Nabil Schear





About Me

I'm currently pursuing my PhD degree in computer science in the area of systems/networking/security at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign working with Nikita Borisov. In 2007, I received an MS degree in systems and networking at UCSD working with Amin Vahdat. I got a BS in computer science from Georgia Tech in 2004. While there I was an undergraduate research assistant for Wenke Lee. Since 2001, I have been employed at Los Alamos National Lab where I work as a security researcher.

My areas of research include covert communications, system and network forensics, and traffic analysis. While at UCSD I worked on a project called Glavlit which is a system to prevent information leaks from protected networks. I also worked on a data policy management system called Neon. My latest work at UIUC is on traffic analysis prevention and high-speed intrusion detection. I have a great deal of code that has supported the research described below in my publications. If you are interested in getting a copy, please contact me via email. In the future, I hope to be better about preemptively posting the code for others to use.

I like skiing, theatre, and movies. I also love taking pictures of my new baby daughter, Alina. Check out my pictures site at smugmug.


Publications and Other Work

MAVMM: Lightweight and Purpose Built VMM for Malware Analysis, Anh Nguyen, Nabil Schear, HeeDong Jung, Apeksha Godiyal, Samuel T. King, Hai D. Nguyen, Twenty-Fifth Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2009, Honolulu, Hawaii, December 2009. [Abstract], [PDF], [Bibtex]

Preventing SSL Traffic Analysis with Realistic Cover Traffic (Poster), Nabil Schear and Nikita Borisov, 16th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2009 Poster Session, Chicago, Illinois, November 2009. [Extended Abstract], [Poster]

Models of Privacy Preserving Traffic Tunneling, David M. Nicol and Nabil Schear, SIMULATION: Transactions of The Society for Modeling and Simulation International, Sep 2009; vol. 85: pp. 589 - 607. [Abstract], [PDF], [Bibtex]
(if you are unable to access a copy of this paper through the publisher's link, contact me via email.)

High-Speed Matching of Vulnerability Signatures, Nabil Schear, David R. Albrecht, Nikita Borisov, 11th International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection, Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 2008 [Abstract], [PDF], [Publisher], [Talk], [Bibtex]

Performance Analysis of Real Traffic Carried with Encrypted Cover Flows, Nabil Schear and David Nicol, 22nd ACM/IEEE/SCS Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS) , Rome, Italy, June 2008. [Abstract], [PDF], [Talk], [Bibtex] Best Paper Award

The Design and Implementation of Glavlit: A Transparent Data Confinement System, Nabil Schear, Master's Thesis, University of California at San Diego, 2007. [Abstract], [PDF], [Bibtex]

Glavlit: Preventing Exfiltration at Wire Speed, Nabil Schear, Carmelo Kintana, Qing Zhang, and Amin Vahdat, Proceedings of the 5th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-V), Irvine, CA, November 2006. [Abstract], [PDF], [Talk], [Bibtex]

File Scrub is a security and forensics tool used by the US federal government to review files before they are "downgraded" from a classified system to an unclassified system. File Scrub reviews complex file formats like MS Office and PDF files and removes extraneous meta-data from them before a trusted (byte-by-byte) transfer to external media. I've worked on this project at Los Alamos since 2001 as a researcher and developer. I am currently the principle investigator and development lead for this project.

That's it, check back for more details.


Last updated 8-Jan-2010