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 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 Related Work
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 12-June-2009