Digital Commons Network^™

A Deep-Dive Into Cryptojacking Malware: From An Empirical Analysis To A Detection Method For Computationally Weak Devices, Ege Tekiner

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cryptojacking is an act of using a victim's computation power without his/her consent. Unauthorized mining costs extra electricity consumption and decreases the victim host's computational efficiency dramatically. In this thesis, we perform an extensive research on cryptojacking malware from every aspects. First, we present a systematic overview of cryptojacking malware based on the information obtained from the combination of academic research papers, two large cryptojacking datasets of samples, and numerous major attack instances. Second, we created a dataset of 6269 websites containing cryptomining scripts in their source codes to characterize the in-browser cryptomining ecosystem by differentiating permissioned and permissionless cryptomining …

Digital Twin-Based Cooperative Control Techniques For Secure And Intelligent Operation Of Distributed Microgrids, Ahmed Aly Saad Ahmed

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Networked microgrids play a key role in constructing future active distribution networks for providing the power system with resiliency and reliability against catastrophic physical and cyber incidents. Motivated by the increasing penetration of renewable resources and energy storage systems in the distribution grids, utility companies are encouraged to unleash the capabilities of the distributed microgrid to work as virtual power plants that can support the power systems. The microgrids nature is transforming the grid and their control systems from centralized architecture into distributed architectures. The distributed networked microgrids introduced many benefits to the future smart grids, it created many challenges …

A Structural Equation Model Analysis Of Computing Identity Sub-Constructs And Student Academic Persistence, Mohsen Taheri

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the impact of computing identity sub-constructs on the academic persistence of computing students. This research provides models, quantified relationships, and insights to increase the number of graduates with the intention of pursuing a career in computing. Despite the growing significance of computer science and all the projected new jobs in computer science, many university and college programs suffer from low student persistence rates. One theoretical framework used to better understand persistence in other STEM disciplines is disciplinary identity. Disciplinary identity refers to how students see themselves with respect to a discipline. This study examines the effects of …

Understanding Event Structure In Text, Mohammed Aldawsari

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Stories often appear in textual form, for example, news stories are found in the form of newspaper articles, blogs, or broadcast transcripts, and so forth. These contain descriptions of current, past, or future events. Automatically extracting knowledge from these events descriptions is an important natural language processing (NLP) task, and understanding event structure aids in this knowledge extraction. Event structure is the fact that events may have relationships or internal structure, for example, be in a co-reference relationship with another event mention, or composed of subevents.

Understanding event structure has received less attention in NLP than is due. This work …

Interactive Virtual Training: Implementation For Early Career Teachers To Practice Classroom Behavior Management, Alban Delamarre

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Teachers that are equipped with the skills to manage and prevent disruptive behaviors increase the potential for their students to achieve academically and socially. Student success increases when prevention strategies and effective classroom behavior management (CBM) are implemented in the classroom. However, teachers with less than 5 years of experience, early career teachers (ECTs), are ill equipped to handle disruptive students. ECTs describe disruptive behaviors as a major factor for stress given their limited training in CBM. As a result, disruptive behaviors are reported by ECTs as one of the main reasons for leaving the field.

Virtual training environments (VTEs) …

A Deep-Learning Based Robust Framework Against Adversarial P.E. And Cryptojacking Malware, Faraz Amjad Naseem

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This graduate thesis introduces novel, deep-learning based frameworks that are resilient to adversarial P.E. and cryptojacking malware. We propose a method that uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify image representations of malware, that provides robustness against numerous adversarial attacks. Our evaluation concludes that the image-based malware classifier is significantly more robust to adversarial attacks than a state-of-the-art ML-based malware classifier, and remarkably drops the evasion rate of adversarial samples to 0% in certain attacks. Further, we develop MINOS, a novel, lightweight cryptojacking detection system that accurately detects the presence of unwarranted mining activity in real-time. MINOS can detect …

A Private Bitcoin Payment Network With Reduced Transaction Fees And Confirmation Times, Enes Erdin

