CV

Education

2017 – 2020

M.Sc., Computer Engineering / University of Tabriz

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Saeid Pashazadeh
Thesis: Privacy improvement of IoT protocols for 6LowPAN in the internet of things

6LoWPAN is a revision of the latest version of the IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (LoWPAN). It enables small devices with limited processing power to transmit data wirelessly. Privacy Enabled Disjoint and Dynamic Address Auto-Configuration (PeDAAC) is one of the 6LoWPAN protocols that was designed to ensure the privacy of the nodes by changing IPv6 and also MAC addresses. One of the goals of this protocol is having a unique, non-fragmented, and disjoint three-level hierarchical IPv6 addressing space, and all of these addresses are based on congruence classes. PeDAAC is a dynamic protocol that its purpose is creating a conflict-free, auto-configuring IPv6 addressing scheme, and it eliminates the need for duplicate address detection. This results in lower latency and optimal communication costs, and also the IPV6 addresses of each node will be unique. Two successful attacks on the PeDAAC protocol are discussed in this thesis. An adversary can attack the availability of the nodes and can cause a denial of service attack. Also, detection of the node’s identity that changes over time can gather more messages, and this increases the likelihood of successful eavesdropping. The Greatest Common Divisor based Lightweight improvement (GCDLi) is a proposed lightweight extension of this thesis to PeDAAC protocol to protect against these attacks. Beyond that, it counteracts with two types of security threats, which are eavesdropping and denial of service attack. The proposed extension of the protocol improves the privacy and anonymity of the nodes.

2022 – 2026

Ph.D., Computer Science / University of Twente

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Mariëlle Stoelinga & Dr. Milan Lopuhaä-Zwakenberg

Thesis:  Integrating safety and cybersecurity through stochastic model checking.

The main objective of the ERC-funded Ph.D. project is to marry the historically separated fields of safety (no disruption due to unintended failures) and security (no malicious attacks). Despite their historic separation, safety and security are heavily intertwined. A simple example: locking your door at night, is great for security against burglars, but bad for safety in case of fire.

An important goal of the project is to develop an effective framework for the joint analysis of safety and security risks. In this way, safety-security decision-making will become more accountable, i.e., more systematic, transparent, and quantitative. The core scientific objectives are concerned with integral safety-security modeling; analysis via stochastic model checking.

Work Experience

2019 – Present

Co-founder & CTO @ Hosting Big Data

Hosting Big Data is a registered Company in The Netherlands

Chamber of Commerce#88189090

The company mission is to provide an easy-to-use VPS.

2021 – 2022

Researcher @ I4.0 Laboratory, University of Southern Denmark

I was working on trustworthy cyber-physical systems at Industry 4.0 laboratory

2017 – 2019

research assistant @ Data Analytics Laboratory, University of Tabriz

I worked on Network Security and more specifically on the security of the Internet of Things.

 

2018 – 2019

R&D Engineer @ SAYMANTECH Knowledge-Based Company

I worked with open source IoT operating system, with support for NBIoT, LoRaWAN, BLE, NFC and other communications stacks to develop projects in Arm Mbed OS.

Honors and Awards

  • Ranked 2nd among master students in Software Engineering, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran.
  • Ranked as top 1% among more than 25,000 participants in the National University Entrance exam in master of Computer Engineering.
  • Elected student from the University of Tabriz at GraDAna Erasmus+ Project in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece.
  • Member of Young Researchers and Elite Club.

Papers

Journals:

Soltani, R., Pashazadeh, S. A lightweight improvement of PeDAAC protocol for 6LoWPAN in the Internet of Things. Multimed Tools Appl 80, 31467–31486 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-021-11236-w

N. Derakhshanfard and R. Soltani, “Opportunistic routing in wireless networks using bitmap-based weighted tree.” Computer Networks, Volume 188, 2021, 107892, 
ISSN 1389-1286, 
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2021.107892.

Conferences:

R. Soltani, E.Y. Kang, J.E.H. Mena – FedCSIS (Position Papers), 2021

https://annals-csis.org/proceedings/2021/drp/pdf/125.pdf

R. A. Ligvan, R. Soitani and S. Pashazadeh, “Distributed synchronization for charging sensors based on service priority in WSAN,” 2020 10th International Conference on Computer and Knowledge Engineering (ICCKE), 2020, pp. 130-135, doi: 10.1109/ICCKE50421.2020.9303688.

S. Pashazadeh and L. Namvari and R. Soltani, “RSS_RAID a novel replicated storage schema for raid system.” The International Conference on Contemporary Issues In Data Science(CiDaS), Zanjan, Iran, 2019. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-37309-2_4.

N. Derakhshanfard and R. Soltani and A. Naghshin, “Node determination based on the dependency for increasing delivery ratio in mobile social networks.” ICETCONF, 13th International Conference on Engineering & Technology, Oslo, Norway, 2019.

S. C. Jepsen et al., “A Research Setup Demonstrating Flexible Industry 4.0 Production,” 2021 International Symposium ELMAR, 2021, pp. 143-150, doi: 10.1109/ELMAR52657.2021.9550961.