Ongoing Projects | Qatar University

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Ongoing Projects

Enhancing the Performance and Security of Anonymous Communication Networks

Tor’s anonymity network is one of the most widely used anonymity networks online, it consists of thousands of routers run by volunteers. Tor preserves the anonymity of its users by relaying the traffic through a number of routers (called onion routers) forming a circuit. The current design of Tor’s transport layer suffers from a number of problems affecting the performance of the network. Several researches proposed changes in the transport design in order to eliminate the effect of these problems and improve the performance of Tor’s network. However, the performance of Tor’s network still limits the adoption of Tor by many users. In our research, we are proposing two main approaches to enhance the performance of Tor’s anonymity network. 1) We address the transport layer issues in Tor’s network by introducing QuicTor; with QUIC protocol replacing the TCP/TLS for the transport layer. 2) We also address the queue management issues at Tor’s application layer.

For more details, please review Project Long Description

Loss Functions Evaluation for Corneal Nerve Segmentation

Corneal confocal microscopy (CCM) has been advocated as a non-invasive technique for the objective diagnosis of very early neuropathy in patients by scanning the corneal subbasal nerve plexus. The obtained images provide a range of research opportunities to be explored. Current research revolves around providing automated solutions for nerve segmentation in CCM images. In this project, we address the problem of low sensitivity of nerves in automatic segmentation caused by imbalanced pixel distribution in the CCM images. We evaluate different loss functions for this problem

For more details, please review Project Long Description

Cyber Security for Next‐Generation Healthcare In Qatar

The next-generation healthcare system deals with medical devices and multiple cloud systems that are linked to the cyberspace. Internet of Things (IoT) based healthcare network (Internet of Medical Things- IoMT) enables the transmitting and receiving of medical data, transforming the heterogenous computing and storage capability. IoMT in e-healthcare provides continuous monitoring of patient vitals and bio-markers, which eases the everyday patient follow up and increases the productivity of human life. The Electronic Health Record (EHR) / Electronic Patient Record (EPR) maintains the health records, where IoMT devices communicate and interacts with the various devices to extract the data of physical and vital signs of individuals.

Security problems concerning healthcare systems are increasing. The intrusions in the IoT/IoMT environment are difficult to detect by the traditional security mechanisms due to the protocol stack itself has numerous vulnerabilities quite different from the cyber-physical system (CPS) or sensor networks. To enforce the security mechanism for IoMT devices different factors need to be considered including the resource constraints of end devices. This project aims at designing and implementing a comprehensive framework for hardening the security and privacy of healthcare data acquired by the IoMT devices.

For more details, please review Project Long Description