Mustafa El-halabi | American University of Science and Technology (original) (raw)

Papers by Mustafa El-halabi

Abstract—In a smart grid environment some customers employ third-party meters and terminals for i... more Abstract—In a smart grid environment some customers employ third-party meters and terminals for integrity verification of the smart meter power measurements reported by the electric utility company. We address the security issues that may arise under the presence of a third-party wireless terminal. In this paper we consider a rate-distortion perspective that contrasts the Slepian-Wolf distortionless coding approach recently presented by Varodayan and Gao [1] for integrity verification through redundant metering. We show that through the use of a limited secret key, we can impose a certain minimum distortion on the eavesdropper, while enabling the wireless terminal to retrieve the measurements losslessly with high probability. We highlight the advantages of our approach. I.

Recently there has been a lot of success in using the deterministic approach to provide approxima... more Recently there has been a lot of success in using the deterministic approach to provide approximate characterization of Gaussian network capacity. In this paper, we take a deterministic view and revisit the problem of wiretap channel with side information. A precise characterization of the secrecy capacity is obtained for a linear deterministic model, which naturally suggests a coding scheme which we show to achieve the secrecy capacity of the degraded Gaussian model (dubbed as "secret writing on dirty paper") to within half a bit.

2009 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, 2009

The concept of channel capacity per unit cost was introduced by Verdú in 1990 to study the limits... more The concept of channel capacity per unit cost was introduced by Verdú in 1990 to study the limits of wideband communication. It was shown that an orthogonal coding scheme achieves the channel capacity per unit cost of memoryless stationary channels with a zero-cost input letter. This paper introduces the concept of secrecy capacity per unit cost to study wideband secrecy communications. For degraded memoryless stationary wiretap channels, it is shown that an orthogonal coding scheme achieves the secrecy capacity per unit cost with a zero-cost input letter. For general memoryless stationary wiretap channels, the performance of orthogonal codes is studied and lower and upper bounds on the secrecy capacity per unit cost are provided.

2017 Fourth International Conference on Advances in Biomedical Engineering (ICABME), 2017

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a paralytic disorder that affects muscles by weakening the... more Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a paralytic disorder that affects muscles by weakening them, until reaching a certain stage of immobility, where the patient could only move his/her eyes. ALS-inflicted victims have been increasing over the past few years with no cure to be found. This has lead to a proliferation of special-aid gadgets, which are tailored to improve the life conditions of those patients. This paper proposes a cost-efficient prototype for an intelligent aid-vehicle that works by interpreting the blinking movements of the ALS patient's eyes. The aid-vehicle is equipped with a pad that controls the motion of the motors, a virtual keyboard that can be used to type its user's thoughts via eye movement and blinking, and several sensors that aid to stop the vehicle whenever an obstacle is detected. The aid-vehicle is designed to be used indoors and outdoors. It is user-friendly, easy to manipulate, and offers ALS patients a mean to be less dependent on others,...

IEEE EUROCON 2019 -18th International Conference on Smart Technologies, 2019

The concept of secrecy capacity per unit cost was introduced in the study of cost-efficient secur... more The concept of secrecy capacity per unit cost was introduced in the study of cost-efficient secure wide-band communications. It has been established that for a degraded memoryless wiretap channel, a structured orthogonal code achieves the secrecy capacity per unit cost. In this paper, we consider a memoryless wiretap channel with channel state, where the state is available non-causally to the transmitter as side information. Under the assumption of the existence of a zero cost input “0”, it is shown that a lower bound on the secrecy capacity per unit cost for such a channel can be achieved using a nested orthogonal random binning coding scheme.

2014 6th International Symposium on Communications, Control and Signal Processing (ISCCSP), 2014

Two main ingredients that enable wiretap codes to achieve information-theoretic secrecy are their... more Two main ingredients that enable wiretap codes to achieve information-theoretic secrecy are their binning structure and the randomization among multiple codewords. The presence of an infinite amount of randomness is an oversimplifying assumption which act as a hurdle that prevents the development of practical codes for wiretap channels. In this paper, we investigate the trade-off between the achievable secrecy rate and the randomness rate for wiretap channels with side information, non-causally known to the transmitter. Using the linear deterministic approach, we present insights into finding near-optimal codes under limited randomness.

Perfect security for the multi-antenna wiretap channel is considered, at the physical layer, unde... more Perfect security for the multi-antenna wiretap channel is considered, at the physical layer, under a limited-energy constraint. The problem was originally considered in [1] for point-to-point channels, where the fundamental limits of secure communication have been established in the wideband regime. In this paper, the more general multi-antenna scenario is addressed. The main result proves that the secrecy capacity per unit cost (energy), under the mild condition of zero-cost input letter, can be achieved using a structured orthogonal random binning coding scheme.

Exploiting the channel state knowledge can play a fundamental role in improving security, hence a... more Exploiting the channel state knowledge can play a fundamental role in improving security, hence a wiretap channel model with distinct channel state information is considered. In particular, it is assumed that the channel between the transmitter, the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper is a function of three different states. One of the states is an unknown state, the second one is known to the legitimate receiver and the third state is non-causally known to the encoder. For this setting, a secrecy rate is shown to be achieved using a coding scheme based on structured binning in conjunction with a time-sharing argument. The secrecy capacity for this model is established for the specific case when the legitimate receiver's observation is a deterministic function of the the channel input and the states.

