Professor, Cloud Systems and Security.

Ibrahim Khalil

Ibrahim Khalil is a Professor at the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bern, Switzerland, in 2003, marking the beginning of a career that would span continents and sectors. Before his tenure at RMIT University, Khalil amassed significant experience in the tech hubs of Silicon Valley, where he worked as a software engineer focused on secure network protocols and smart network provisioning. His academic journey also includes valuable stints at EPFL the University of Bern in Switzerland, and Osaka University in Japan. A prolific contributor to the fields of Blockchain and Privacy, Khalil has led several high-profile ARC discovery and linkage grants in Australia between 2018 and 2024, alongside securing international European grants, industry grants, and a QNRF grant from Qatar. His research portfolio is diverse, encompassing Privacy, Blockchain, secure AI data analytics, distributed systems, e-health, wireless and body sensor networks, biomedical signal processing, and Quantum Computing, reflecting a broad and impactful engagement with the frontiers of computing and technology.



Research Areas

Security, Privacy, Federated Learning, GenAI/LLM, Blockchain, and Distributed Systems, Quantum Computing,


Contact Details:

Ibrahim Khalil is a professor in School of Computing Technologies (Computer Science), RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Ibrahim obtained his Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of Berne in Switzerland. He has several years of experience in Silicon Valley, California based networking companies as software engineers working on secure network protocols and smart network service provisioning. He worked for EPFL and University of Berne in Switzerland and Osaka University in Japan before joining RMIT University, Australia in 2004.

Ibrahim leads a fairly large research group with approximately 10 PhD students and supervised 24 PhD students towards completions. His research interests are in security and scalable computing in distributed systems such as IoT, Fog, Cloud, Smart Grid, and Remote Health. The specific application areas he is interested in are secure sensor/IoT data analytics, m-health/e- health, wireless body sensor networks, secure IoT applications. Ibrahim and his research team have developed Fully Homomorphic based privacy preserving techniques for Big Data on cloud. This involves data analytics of encrypted data on cloud without any decryption. Since working on encrypted data is extremely time-consuming, Ibrahim’s research group have built innovative distributed computing techniques to speed up computations. In recent past, Ibrahim has also contributed in the area of remote cardiac monitoring for elderly people. With cardiovascular disease as the number one killer of modern era, Electrocardiogram (ECG) is collected, stored and transmitted in greater frequency than ever before. However, in reality, ECG is rarely transmitted and stored in an efficient and secured manner. Ibrahim has developed ECG compression algorithms, cardiovascular diagnosis methods, secure transmission and storage techniques for remote cardiac monitoring applications. Such applications will enable patients to stay at home while being continuously monitored by medical service providers.

Ibrahim received serveral research awards during his career. He is recipient of IEEE LCN 2001 Best Paper award for A Range-Based SLA and Edge Driven Virtual Core Provisioning in DiffServ-VPNs, and Joint author of a Best paper at MobiHealth 2011, Greece. Ibrahim received the prestigious Fritz-Kutter award for the best practice oriented PhD thesis in Computer Science in whole Switzerland during the academic year 2002/2003. He was interviewed by IEEE Spectrum for the pioneering work on ECG Steganogrpahy which was published in IEEE TMBE. The interview has been published in IEEE Spectrum Hiding Data in a HeartBeat. (available online: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/biomedical/diagnostics/hiding-data-in-a-heartbeat)

Ibrahim is the Chief Investigators of prestigious few ARC discovery and linkage grants awarded in Australia in 2017 and 2021. He is also the recipients of international European grants, industry grants from Siemens, and QNRF grants from Qatar. Ibrahim has served as reviewers of IEEE Transactions on Networking, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications , IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Pattern Recognition, Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, Mobile and Pervasive Commuting, Journal of Security and Communication Networks (Wiley), Journal of Network and Computer Applications (Elsevier), and guest edited a special issue in IEEE Cloud Computing. Ibrahim has also served as Technical Program Committee (TPC) members of several international IEEE sponsored conferences: IEEE LCN (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008), IEEE Globecom (2006,2007), IEEE ICC (2006,2007,2009,2010,2011), WWIC (2006, 2007, 2008).

Research Grants

I have been awarded research grants to fund projects in the areas of LLM/GenAI, privacy, blockchain, security, and defense. These grants have facilitated exploration and advancement in these areas. Notable ones are: ARC Discovery Project DP250100582 (2025-2027) - Privacy-Aware Intelligent Digital Twin for Secure Critical Infrastructures; ARC Discovery Project DP220100215 (2022-2025) - Privacy-aware Smart Access Control for Internet-of-Things on Blockchain; ARC Discovery Project DP210102761 (2021-2024)- Constraint-based Privacy Preserving BioSignal Data Management on Blockchain; ARC Discovery Project DP18010325 (2018-2021) - Privacy-Preserving Online User Matching; ARC LP LP240100417 (2025-2027) - Federated Fine-Tuning Framework for Secure and Collaborative GenAI Models; ARC LP LP160101766 (2017-2020) - Privacy-preserving Cloud Data Mining-as-a-Service; NPRP11S-1227-170135 (2019-2022) Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) (2019-2022): Designing an Efficient Smart Contract based Blockchain System from Multi-modal Supply Chain Systems; SPGP 2022 (2022-2023) Department of Defence Strategic Policy Grants 2022 : Australia’s trade and the threat of autonomous unmanned underwater vehicles; SELFY EU (2022-2025) SELFY: SELF assessment, protection & healing tools for a trustworthY and resilient CCAM.