Dr. Shoukat Ali

Academic and Professional Background

My research focuses on design and development of efficient cryptographic algorithms where the implementation is based on secure coding practices. For the design and development of long-term secure systems, it is vital to consider both current and emerging security challenges particularly, large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers. Moreover, the efficiency and scalability of such systems are important for it’s usability. Through rigorous research and development, I have created scalable big integer library, designed and developed quantum resistant system, contributed to secure communication protocol, efficient biometric authentication/authorization system and developed efficient cryptographic algorithms.

As a research associate, I managed, designed and implemented a system for long-term security such that the system is quantum-safe. In other words, we developed a (password-authenticated) mutual authentication secure communication system between (TCP/IP) client and server with information-theoretic security. The system can be used either stand-alone or as an additional layer of protection in secure communication. As a postdoc fellow, my work was mainly based on accuracy-preserving transformation, scale-then-round (StR), of real-valued to integer-valued biometric feature vector. I conducted research and implemented our secure noise-tolerant template generation/matching algorithms using biometrics. To test the efficacy of our algorithms, we used face (physiological) and keystroke (behavioral) biometrics. In my PhD, I designed and developed a novel and an efficient residue multiplication algorithm based on the Toeplitz Matrix-Vector Product (TMVP). The algorithm showed promising results for Mersenne primes and resulted fast computation modulo 521-bit Mersenne prime. I implemented, tested, and optimized my code both on 32-bit and 64-bit machines. The primary purpose of the algorithm was to speed up the vital scalar multiplication operation on Elliptic Curve. I implemented constant-time (resilient to simple timing attacks) variable- and fixed-base scalar multiplication for the standard NIST curve P-521 and Edwards curve E-521.

Some of my research and academic achievements are; US patent on extending the domain of biometric template protection, PhD thesis of the year award, Best poster award, Invited speaker at 20^th Workshop on ECC, PhD full scholarship, Rector’s merit award, Merit-based scholarship, etc.

Publications

•  J1. A. Acar, S. Ali, K. Karabina, C. Kaygusuz, H. Aksu, K. Akkaya and S. Uluagac, A Lightweight Privacy-aware Continuous Authentication Protocol – PACA, ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security. September 2021, Volume 24, Issue 4, pp 1-28 (https://doi.org/10.1145/3464690).
• J2. S. Ali and M. Cenk, Faster Residue Multiplication Modulo 521-bit Mersenne prime and an Application to ECC, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers. August 2018, Volume 65, ISSN 1549-8328, pp. 2477-2490 (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8272463).
• C1. S. Ali, K. Karabina and E. Karagoz, Formal Accuracy Analysis of a Biometric Data Transformation and its Application to Secure Template Generation, SECRYPT 2020, 17th International Conference on Security and Cryptography (SECRYPT), July 8–10, 2020, Lieusant, Paris, France (https://www.scitepress.org/Link.aspx?doi=10.5220/0009888604850496).
• C2. S. Ali and M. Cenk, A new algorithm for residue multiplication modulo 2521 − 1, Information Security and Cryptology – ICISC 2016 – 19th International Conference, Seoul, South Korea, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10157, pp. 181-193, Springer, Cham (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-53177-9_9).
• Abs1. S. Ali, K. Karabina and E. Karagoz, Biometric Data Transformation for Cryptographic Domains and its Application: Poster, WiSec ‘19, ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, May 15–17, 2019, Miami, FL, USA (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3317549.3326302).