Computer Engineering Commons^™

Domain Specific Analysis Of Privacy Practices And Concerns In The Mobile Application Market, Fahimeh Ebrahimi Meymand

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Mobile applications (apps) constantly demand access to sensitive user information in exchange for more personalized services. These-mostly unjustified-data collection tactics have raised major privacy concerns among mobile app users. Existing research on mobile app privacy aims to identify these concerns, expose apps with malicious data collection practices, assess the quality of apps' privacy policies, and propose automated solutions for privacy leak detection and prevention. However, existing solutions are generic, frequently missing the contextual characteristics of different application domains. To address these limitations, in this dissertation, we study privacy in the app store at a domain level. Our objective is to …

Software Protection And Secure Authentication For Autonomous Vehicular Cloud Computing, Muhammad Hataba

Dissertations

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing every technology we deal with. Autonomy has been a sought-after goal in vehicles, and now more than ever we are very close to that goal. Vehicles before were dumb mechanical devices, now they are becoming smart, computerized, and connected coined as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Moreover, researchers found a way to make more use of these enormous capabilities and introduced Autonomous Vehicles Cloud Computing (AVCC). In these platforms, vehicles can lend their unused resources and sensory data to join AVCC.

In this dissertation, we investigate security and privacy issues in AVCC. As background, we built our …

Comprehending The Safety Paradox And Privacy Concerns With Medical Device Remote Patient Monitoring, Marc Doyle

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Medical literature identifies a number of technology-driven improvements in disease management such as implantable medical devices (IMDs) that are a standard treatment for candidates with specific diseases. Among patients using implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICD), for example, problems and issues are being discovered faster compared to patients without monitoring, improving safety. What is not known is why patients report not feeling safer, creating a safety paradox, and why patients identify privacy concerns in ICD monitoring.

There is a major gap in the literature regarding the factors that contribute to perceived safety and privacy in remote patient monitoring (RPM). To address this …

Breadcrumbs: Privacy As A Privilege, Prachi Bhardwaj

Capstones

Breadcrumbs: Privacy as a Privilege Abstract

By: Prachi Bhardwaj

In 2017, the world saw more data breaches than in any year prior. The count was more than the all-time high record in 2016, which was 40 percent more than the year before that.

That’s because consumer data is incredibly valuable today. In the last three decades, data storage has gone from being stored physically to being stored almost entirely digitally, which means consumer data is more accessible and applicable to business strategies. As a result, companies are gathering data in ways previously unknown to the average consumer, and hackers are …

Data-Driven Network-Centric Threat Assessment, Dae Wook Kim

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

As the Internet has grown increasingly popular as a communication and information sharing platform, it has given rise to two major types of Internet security threats related to two primary entities: end-users and network services. First, information leakages from networks can reveal sensitive information about end-users. Second, end-users systems can be compromised through attacks on network services, such as scanning-and-exploit attacks, spamming, drive-by downloads, and fake anti-virus software. Designing threat assessments to detect these threats is, therefore, of great importance, and a number of the detection systems have been proposed. However, these existing threat assessment systems face significant challenges in …

Video Annotation By Crowd Workers With Privacy-Preserving Local Disclosure, Apeksha Dipak Kumavat

Open Access Theses

Advancements in computer vision are still not reliable enough for detecting video content including humans and their actions. Microtask crowdsourcing on task markets such as Amazon Mechnical Turk and Upwork can bring humans into the loop. However, engaging crowd workers to annotate non-public video footage risks revealing the identities of people in the video who may have a right to anonymity.

This thesis demonstrates how we can engage untrusted crowd workers to detect behaviors and objects, while robustly concealing the identities of all faces. We developed a web-based system that presents obfuscated videos to crowd workers, and provides them with …

De-Anonymization Attack Anatomy And Analysis Of Ohio Nursing Workforce Data Anonymization, Jacob M. Miracle

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Data generalization (anonymization) is a widely misunderstood technique for preserving individual privacy in non-interactive data publishing. Easily avoidable anonymization failures are still occurring 14 years after the discovery of basic techniques to protect against them. Identities of individuals in anonymized datasets are at risk of being disclosed by cyber attackers who exploit these failures. To demonstrate the importance of proper data anonymization we present three perspectives on data anonymization. First, we examine several de-anonymization attacks to formalize the anatomy used to conduct attacks on anonymous data. Second, we examine the vulnerabilities of an anonymous nursing workforce survey to convey how …

A Novel Defense Mechanism Against Web Crawler Intrusion, Alireza Aghamohammadi

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Web robots also known as crawlers or spiders are used by search engines, hackers and spammers to gather information about web pages. Timely detection and prevention of unwanted crawlers increases privacy and security of websites. In this research, a novel method to identify web crawlers is proposed to prevent unwanted crawler to access websites. The proposed method suggests a five-factor identification process to detect unwanted crawlers. This study provides the pretest and posttest results along with a systematic evaluation of web pages with the proposed identification technique versus web pages without the proposed identification process. An experiment was performed with …

Privacy-Preserving Attribute-Based Access Control In A Grid, Sang Mork Park

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

A Grid community is composed of diverse stake holders, such as data resource providers, computing resource providers, service providers, and the users of the resources and services. In traditional security systems for Grids, most of the authentication and authorization mechanisms are based on the user's identity or the user's classification information. If the authorization mechanism is based on the user's identity, fine-grained access control policies can be implemented but the scalability of the security system would be limited. If the authorization mechanism is based on the user's classification, the scalability can be improved but the fine-grained access control policies may …

A Taxonomy For And Analysis Of Anonymous Communications Networks, Douglas J. Kelly

Theses and Dissertations

Any entity operating in cyberspace is susceptible to debilitating attacks. With cyber attacks intended to gather intelligence and disrupt communications rapidly replacing the threat of conventional and nuclear attacks, a new age of warfare is at hand. In 2003, the United States acknowledged that the speed and anonymity of cyber attacks makes distinguishing among the actions of terrorists, criminals, and nation states difficult. Even President Obama’s Cybersecurity Chief-elect recognizes the challenge of increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. Now through April 2009, the White House is reviewing federal cyber initiatives to protect US citizen privacy rights. Indeed, the rising quantity and ubiquity …