Profiles

Marc Dacier is a professor of Computer Science at KAUST. He is the principal investigator of the Security Research Bearing Experimental Results (SeRBER) Group. He previously served as a full professor and head of the Digital Security Department at EURECOM.

Dr. Dacier holds a Ph.D. in computer science (European Doctorate) from the Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse, France, awarded in 1994. He has received numerous scientific awards and has served on over 120 security and dependability conference program committees.

Dacier has had a distinguished career in both academia and industry, working with several notable companies and institutions. His experience includes consulting for France Telecom and roles at IBM Research, Symantec Research Labs and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI).

At IBM, Dacier was the director of the IBM Global Security Analysis Laboratory, where his group produced the first market product for intrusion detection alert correlation. During his time at Symantec, his team developed an open platform called Worldwide Intelligent Network Environment (WINE) to share operational security data with researchers worldwide, promoting the reproducibility of security experiments. While at QCRI, he served as the founding director of the institute's cybersecurity research group.

He has served on over 120 program committees for major security and dependability conferences and has been a member of the editorial board of several top-tier peer-reviewed technical journals. In 1998, he founded the Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID) conference (formerly known as Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection), which is ranked as a "Class A" conference by the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE).

The internationally recognized expert in cybersecurity, who joined KAUST in 2021, focuses his research on intrusion detection, intrusion tolerance, network security, cybersecurity, threat intelligence and fraud detection.

At KAUST, Professor Dacier and his SeRBER group address network security issues related to the detection of middleboxes—devices that can serve a legitimate purpose in the connection between a client and a server but can also be misused by attackers to commit man-in-the-middle attacks. Another active area of research involves the security of online gaming (e-games, e-sports) and, more broadly, the metaverse. Additionally, they focus on the IoT ecosystem and operational technology (OT) networks, which are of particular interest to the oil and water industries.

Roberto Di Pietro (Fellow, IEEE; Distinguished Scientist, ACM; Fellow, AAIA; Member Academia Europaea) is a Professor of Computer Science with the KAUST CEMSE Division, Saudi Arabia. Previously, he was a Professor in Cybersecurity and founder of the Cyber-Security Research Innovation Lab (CRI-Lab) at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU)-College of Science and Engineering (CES), Qatar.

Previously, at Bell Labs (Alcatel-Lucent/Nokia), he served as Global Head for Security Research, managing three security research departments based in Paris, Munich and Espoo, aligning research with business objectives and moving research results into innovation. Before, he was a tenured professor at the University of Padova. He started his career as a senior military officer within the Italian Ministry of Defence (MoD), working on security-related nationwide technology projects.

He has been working in the cybersecurity field for more than 25 years, leading technology-oriented and research-focused teams in the private sector, government and academia. He has served as a senior security consultant for international organizations, including the United Nations (U.N.) and U.N. agencies (the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations Global Service Centre (UNLB) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)). In addition to his international experience, he was appointed Seconded National Expert and detached for one year at the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation (Eurojust).

As per his drive for innovation, besides being involved in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) of startups—and having founded one (exited)—he is on the board of research centres and startups.

In 2011-2012, he was awarded a Chair of Excellence from the University Carlos III, Madrid, Spain. In 2020, he received the Jean-Claude Laprie Award for having significantly influenced the theory and practice of Dependable Computing. In 2022, he was awarded the Individual Innovation Award from HBKU. He has been consistently included in Stanford University's "World Ranking Top 2% Scientists" list since this ranking existed.

His education accounts for an M.S. in Computer Science ('94) and an M.S. in Informatics ('03), both from the University of Pisa (UniPi), Italy, and a Specialization Diploma in Operations Research and Strategic Decisions ('03) and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science ('04), both from the University of Rome "La Sapienza."

In his academic career, he has secured more than $9 million in funding (either as LPI or PI).

A cybersecurity expert, his main research interests include AI-driven cybersecurity, security and privacy for distributed systems (e.g., UAVs, Blockchain technology, Cloud, IoT, OSNs), applied cryptography, FinTech, Quantum Computing and data science. In particular, Di Pietro identifies three lines of research above all others: critical infrastructure protection (CIP), online social networks (OSN) and cloud security.

He has extensively contributed scientific articles to the cited topics, co-authored four books and registered many patents and applications.

Sheikh received his PhD in Computer Engineering from King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (KFUPM), Dhahran, KSA in 2016. Before coming to KAUST, he was serving as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Air University, Islamabad, Pakistan.

His research interests lie in designing fault tolerant digital circuits, hardware security and computer architecture. At RC3 he will extend his knowledge in investigating and designing of secure and resilient hardware platforms.