Associate Professor, Computer Science Dept., Bar-Ilan University

Teaching (2011-2012)

• 89-350 Introduction to communication networks

• 89-690 Introduction to Secure Communication and Commerce

• 89-550 Applied network security (`ethical hacking')

• 89-430 Seminar in applied network security

• not this year: 89-850 Communication networks and protocols (will probably be given again 2011-2012) 

Contact

Reception hours: Mondays 3-4. Please send email stating purpose and time of visit. 
Office: Room 10, Building 408, Bar-Ilan University, 52900 Ramat-Gan, Israel. See campus map (Flash). 
E-mail: herzbea at cs dot biu dot ac dot il
Fax: +972-3-7360498 (CS dept.).

Research:

• See selected recent papers and network security group's technical reports.
  

• Security: Denial-of-Service, security in hostile environments (software protection, white-box security), Phishing, Spoofing, Spam, Malware, DNS poisoning...

• Cryptography: provable yet applied. Esp.: protocols, robust combiners, resilient & proactive security

• Network protocols and distributed algorithms, esp. peer to peer and social networking, vehicular networking

Software Precedence Rules-of-thumb:

Functionality > Usability > Reliability > Performance > Security > Privacy

Tips for graduate students

1. Search and read - a lot... use keywords and previous articles to find new works. In particular try Citeseer (or new version Citeseerx), Google Scholar and ACM Portal. Use Citeseer and Scholar to find citations, crucial for searching an area. Once you identify important author, look for other publications in her homepage and in DBLP. Many articles are available online. University provides online access to many sources.

2. Improve your (English) writing style. Two great online sources: Lynch's guide to grammar and style, and the very concise Strunk's `The Elements of Style` (this online version is 1st edition; I use 3rd edition, by Strunk and White). 

3. Write using LaTeX, e.g. with TeXnicCenter, and using BibTeX for citations.  I use, and recommend, the Algorithm2e package for writing algorithms and protocols. Two cute tools (sites): Detextify (find LaTeX macros for symbols by scribbling them) and EqnEditor (online equation editor).  For figures and presentations, I recommend either to use LaTeX's Beamer package, or Open-Office (which makes great PDF output - see more PDF/PS tips). To write equations in presentations, you can use Beamer or Open-office formula language - not bad, and similar to LaTeX; or use Powerpoint with IguanaTex, a (free) power-point add-on that allows editing LaTeX equations from within Powerpoint. Another handly site counts words in a latex documents. 

   
   

4. Citations are very important and could be surprisingly painful... but LaTeX makes life easier with BiBTeX citations, available from the Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies, DBLP or ACM Portal. Scholar also provides BibTex citations (if you set preference), but less reliable.

5. To find conferences: use confsearch or, for security CFPs, see collections UCL and IEEE.