Computer Engineering Commons^™

A General And Practical Framework For Realization Of Sdn-Based Vehicular Networks, Juan V. Leon

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the recent developments of communication technologies surrounding vehicles, we witness the simultaneous availability of multiple onboard communication interfaces on vehicles. While most of the current interfaces already include Bluetooth, WiFi, and LTE, they are augmented further by IEEE 802.11p and the 5G interfaces, which will serve for safety, maintenance, and infotainment applications. However, dynamic management of interfaces depending on application needs becomes a significant issue that can be best addressed by Software Defined Networking (SDN) capabilities. While SDN-based vehicular networks have been promoted previously, none of these works deal with practical challenges. In this thesis, we propose and develop …

Honeypot-Based Security Enhancements For Information Systems, Javier R. Franco

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to explore honeypot-based security enhancements for information systems. First, we provide a comprehensive survey of the research that has been carried out on honeypots and honeynets for Internet of Things (IoT), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and Cyber-physical Systems (CPS). We provide a taxonomy and extensive analysis of the existing honeypots and honeynets, state key design factors for the state-of-the-art honeypot/honeynet research and outline open issues. Second, we propose S-Pot, a smart honeypot framework based on open-source resources. S-Pot uses enterprise and IoT honeypots to attract attackers, learns from attacks via ML classifiers, and …

Dual-Band Rf Receiver For Collocated Dsrc And 5g Millimeter-Wave Vehicle-To-Vehicle Communication, Sandhiya Reddy Govindarajulu

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, vehicle crashes have taken nearly 38,000 lives per year in the U.S., according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). To improve the safety of the drivers, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has allocated the Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) frequency spectrum, viz. 5.850-5.925 GHz band for vehicular communication. However, the limited bandwidth at the DSRC band provided an impetus to explore the millimeter-wave (mm-wave) spectrum that promises much higher data rates. Nevertheless, operating in the mm-wave spectrum comes with the expense of high path loss and attenuation due to rain.

To overcome the abovementioned problems, …

Thermal Aware Design Automation Of The Electronic Control System For Autonomous Vehicles, Ajinkya Bankar

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The autonomous vehicle (AV) technology, due to its tremendous social and economical benefits, is transforming the entire world in the coming decades. However, significant technical challenges still need to be overcome until AVs can be safely, reliably, and massively deployed. Temperature plays a key role in the safety and reliability of an AV, not only because a vehicle is subjected to extreme operating temperatures but also because the increasing computations demand more powerful IC chips, which can lead to higher operating temperature and large thermal gradient. In particular, as the underpinning technology for AV, artificial intelligence (AI) requires substantially increased …

A Machine Learning Framework For Identifying Molecular Biomarkers From Transcriptomic Cancer Data, Md Abdullah Al Mamun

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cancer is a complex molecular process due to abnormal changes in the genome, such as mutation and copy number variation, and epigenetic aberrations such as dysregulations of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA). These abnormal changes are reflected in transcriptome by turning oncogenes on and tumor suppressor genes off, which are considered cancer biomarkers.

However, transcriptomic data is high dimensional, and finding the best subset of genes (features) related to causing cancer is computationally challenging and expensive. Thus, developing a feature selection framework to discover molecular biomarkers for cancer is critical.

Traditional approaches for biomarker discovery calculate the fold change for each …

Hardware-In-The-Loop Simulation To Evaluate The Performance And Constraints Of The Red-Light Violation Warning Application On Arterial Roads, Mahmoud Arafat

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Understanding the safety and mobility impacts of Connected Vehicle (CV) applications is critical for ensuring effective implementations of these applications. This dissertation provides an assessment of the safety and mobility impacts of the Red-Light Violation Warning (RLVW), a CV-based application at signalized intersections, under pre-timed signal control and semi-actuated signal control utilizing Emulator-in-the-loop (EILS), Software-in-the-loop (SILS), and Hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS) environments. Modern actuated traffic signal controllers contain several features with which controllers can provide varying green intervals for actuated phases, skip phases, and terminate phases depending on the traffic demand fluctuation from cycle to cycle. With actuated traffic signal operations, …

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 …

Securing The Internet Of Things Communication Using Named Data Networking Approaches, Sanjeev Kaushik Ramani

