Digital Commons Network^™

Countering Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities In The Power System, Fengli Zhang

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Security vulnerabilities in software pose an important threat to power grid security, which can be exploited by attackers if not properly addressed. Every month, many vulnerabilities are discovered and all the vulnerabilities must be remediated in a timely manner to reduce the chance of being exploited by attackers. In current practice, security operators have to manually analyze each vulnerability present in their assets and determine the remediation actions in a short time period, which involves a tremendous amount of human resources for electric utilities. To solve this problem, we propose a machine learning-based automation framework to automate vulnerability analysis and …

Contrasting Geometric Variations Of Mathematical Models Of Self-Assembling Systems, Michael Sharp

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Self-assembly is the process by which complex systems are formed and behave due to the interactions of relatively simple units. In this thesis, we explore multiple augmentations of well known models of self-assembly to gain a better understanding of the roles that geometry and space play in their dynamics. We begin in the abstract Tile Assembly Model (aTAM) with some examples and a brief survey of previous results to provide a foundation. We then introduce the Geometric Thermodynamic Binding Network model, a model that focuses on the thermodynamic stability of its systems while utilizing geometrically rigid components (dissimilar to other …

Digitalization In Practice: The Fifth Discipline Advantage, Siu Loon Hoe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide advice to organizations on how to become successful in the digital age. The paper revisits Peter Senge's (1990) notion of the learning organization and discusses the relevance of systems thinking and the other four disciplines, namely, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning in the context of the current digitalization megatrend. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on content analysis of essays from international organizations, strategy experts and management scholars, and insights gained from the author's consulting experience. A comparative case study from the health and social sector is also …

Blockchain In Libraries, Michael Meth

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

This issue of Library Technology Reports (vol. 55, no. 8), “Blockchain in Libraries,” examines the application of blockchain in libraries. Blockchain technology has the ability to transform how libraries provide services and organize information. To date, most of these applications are still in the conceptual stage. However, sooner or later, development and implementation will follow. This report is intended to provide a primer on the technology and some thought starters. In chapter 2, the concept of blockchain is explained. Chapter 3 provides eight thought and conversation starters that look at how blockchain could be applied in libraries. Chapter 4 looks …

Supporting Software Architecture Maintenance By Providing Task-Specific Recommendations, Matthias Galster, Christoph Treude, Kelly Blincoe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

During software maintenance, developers have different information needs (e.g., to understand what type of maintenance activity to perform, the impact of a maintenance activity and its effort). However, information to support developers may be distributed across various sources. Furthermore, information captured in formal architecture documentation may be outdated. In this paper, we put forward a late breaking idea and outline a solution to improve the productivity of developers by providing task-specific recommendations based on concrete information needs that arise during software maintenance.

On The Yellow Brick Road, A Path To Enterprise Architecture Maturity, Avsharn Bachoo

The African Journal of Information Systems

This study concentrated on the relationship between the Enterprise Architecture (EA) maturity of an organization and the business value associated with it in the South African financial services environment. It was developed within the critical realism philosophy, which states that mechanisms generate events by accentuating the underlying EA mechanisms that lead to business value, as well as provide insights into the opportunities and challenges organizations experienced as they progressed to higher levels of maturity. Constructed using the resource-based view of the firm as the underlying theoretical framework, this research examined EA as an intangible resource and maturity as a source …

Similarity-Based Chained Transfer Learning For Energy Forecasting With Big Data, Yifang Tian, Ljubisa Sehovac, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Smart meter popularity has resulted in the ability to collect big energy data and has created opportunities for large-scale energy forecasting. Machine Learning (ML) techniques commonly used for forecasting, such as neural networks, involve computationally intensive training typically with data from a single building or a single aggregated load to predict future consumption for that same building or aggregated load. With hundreds of thousands of meters, it becomes impractical or even infeasible to individually train a model for each meter. Consequently, this paper proposes Similarity-Based Chained Transfer Learning (SBCTL), an approach for building neural network-based models for many meters by …

Extract Transform And Loading Tool For Email, Amit Rajiv Lawanghare

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This project focuses on applying Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) operations on the relational data exchanged via emails. An Email is an important form of communication by both personal and corporate means as it enables reliable and quick exchange. Many useful files are shared as a form of attachments which contains transactional/ relational data. This tool allows a user to write the filter conditions and lookup conditions on attachments; define the attribute map for attachments to the database table. The Data Cleansing for each attribute can be performed writing rules and their matching state. A user can add custom functions …

