Hisham Kholidy

Cybersecurity Program Director
Professor

Psychology/Computer Science Building, room 360A
kholidy@niu.edu
Website

Education

• Ph.D., University of Pisa, Italy and University of Arizona

Areas of Interest

• Cybersecurity
  • 5G systems security
  • High-performance systems including grid and cloud computing systems security
  • Quantum computing security
  • Autonomous vehicles security
  • CPS, smart grid, IoT, and SCADA systems security
  • Big data analytics security
• AI, machine learning, and autonomic computing
• Software composition for cloud and distributed systems

Short Profile

• Ten years of administrative experience at several universities, chairing the computer science department, cybersecurity department, the Student Success and Academic Affairs Committee, and IT and research faculty committees.
• Six years of professional IT experience at several software companies such as IBM and Vodafone in developing large-scale networks and security applications.
• Lead PI/Co-PI/Senior Personnel of several research projects with a total fund of 4 million dollars including a nearly $1.1 million contract from the AFRL which is the largest single-investigator award ever received at the SUNY Poly.
• More than 100 published papers in high-quality journals and conferences including three best paper awards (sole author) and several information security patents published by the USPTO (US Patent and Trademark Office).
• Experienced Penetration Tester with a demonstrated history of working in the computer security industry. Strong consulting professional with CEH certification.
• Solid understanding and hands-on experience of 5G, cloud computing, machine learning, autonomic computing, cyber physical systems, and IoT from cybersecurity and resiliency analysis and design perspectives.
• More than 20 years of research experience at University of Arizona, Mississippi State University, University of Nevada in Reno, SUNY Polytechnic Institute, University of Pisa in Italy, Qatar University in Qatar, and Fayoum and Helwan Universities in Egypt.
• More than 10 years of teaching experience at SUNY Polytechnic Institute (associate professor), Fayoum University (assistant professor), Mississippi State University (postdoc), University of Nevada (postdoc).
• Last five years, the Air Force Research Lab's (AFRL) Visiting Faculty Research Awards, Rome, NY, USA.
• 2023, 2022, 2021 AFRL Extension Award.
• 2024 SUNY Poly Presidential Award in Excellence Research and Services.
• 2021, 2023 SUNY Poly Dean’s Excellence Research Award and Certificate of Excellence in Research by SUNY Poly and Fayoum University.
• PhD-Plus Certificate of Research Business Plan and Entrepreneurs by Pisa Univ., Italy.
• Best Presentation and Demo award in the OSM-MR Hackfest 2021 and 2nd rank with my student team in the 2022 international 5G core ETSI OSM Hackfest.
• IEEE senior member.
• Highly committed to excellence in administration, teaching, and quality research.

Patents

• Hisham A. Kholidy, Fabrizio Baiardi, A. Azab, "A Data-Driven Semi-Global Alignment Technique for Masquerade Detection in Stand-Alone and Cloud Computing Systems", US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), granted on January 2019, US 20170019419 A1.
• Hisham A. Kholidy, “Accelerating Stream Cipher Operations using Single and Grid Systems”, USPTO, April 2012, US 20120089829 A1.

