalists!
  • March 2020: Our proposal “Practical Security for Heterogeneous Systems” is selected for the second phase of Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) 2020 North America. (Acceptance rate 120/188 = 63.8%)
  • January 2020: Our work on fine grained memory safety, Califorms, is recognized with an IEEE Micro Top Picks Honorable Mention!
  • October 2019: I presented our Califorms paper @ MICRO-52 at Columbus, Ohio, USA!
  • August 2019: We are releasing the code of our CryptoImg project as open-source.
  • July 2019: Our paper “Practical Byte-Granular Memory Blacklisting using Califorms” is accepted in the International Symposium on Microarchitecture® (MICRO 2020). (Acceptance rate 80/345 = 23.2%).
  • July 2019: I gave a talk with Miguel Arroyo about YOLO in the fourth workshop on the design and analysis of robust systems (DARS), held in conjunction with CAV 2019. Slides can be found here.

Publications

*
All Peer-reviewed Technical Reports Thesis Other
Hardware-Software Co-design for Practical Memory Safety
Mohamed Tarek Ibn Ziad
PDF Slides Video
EPI: Efficient Pointer Integrity For Securing Embedded Systems
Mohamed Tarek Ibn Ziad, Miguel A. Arroyo, Evgeny Manzhosov, Vasileios P. Kemerlis, and Simha Sethumadhavan
PDF Slides DOI
Securing Resource-Constrained Processors with Name Confusion
Mohamed Tarek Ibn Ziad, Miguel A. Arroyo, Evgeny Manzhosov, Vasileios P. Kemerlis, and Simha Sethumadhavan
PDF Slides
No-FAT: Architectural Support for Low Overhead Memory Safety Checks
Mohamed Tarek Ibn Ziad, Miguel A. Arroyo, Evgeny Manzhosov, Ryan Piersma, and Simha Sethumadhavan
PDF Slides Video DOI
ZeRØ: Zero-Overhead Resilient Operation Under Pointer Integrity Attacks
Mohamed Tarek Ibn Ziad, Miguel A. Arroyo, Evgeny Manzhosov, and Simha Sethumadhavan
PDF Slides Video DOI
SPAM: Stateless Permutation of Application Memory
Mohamed Tarek Ibn Ziad, Miguel A. Arroyo, and Simha Sethumadhavan
PDF Slides Video
Why is memory safety still a concern?
Mohamed Tarek Ibn Ziad
PDF Slides
Practical Byte-Granular Memory Blacklisting using Califorms
Hiroshi Sasaki, Miguel A. Arroyo, M. Tarek Ibn Ziad, Koustubha Bhat, Kanad Sinha, and Simha Sethumadhavan
PDF Poster Slides Video DOI
YOLO: Frequently Resetting Cyber-Physical Systems for Security
Miguel A. Arroyo, M. Tarek Ibn Ziad, Hidenori Kobayashi, Junfeng Yang, and Simha Sethumadhavan
PDF Slides DOI
Subtractive Hardware Trojans
M. Tarek Ibn Ziad and Simha Sethumadhavan
PDF Poster
Homomorphic Encryption for Secure Data Computations
Mohamed Tarek Ibn Ziad
PDF Slides
CryptoImg: Privacy Preserving Processing Over Encrypted Images
M. Tarek Ibn Ziad, Amr Alanwar, Moustafa Alzantot, and Mani Srivastava
PDF Code Slides DOI
Accelerating Electromagnetic Simulations: a Hardware Emulation Approach
M. Tarek Ibn Ziad, Y. Alkabani, M. W. El-Kharashi, K. Salah, and M. AbdelSalam
PDF Slides DOI
On Kernel Acceleration of Electromagnetic Solvers via Hardware Emulation
M. Tarek Ibn Ziad, M. Hossam, M. A. Masoud, M. Nagy, H. A. Adel, Y. Alkabani, M. W. El-Kharashi, K. Salah, and M. AbdelSalam
PDF DOI
On Hardware Solution of Dense Linear Systems via Gauss-Jordan Elimination
M. Tarek Ibn Ziad, Y. Alkabani, and M. W. El-Kharashi
PDF Slides DOI
Homomorphic Data Isolation for Hardware Trojan Protection
M. Tarek Ibn Ziad, A Al-Anwar, Y. Alkabani, M. W. El-Kharashi, and H. Bedour
PDF Poster DOI
Finite Element Emulation-based Solver for Electromagnetic Computations
M. Tarek Ibn Ziad, M. Hossam, M. A. Masoud, M. Nagy, H. A. Adel, Y. Alkabani, M. W. El-Kharashi, K. Salah, and M. AbdelSalam
PDF Poster DOI
Acceleration of Numerical Solutions of Differential Equations Using FPGA-Based Emulation Technology
M. Tarek Ibn Ziad, M. Hossam, M. A. Masoud, M. Nagy, H. A. Adel, Y. Alkabani, M. W. El-Kharashi, K. Salah, and M. AbdelSalam
PDF
E-Voting Attacks and Countermeasures
M. Tarek Ibn Ziad, A Al-Anwar, Y. Alkabani, M. W. El-Kharashi, and H. Bedour
PDF DOI

