I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Networked Systems Program at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science (ICS) at the University of California in Irvine (UCI). I work with Gene Tsudik in the Security and Privacy Research OUTfit (SPROUT) group in the Secure Computing and Networking Center (SCONCE). I also worked with Athina Markopoulou on mitigating large scale attacks on the Internet.

I am interested in applied cryptography and in solving security and privacy problems in wired and wireless networks. Specifically, I am working on designing privacy preserving routing protocols in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), analyzing and mitigating large scale attacks on the Internet and misusing P2P systems. For more details check my projects and publications sections.

Before joining UCI I completed a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at Cairo University in Egypt. I worked as a summer intern in Ericsson in 2000, in Lucent in 2001 and in Cisco in 2003. I worked at SySDSoft developing the Medium Access Control (MAC) of the IEEE802.16/WiMAX wireless system from 2003 until 2005. I spent the summer of 2007 as an intern in AT&T Research Labs at Florham Park, NJ. I also spent the Spring of 2009 in ETH Zurich as an academic guest in the System Security Group working woth Professor Srdjan Capkun.

• Winter/Spring 2009: At ETH Zurich as an academic guest (Feb. to June) in the System Security Group working woth Professor Srdjan Capkun.


• Winter 2009: Completed my first marathon (Huntington Beach Marathon) in 4 hours and 26 minutes ( I hit the wall at the 19th mile :) ).


• September 2007: Consulted for Egypt's largest ISP (TE-Data) on mitigating spam and botnets.


• June 2007: Internship in AT&T Research Labs with Bala Krishnamurthy and Kobus van der Merwe.


• May 2007: New Scientist Tech has an article about using P2P for DDoS attacks here. Our work on BotTorrent is mentioned in it. The topic of using P2P in DDoS attacks made the news in slashdot.

• Privacy in MANETs/VANETs


• Security and Privacy in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs)

• Filtering DDoS and Malicious Traffic


• Misusing P2P Systems

Journals

- Karim El Defrawy, Gene Tsudik, "Anonymous Location Aided Routing in Suspicious MANETs" in submission.

Conferences

- Mishari Al Mishari, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Karim El Defrawy and Gene Tsudik, "Harvesting SSL Certificate Data to Mitigate Web-Fraud", in submission. PDF

- Karim El Defrawy, John Solis, Gene Tsudik, "Leveraging Social Contacts for Message Confidentiality in Delay Tolerant Networks", presented in the 33rd Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC'09), Seattle,Washington, July 20 - July 24, 2009. PDF

- Karim El Defrawy and Gene Tsudik, "PRISM: Privacy-friendly Routing In Suspicious MANETs (and VANETs)", The 2008 IEEE International Conference of Network Protocols (ICNP'08), October 19-22, Florida, USA. PDF

- F.Soldo, K.El Defrawy, A.Markopoulou, B.Krishnamurthy, K.van der Merwe, "Filtering Sources of Unwanted Traffic Based on Blacklists", The 2008 Information Theory and Applications Workshop (ITA), San Diego, CA, Jan.2008. PDF

- Karim El Defrawy, Gene Tsudik, "ALARM: Anonymous Location Aided Routing in Suspicious MANETS", The 2007 IEEE International Conference of Network Protocols (ICNP'07), October 16-19, Beijing, China. PDF

- Karim El Defrawy, Athina Markopoulou, Katerina Argyraki, "Optimal Filter Allocation Against Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks", The 2007 Information Theory and Applications Workshop (ITA), Jan. 2007, San Diego, California. PDF

- Karim M. El Defrawy , Magda S. El Zarki , Mohamed M. Khairy, “Proposal for a cross-layer coordination framework for next generation wireless systems”, Proceeding of the 2006 international conference on Communications and mobile computing, IWCMC '06, July 2006, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. PDF

- Karim M. El Defrawy, Mohamed M. Khairy and Amin Nassar, “Sub-Carrier Allocation using Channel Prediction for OFDMA systems based on IEEE 802.16 Standard”, International Conference on Computer Engineering and Systems, ICCES'06, Sep. 2006, Cairo Egypt.

Workshops

- Karim El Defrawy, Minas Gjoka, Athina Markopoulou, "BotTorrent: Misusing BitTorrent to Launch DDoS Attacks", USENIX SRUTI, in conjucntion with USENIX'07, Santa Clara, June 2007. PDF

- Karim El Defrawy, Magda El Zarki, Gene Tsudik, "Incentive-Based Cooperative and Secure Inter-Personal Networking", ACM MobiOpp, in conjucntion with ACM MobiSys'07, June 2007. PDF

- Karim El Defrawy and Claudio Soriente, “PEUC-WiN: Privacy Enhancement by User Cooperation in Wireless Networks”, Second Workshop on Secure Network Protocols NPSEC'06, in conjucntion with IEEE ICNP'06, Nov. 2006, Santa Barbara, California. PDF

Posters

- Karim El Defrawy, John Solis and Gene Tsudik, "Leveraging Social Contacts for Message Confidentiality in Delay Tolerant Networks", To be presented in the 2008 IEEE International Conference of Network Protocols (ICNP'08), October 19-22, Florida, USA. Abstract

Technical Reports

- Karim El Defrawy, Athina Markopoulou, Katerina Argyraki, “Optimal Filter Allocation during a DDoS Attack”, Technical Report arXiv:cs.NI/0612066 at arXiv.org, Dec. 2006. PDF

Submitted for Publication (or in the pipeline not wanting to go out :) )

- Karim El Defrawy, Fabio Soldo, Athina Markopoulou, Balachander Krishnamurthy and Kobus van der Merwe, "Spatial-Temporal Behavior of Malicious IP Sources".

• Overview of WiMAX
• Overview of Group Signatures