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The rapid advancement in sensors and their use in devices has led to the drastic increase of Internet-of-Things (IoT) device applications and usage. A fundamental requirement of an IoT-enabled ecosystem is the device’s ability to communicate with other devices, humans etc. IoT devices are usually highly resource constrained and come with varying capabilities and features. Hence, a host-based communication approach defined by the TCP/IP architecture relying on securing the communication channel between the hosts displays drawbacks especially when working in a highly chaotic environment (common with IoT applications). The discrepancies between requirements of the application and the network supporting the …

Enabling Distributed Applications Optimization In Cloud Environment, Pinchao Liu

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The past few years have seen dramatic growth in the popularity of public clouds, such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Container-as-a-Service (CaaS). In both commercial and scientific fields, quick environment setup and application deployment become a mandatory requirement. As a result, more and more organizations choose cloud environments instead of setting up the environment by themselves from scratch. The cloud computing resources such as server engines, orchestration, and the underlying server resources are served to the users as a service from a cloud provider. Most of the applications that run in public clouds are the distributed applications, also called …

A Study Of Non-Datapath Cache Replacement Algorithms, Steven G. Lyons Jr.

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Conventionally, caching algorithms have been designed for the datapath — the levels of memory that must contain the data before it gets made available to the CPU. Attaching a fast device (such as an SSD) as a cache to a host that runs the application workload are recent developments. These host-side caches open up possibilities for what are referred to as non-datapath caches to exist. Non-Datapath caches are referred to as such because the caches do not exist on the traditional datapath, instead being optional memory locations for data. As these caches are optional, a new capability is available to …

Secure Distributed Systems Over Satoshi Blockchains, Ruben Recabarren Velarde

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) have become an important driving force towards the creation of novel distributed applications aimed at solving problems that range from digital currency tools to self governing digital democracy systems.

Our thesis is that Satoshi cryptocurrencies, i.e., Bitcoin and its variants, can be used to endow several popular distributed services with strong privacy, anonymity and censorship resistance properties that evade current solutions.

To this end, we first study the design of Satoshi cryptocurrency mining protocols, and discover and document privacy and integrity vulnerabilities of Stratum, the de-facto pooled mining protocol.

We have developed tools that exploit these …

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 …

Digital And Mixed Domain Hardware Reduction Algorithms And Implementations For Massive Mimo, Najath A. Mohomed

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Emerging 5G and 6G based wireless communications systems largely rely on multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems to reduce inherently extensive path losses, facilitate high data rates, and high spatial diversity. Massive MIMO systems used in mmWave and sub-THz applications consists of hundreds perhaps thousands of antenna elements at base stations. Digital beamforming techniques provide the highest flexibility and better degrees of freedom for phased antenna arrays as compared to its analog and hybrid alternatives but has the highest hardware complexity.

Conventional digital beamformers at the receiver require a dedicated analog to digital converter (ADC) for every antenna element, leading to ADCs for …

Geographic Data Mining And Knowledge Discovery, Liangdong Deng

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Geographic data are information associated with a location on the surface of the Earth. They comprise spatial attributes (latitude, longitude, and altitude) and non-spatial attributes (facts related to a location). Traditionally, Physical Geography datasets were considered to be more valuable, thus attracted most research interest. But with the advancements in remote sensing technologies and widespread use of GPS enabled cellphones and IoT (Internet of Things) devices, recent years witnessed explosive growth in the amount of available Human Geography datasets. However, methods and tools that are capable of analyzing and modeling these datasets are very limited. This is because Human Geography …

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) …

Solving Complex Data-Streaming Problems By Applying Economic-Based Principles To Mobile And Wireless Resource Constraint Networks, Concepcion Z. Sanchez Aleman

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The applications that employ mobile networks depend on the continuous input of reliable data collected by sensing devices. A common application is in military systems, where as an example, drones that are sent on a mission can communicate with each other, exchange sensed data, and autonomously make decisions. Although the mobility of nodes enhances the network coverage, connectivity, and scalability, it introduces pressing issues in data reliability compounded by restrictions in sensor energy resources, as well as limitations in available memory, and computational capacity.