The knowledge of interference plays a positive role in enhancing the secrecy of Gaussian wiretap ... more The knowledge of interference plays a positive role in enhancing the secrecy of Gaussian wiretap channels. We address this fact using a linear deterministic model to explicitly show the interplay between different channel parameters. This evokes a coding scheme which leverages the knowledge of the interfering sequence to confuse the eavesdropper without compromising the decoding at the legitimate receiver. Through a numerical example, we show that interference enhancement through power management at the transmitter can offer higher secrecy rate compared to using the classical structured double-binning scheme.

Procedia Computer Science, 2016

Voice recognition systems are used to distinguish different sorts of voices. However, recognizing... more Voice recognition systems are used to distinguish different sorts of voices. However, recognizing a voice is not always successful due to the presence of different parameters. Hence, there is a need to create a set of estimation criteria and a learning process using Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The learning process performed using ANN allows the system to mimic how the brain learns to understand and differentiate among voices. The key to undergo this learning is to specify the free parameters that will be adapted through this process of simulation. Accordingly, this system will store the knowledge processed after performing the back propagation learning and will be able to identify the corresponding voices. The proposed learning allows the user to enter a number of different voices to the system through a microphone.

IEEE EUROCON 2021 - 19th International Conference on Smart Technologies

Physical-layer security is a new paradigm that offers data protection against eavesdropping in wi... more Physical-layer security is a new paradigm that offers data protection against eavesdropping in wireless 5G networks. In this context, the Gaussian channel is a typical model that captures the practical aspects of confidentially transmitting a message through the wireless medium. In this paper, we consider the peculiar case of transmitting a message through a wireless, state-dependent channel which is prone to eavesdropping, where the state knowledge is non-causally known and shared between the sender and the eavesdropper. We show that a novel structured coding scheme, which combines random coding arguments and the dirty-paper coding technique, achieves the fundamental limit of secure and reliable communication for the considered model.

IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2012

Recently, there has been a lot of success in using the deterministic approach to provide approxim... more Recently, there has been a lot of success in using the deterministic approach to provide approximate characterization of Gaussian network capacity. In this paper, we take a deterministic view and revisit the problem of wiretap channel with side information. A precise characterization of the secrecy capacity is obtained for a linear deterministic model, which naturally suggests a coding scheme which we show to achieve the secrecy capacity of the degraded Gaussian model (dubbed as “secret writing on dirty paper”) to within half a bit.

Recently there has been a lot of success in using deterministic approach to provide approximate c... more Recently there has been a lot of success in using deterministic approach to provide approximate characterization of capacity for Gaussian networks. In this paper, we take a deterministic view and revisit the problem of wiretap channel with side information. A precise characterization of the secrecy capacity is obtained for a linear deterministic model, which naturally suggests a coding scheme which we show to achieve the secrecy capacity of the Gaussian model (dubbed as "secret writing on dirty paper") to within (1/2) log 3 bits.

The concept of channel capacity per unit cost was introduced by Verdú in 1990 to study the limits... more The concept of channel capacity per unit cost was introduced by Verdú in 1990 to study the limits of costefficient wide-band communication. It was shown that orthogonal signaling can achieve the channel capacity per unit cost of memoryless stationary channels with a zero-cost input letter. This paper introduces a concept of secrecy capacity per unit cost to study cost-efficient wide-band secrecy communication. For degraded memoryless stationary wiretap channels, it is shown that an orthogonal coding scheme with randomized pulse position and constant pulse shape achieves the secrecy capacity per unit cost with a zero-cost input letter. For general memoryless stationary wiretap channels, the performance of orthogonal codes is studied, and the benefit of further randomizing the pulse shape is demonstrated via a simple example.

2009 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, 2009

2017 Fourth International Conference on Advances in Biomedical Engineering (ICABME), 2017

IEEE EUROCON 2019 -18th International Conference on Smart Technologies, 2019

2014 6th International Symposium on Communications, Control and Signal Processing (ISCCSP), 2014

Procedia Computer Science, 2016

IEEE EUROCON 2021 - 19th International Conference on Smart Technologies

IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2012

The concept of channel capacity per unit cost was introduced by Verdú in 1990 to study the limits... more The concept of channel capacity per unit cost was introduced by Verdú in 1990 to study the limits of costefficient wide-band communication. It was shown that orthogonal signaling can achieve the channel capacity per unit cost of memoryless stationary channels with a zero-cost input letter. This paper introduces a concept of secrecy capacity per unit cost to study cost-efficient wide-band secrecy communication. For degraded memoryless stationary wiretap channels, it is shown that an orthogonal coding scheme with randomized pulse position and constant pulse shape achieves the secrecy capacity per unit cost with a zero-cost input letter. For general memoryless stationary wiretap channels, the performance of orthogonal codes is studied, and the benefit of further randomizing the pulse shape is demonstrated via a simple example.