Computer Engineering Commons^™

Ads-B Communication Interference In Air Traffic Management, George Ray

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

Automated Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) provides position and state information about aircraft and is becoming an essential component in the global air traffic management system. ADS-B transponders broadcast this key information on a common frequency to both other aircraft and to secondary surveillance radar systems located at ground stations. Both the aircraft transponders and the ground stations work together to assist in managing the commercial airspace. Since the aircraft transponders all broadcast on the same frequency and are in close proximity there is an apparent risk of interference and the garbling of the communications needed to manage the airspace.

The …

Height Information Aided 3d Real-Time Large-Scale Underground User Positioning, Houbing Song, Chengkai Tang, Cunle Zhang, Lingling Zhang, Yi Zhang

Publications

Due to the cost of inertial navigation and visual navigation equipment and lake of satellite navigation signals, they cannot be used in large‐scale underground mining environment. To solve this problem, this study proposes large‐scale underground 3D real‐time positioning method with seam height assistance. This method uses the ultrawide band positioning base station as the core and is combined with seam height information to build a factor graph confidence transfer model to realise3D positioning. The simulation results show that the proposed real‐time method is superior to the existing algorithms in positioning accuracy and can meet the needs of large‐scale underground users.

Machine Learning For Unmanned Aerial System (Uas) Networking, Jian Wang

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Fueled by the advancement of 5G new radio (5G NR), rapid development has occurred in many fields. Compared with the conventional approaches, beamforming and network slicing enable 5G NR to have ten times decrease in latency, connection density, and experienced throughput than 4G long term evolution (4G LTE). These advantages pave the way for the evolution of Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) on a large scale. The reduction of consumption, the advancement of control engineering, and the simplification of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) enable the UAS networking deployment on a large scale to become feasible. The UAS networking can finish multiple complex …

Rf Fingerprinting Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Norah Ondus

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) continue to become more readily available, their use in civil, military, and commercial applications is growing significantly. From aerial surveillance to search-and-rescue to package delivery the use cases of UAVs are accelerating. This accelerating popularity gives rise to numerous attack possibilities for example impersonation attacks in drone-based delivery, in a UAV swarm, etc. In order to ensure drone security, in this project we propose an authentication system based on RF fingerprinting. Specifically, we extract and use the device-specific hardware impairments embedded in the transmitted RF signal to separate the identity of each UAV. To achieve …

A Framework To Detect The Susceptibility Of Employees To Social Engineering Attacks, Hashim H. Alneami

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Social engineering attacks (SE-attacks) in enterprises are hastily growing and are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Generally, SE-attacks involve the psychological manipulation of employees into revealing confidential and valuable company data to cybercriminals. The ramifications could bring devastating financial and irreparable reputation loss to the companies. Because SE-attacks involve a human element, preventing these attacks can be tricky and challenging and has become a topic of interest for many researchers and security experts. While methods exist for detecting SE-attacks, our literature review of existing methods identified many crucial factors such as the national cultural, organizational, and personality traits of employees that enable …

Data-Efficient Machine Learning With Focus On Transfer Learning, Shuteng Niu

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Machine learning (ML) has attracted a significant amount of attention from the artifi- cial intelligence community. ML has shown state-of-art performance in various fields, such as signal processing, healthcare system, and natural language processing (NLP). However, most conventional ML algorithms suffer from three significant difficulties: 1) insufficient high-quality training data, 2) costly training process, and 3) domain dis- crepancy. Therefore, it is important to develop solutions for these problems, so the future of ML will be more sustainable. Recently, a new concept, data-efficient ma- chine learning (DEML), has been proposed to deal with the current bottlenecks of ML. Moreover, transfer …

Differential Privacy For Industrial Internet Of Things: Opportunities, Applications And Challenges, Bin Jiang, Houbing Song, Jianqiang Li, Guanghui Yue

Publications

The development of Internet of Things (IoT) brings new changes to various fields. Particularly, industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is promoting a new round of industrial revolution. With more applications of IIoT, privacy protection issues are emerging. Specially, some common algorithms in IIoT technology such as deep models strongly rely on data collection, which leads to the risk of privacy disclosure. Recently, differential privacy has been used to protect user-terminal privacy in IIoT, so it is necessary to make in-depth research on this topic. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey on the opportunities, applications and challenges of differential …

