Mohamed Alzayat

In a nutshell ...

Since October 2016, I am a PhD student with Peter Druschel and Deepak Garg. I am part of the Distributed Systems and the Security & Privacy research groups. I am interested in designing and building computer systems that are secure, highly-available and privacy-preserving.

Active Projects

Ensuring Correctness and Security in Function-as-a-Service

Drop me a note for more details ;)

Publications

Groundhog: Efficient Request Isolation in FaaS [PDF][Code]

Mohamed Alzayat, Jonathan Mace, Peter Druschel, Deepak Garg

To Appear at the European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), 2023

Pacer: Network Side-Channel Mitigation in the Cloud [PDF][Code]

Aastha Mehta, Mohamed Alzayat, Roberta De Viti, Björn B. Brandenburg, Peter Druschel, Deepak Garg

USENIX Security Symposium, 2022.

Modeling Coordinated vs. P2P Mining: An Analysis of Inefficiency and Inequality in Proof-of-Work Blockchains [PDF] [Code]

Mohamed Alzayat, Johnnatan Messias, Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, Krishna P. Gummadi, Patrick Loiseau

Under submission.

Selfish & Opaque Transaction Ordering in the Bitcoin Blockchain: The Case for Chain Neutrality [PDF][Data]

Johnnatan Messias, Mohamed Alzayat, Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, Krishna P. Gummadi, Patrick Loiseau, and Alan Mislove

In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'21). Virtual Event. November, 2021.

On Blockchain Commit Times: An analysis of how miners choose Bitcoin transactions [PDF, Slides]

Johnnatan Messias, Mohamed Alzayat, Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, Krishna P. Gummadi

In Proceedings of the Second International KDD Workshop on Smart Data for Blockchain and Distributed Ledger (SDBD'20). August, 2020.

PolSim: Automatic Policy Validation via Meta-Data Flow Simulation [PDF, Thesis]

Mohamed Alzayat, Deepak Garg, Peter Druschel

Master Thesis. (Saarland University, MPI-INF, MPI-SWS)

Internships & Assistantships

Jun. 2021 - Aug. 2021

Software Engineer Intern

Amazon Web Services

Kernel and Operating System team for AWS EC2

Dresden, Germany (virtual)

Feb. 2015 - Jul. 2015

Research Assistant Student

Cluster of Excellence MMCI, Cryptographic Systems Research Group

Secure Multi-Party Computation

Saarbruecken, Germany

Nov. 2014 - Dec. 2015

Research Assistant Student

The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH)

Semantic and Proactive Task Management

Kaiserslautern, Germany

July 2014 - Sep. 2014

Research Assistant Student

German University in Cairo

Vehicular Context-Aware intelligence

Cairo, Egypt

Apr. 2013 - Aug. 2013

Research Assistant Student, DAAD fellowship

The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH)

Semantic and Proactive Task Management, Bachelor Thesis

Kaiserslautern, Germany

Feb. 2013 - Mar. 2013

Research Intern

Intel Cairo Research Labs

Video over wireless team

Cairo, Egypt

July 2012 - Aug. 2012

Software Engineer Intern

Robusta Development Studio

Cairo, Egypt

Teaching

Oct. 2015 - Apr. 2019

Teaching Assistant

Saarland University, Max-Planck-Institute for software systems

Saarbruecken, Germany

Distributed Systems (Winter 2018)
Operating Systems (Winter 2015)

Mar. 2011 - Jul. 2014

Junior Teaching Assistant

German University in Cairo

Cairo, Egypt

Media and Networks lab (Spring 2014)
Data-structures and Algorithms (Winter 2012)
Databases I (Winter 2012)
Introduction to Communication Networks (Winter 2012)
Introduction to Computer Programming (Spring 2011, Summer 2011, Spring 2012, Spring 2014)

Education

Oct. 2016 - Present

Doctoral Student

Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Saarland University

Saarbruecken, Germany

Oct. 2014 - Sep. 2016

Master's Student

Saarland University, International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems

Saarbruecken, Germany

2009 - 2014

Bachelor Student, Computer Science and Engineering

German university in Cairo (GUC)

Cairo, Egypt