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since its introduction, Bitcoin cryptocurrency has revolutionized the way payment systems can be designed in a purely distributed manner through its novel Blockchain data structure. While Bitcoin has opened new opportunities, it has been long criticized for its slow transaction confirmation times and high transaction fees. To address this issue, one of the recently emerging solutions is to build a payment channel network (PCN) on top of Bitcoin where the transactions can be made without writing to blockchain. Specifically, a PCN is a network where the users connect either directly or indirectly to send payments to each other in a …

Alexa, Ask My Library: How Do I Build A Custom Skill To Extend Reference Services?, Christopher M. Jimenez

Works of the FIU Libraries

The Reference Technology team at Florida International University recently published an Alexa Skill that incorporates the LibAnswers API into the device’s answer bank. We have several Echo Show devices at our public service desks to meet the demands of extended hours while also enhancing public service presence beyond the reference desk.

The Green Library at FIU’s Modesto Maidique Campus now operates on a 24/5 schedule, allowing students to access library facilities at any time during the week. In addition, both the Hubert Library and the Engineering Library Service Center stay open past times when personal reference assistance is available. This …

Privacy-Aware Security Applications In The Era Of Internet Of Things, Abbas Acar

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we introduce several novel privacy-aware security applications. We split these contributions into three main categories: First, to strengthen the current authentication mechanisms, we designed two novel privacy-aware alternative complementary authentication mechanisms, Continuous Authentication (CA) and Multi-factor Authentication (MFA). Our first system is Wearable-assisted Continuous Authentication (WACA), where we used the sensor data collected from a wrist-worn device to authenticate users continuously. Then, we improved WACA by integrating a noise-tolerant template matching technique called NTT-Sec to make it privacy-aware as the collected data can be sensitive. We also designed a novel, lightweight, Privacy-aware Continuous Authentication (PACA) protocol. PACA …

Scalable Profiling And Visualization For Characterizing Microbiomes, Camilo Valdes

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Metagenomics is the study of the combined genetic material found in microbiome samples, and it serves as an instrument for studying microbial communities, their biodiversities, and the relationships to their host environments. Creating, interpreting, and understanding microbial community profiles produced from microbiome samples is a challenging task as it requires large computational resources along with innovative techniques to process and analyze datasets that can contain terabytes of information.

The community profiles are critical because they provide information about what microorganisms are present in the sample, and in what proportions. This is particularly important as many human diseases and environmental disasters …

Malware Analysis For Evaluating The Integrity Of Mission Critical Devices, Robert Heras

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The rapid evolution of technology in our society has brought great advantages, but at the same time it has increased cybersecurity threats. At the forefront of these threats is the proliferation of malware from traditional computing platforms to the rapidly expanding Internet-of-things. Our research focuses on the development of a malware detection system that strives for early detection as a means of mitigating the effects of the malware's execution.

The proposed scheme consists of a dual-stage detector providing malware detection for compromised devices in order to mitigate the devices malicious behavior. Furthermore, the framework analyzes task structure features as well …

A Privacy Framework For Decentralized Applications Using Blockchains And Zero Knowledge Proofs, David Gabay

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the increasing interest in connected vehicles along with electrification opportunities, there is an ongoing effort to automate the charging process of electric vehicles (EVs) through their capabilities to communicate with the infrastructure and each other. However, charging EVs takes time and thus in-advance scheduling is needed. As this process is done frequently due to limited mileage of EVs, it may expose the locations and charging pattern of the EV to the service providers, raising privacy concerns for their users. Nevertheless, the EV still needs to be authenticated to charging providers, which means some information will need to be provided …

Click Fraud Detection In Online And In-App Advertisements: A Learning Based Approach, Thejas Gubbi Sadashiva

