Md Tariqul Islam ‘Pavel’ is an Assistant Professor of Trustworthy Cyberspace in the School of Information Studies at the Syracuse University. Pavel received his bachelor’s degree (2008) in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He earned his master’s (2016) and Ph.D. (2020) in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky. Pavel’s work in general focuses on the security and fault tolerance of distributed computing systems. His aim is to devise novel schemes, algorithms, and protocols that support the development of secure, reliable, and trustworthy distributed networks (e.g., cloud, edge, and vehicular networks). His research supports these undertakings, and he always thrives to design and deliver practical approaches to problems being experienced in industry or society. Other than the above areas, Pavel would also like to investigate new research topics in closely related areas such as, mobile cloud, sensor network, software-defined network, Internet of things (IoT), and block chain-based distributed systems.
While at the University of Kentucky, Pavel has been taking a variety of teaching roles in different capacities. During fall and spring semesters, he used to assist his course instructor by lecturing for the evening sections. He also had the opportunity to design and teach a variety of summer courses as a primary instructor between 2016-2019. When teaching in the classroom, Pavel tries to engage his students in the interactive learning process which help them increase their attention and focus, motivate them to think critically. He is very accessible to his students, and the stellar evaluations from his students earned him all major teaching awards in the last three years at the University of Kentucky. Pavel was the two times finalists of the University of Kentucky Provost’s Award in 2019 and 2020. He was the recipient of the 2018 Dean’s Award in the outstanding teaching assistant category. He also is the two times winner of the Computer Science Outstanding Teaching Assistant in 2018 and 2019. For his remarkable contribution in teaching at the University of Kentucky, he was nominated for the prestigious Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools (MAGS) Excellence in Teaching Award in the doctoral student category for the year 2019.
Personal
Married and a father of a four years old son. A passionate soccer player. Loves to travel around the world. Other interests are reading books, listening to music, watching movies, and surfing the internet.
Professional
Served as a reviewer for the IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC), Journal of Security and Communication Network, International Journal of Information Security, IEEE Access, and few others.
Research
During his Ph.D. research, Pavel had developed several prototypes of cloud storage using cryptographic protocols that ensure security, privacy, and fault tolerance. He intends to further revise and enhance these prototypes to accomplish his future research plans. His research offers opportunities to work on building novel security algorithms and fault tolerant solutions for cloud and vehicular networks. Following are the most recent research projects he had worked on.
SecReS: Since data and storage are outsourced to third party service providers, users lose direct control of data management and have to depend solely on the providers who may not always be dependable. This distinctive feature therefore poses numerous security threats and vulnerabilities. To address these issues, we proposed SecReS (Secure and Reliable Storage)– a cloud storage scheme that simultaneously achieves security, reliability, and deduplication. SecReS blends convergent encryption and perfect secret sharing scheme to achieve confidentiality of data and encryption keys. It also achieves fault tolerance by dispersing data to multiple storage servers using Reed-Solomon erasure code. SecReS uses Merkle hash tree to authenticate users by verifying Proof of Ownership (PoW) of data for carrying out secure deduplication.
CP-ABCE: To overcome the inherent limitations of convergent encryption and its vulnerability to several side-channel attacks (e.g., “confirmation-of-a-file” attack and “learn-the-remaining-information” attack),
we proposed a storage scheme named CP-ABCE (Ciphertext Policy Attribute-Based Convergent Encryption). It blends convergent encryption with an attribute-based encryption scheme to ensure confidentiality and deduplication. The convergent encryption guarantees that only a single copy of data is stored at the server, and thus reduces the amount of data need to be transferred, stored, and managed by storage provider. In our scheme, users’ keys are specified by a set of attributes while the entity encrypting the data can specify an access control policy over these attributes so that only a specific set of users are able to decrypt.
FaCS: Large-scale cloud datacenters often experience reduced performance and service outage. Due to the inherent complexity, heterogeneity, and multitenant architecture of these datacenters, applications (i.e., jobs and tasks) running on them are susceptible to various types of failures. In this project, we first characterize the application failures in Google cluster trace and then propose a prediction model which can forecast the termination status of a task. Then, we introduce a task scheduler named FaCS (A Fault-tolerant Cloud Scheduler) that dynamically reschedules tasks based on the predicted results. This proactive fault-tolerant scheduler improves system reliability and ensures timely execution of the applications. Simulation results show that FaCS reduces makespan and failure rates of tasks substantially while balancing load at the same time. Moreover, early prediction along with quick scheduling adjustment improves overall resource utilization and reduces resource wastage.
Recent Publications
T. Islam, K. Lim and D. Manivannan, “Blending Convergent Encryption and Access Control Scheme for Achieving A Secure and Storage Efficient Cloud,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC-2020), January 2020.
K. Lim, T. Islam, K. Hyunbum, and J. Jingon, “A Sybil Attack Detection Scheme based on ADAS Sensors for Vehicular Networks,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC-2020), January 2020.
T. Islam, H. Mistareehi, and D. Manivannan, “SecReS: A Secure and Reliable Storage Scheme for Cloud with Client-side Data Deduplication,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Global Communications Conference (GlobeCom-2019), December 2019.
T. Islam and D. Manivannan, “FaCS: Toward a Fault-Tolerant Cloud Scheduler Leveraging Long Short- Term Memory Network,” in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Cybersecurity and Cloud Computing (CSCloud/EdgeCom 2019), pp. 1-6, June 2019.
H. Mistareehi, T. Islam, K. Lim and D. Manivannan, “A Secure and Distributed Architecture for Vehicular Cloud,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud and Internet Computing (3PGCIC-2019), August 2019.
Teaching
Pavel has keen interests on teaching following courses.
- Introduction to Computer Networking
- Security in Networked Environment
- Introduction to Information Security
- Leading Issues in Information Security
- Digital Forensics
- Blockchain Management
- Applied Information Security
- Database Security