Representative Publications

• Hisham Kholidy, "Dynamic network slicing orchestration in open 5G networks using multi-criteria decision-making and secure federated learning techniques". Cluster Computing 28, 237 (February 25, 2025).
• (Best Paper Award) Hisham A. Kholidy, "A Novel Blockchain Approach for Continuously Authenticating UAVs to Achieve Zero Trust Principles in 5G-enabled UAVs", The Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC 2024), Tallinn, Estonia, May 27 – 29, 2024.
• Hisham Kholidy, A. Berrouachedi, E. Benkhelifa and R. Jaziri, "Enhancing Security in 5G Networks: A Hybrid Machine Learning Approach for Attack Classification," 20th ACS/IEEE International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA), pp. 1-8.
• (Best Paper Award) Hisham A. Kholidy, "A Smart Network Slicing Provisioning Framework for 5G based IoT Networks", The 10th International Conference on Internet of Things: Systems, Management and Security (IOTSMS 2023). San Antonio, Texas, USA. October 2023.
• Hisham Kholidy, "Multi-Layer Attack Graph Analysis in the 5G Edge Network Using a Dynamic Hexagonal Fuzzy Method", Sensors 2022, 22, 9. (IF: 3.576).
• Hisham A. Kholidy, Riaad Kamaludeen "An Innovative Hashgraph-based Federated Learning Approach for Multi Domain 5G Network Protection", the IEEE Future Networks World Forum (FNWF), Montreal, Canada, October 2022.
• Hisham Kholidy, "Detecting impersonation attacks in cloud computing environments using a centric user profiling approach", Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume 117, issue 17, Pages 299-320, ISSN 0167-739X. April 2021.
• Hisham Kholidy, "Autonomous Mitigation of Cyber Risks in Cyber-Physical Systems", Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume 115, 2021, Pages 171-187, ISSN 0167-739X, (IF: 7.307).
• Hisham A. Kholidy, "An Intelligent Swarm based Prediction Approach for Predicting Cloud Computing User Resource Needs", The Computer Communications Journal, Feb 2020 (IF: 5.047).
• (Best Paper Award) Hisham A. Kholidy, "Towards A Scalable Symmetric Key Cryptographic Scheme: Performance Evaluation and Security Analysis", IEEE International Conference on Computer Applications and Information Security (ICCAIS), Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 1-3, 2019.
• Hisham A. Kholidy, "Correlation Based Sequence Alignment Models for Detecting Masquerades in Cloud Computing", IET Information Security Journal, DOI: 10.1049/iet-ifs.2019.0409, Sept. 2019 (IF: 1.51)
• Hisham A. Kholidy, Andrew Karam, James Sidoran, et al. "Toward Zero Trust Security in 5G Open Architecture Network Slices", IEEE Military Conference (MILCOM), CA, USA, November 29, 2022.
• Hisham Kholidy, Andrew Karam, James L. Sidoran, Mohammad A. Rahman, "5G Core Security in Edge Networks: A Vulnerability Assessment Approach", the 26th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (The 26th IEEE ISCC), Athens, Greece, September 5-8, 2021.
• Hisham A. Kholidy, Abdelkarim Erradi, "VHDRA: A Vertical and Horizontal Dataset Reduction Approach for Cyber-Physical Power-Aware Intrusion Detection Systems", Security and Communication Networks Journal (IF: 1.968), March 7, 2019. vol. 2019, 15 pages.
• Hisham A. Kholidy, Abdelkarim Erradi, Sherif Abdelwahed, Fabrizio Baiardi, "A risk mitigation approach for autonomous cloud intrusion response system", in Journal of Computing, Springer, June 2016. (IF: 2.42).
• Hisham A. Kholidy, Fabrizio Baiardi, Salim Hariri, "DDSGA: A Data-Driven Semi- Global Alignment Approach for Detecting Masquerade Attacks", in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, May 2014. (ISI Impact factor: 6.791).
• Mustafa, F.M., Hisham A. Kholidy., Sayed, A.F. et al. "Optical fiber fronthaul segment in open radio access 5G networks: enhanced performance utilizing AFBG", Opt Quant Electron 56, 1014 (2024).
• A Jakaria, M. Rahman, M. Asif, A. Khalil, Hisham Kholidy, M. Anderson, S. Drager, "Trajectory Synthesis for a UAV Swarm Based on Resilient Data Collection Objectives", in IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, 2022. (IF: 4.75).
• Boualem, A., Ayaida, M., de Runz, C., Hisham A. Kholidy et al. "Sm-vsn-3c: a new Starlings model-based virtual sensor networks for coverage, connectivity, and data ccommunication". Cluster Comput 27, 13777–13793 (2024).
• Stefano Iannucci, Hisham A. Kholidy Amrita Dhakar Ghimire, Rui Jia, Sherif Abdelwahed, Ioana Banicescu, "A Comparison of Graph-Based Synthetic Data Generators for Benchmarking Next-Generation Intrusion Detection Systems", IEEE Cluster, Sept 5 2017, Hawaii, USA.