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Improving Energy Efficiency And Security For Pervasive Computing Systems, Fengyuan Xu

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Pervasive computing systems are comprised of various personal mobile devices connected by the wireless networks. Pervasive computing systems have gained soaring popularity because of the rapid proliferation of the personal mobile devices. The number of personal mobile devices increased steeply over years and will surpass world population by 2016.;However, the fast development of pervasive computing systems is facing two critical issues, energy efficiency and security assurance. Power consumption of personal mobile devices keeps increasing while the battery capacity has been hardly improved over years. at the same time, a lot of private information is stored on and transmitted from personal …

Carbon Emissions From Soil Respiration In The Northern Chihuahuan Desert Shrubland, Anna Cristina Ortiz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The United States Department of Agriculture's Jornada Experimental Range (JER), is located in the northern Chihuahuan Desert in southern New Mexico and historically functioned as an experimental rangeland for cattle grazing. Historical grazing in the US Southwest has been identified as a leading, but not the sole, factor that has led to the conversion of pristine grasslands to shrublands, such has been the case on the JER. The estimated increased variability in precipitation intensity and frequency that is predicted to occur with climate warming will likely affect ecosystem responses from ecological processes including primary productivity, microbial decomposition, and thus respiration. …

Snoop-Forge-Replay Attack On Continuous Verification With Keystrokes, Khandaker Abir Rahman

Doctoral Dissertations

We present a new attack called the snoop-forge-replay attack on the keystroke-based continuous verification systems. We performed the attacks on two levels – 1) feature-level and 2) sample-level.

(1) Feature-level attack targets specific keystroke-based continuous verification method or system. In feature-level attacks, we performed a series of experiments using keystroke data from 50 users who typed approximately 1200 to 2300 keystrokes of free text during three different periods. The experiments consisted of two parts. In the first part, we conducted zero-effort verification experiments with two verifiers ("R" and "S") and obtained Equal Error Rates (EERs) between 10% and 15% under …

Ensuring Application Specific Security, Privacy And Performance Goals In Rfid Systems, Farzana Rahman

Dissertations (1934 -)

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is an automatic identification technology that uses radio frequency to identify objects. Securing RFID systems and providing privacy in RFID applications has been the focus of much academic work lately. To ensure universal acceptance of RFID technology, security and privacy issued must be addressed into the design of any RFID application. Due to the constraints on memory, power, storage capacity, and amount of logic on RFID devices, traditional public key based strong security mechanisms are unsuitable for them. Usually, low cost general authentication protocols are used to secure RFID systems. However, the generic authentication protocols provide …

Verification Of Information Flow Security In Cyber-Physical Systems, Rav Akella

Doctoral Dissertations

"With a growing number of real-world applications that are dependent on computation, securing the information space has become a challenge. The security of information in such applications is often jeopardized by software and hardware failures, intervention of human subjects such as attackers, incorrect design specification and implementation, other social and natural causes. Since these applications are very diverse, often cutting across disciplines a generic approach to detect and mitigate these issues is missing. This dissertation addresses the fundamental problem of verifying information security in a class of real world applications of computation, the Cyber-physical systems (CPSs). One of the motivations …

Security Analysis Of A Cyber Physical System : A Car Example, Jason Madden

Masters Theses

"Deeply embedded Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are infrastructures that have significant cyber and physical components that interact with each other in complex ways. These interactions can violate a system's security policy, leading to the leakage of rights and unintended information flow. This thesis will explore information flow as it uses a public channel. In order to exemplify the use of the public channel, a vehicle being composed of the computer system and its operators will show how information is disclosed to an observer. The example is made up of a vehicle traveling across some terrain with an observer watching the …

Plc Code Vulnerabilities Through Scada Systems, Sidney E. Valentine, Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are widely used in automated manufacturing and in all areas of our nation's infrastructure. Applications range from chemical processes and water treatment facilities to oil and gas production and electric power generation and distribution. Current research on SCADA system security focuses on the primary SCADA components and targets network centric attacks. Security risks via attacks against the peripheral devices such as the Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) have not been sufficiently addressed.

Our research results address the need to develop PLC applications that are correct, safe and secure. This research provides an analysis of …

Online Deception Detection Using Bdi Agents, Richard Alan Merritts

CCE Theses and Dissertations

This research has two facets within separate research areas. The research area of Belief, Desire and Intention (BDI) agent capability development was extended. Deception detection research has been advanced with the development of automation using BDI agents. BDI agents performed tasks automatically and autonomously. This study used these characteristics to automate deception detection with limited intervention of human users. This was a useful research area resulting in a capability general enough to have practical application by private individuals, investigators, organizations and others. The need for this research is grounded in the fact that humans are not very effective at detecting …

Assessing The Role Of User Computer Self-Efficacy, Cybersecurity Countermeasures Awareness, And Cybersecurity Skills Toward Computer Misuse Intention At Government Agencies, Min Suk Choi

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities are causing substantial financial losses for governments and organizations all over the world. Cybersecurity criminals are stealing more than one billion dollars from banks every year by exploiting vulnerabilities caused by bank users' computer misuse. Cybersecurity breaches are threatening the common welfare of citizens since more and more terrorists are using cyberterrorism to target critical infrastructures (e.g., transportation, telecommunications, power, nuclear plants, water supply, banking) to coerce the targeted government and its people to accomplish their political objectives. Cyberwar is another major concern that nations around the world are struggling to get ready to fight. It …

Energy Efficient Context-Aware Framework In Mobile Sensing, Ozgur Yurur

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The ever-increasing technological advances in embedded systems engineering, together with the proliferation of small-size sensor design and deployment, have enabled mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) to recognize daily occurring human based actions, activities and interactions. Therefore, inferring a vast variety of mobile device user based activities from a very diverse context obtained by a series of sensory observations has drawn much interest in the research area of ubiquitous sensing. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users, and this allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently …

A Study Of Habitat Selection By Blanding's Turtles (Emydoidea Blandingii) In Dutchess County, New York, Shannon Rauch

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The Blanding's turtle (Emydoidea blandingii) is a New York State-listed threatened species with several disjunct populations located throughout the state. Blanding's turtles require a variety of habitat types including ponds, wetlands, vernal pools, and the surrounding uplands. Preserving these habitat complexes is necessary to ensure the persistence of Blanding's turtle populations, but this is becoming increasingly challenging in some locations due to significant development pressure. Key components of habitat protection are identifying preferred habitat types and gaining a better understanding of the variables that influence habitat selection. Previous landscape-level studies of turtles have found that land cover type, wetland type, …

Sybil Detection In Vehicular Networks, Muhammad Ibrahim Almutaz

Masters Theses

"A Sybil attack is one where an adversary assumes multiple identities with the purpose of defeating an existing reputation system. When Sybil attacks are launched in vehicular networks, an added challenge in detecting malicious nodes is mobility that makes it increasingly difficult to tie a node to the location of attacks. In this thesis, we present an innovative protocol for Sybil detection in vehicular networks. Considering that vehicular networks are cyber-physical systems integrating cyber and physical components, our technique exploits well grounded results in the physical (i.e., transportation) domain to tackle the Sybil problem in the cyber domain. Compared to …