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Click Fraud is the fraudulent act of clicking on pay-per-click advertisements to increase a site’s revenue, to drain revenue from the advertiser, or to inflate the popularity of content on social media platforms. In-app advertisements on mobile platforms are among the most common targets for click fraud, which makes companies hesitant to advertise their products. Fraudulent clicks are supposed to be caught by ad providers as part of their service to advertisers, which is commonly done using machine learning methods. However: (1) there is a lack of research in current literature addressing and evaluating the different techniques of click fraud …

Search Rank Fraud Prevention In Online Systems, Md Mizanur Rahman

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The survival of products in online services such as Google Play, Yelp, Facebook and Amazon, is contingent on their search rank. This, along with the social impact of such services, has also turned them into a lucrative medium for fraudulently influencing public opinion. Motivated by the need to aggressively promote products, communities that specialize in social network fraud (e.g., fake opinions and reviews, likes, followers, app installs) have emerged, to create a black market for fraudulent search optimization. Fraudulent product developers exploit these communities to hire teams of workers willing and able to commit fraud collectively, emulating realistic, spontaneous activities …

A Simplified Secure Programming Platform For Internet Of Things Devices, Halim Burak Yesilyurt

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) revolution has introduced many useful applications that are utilized in our daily lives. Users can program these devices in order to develop their own IoT applications; however, the platforms and languages that are used during development are abounding, complicated, and time-consuming. The software solution provided in this thesis, PROVIZ+, is a secure sensor application development software suite that helps users create sophisticated and secure IoT applications with little software and hardware experience. Moreover, a simple and efficient domain-specific programming language, namely Panther language, was designed for IoT application development to unify existing programming languages. …

The Thermal-Constrained Real-Time Systems Design On Multi-Core Platforms -- An Analytical Approach, Shi Sha

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Over the past decades, the shrinking transistor size enabled more transistors to be integrated into an IC chip, to achieve higher and higher computing performances. However, the semiconductor industry is now reaching a saturation point of Moore’s Law largely due to soaring power consumption and heat dissipation, among other factors. High chip temperature not only significantly increases packing/cooling cost, degrades system performance and reliability, but also increases the energy consumption and even damages the chip permanently. Although designing 2D and even 3D multi-core processors helps to lower the power/thermal barrier for single-core architectures by exploring the thread/process level parallelism, the …

Exploring Hidden Coherent Feature Groups And Temporal Semantics For Multimedia Big Data Analysis, Yimin Yang

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Thanks to the advanced technologies and social networks that allow the data to be widely shared among the Internet, there is an explosion of pervasive multimedia data, generating high demands of multimedia services and applications in various areas for people to easily access and manage multimedia data. Towards such demands, multimedia big data analysis has become an emerging hot topic in both industry and academia, which ranges from basic infrastructure, management, search, and mining to security, privacy, and applications. Within the scope of this dissertation, a multimedia big data analysis framework is proposed for semantic information management and retrieval with …

A Regression Approach To Execution Time Estimation For Programs Running On Multicore Systems, Mohammad Alshamlan

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Execution time estimation plays an important role in computer system design. It is particularly critical in real-time system design, where to meet a deadline can be as important as to ensure the logical correctness of a program. To accurately estimate the execution time of a program can be extremely challenging, since the execution time of a program varies with inputs, the underlying computer architectures, and run-time dynamics, among other factors. The problem becomes even more challenging as computing systems moving from single core to multi-core platforms, with more hardware resources shared by multiple processing cores.

The goal of this research …

Efficient Storage And Domain-Specific Information Discovery On Semistructured Documents, Fernando R. Farfan

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The increasing amount of available semistructured data demands efficient mechanisms to store, process, and search an enormous corpus of data to encourage its global adoption. Current techniques to store semistructured documents either map them to relational databases, or use a combination of flat files and indexes. These two approaches result in a mismatch between the tree-structure of semistructured data and the access characteristics of the underlying storage devices. Furthermore, the inefficiency of XML parsing methods has slowed down the large-scale adoption of XML into actual system implementations. The recent development of lazy parsing techniques is a major step towards improving …