Awards

QIF Winners

Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Aug 2020
My proposal “Practical Security for Heterogeneous Systems” won a Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QlF 2020).

RSAC Security Scholar

RSA Mar 2019
Selected as an RSAC Security Scholar, which is a nomination-based program for cyber security students to present their research to leading-experts at the RSA Conference.

MICRO-50 Travel Grant

MICRO-50 Oct 2017
Received a student travel grant for MICRO-50 in Boston/Cambridge, MA. The travel grant was supported by the NSF with reimbursements being conducted by Princeton university.

2nd rank in the TIEC Gradation Project Competition (IBTIECAR)

IBTIECAR Feb 2015
My B.Sc. Graduation Project “Acceleration of Numerical Solutions of Differential Equations Using FPGA-Based Emulation Technology” won the 2nd rank in the TIEC Gradation Project Competition (IBTIECAR 2014).

Top of Undergraduate Class of 2014

Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University, Egypt Jul 2014
Had the 1st rank, over (2500) students, graduated on 2014 from Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University, Egypt. I have been honored by the Egyptian president, at the Sixty-fifth Science Festival.

Distinction Award

Ain Shams University Jul 2014
Received distinction Award, Graduation with Honors from Computer and Systems Engineering, Ain Shams University.

Best Semester project award

Mentor Graphics Egypt Feb 2013
Won the best Semester project award sponsored by Mentor Graphics Egypt. The project requires using Mentor tools to design and implement a simple processor (complete design files, sample test bench and synthesize report).

Egyptian Government Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Studies

Egyptian Governmen Sep 2009 – Sep 2014
Received Egyptian Government Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Studies, Five years in a row, Ain Shams University.

Teaching

Columbia University

Served as a teaching assistant for the following courses:

  • CSEEW4824: Computer Architecture [Fall 2019]
  • COMSE6424: Hardware Security [Fall 2018]

Ain Shams University

Served as teaching assistant and grader for the following courses:

  • CSE011: Computer Technology [Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Fall 2016]
  • CSE121: Computer Programming [Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017]
  • CSE128: Software Engineering (1) [Spring 2015, Spring 2016]
  • CSE222: Software Engineering (2) [Fall 2014, Fall 2015]
  • CSE211: Computer Organization (1) [Spring 2016, Spring 2017]
  • CSE271: System Dynamics and Control Components [Spring 2015]
  • CSE351: Electrical Testing (2) [Fall 2014, Spring 2016]
  • CSE431: Computer Networks [Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Fall 2016]
  • CSE451: Electrical Testing (3) [Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016]

Contact