About Me

Dr.Muhammad Ajmal Azad, Ph.D. Email: muhammadajmal.azad {@ }bcu.ac.uk
 Senior Lecturer in Cyber Security : majmalazad {@} gmail.com
Birmingham City University, UK Twitter: @majmalazad                             

Contact: Dept. of Computer Science and Digital Technologies,
 STEAM House, Birmingham, England, United Kingdom

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I am a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Cyber Security in the Department of Computer Science and Digital Technologies at Birmingham City University. I was Senior Lecturer in Cybersecurity and Programme lead for B.Sc. Cybersecurity and B.Sc. Digital Forensics and Security at University of Derby. Before joining University of Derby, I was a Research Fellow (equivalent of Lecturer ) in the Department of Computer Science at University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom and a research associate in the School of Computing Science at Newcastle University, United Kingdom, where I worked with Professor Feng Hao on privacy-preservation aggregation and analytics. 

I received a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Porto, Portugal. My PhD. was funded by FCT (Portuguese Science Foundation) and the University of Porto (FEUP) fellowship. I was advised by Professor Ricardo Morla at the INESCTEC Porto laboratory. Before Ph.D. I also worked in a leading VoIP telecommunication company in Pakistan for four years, and the FCT project "Next-generation network management" (FEUP and CMU collaboration).

My research interests broadly cover the areas of network security and privacy. In the past few years, I designed systems and methods for securing the telecommunication users from the telemarketers, robo-callers, scammers, and spammers using behavioral modeling and social network analysis. I have also explored ways for protecting the privacy of telephone users when call records are outsourced to the third party. Currently, I am researching on topics related to privacy-aware collaboration among service providers, secure reputation systems, collaborative security, Telephone and Next-generation Network security and spam detection.

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Research Interests

I am interested in various aspects of network security and privacy protection. I mainly focus on identifying anomalies and intrusions in the Internet infrastructure and services. Particularly, I am interested in the followings:

Secure Analytics: Trust and Reputation Management, Privacy-Aware Collaboration for Intrusion and Anomaly Detection, Secure Collaborative reputation aggregation, E-voting, non-tracking web analytics.

VoIP Security: Spam Detection, Fraud Detection, Identity Linking, spoofing, and Vishing attack detection.

IoT and Digital Manufacturing Security:  Intrusion detection, security analytics. 

Social Network Analysis: Application of social network analysis for network security and anomaly detection, application of SNA for fraud detection

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Selected Publications [Full List]

Decentralized Self-enforcing Trust Management System for Social Internet of ThingsIEEE The Internet of Things Journal, 2018

TrustVote: Privacy-preserving Node Ranking in Vehicular NetworksIEEE The Internet of Things Journal, 2018

PrivBox: Verifiable Decentralized Reputation System for online MarketplacesElsevier Future Generation Computer Systems, 2018.

privy: Privacy-Preserving Collaboration Across Multiple Service Providers to Combat Telecom SpamsIEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing, 2018.

M2M-REP: Reputation of Machines in the Internet of Things12th International Conference on Availability, Reliability, and Security (ARES), 2017.

Decentralized Privacy-Aware Collaborative Filtering of Smart Spammers in a Telecommunication Network 32nd ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Computer Security Track (SAC-SEC),  2017.

Caller-REP: Detecting unwanted Calls with Caller Social Strength  Elsevier Computers & Security, 2013. 

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Grants & Scholarships

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Prospective Students

If you are interested in doing research/project in the area of network security and privacy, please write me an email.