Testing And Validation Framework For Autonomous Aerial Vehicles, Mustafa I. Akbas

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

Autonomous aerial vehicles (AAV) have the potential to have market disruptions for various industries such as ground delivery and aerial transportation. Hence, the USAF has called for increased level of autonomy. There has been a significant progress in artificial intelligence engines, complex and non-deterministic system components, which are at the core of the autonomous aerial platforms. Traditional testing and validation methods fall short of satisfying the requirement of testing such complex systems. Therefore, to achieve highly or fully autonomous capabilities, a major leap forward in the validation is required. The key challenges are the localization of problems, development of object …

Zero-Bias Deep Learning For Accurate Identification Of Internet Of Things (Iot) Devices, Yongxin Liu, Houbing Song, Thomas Yang, Jian Wang, Jianqiang Li, Shuteng Niu, Zhong Ming

Publications

The Internet of Things (IoT) provides applications and services that would otherwise not be possible. However, the open nature of IoT makes it vulnerable to cybersecurity threats. Especially, identity spoofing attacks, where an adversary passively listens to the existing radio communications and then mimic the identity of legitimate devices to conduct malicious activities. Existing solutions employ cryptographic signatures to verify the trustworthiness of received information. In prevalent IoT, secret keys for cryptography can potentially be disclosed and disable the verification mechanism. Noncryptographic device verification is needed to ensure trustworthy IoT. In this article, we propose an enhanced deep learning framework …

Tech Comm Eagle Eye-Tracking Control System, Gabiella Lail, Robert Shaw, Hunter Smatla, Matthew Gary

Discovery Day - Prescott

Mobile eye-tracking systems provide usability research support as well as access to a wide range of robotics and technical communication research opportunities. Optical tracking systems are often prohibitively expensive and do not provide the mobility or flexibility needed for a variety of research application possibilities. Our team proposes building a simple mobile eye-tracking system to be used in-house at ERAU for heat-mapping, robotics, control systems, and various technical communication applications in a structured research environment. The mobile eyetracking system will become part of a larger research and hands-on technical communication usability lab and research center. The research team intends to …

Drones Detection Using Smart Sensors, Aishah Moafa

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Drones are modern and sophisticated technology that have been used in numerous fields. Nowadays, many countries use them in exploration, reconnaissance operations, and espionage in military operations. Drones also have many uses that are not limited to only daily life. For example, drones are used for home delivery, safety monitoring, and others. However, the use of drones is a double-edged sword. Drones can be used for positive purposes to improve the quality of human lives, but they can also be used for criminal purposes and other detrimental purposes. In fact, many countries have been attacked by terrorists using smart drones. …

Coverage Guided Differential Adversarial Testing Of Deep Learning Systems, Jianmin Guo, Houbing Song, Yue Zhao, Yu Jiang

Publications

Deep learning is increasingly applied to safety-critical application domains such as autonomous cars and medical devices. It is of significant importance to ensure their reliability and robustness. In this paper, we propose DLFuzz, the coverage guided differential adversarial testing framework to guide deep learing systems exposing incorrect behaviors. DLFuzz keeps minutely mutating the input to maximize the neuron coverage and the prediction difference between the original input and the mutated input, without manual labeling effort or cross-referencing oracles from other systems with the same functionality. We also design multiple novel strategies for neuron selection to improve the neuron coverage. The …

Real-Time Urban Weather Observations For Urban Air Mobility, Kevin A. Adkins, Mustafa Akbas, Marc Compere

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

Cities of the future will have to overcome congestion, air pollution and increasing infrastructure cost while moving more people and goods smoothly, efficiently and in an eco-friendly manner. Urban air mobility (UAM) is expected to be an integral component of achieving this new type of city. This is a new environment for sustained aviation operations. The heterogeneity of the urban fabric and the roughness elements within it create a unique environment where flight conditions can change frequently across very short distances. UAM vehicles with their lower mass, more limited thrust and slower speeds are especially sensitive to these conditions. Since …

Security Of The Internet Of Things: Vulnerabilities, Attacks And Countermeasures, Ismail Butun, Houbing Song, Patrik Osterberg

