Assistant Professor Abde Mtibaa wins Best Paper Award at IEEE International Conference on Cloud Networking in Brazil

by | Jan 21, 2025

Mtibaa shared the honor with former UMSL doctoral student and graduate research assistant Jianyu Wang for research on cybersecurity and remote computing.
Abde Mtibaa

Assistant Professor Abde Mtibaa attended the 2024 International Conference on Cloud Networking in Brazil. He won the Best Paper Award for  a paper titled “CoVFeFE: Collusion-Resilient Verifiable Computing Framework for Resource-Constrained Devices at Network Edge,” based on research conducted with former graduate research assistant Jianyu Wang. (Photo by August Jennewein)

Modern society has been moving to adopt more and more autonomous technology, turning to computers to perform tasks without human control.

Robots roam the aisles at grocery stores, taking inventory of what shelves need restocking. Robo-advisors make investment decisions for their clients using artificial intelligence. And perhaps a decade from now, autonomous cars and trucks will have replaced human-controlled vehicles on roadways throughout the developed world.

For people to adopt these new technologies, they must first trust that they work. That requires built-in safeguards and ways to ensure that the technology hasn’t been corrupted by outside actors.

“We tend to trust those things, even the people that implement them, that they’re not maliciously doing these things,” said Abde Mtibaa, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. “But they can be compromised. That’s what cybersecurity is here for.”

Mtibaa has made cybersecurity the focus of his research for much of the past decade after doing earlier work on remote computing and networking, and he currently serves as the department’s director of cybersecurity. In particular, he has been exploring ways to improve the security of edge computing, and he presented three research papers at the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Networking, held Nov. 27-29 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

IEEE CloudNet, as it’s commonly called, brought together leading researchers and practitioners from around the world to discuss emerging trends in cloud networking and related technologies. One of Mtibaa’s papers, co-authored with former UMSL doctoral student Jianyu Wang and titled “CoVFeFE: Collusion-Resilient Verifiable Computing Framework for Resource-Constrained Devices at Network Edge,” received the Best Paper Award at the conference.

“It’s definitely an honor,” said Mtibaa, who had a parade of people coming up to talk to him at the conference after the award was announced. “It’s good publicity for UMSL also, getting in South America and in Brazil. I tried to get some outreach, and for me personally, get some PhD students who want to come do some research with UMSL Computer Science. I’m mainly into cybersecurity and computer networking, but there were others asking me about other areas of research that we are doing in here. That was good.”

Mtibaa used the test case of autonomous vehicles to explain his research. Such vehicles are equipped with cameras and other sensors to gather information. He described one vehicle sending information that it collected – for example, a pedestrian crossing the street – to a computing device that analyzes the data and provides a direction for how the vehicle should react.

A challenge arises if the analysis performed by the computing device is incorrect – it says there isn’t a pedestrian when there is one or there is one when there is not. Then the car will react inappropriately, with potentially fatal consequences.

Mtibaa and Wang turn to verifiable computing for a solution, suggesting that the vehicle relay information to at least three computing devices for analysis. If they all return the same direction, the vehicle follows that direction. But if there’s a discrepancy in the commands, the vehicle follows the majority direction or sends a signal to the passenger to take over the controls while the circumstances of the discrepancy are investigated.

“The research is on how to trust and how to detect if also those people are colluding to send the wrong result as well,” Mtibaa said. “The solution that we propose, even though it’s innovative and it’s new, it’s very simple. We like simple solutions because they are lightweight, and they are easy to implement. And people actually like it.”

The same approach could be applied to the case of a robo-advisor, which is programmed with a client’s preferred investment parameters on how and when to buy or sell assets. A device might track market data and share it with a central computer to analyze and make recommendations. It’s safer to get analysis from multiple sources and cross check the results before proceeding. If a robo-advisor receives incorrect directions, it could come with a significant financial cost.

“This can be applied to many other things,” he said. “You can apply it for anything that uses commands to do actions later on. The goal for us is how can we trust that command? That command can go wrong. It can tell you to do something that it is not supposed to do. For cars, this can be fatal. For other things, it can cost money. It can create chaos. It can do many things. It can disrupt. It can be also for national security. You can think about it that way, but the idea for us is you set the alarm, say that there is something wrong, and now humans need to take over. Do not go autonomous. Go manual now, and then we are working on investigating.”

Mtibaa’s paper grew out of ongoing research he has been doing with colleagues from New Mexico State University and Saint Louis University with the support of a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Resilient and Intelligent Next Generation Systems, or RINGS, program. RINGS is a public-private partnership focused on accelerating research in the areas of wireless and mobile communication, networking, sensing, computing systems and global-scale services, and NSF has been working with industry partners such as Apple, Ericsson, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, Qualcomm and VMware.

The grant is set to expire later this year, but Mtibaa and his colleagues are applying for renewed funding to continue building on their work.

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