Tranchulas - Research

NUST - Tranchulas Center for Cyber Security

Tranchulas has partnered with National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) which is one of Pakistan’s largest universities and among top 300 universities of world to form Pakistan’s first ever cyber security research center called “NUST – Tranchulas Center for Cyber Security”. The Center is the umbrella under which Tranchulas will coordinate and perform its research and development activities. Tranchulas will provide funding and design the center to enhance the security and integrity of information systems, technologies, and content by facilitating research and education, which translates into the fact that we want to remain one step ahead of malicious hackers threatening cyber security. The center will respond to the need to advance the state-of-the-art in information security and to produce more trained information security professionals to meet the growing demand for skill in the area. The center is an effort to pursue an aggressive research and development agenda.

Management

Zubair Khan (CEO, Tranchulas)

Director (NUST-Tranchulas Center for Cyber Security)

Email: zubair [at] tranchulas [dot] com

Zubair Khan is CEO at Tranchulas. He has been researching mainly on cyber warfare and on various other facets of information security for the past seven years. He has conducted large enterprise security assessments and given information security consultancy to top organizations of Pakistan.

Zubair has conducted security trainings at various forums in Pakistan and abroad. He has previously presented at renowned security conferences including Hack.lu Luxembourg, Hack In The Box Malaysia and Infosek Slovenia. Chairman of Pakistan Engineering Development Board and Chairman of Pakistan Engineering Council recognize his research and work. Zubair holds a bachelor's degree in Business IT from Curtin University of Technology, Australia.

He is CISA (Certified Information Systems Auditor), CISM (Certified Information Security Manager) and also ISO27001 ISMS (Information Security Management System) Auditor.

Dr. Fauzan Mirza (Ph.D. Information Security)

Co-Director (NUST-Tranchulas Center for Cyber Security)

Email: fauzan [dot] mirza [at] seecs [dot] edu [dot] pk

Dr. Fauzan Mirza joined NUST School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science in September 2006. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Systems Engineering. He has a first class honours BSc in Computer Science from Royal Holloway, University of London and a PhD in Information Security also from Royal Holloway, University of London.

His PhD thesis was on the analysis of some modern block and stream ciphers. During his PhD studies, he visited the University of Bergen, Norway, for three months where he investigated a design flaw in the Twofish block cipher which was proposed for the US Government's Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Dr. Fauzan and his PhD advisor (Professor Sean Murphy) were awarded a $10,000 (US) prize for the discovery of this weakness. During and after his PhD studies, he worked for various UK companies, government organizations and police forces in the capacity of a data security specialist. His expertise and knowledge includes: computer hacking attacks and defence, software registration/activation mechanisms (anti-piracy), digital evidence investigation (computer forensics), role-based access control.