Publications

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) constitute one of the most promising third-millennium technologies and have wide range of applications in our surrounding environment. The reason behind the vast adoption of WSNs in various applications is that they have tremendously appealing features, e.g., low production cost, low installation cost, unattended network operation, autonomous and longtime operation. WSNs have started to merge with the Internet of Things (IoT) through the introduction of Internet access capability in sensor nodes and sensing ability in Internet-connected devices. Thereby, the IoT is providing access to huge amount of data, collected by the WSNs, over the Internet. Hence, …

Guest Editorial Special Issue On Toward Securing Internet Of Connected Vehicles (Iov) From Virtual Vehicle Hijacking, Yue Cao, Houbing Song, Omprakash Kaiwartya, Sinem Coleri Ergen, Jaime Lloret, Naveed Ahmad

Publications

Today’s vehicles are no longer stand-alone transportation means, due to the advancements on vehicle-tovehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications enabled to access the Internet via recent technologies in mobile communications, including WiFi, Bluetooth, 4G, and even 5G networks. The Internet of vehicles was aimed toward sustainable developments in transportation by enhancing safety and efficiency. The sensor-enabled intelligent automation of vehicles’ mechanical operations enhances safety in on-road traveling, and cooperative traffic information sharing in vehicular networks improves traveling efficiency.

Source Anonymization Of Digital Images: A Counter–Forensic Attack On Prnu Based Source Identification Techniques, Prithviraj Sengupta, Venkata Udaya Sameer, Ruchira Naskar, Ezhil Kalaimannan

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

A lot of photographers and human rights advocates need to hide their identity while sharing their images on the internet. Hence, source–anonymization of digital images has become a critical issue in the present digital age. The current literature contains a number of digital forensic techniques for “source–identification” of digital images, one of the most efficient of them being Photo–Response Non–Uniformity (PRNU) sensor noise pattern based source detection. PRNU noise pattern being unique to every digital camera, such techniques prove to be highly robust way of source–identification. In this paper, we propose a counter–forensic technique to mislead this PRNU sensor noise …

A Forensic Email Analysis Tool Using Dynamic Visualization, Johannes Stadlinger, Andreas Dewald

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Communication between people counts to the most important information of today’s business. As a result, in case of forensic investigations in big companies, analysis of communication data in general and especially email, as the still most widely used business communication platform with an immense and still growing volume, is a typical task in digital forensics. One of the challenges is to identify the relevant communication partners and structures in the suspects surrounding as quickly as possible in order to react appropriately and identify further targets of evaluation. Due to the amount of emails in typical inboxes, reading through all the …

Find Me If You Can: Mobile Gps Mapping Applications Forensic Analysis & Snavp The Open Source, Modular, Extensible Parser, Jason Moore, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The use of smartphones as navigation devices has become more prevalent. The ubiquity of hand-held navigation devices such as Garmins or Toms Toms has been falling whereas the ownership of smartphones and their adoption as GPS devices is growing. This work provides a comprehensive study of the most popular smartphone mapping applications, namely Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, MapQuest, Bing, and Scout, on both Android and iOS. It details what data was found, where it was found, and how it was acquired for each application. Based on the findings, the work allowed for the construction of a tool capable of …

Compression Of Virtual-Machine Memory In Dynamic Malware Analysis, James E. Fowler Ph.D.

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Lossless compression of memory dumps from virtual machines that run malware samples is considered with the goal of significantly reducing archival costs in dynamic-malware-analysis applications. Given that, in such dynamic-analysis scenarios, malware samples are typically run in virtual machines just long enough to activate any self-decryption or other detection- avoidance maneuvers, the virtual-machine memory typically changes little from that of the baseline state, with the difference being attributable in large degree to the loading of additional executables and libraries. Consequently, delta coding is proposed to compress the current virtual-machine memory dump by coding its differences with respect to a predicted …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Special Issue Of Best Papers From The 11th International Conference On Systematic Approaches To Digital Forensic Engineering (Sadfe 2016)

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The SADFE series feature the different editions of the International Conference on Systematic Approaches to Digital Forensics Engineering. Now in its eleventh edition, SADFE has established itself as the premier conference for researchers and practitioners working in Systematic Approaches to Digital Forensics Engineering.

SADFE 2016, the eleventh international conference on Systematic Approaches to Digital Forensic Engineering was held in Kyoto, Japan, September 20 - 22, 2016.

