Noura Ahmed Mawla

Scopus Publications

Blockchain and Smart Contracts: Enabling Trustworthy and Decentralized Digital Transactions
Ali Ibrahim Ahmed, Adil Abbas Majeed, Azhar Raheem Mohammed Al-Ani, Noura Ahmed Mawla, Saad Mahdi, Tetiana Lavryk, and Hind Monadhel
IEEE
In a digital world, transactions have to be transparent and trusted, respectively. There are always concerns that come into play with conventional centralized systems, mostly revolving around data security and intermediary control, both of which these traditional, agent-based approaches often do not meet the requirements. In this sense, blockchain is a secure and decentralized solution, that makes a real difference.The article aims to clarify the basic concepts of smart contracts and blockchain technology, in an attempt to identify why these innovations seem likely to improve interaction online. The study looks at the decentralized architecture embodied by a core blockchain participant, the distributed ledger system, and its role in securing data with immutability property allowing anyone to verify all transactional history.It is important to know the roles and functionalities of consensus mechanisms such as Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake, that are fundamental in supporting a secure decentralized blockchain network. Moreover, explores the potential of smart contracts coordinating contracts and introducing trustless transactions based on pre-agreed terms.This study demonstrates the practical use cases of blockchain technology and experienced-based knowledge in healthcare, SCMs supply chain management, and financial sectors. While the study discusses possible solutions and future advances, it also acknowledges that even with these added capabilities, our current technology would struggle to handle such tasks in a realistic setting, primarily due to issues of scalability, and energy consumption.With smart contracts and blockchain technology, new possibilities of a decentralized digital security infrastructure emerge. Clearly, they have the power of a revolution to re-write concepts or trust and real superpowers, both for individual users, and corporations. To enhance their capacities, collaboration is essential to tackle current issues and implement robust legal frameworks, that govern the ethical and innovative use of these cutting-edge technologies.

Progress and Challenges in Quantum Computing Algorithms for NP-Hard Problems
Marwa Mahmood Younis, Abeer Salim Jamil, Ahmed Hamid Abdulrazzaq, Noura Ahmed Mawla, Rashid Merzah Khudhair, and Yevhen Vasiliu
IEEE
Background: Traditional computers can be inadequate to solve computationally complex problems, generally known as NP-hard problems, for example, optimization, cryptography, and network design. Quantum Computing is referred to as a breakthrough paradigm, that exploits the principles of quantum physics for performing computation in an exceedingly efficient manner.Objective: This study aims to explore the abilities of quantum algorithms in capturing NP-hard problems and discuss their strengths and limitations. The article illustrates how algorithms like Grover's and Shor's may offer exponential or polynomial improvements under specific circumstances.Methodology: The study provides a thorough survey of present-day quantum algorithms and analyzes their capabilities as well as limitations. This article examines advancements in hardware innovation and error correction methods to assess their ability to address the challenges of limited scalability and elevated error rates currently hindering their adoption.Results: The article underscores the profound impact of quantum computing on NP-hard problems. However, significant barriers remain, such as the inherent limitations of hardware, universality with respect to programming language and robust error correction capabilities.Conclusion: The article shows important progress and open problems for solving NP-hard problems using quantum algorithms. The results reveal the capabilities to achieve significant computational speedup with algorithms such as Grover’s and Shor's especially in concert when current quantum hardware matures along with novel error correction techniques. Nevertheless, scholars have to investigate more about scalability and the creation of standard programming languages for quantum computers.

Enhancing Data Security: A Cutting-Edge Approach Utilizing Protein Chains in Cryptography and Steganography
Noura A. Mawla and Hussein K. Khafaji
MDPI AG
Nowadays, with the increase in cyber-attacks, hacking, and data theft, maintaining data security and confidentiality is of paramount importance. Several techniques are used in cryptography and steganography to ensure their safety during the transfer of information between the two parties without interference from an unauthorized third party. This paper proposes a modern approach to cryptography and steganography based on exploiting a new environment: bases and protein chains used to encrypt and hide sensitive data. The protein bases are used to form a cipher key whose length is twice the length of the data to be encrypted. During the encryption process, the plain data and the cipher key are represented in several forms, including hexadecimal and binary representation, and several arithmetic operations are performed on them, in addition to the use of logic gates in the encryption process to increase encrypted data randomness. As for the protein chains, they are used as a cover to hide the encrypted data. The process of hiding inside the protein bases will be performed in a sophisticated manner that is undetectable by statistical analysis methods, where each byte will be fragmented into three groups of bits in a special order, and each group will be included in one specific protein base that will be allocated to this group only, depending on the classifications of bits that have been previously stored in special databases. Each byte of the encrypted data will be hidden in three protein bases, and these protein bases will be distributed randomly over the protein chain, depending on an equation designed for this purpose. The advantages of these proposed algorithms are that they are fast in encrypting and hiding data, scalable, i.e., insensitive to the size of plain data, and lossless algorithms. The experiments showed that the proposed cryptography algorithm outperforms the most recent algorithms in terms of entropy and correlation values that reach −0.6778 and 7.99941, and the proposed steganography algorithm has the highest payload of 2.666 among five well-known hiding algorithms that used DNA sequences as the cover of the data.

An Ultra Lightweight Cipher Algorithm For IoT Devices and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Noura A. Mawla and Hussein K. Khafaji
IEEE
Drones and the Internet of Things (IoT) have become of paramount importance to individuals, entities, organizations, and states due to the benefits they provide in daily life. Most of the consumer devices around us have become connected to the Internet, no matter how small they are, including smart home applications, automatic sensors, portable medical devices, implants inside the human body, etc. The connection of these devices to the Internet has opened the way for many intrusions, either to steal data or cause harm to humans. This research suggests a method to protect this data from being exposed to security breaches by proposing a new lightweight encryption algorithm. The proposed algorithm presents new ways to encrypt data by exploiting the different faces of the characters in ASCII code, where the text is converted into four different forms, including binary, hexadecimal, characters, and digits. Each of these forms undergoes a certain process, either summation or subtracting, or passing it through the logic gates to obtain high encoding confidentiality to give more complexities to increase data security. Experimental results of the proposed algorithm show a significant improvement in coding rate with high encryption and decryption speeds, in addition to the correlation coefficient and entropy reaching -0.4735 and 7.9983, respectively.

Protein Motifs to Hide GA-Based Encrypted Data
Noura A. Mawla and Hussein K. Khafaji
Hindawi Limited
The arms of the Internet octopus have reached the ends of the planet. As it has become indispensable in our daily lives, huge amounts of information are transmitted through this network, and it is growing momentarily, which has led to an increase in the number of attacks on this information. Keeping the security of this information has become a necessity today. Therefore, the scientists of cryptography and steganography have seen a great and rapid development in the previous years to the present day, where various security and protection techniques have been used in these two technologies. In this research, it was emphasized to secure the confidentiality and security of the transmitted data between the sending and receiving parties by using both techniques of encryption and steganography. In contrast, where genetic algorithms and logic gates are exploited in an encryption process, in an unprecedented approach, protein motifs are used to mask the encoded message, gaining more dispersion because there are 20 bases used to represent the protein. The real payload gained ranges between 0.8 and 2.666, which outperforms the algorithms that depend on DNA sequences.

Noura Ahmed Mawla

RESEARCH, TEACHING, or OTHER INTERESTS

Scopus Publications

RECENT SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS

MOST CITED SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS