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Marc Dacier

Professor, Computer Science

Principal Investigator, Security Research Bearing Experimental Results

Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering Division
Email icon marc.dacier@kaust.edu.sa

Program Affiliations

Biography

Marc Dacier is a professor of Computer Science at KAUST. He is the principal investigator of the Security Research Bearing Experimental Results (SeRBER) Group. He previously served as a full professor and head of the Digital Security Department at EURECOM.

Dr. Dacier holds a Ph.D. in computer science (European Doctorate) from the Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse, France, awarded in 1994. He has received numerous scientific awards and has served on over 120 security and dependability conference program committees.

Dacier has had a distinguished career in both academia and industry, working with several notable companies and institutions. His experience includes consulting for France Telecom and roles at IBM Research, Symantec Research Labs and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI).

At IBM, Dacier was the director of the IBM Global Security Analysis Laboratory, where his group produced the first market product for intrusion detection alert correlation. During his time at Symantec, his team developed an open platform called Worldwide Intelligent Network Environment (WINE) to share operational security data with researchers worldwide, promoting the reproducibility of security experiments. While at QCRI, he served as the founding director of the institute's cybersecurity research group.

He has served on over 120 program committees for major security and dependability conferences and has been a member of the editorial board of several top-tier peer-reviewed technical journals. In 1998, he founded the Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID) conference (formerly known as Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection), which is ranked as a "Class A" conference by the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE).

Research Interests

The internationally recognized expert in cybersecurity, who joined KAUST in 2021, focuses his research on intrusion detection, intrusion tolerance, network security, cybersecurity, threat intelligence and fraud detection.

At KAUST, Professor Dacier and his SeRBER group address network security issues related to the detection of middleboxes—devices that can serve a legitimate purpose in the connection between a client and a server but can also be misused by attackers to commit man-in-the-middle attacks. Another active area of research involves the security of online gaming (e-games, e-sports) and, more broadly, the metaverse. Additionally, they focus on the IoT ecosystem and operational technology (OT) networks, which are of particular interest to the oil and water industries.
Keyword tag icon
cybersecurity threat intelligence fraud detection intrusion tolerance intrusion detection

Education Profile

  • Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

    Computer Science, INPT National Polytechnic Institute of Toulouse, France, 1994

  • Master of Science (M.S.)

    Computer Science, UCLouvain, Belgium, 1989

Awards and Recognitions

  • IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, 2024

  • The IBM Faculty Award, 2005

  • Community Service Award for having served for 20 years as chair of the RAID symposium steering committee, 2018

Publications

  • An industrial perspective on web scraping characteristics and open issues, E Chiapponi, M Dacier, O Thonnard, M Fangar, M Mattsson, V Rigal2022 52nd Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable System

  • WPAD: Waiting Patiently for an Announced Disaster, E Boulila, M Dacier, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)

  • Badpass: Bots taking advantage of proxy as a service, E Chiapponi, M Dacier, O Thonnard, M Fangar, V Rigal

  • ImMuNE: Improved Multilateration in Noisy Environments, M Champion, M Dacier, E Chiapponi, M Fangar, V Rigal

  • Dhia Farrah, Marc Dacier, “Zero Conf Protocols and their numerous Man In The Middle (MITM) Attacks”, Proc. of WOOT 2021, the 15th IEEE Workshop on Offensive Technologies, May 27, 2021, collocated with IEEE S&P and in cooperation with Usenix.

  • Vitale, A., & Dacier, M. (2021). Inmap-t: Leveraging TTCN-3 to Test the Security Impact of Intra Network Elements. Journal of Computer and Communications, 09(06), 174–190. doi:10.4236/jcc.2021.96010.

  • Elisa Chiapponi, Onur Catakoglu, Olivier Thonnard, Marc Dacier, HoPLA: a Honeypot Platform to Lure Attackers. Proc. of the C&ESAR 2020, Computer & Electronics SecurityApplications Rendez-vous, Deceptive security Conference, part of European CyberWeek. Rennes, France, (2020).

  • Elisa Chiapponi, Marc Dacier, Massimiliano Todisco, Onur Catakoglu and Olivier Thonnard, "Botnet sizes: when maths meet myths", Proc. of CFTIC 2020, 1st International Workshop on Cyber Forensics and Threat INvestigations Challenges in Emerging Infrastructures, held in conjunction with the 18th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2020), 14-17 December 2020, Dubai, UAE.

  • Y. Zhauniarovich, I. Khalil, T. Yu, and M. Dacier, "A Survey on Malicious Domains Detection through DNS Data Analysis", Journal ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 51, Issue 4, July 2018, 36 pages,DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3191329.

  • M Dacier, M. Bailey, M. Polychronakis (Editors), Proc. Of the 20th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID 2017), Atlanta (GA), USA, September 18-20 2017.

  • Marc Dacier, Hartmut König, Radoslaw Cwalinski, Frank Kargl, Sven Dietrich, « Security Challenges and Opportunities of Software Defined Networks », Journal IEEE Security and Privacy, 15(2), 2017.

  • Marc Dacier, Hartmut König, Radoslaw Cwalinski, Frank Kargl, Sven Dietrich, "Security Challenges and Opportunities of Software Defined Networks", Journal IEEE Security and Privacy, 15(2), 2016.

  • Marc Dacier, Sven Dietrich, Frank Kargl, Hartmut König: Network Attack Detection and Defense (Dagstuhl Seminar 16361), Dagstuhl Reports 6(9): 1-28 (2016).

  • F Monrose, M Dacier, G Blanc, J Garcia-Alfaro (Editors), Proc. Of the 19th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID 2016), Paris, France, September 19-21 2016.

  • Michael Aupetit, Yury Zhauniarovich, Giorgos Vasiliadis, Marc Dacier, Yazan Boshmaf, Visualization of actionable knowledge to mitigate DRDoS attacks, Proc. of 2016 IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec), pp 1-8.

Research Areas

  • Electrical and Computer Engineering

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