Digital forensics engineering and the curation of digital collections in cultural institutions face pressing and overlapping challenges related to provenance, chain of custody, authenticity, integrity, and identity. The generation, analysis and sustainability of digital …

Bloom Filters Optimized Wu-Manber For Intrusion Detection, Monther Aldwairi, Koloud Al-Khamaiseh, Fatima Alharbi, Babar Shah

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

With increasing number and severity of attacks, monitoring ingress and egress network traffic is becoming essential everyday task. Intrusion detection systems are the main tools for capturing and searching network traffic for potential harm. Signature-based intrusion detection systems are the most widely used, and they simply use a pattern matching algorithms to locate attack signatures in intercepted network traffic. Pattern matching algorithms are very expensive in terms of running time and memory usage, leaving intrusion detection systems unable to detect attacks in real-time. We propose a Bloom filters optimized Wu-Manber pattern matching algorithm to speed up intrusion detection. The Bloom …

The Impact Of Md5 File Hash Collisions On Digital Forensic Imaging, Gary C. Kessler

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The Message Digest 5 (MD5) hash is commonly used as for integrity verification in the forensic imaging process. The ability to force MD5 hash collisions has been a reality for more than a decade, although there is a general consensus that hash collisions are of minimal impact to the practice of computer forensics. This paper describes an experiment to determine the results of imaging two disks that are identical except for one file, the two versions of which have different content but otherwise occupy the same byte positions on the disk, are the same size, and have the same hash …

Leveraging The Windows Amcache.Hve File In Forensic Investigations, Bhupendra Singh, Upasna Singh

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The Amcache.hve is a registry hive file that is created by Microsoft® Windows® to store the information related to execution of programs. This paper highlights the evidential potential of Amcache.hve file and its application in the area of user activity analysis. The study uncovers numerous artifacts retained in Amcache.hve file when a user performs certain actions such as running host-based applications, installation of new applications, or running portable applications from external devices. The results of experiments demonstrate that Amcache.hve file stores intriguing artifacts related to applications such as timestamps of creation and last modification of any application; name, description, publisher …

The 2016 Analysis Of Information Remaining On Computer Hard Disks Offered For Sale On The Second Hand Market In The Uae, Thomas Martin, Andy Jones, Mohammed Alzaabi

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This research describes our survey of data remaining on computer hard disks sold on the second hand market in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This is a repetition of the first survey conducted in 2012 (Jones, Martin, & Alzaabi, 2012). Similar studies have been carried over the last ten years in the United Kingdom, Australia, USA, Germany and France: (Jones, Mee, Meyler, & Gooch, 2005), (Jones, Valli, Sutherland, & Thomas, 2006), (Jones, Valli, Dardick, & Sutherland, 2008), (Jones, Valli, Dardick, & Sutherland, 2009). This research was undertaken to gain insight into the volumes of data found on second-hand disks purchased …

A New Distributed Chinese Wall Security Policy Model, Saad Fehis, Omar Nouali, Mohand-Tahar Kechadi

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The application of the Chinese wall security policy model (CWSPM) to control the information flows between two or more competing and/or conflicting companies in cloud computing (Multi-tenancy) or in the social network, is a very interesting solution. The main goal of the Chinese Wall Security Policy is to build a wall between the datasets of competing companies, and among the system subjects. This is done by the applying to the subjects mandatory rules, in order to control the information flow caused between them. This problem is one of the hottest topics in the area of cloud computing (as a distributed …

The Impact Of Sha-1 File Hash Collisions On Digital Forensic Imaging: A Follow-Up Experiment, Gary C. Kessler

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

A previous paper described an experiment showing that Message Digest 5 (MD5) hash collisions of files have no impact on integrity verification in the forensic imaging process. This paper describes a similar experiment applied when two files have a Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-1) collision.

A Survey Of Social Network Forensics, Umit Karabiyik, Muhammed Abdullah Canbaz, Ahmet Aksoy, Tayfun Tuna, Esra Akbas, Bilal Gonen, Ramazan S. Aygun

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Social networks in any form, specifically online social networks (OSNs), are becoming a part of our everyday life in this new millennium especially with the advanced and simple communication technologies through easily accessible devices such as smartphones and tablets. The data generated through the use of these technologies need to be analyzed for forensic purposes when criminal and terrorist activities are involved. In order to deal with the forensic implications of social networks, current research on both digital forensics and social networks need to be incorporated and understood. This will help digital forensics investigators to predict, detect and even prevent …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.