Yuval Elovici is a computer scientist. He is a professor in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), where he is the incumbent of the Davide and Irene Sala Chair in Homeland Security Research. He is the director of the Cyber Security Research Center at BGU and the founder and director of the Telekom Innovation Laboratories at Ben-Gurion University. In addition to his roles at BGU, he also serves as the lab director of Singapore University of Technology and Design’s (SUTD) ST Electronics-SUTD Cyber Security Laboratory, as well as the research director of iTrust. In 2014 he co-founded Morphisec, a start-up company, that develops cyber security mechanisms related to moving target defense.
Biography
Yuval Elovici was born in Beer-Sheva, Israel in 1966. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in computer and electrical engineering from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 1989 and 1991, respectively (thesis title: Multi-Target Tracking Implementation onto a Parallel Multiprocessor System based on Transputers). He received his Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Management's information systems program (dissertation title: Information Technology Evaluation, Investment Decisions and Benefits to the Organization over Time).
Career
Elovici began his academic career at BGU in 1998, where he served as a Senior Teaching Assistant/Instructor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management while pursuing his Ph.D. at Tel Aviv University. In 2000 he became a Lecturer in BGU's Department of Information Systems Engineering. In 2006 he advanced to Senior Lecturer, and he received academic tenure in 2007. From 2010 through 2012 Elovici was an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Systems Engineering, and in 2012 he became a full Professor in this department which was recently renamed the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering. He has held a variety of positions in academic administration at BGU as well. Since 2014 Elovici has served as the Director of BGU's Cyber Security Research Center, and since 2005 he has been the Director of Telekom Innovation Laboratories at BGU. In the past, he has served as Head of the Software Engineering Program at BGU.
Research
Elovici's research interests include Privacy and Anonymity in the Electronic Society, Malware Detection, Mobile Phone Security, and Web Intelligence and Social Network Security. Elovici has published over 75 academic papers, and he has been awarded 20 patents. He is a co-author of the book, A Survey of Data Leakage Detection and Prevention Solutions and co-editor of another book, Security and Privacy in Social Network.
Privacy and Anonymity in the Electronic Society
Although surfing the World Wide Web (hereafter: the Web) feels as if it is a bilateral private interaction, this impression is far from being accurate, as users leave identifiable digital tracks at every website they visit, and Elovici's research aims to address this. Elovici has demonstrated how a collaborative attack on the anonymity of Web users can be performed by analyzing only a small number of Internet routers. The computer security community has concentrated on improving users’ privacy by concealing their identities on the Web. However, users may want or need to identify themselves on the Web in order to receive certain services, while retaining the privacy of their interests, needs, and intentions. PRAW, the privacy model developed by Elovici, is aimed at hiding users’ navigation tracks, in an attempt to prevent eavesdroppers from inferring their profiles, while still allowing them to be identified. Securing data at rest stored in a database is a very challenging privacy-related task, and Elovici has developed a new database encryption scheme, SPDE, which preserves the structure of the database and encrypts its content, such that even the DBA cannot view or modify the database cells’ content.
Bridging the Air-Gap
Air-gapped networks in which the computer network is separated physically from other networks, specifically those that are less secure, are widely used to protect the networks of military defense systems and critical infrastructure. The air-gap isolation was once thought to be a means of successfully preventing sensitive data from leaking from critical networks; however, some of Elovici's recent research has challenged this, exposing techniques that enable attackers to leak data from these networks via covert channels, including electromagnetic, ultrasonic, thermal, optical channels. In each case, new types of attacks that can bridge the air-gap have been demonstrated.