Trust Architecture And Reputation Evaluation For Internet Of Things, Juan Chen, Zhihong Tian, Xiang Cui, Lihua Yin, Xianzhi Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Internet of Things (IoT) represents a fundamental infrastructure and set of techniques that support innovative services in various application domains. Trust management plays an important role in enabling the reliable data collection and mining, context-awareness, and enhanced user security in the IoT. The main tasks of trust management include trust architecture design and reputation evaluation. However, existing trust architectures and reputation evaluation solutions cannot be directly applied to the IoT, due to the large number of physical entities, the limited computation ability of physical entities, and the highly dynamic nature of the network. In comparison, it generally requires a general …

Formally Designing And Implementing Cyber Security Mechanisms In Industrial Control Networks., Mehdi Sabraoui

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation describes progress in the state-of-the-art for developing and deploying formally verified cyber security devices in industrial control networks. It begins by detailing the unique struggles that are faced in industrial control networks and why concepts and technologies developed for securing traditional networks might not be appropriate. It uses these unique struggles and examples of contemporary cyber-attacks targeting control systems to argue that progress in securing control systems is best met with formal verification of systems, their specifications, and their security properties. This dissertation then presents a development process and identifies two technologies, TLA+ and seL4, that can be …

Teaching Self-Balancing Trees Using A Beauty Contest, Samah Senbel

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

Trees data structures and their performance is one of the main topics to teach in a data structures course. Appreciating the importance of tree structure and tree height in software performance is an important concept to teach. In this paper, a simple and amusing activity is presented. It demonstrates to students the importance of a well-balanced tree by comparing the height of a binary search tree to a balanced (AVL) tree build upon some personal data to find the “prettiest” tree (minimum height). The activity highlights the fact that, irrelevant of your data sequence, a balanced tree guarantees a height …

An Architecture For Blockchain-Based Collaborative Signature-Based Intrusion Detection System, Daniel Laufenberg

Master of Science in Information Technology Theses

Collaborative intrusion detection system (CIDS), where IDS hosts work with each other and share resources, have been proposed to cope with the increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. Despite the promising benefits such as expanded signature databases and alert data from multiple sites, trust management and consensus building remain as challenges for a CIDS to work effectively. The blockchain technology with built-in immutability and consensus building capability provides a viable solution to the issues of CIDS. In this paper, we introduce an architecture for a blockchain-enabled signature-based collaborative IDS, discuss the implementation strategy of the proposed architecture and developed a prototype using Hyperledger …

Sensitive Behavior Analysis Of Android Applications On Unrooted Devices In The Wild, Xiaoxiao Tang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Dynamic analysis is widely used in malware detection, taint analysis, vulnerability detection, and other areas for enhancing the security of Android. Compared to static analysis, dynamic analysis is immune to common code obfuscation techniques and dynamic code loading. Existing dynamic analysis techniques rely on in-lab running environment (e.g., modified systems, rooted devices, or emulators) and require automatic input generators to execute the target app. However, these techniques could be bypassed by anti-analysis techniques that allow apps to hide sensitive behavior when an in-lab environment is detected through predefined heuristics (e.g., IMEI number of the device is invalid). Meanwhile, current input …

The Performance Cost Of Security, Lucy R. Bowen

Master's Theses

Historically, performance has been the most important feature when optimizing computer hardware. Modern processors are so highly optimized that every cycle of computation time matters. However, this practice of optimizing for performance at all costs has been called into question by new microarchitectural attacks, e.g. Meltdown and Spectre. Microarchitectural attacks exploit the effects of microarchitectural components or optimizations in order to leak data to an attacker. These attacks have caused processor manufacturers to introduce performance impacting mitigations in both software and silicon.

To investigate the performance impact of the various mitigations, a test suite of forty-seven different tests was created. …

Virtual Sensor Middleware: A Middleware For Managing Iot Data For The Fog-Cloud Platform, Fadi Almahamid

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Internet of Things is a massively growing field where billions of devices are connected to the Internet using different protocols and produce an enormous amount of data. The produced data is consumed and processed by different applications to make operations more efficient. Application development is challenging, especially when applications access sensor data since IoT devices use different communication protocols.

The existing IoT architectures address some of these challenges. This thesis proposes an IoT Middleware that provides applications with the abstraction required of IoT devices while distributing the processing of sensor data to provide a real-time or near real-time response and …

Mobile Music Development Tools For Creative Coders, Daniel Stuart Holmes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project is a body of work that facilitates the creation of musical mobile artworks. The project includes a code toolkit that enhances and simplifies the development of mobile music iOS applications, a flexible notation system designed for mobile musical interactions, and example apps and scored compositions to demonstrate the toolkit and notation system.

