LSU Computer Science PhD Student Wins Pair of Best Paper Awards
September 3, 2024
BATON ROUGE, LA – Prior to this summer, LSU Computer Science Ph.D. student Taha Gharaibeh had never won a Best Paper award, which is typically given in recognition of the quality and impact of the published work.
Over the last two months, he’s changed that, winning Best Paper awards at the DFRWS (Digital Forensic Research Workshop) USA 2024 Conference, held at LSU this year, and the ARES Conference in Vienna, Austria.
“I won the first in July and the second in August, which is unbelievable,” said Gharaibeh, a native of Irbid, Jordan. “I was speechless after working so hard to perfect them. The adrenaline rush was intense, and I knew I was in the perfect place and time at LSU.”
Gharaibeh’s winning paper at the DFRWS conference was titled, “On Enhancing Memory Forensics With FAME: Framework for Advanced Monitoring and Execution,” and was co-authored by his Ph.D. advisor and LSU Computer Science (CS) Chair and Professor Ibrahim “Abe” Baggili and LSU CS Associate Professor Nash Mahmoud. The paper details how FAME can enhance Volatility, software used in digital investigations by personnel such as incident responders, without requiring changes in the source code.
“The velocity, variety, and volume of digital evidence pose a major challenge in digital forensics,” Gharaibeh said. “Our work helps to reduce the processing time of digital evidence for Volatility.”
Gharaibeh’s paper at the ARES Conference, titled “Don’t, Stop, Drop, Pause: Forensics of CONtainer CheckPOINTs (ConPoint),” was co-authored by Baggili, LSU CS Associate Professor Elias Bou-Harb, CS graduate Steven Seiden, and Mohamed Abouelsaoud, technical leader at Cisco. It describes the research group’s work assisting human analysts in conducting digital investigations on containers. In this case, a container is a lightweight, isolated process that encapsulates an application or server on a single processing unit.
“Containers are known to be ephemeral; they perform a specific task and may fail while
doing so,” Gharaibeh explained. “Previously, IT organizations used virtual machines
(VMs). The main difference between the two is that containers are lighter, share resources,
and so on. My work identified an opportunity to provide human analysts with an automated
method of acquiring the state of these containers at any given time and investigating
them.”
For Gharaibeh’s advisor, Baggili, what impressed him most about the pair of award wins was the determination his student showed along the way, even when the eventual outcome seemed improbable.
“I began working with Taha while he was finishing his BS in Jordan,” Baggili said. “We collaborated remotely on a project that ultimately won the Best Paper Award at DFRWS. Initially, we submitted the paper to two different venues, but it was rejected, and Taha had a tough time accepting that. However, this story is truly about perseverance. I kept encouraging him to believe in both the work and himself and to keep pushing forward. In the end, his hard work paid off, and he won the Best Paper Award!
“ARES, on the other hand, is a prestigious international conference in Europe and highly regarded within the cybersecurity community. Taha presented our work there as well and, once again, won the Best Paper award for a paper we collaborated on with colleagues from both industry and academia. The key takeaway here is that perseverance wins! I am incredibly proud of Taha for these outstanding achievements.”
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Contact: Joshua Duplechain
Director of Communications
225-578-5706
josh@lsu.edu