Alumni

I have 20 years experience in the design, implementation and operation of large data networks, both in the commercial and research sectors. Prior to joining CSIRO I worked as a network engineer for a tier-2 telecommunications carrier and as a software engineer for a multinational company. I also attained the highest level of industry certification in networking (Cisco Certified Inter-networking Expert, CCIE).

Prof. Dali Kaafar is the Founder of the Information Security and Privacy Group and Leader of the Networks Group. He is the Executive Director of the Optus Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub and a Professor at the Faculty of Science and Engineering in Macquarie University.

Farhad Farokhi holds a Research Fellow position at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Melbourne. Prior to that, he was a McKenzie Fellow at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Melbourne. In 2014, he received his PhD degree in Automatic Control from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. He received his BSc and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering (Automatic Control), respectively, in 2008 and 2010 from Sharif University of Technology, Iran. During his PhD studies, he was a visiting researcher at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Farhad has been the recipient of the VESKI Fellowship from the Victorian State Government and the 2015 Early Career Researcher Award from the University of Melbourne. He was also a finalist in the 2014 European Embedded Control Institute (EECI) PhD Award. His research interests include security and privacy of cyber-physical systems, such as smart grids and intelligent transportation systems.

My research interests revolve around network measurements, fraud detection, and new network architectures.  My current projects include:

• Large Scale Measurement Architecture and performance evaluation;
• Network Economics;
• Software Defined Networking;
• Multi-threaded high-speed packet processing for network bound applications;
• Cyber-security.

I am mainly interested in research in cryptography, information security and privacy. Within these broad fields, my current research areas are:

• Design and analysis of observation resistant password systems
• Topics in cryptography such as identification protocols and multi-party computation
• Application of cryptography for network security such as secure network function virtualisation
• Formal treatment of privacy threats and application of privacy preserving technologies for sharing/releasing data

My research interests generally include optimizations in information theory, wireless communications, signal processing and machine learning. I am currently interested in the discrete and combinatorial optimization problems raised in the following areas:

• discrete event control in cross-layer adaptive modulation
• (information theoretic) lossless and lossy data compression
• information flow over a graph
• game theory (in particular, the games with strong structures, e.g., supermodular and convex games)

My research focuses generally on privacy of mobile and wearable devices (Internet of Things). I aim to identify and combat privacy threats on mobile and wearable devices through the quantification and analysis of user behavioural biometrics. My previous research works include risk measurement and evaluation of critical infrastructures, through threat models and risk methodologies.

My research interests revolve around security and (network) measurement, with a decidedly empirical approach. My current interests are:

• Global-scale measurement of Internet service deployments and their security
• Data-driven security mechanisms
• Analysis of blockchain technology and its implications