The code library is designed to simplify the technical aspect of user-centered design and development with a more direct connection between concept and deliverable. This sim- plification addresses learning problems (such as motivation, self-efficacy, and self-perceived understanding) by bridging the gap between idea and functional prototype …

Real-Time Data Processing With Lambda Architecture, Omkar Ashok Malusare

Master's Projects

Data has evolved immensely in recent years, in type, volume and velocity. There are several frameworks to handle the big data applications. The project focuses on the Lambda Architecture proposed by Marz and its application to obtain real-time data processing. The architecture is a solution that unites the benefits of the batch and stream processing techniques. Data can be historically processed with high precision and involved algorithms without loss of short-term information, alerts and insights. Lambda Architecture has an ability to serve a wide range of use cases and workloads that withstands hardware and human mistakes. The layered architecture enhances …

A Study Of The Effect Of Memory System Configuration On The Power Consumption Of An Fpga Processor, Adam Blalock

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

With electrical energy being a finite resource, feasible methods of reducing system power consumption continue to be of great importance within the field of computing, especially as computers proliferate. A victim cache is a small fully associative cache that “captures” lines evicted from L1 cache memory, thereby reducing lower memory accesses and compensating for conflict misses. Little experimentation has been done to evaluate its effect on system power behavior and consumption. This project investigates the performance and power consumption of three different processor memory designs for a sample program using a field programmable gate array (FPGA) and the Vivado Integrated …

Visualization And Machine Learning Techniques For Nasa’S Em-1 Big Data Problem, Antonio P. Garza Iii, Jose Quinonez, Misael Santana, Nibhrat Lohia

SMU Data Science Review

In this paper, we help NASA solve three Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1) challenges: data storage, computation time, and visualization of complex data. NASA is studying one year of trajectory data to determine available launch opportunities (about 90TBs of data). We improve data storage by introducing a cloud-based solution that provides elasticity and server upgrades. This migration will save $120k in infrastructure costs every four years, and potentially avoid schedule slips. Additionally, it increases computational efficiency by 125%. We further enhance computation via machine learning techniques that use the classic orbital elements to predict valid trajectories. Our machine learning model decreases trajectory …

Applications Of Fog Computing In Video Streaming, Kyle Smith

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of this paper is to show the viability of fog computing in the area of video streaming in vehicles. With the rise of autonomous vehicles, there needs to be a viable entertainment option for users. The cloud fails to address these options due to latency problems experienced during high internet traffic. To improve video streaming speeds, fog computing seems to be the best option. Fog computing brings the cloud closer to the user through the use of intermediary devices known as fog nodes. It does not attempt to replace the cloud but improve the cloud by allowing faster …

A Mobile Cyber-Physical System Framework For Aiding People With Visual Impairment, Martin Goldberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

It is a challenging problem for researchers and engineers in the assistive technology (AT) community to provide suitable solutions for visually impaired people (VIPs) through AT to meet orientation, navigation and mobility (ONM) needs. Given the spectrum of assistive technologies currently available for the purposes of aiding VIPs with ONM, our literature review and survey have shown that there is a reluctance to adopt these technological solutions in the VIP community.

Motivated by these findings, we think it critical to re-examine and rethink the approaches that have been taken. It is our belief that we need to take a different …

Community Detection Via Neighborhood Overlap And Spanning Tree Computations, Ketki Kulkarni, Aris Pagourtzis, Katerina Potika, Petros Potikas, Dora Souliou

Faculty Publications, Computer Science

Most social networks of today are populated with several millions of active users, while the most popular of them accommodate way more than one billion. Analyzing such huge complex networks has become particularly demanding in computational terms. A task of paramount importance for understanding the structure of social networks as well as of many other real-world systems is to identify communities, that is, sets of nodes that are more densely connected to each other than to other nodes of the network. In this paper we propose two algorithms for community detection in networks, by employing the neighborhood overlap metric …

Securing Our Future Homes: Smart Home Security Issues And Solutions, Nicholas Romano

Senior Honors Theses

The Internet of Things, commonly known as IoT, is a new technology transforming businesses, individuals’ daily lives and the operation of entire countries. With more and more devices becoming equipped with IoT technology, smart homes are becoming increasingly popular. The components that make up a smart home are at risk for different types of attacks; therefore, security engineers are developing solutions to current problems and are predicting future types of attacks. This paper will analyze IoT smart home components, explain current security risks, and suggest possible solutions. According to “What is a Smart Home” (n.d.), a smart home is a …

