Dr Ilir Gashi

Contact details

Phone: +44 (0)20 7040 0273

Room: A229 College Building

Position: Research Fellow

Biography:

Ilir holds PhD (2007) and BEng (Honours) (2003) degrees in Software Reliability and Computing respectively from City University, London. He joined CSR in July 2003, first as a Research Assistant and then as a PhD student. He was appointed to a permanent post as a Research Fellow in CSR in January 2009.

He has worked previously in the DOTS and DIRC projects, a research project sponsored by the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) on technological trends of secure system evolution as well as the EU Framework Programme 6 (FP 6) project ReSIST and EU FP 7 project AMBER. He was the CSR lead on the ReSIST activity FOREVER.

Research Interests:

Since September 2005 he also does research on Security and Forensic Evaluation of ICT (Information and Communications Technology) systems and in dependability and security evaluation challenges posed by emerging and future systems. He has been closely involved in most of the security research undertaken at CSR since then, co-authoring the papers and proposals that resulted from this research.

In 2010-2011 he was involved in a security review of the specifications of the European Railway Traffic Management System (ERTMS) on behalf of the UK railway industry.

He was one of 17 UK researchers to be selected to attend two workshops on Aviation Security organised by the UK Home Office and the US Department for Homeland Security in August and December 2010, which aimed to 'develop an assortment of creative and original ideas to help identify what aviation security could and should be in the year 2027'.

In the summer of 2011 he spent two months on a research visit to the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). The visit was sponsored by NIST, and he researched open-ended vulnerability testing and assessment methods for electronic voting systems that could be used in US federal elections. A white-paper on this work is currently in development co-authored with researchers at NIST.

He has served as a member of the Programme Committee (PC) for the IEEE ISSRE'10, and ISSRE'11 (where he chaired the Student Papers stream in 2010 and Fast Abstracts in 2011), IEEE DSN'11 (DCCS) and the IEEE NCA'10 and NCA'11 conferences. He will serve in the forthcoming IEEE DSN'12 (PDS) PC and will also co-chair the 6th WRAITS workshop.

His main research interests are in the assessment and evaluation of dependability and security of systems with particular emphasis on systems built out of off-the-shelf software components.

Projects:

Publications:

P. Bishop, R. Bloomfield, I. Gashi, V. Stankovic, "Diversity for Security: a Study with Off-The-Shelf AntiVirus Engines", in Proc. ISSRE 2011, International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, Hiroshima, Japan, IEEE Computer Society Press, accepted for publication, 2011, In print
M. Garcia, A. Bessani, I. Gashi, N. Neves, R. Obelheiro, "OS Diversity for Intrusion Tolerance: Myth or Reality?", in Proc. DSN 2011, International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, Hong Kong, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 383-394, 2011
I. Gashi, C. Leita, V. Stankovic, O. Thonnard, "An Experimental Study of Diversity with Off-The-Shelf AntiVirus Engines", in Proc. NCA-2009, 8th IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications, Cambridge, MA, USA, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 4-11, 2009
The above paper was the recipient of the Best Paper award from the NCA symposium
A. Bessani, A. Daidone, I. Gashi, R. Obelheiro, P. Sousa and V. Stankovic, "Enhancing Fault / Intrusion Tolerance through Design and Configuration Diversity", in Proc. of the 3rd Workshop on Recent Advances on Intrusion-Tolerant Systems (WRAITS 2009), Lisbon, Portugal, IEEE Computer Society Press, 2009
I. Gashi, P. Popov, V. Stankovic, "Uncertainty Explicit Assessment of Off-The-Shelf Software: A Bayesian Approach", in Elsevier Journal of Information and Software Technology, Elsevier, 51 (2), pp. 497-511, 2009
R. Bloomfield, I. Gashi, A. Povyakalo, V. Stankovic, "Comparison of Empirical Data from Two Honeynets and a Distributed Honeypot Network", in Proc. ISSRE-2008, 18th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, Seattle, WA, USA, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 219-228, 2008
I. Gashi, P. Popov, and L. Strigini, "Fault tolerance via diversity for off-the-shelf products: a study with SQL database servers", IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Computer Society Press, 4(4), 2007, pp. 280-294
The above paper was the Featured Article of this issue of the journal
P. Bishop, I. Gashi, B. Littlewood, D. Wright, "Reliability Modelling of a 1-Out-Of-2 System: Research with Diverse Off-The-Shelf SQL Database Servers", in Proc. ISSRE-2007, 18th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, Trollhattan, Sweden, IEEE Computer Society Press, 2007, pp. 49-58
I. Gashi and P. Popov, "Uncertainty Explicit Assessment of Off-the-Shelf Software: Selection of an Optimal Diverse Pair", in Proc. ICCBSS-2007, Sixth International Conference on COTS Based Software Systems, Banff, Alberta, Canada, IEEE Computer Society Press, 2007, pp: 93-102
I. Gashi and P. Popov, "Rephrasing rules for off-the-shelf SQL database servers", in Proc. EDCC-6, Sixth European Dependable Computing Conference, Coimbra, Portugal, IEEE Computer Society Press, 2006, pp: 139-148
I. Gashi, P. Popov, and L. Strigini, "Fault diversity among off-the-shelf SQL database servers", in Proc. DSN 2004, International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, Florence, Italy, 2004, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 389-398
I. Gashi, P. Popov, V. Stankovic, L. Strigini, "On Designing Dependable Services with Diverse Off-The-Shelf SQL Servers", in "Architecting Dependable Systems II", Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (R. de Lemos, C. Gacek and A. Romanovsky, Eds.), vol. 3069, pp. 191-214, Springer-Verlag, 2004

Ilir's full list of research papers and abstracts / full texts