Building Consumer Trust In The Cloud: An Experimental Analysis Of The Cloud Trust Label Approach, Lisa Van Der Werff, Grace Fox, Ieva Masevic, Vincent C. Emeakaroha, John P. Morrison, Theo Lynn

Department of Computer Science Publications

The lack of transparency surrounding cloud service provision makes it difficult for consumers to make knowledge based purchasing decisions. As a result, consumer trust has become a major impediment to cloud computing adoption. Cloud Trust Labels represent a means of communicating relevant service and security information to potential customers on the cloud service provided, thereby facilitating informed decision making. This research investigates the potential of a Cloud Trust Label system to overcome the trust barrier. Specifically, it examines the impact of a Cloud Trust Label on consumer perceptions of a service and cloud service provider trustworthiness and trust in the …

Haptics-Enabled, Gpu Augmented Surgical Simulation Platform For Glenoid Reaming, Vlad Popa

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Surgical simulators are technological platforms that provide virtual substitutes to the current cadaver-based medical training models. The advantages of exposure to these devices have been thoroughly studied, with enhanced surgical proficiency being one of the assets gained after extensive use. While simulators have already penetrated numerous medical domains, the field of orthopedics remains stagnant despite a demand for the ability to practice uncommon surgeries, such as total shoulder arthroplasty (TSA). Here we extrapolate the algorithms of an inhouse software engine revolving around glenoid reaming, a critical step of TSA. The project’s purpose is to provide efficient techniques for future simulators, …

An Underground Radio Wave Propagation Prediction Model For Digital Agriculture, Abdul Salam

Faculty Publications

Underground sensing and propagation of Signals in the Soil (SitS) medium is an electromagnetic issue. The path loss prediction with higher accuracy is an open research subject in digital agriculture monitoring applications for sensing and communications. The statistical data are predominantly derived from site-specific empirical measurements, which is considered an impediment to universal application. Nevertheless, in the existing literature, statistical approaches have been applied to the SitS channel modeling, where impulse response analysis and the Friis open space transmission formula are employed as the channel modeling tool in different soil types under varying soil moisture conditions at diverse communication distances …

Graphics Processing Units (Gpus) And Cuda, Josiah Brett, Josiah Brouwer

18th Annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (2019)

Computers almost always contain one or more central processing units (CPU), each of which processes information sequentially. While having multiple CPUs allow a computer to run several tasks in parallel, many computers also have a graphics processing unit (GPU) which contains hundreds to thousands of cores that allow it to execute many computations in parallel. In order to complete a larger task, GPUs run many subtasks concurrently. Each core performs the same instruction on different sets of data, making it useful for performing tasks such as calculating what each individual pixel displays on a screen. The purpose of this research …

Safety And Security With Aadl: Using Lattices To Model Data Flow, Erick Martinez

Kansas State University Undergraduate Research Conference

Architecture and Design Language is a model based engineering language that is used to create safety-critical systems. The issue with the creation of these systems is the lack of importance in security when these systems are created. To improve and promote the increase if importance and reliability for the creation of these systems we are looking into creating a method in which we can create lattice formations to identify and restrict certain information to its own category/classification. Lattices form sets of nodes that can be restricted so that certain information can only be distributed between two nodes that have the …

Detection And Prevention Of Abuse In Online Social Networks, Sajedul Karim Talukder

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Adversaries leverage social networks to collect sensitive data about regular users and target them with abuse that includes fake news, cyberbullying, malware distribution, and propaganda. Such behavior is more effective when performed by the social network friends of victims. In two preliminary user studies we found that 71 out of 80 participants have at least 1 Facebook friend with whom (1) they never interact, either in Facebook or in real life, or whom they believe is (2) likely to abuse their posted photos or status updates, or (3) post offensive, false or malicious content. Such friend abuse is often considered …

Evaluating The Impacts Of Detecting X.509 Covert Channels, Cody Welu

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

This quasi-experimental before-and-after study examined the performance impacts of detecting X.509 covert channels in the Suricata intrusion detection system. Relevant literature and previous studies surrounding covert channels and covert channel detection, X.509 certificates, and intrusion detection system performance were evaluated. This study used Jason Reaves’ X.509 covert channel proof of concept code to generate malicious network traffic for detection (2018). Various detection rules for intrusion detection systems were created to aid in the detection of the X.509 covert channel. The central processing unit (CPU) and memory utilization impacts that each rule had on the intrusion detection system was studied and …