This dissertation investigates the issues that mobile networks encounter in providing reliable data. Our research goal …

A Comprehensive Security Framework For Securing Sensors In Smart Devices And Applications, Amit Kumar Sikder

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This doctoral dissertation introduces novel security frameworks to detect sensor-based threats on smart devices and applications in smart settings such as smart home, smart office, etc. First, we present a formal taxonomy and in-depth impact analysis of existing sensor-based threats to smart devices and applications based on attack characteristics, targeted components, and capabilities. Then, we design a novel context-aware intrusion detection system, 6thSense, to detect sensor-based threats in standalone smart devices (e.g., smartphone, smart watch, etc.). 6thSense considers user activity-sensor co-dependence in standalone smart devices to learn the ongoing user activity contexts and builds a context-aware model to distinguish malicious …

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 …

Design Of A Robotic Inspection Platform For Structural Health Monitoring, Jason R. Soto

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Actively monitoring infrastructure is key to detecting and correcting problems before they become costly. The vast scale of modern infrastructure poses a challenge to monitoring due to insufficient personnel. Certain structures, such as refineries, pose additional challenges and can be expensive, time-consuming, and hazardous to inspect.

This thesis outlines the development of an autonomous robot for structural-health-monitoring. The robot is capable of operating autonomously in level indoor environments and can be controlled manually to traverse difficult terrain. Both visual and lidar SLAM, along with a procedural-mapping technique, allow the robot to capture colored-point-clouds.

The robot is successfully able to automate …

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 …

Support Efficient, Scalable, And Online Social Spam Detection In System, Hailu Xu

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The broad success of online social networks (OSNs) has created fertile soil for the emergence and fast spread of social spam. Fake news, malicious URL links, fraudulent advertisements, fake reviews, and biased propaganda are bringing serious consequences for both virtual social networks and human life in the real world. Effectively detecting social spam is a hot topic in both academia and industry. However, traditional social spam detection techniques are limited to centralized processing on top of one specific data source but ignore the social spam correlations of distributed data sources. Moreover, a few research efforts are conducting in integrating the …

Mitigating Stealthy Link Flooding Ddos Attacks Using Sdn-Based Moving Target Defense, Abdullah Aydeger

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the increasing diversity and complication of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, it has become extremely challenging to design a fully protected network. For instance, recently, a new type of attack called Stealthy Link Flooding Attack (SLFA) has been shown to cause critical network disconnection problems, where the attacker targets the communication links in the surrounding area of a server. The existing defense mechanisms for this type of attack are based on the detection of some unusual traffic patterns; however, this might be too late as some severe damage might already be done. These mechanisms also do not consider countermeasures during …

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 …

A System-Level Perspective Towards Efficient, Reliable And Secure Neural Network Computing, Tao Liu

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Digital Era is now evolving into the Intelligence Era, driven overwhelmingly by the revolution of Deep Neural Network (DNN), which opens the door for intelligent data interpretation, turning the data and information into actions that create new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented economic opportunities, achieving game-changing outcomes spanning from image recognition, natural language processing, self-driving cars to biomedical analysis. Moreover, the emergence of deep learning accelerators and neuromorphic computing further pushes DNN computation from cloud to the edge devices for the low-latency scalable on-device neural network computing. However, such promising embedded neural network computing systems are subject to various …

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 …

Customized Wireless Mesh Routing Metric For Swarm Of Drones Applications, Oscar G. Bautista Chia

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the proliferation of drones applications, there is an increasing need for handling their numerous challenges. One of such challenges arises when a swarm-of-drones is deployed to accomplish a specific task which requires coordination and communication. While this swarm-of-drones is essentially a special form of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) which has been studied for many years, there are still some unique requirements of drone applications that necessitates re-visiting MANET approaches. These challenges stem from 3-D environments the drones are deployed in, and their specific way of mobility which adds to the wireless link management challenges. In this thesis, we …

Reputation-Aware Trajectory-Based Data Mining In The Internet Of Things (Iot), Samia Tasnim

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Internet of Things (IoT) is a critically important technology for the acquisition of spatiotemporally dense data in diverse applications, ranging from environmental monitoring to surveillance systems. Such data helps us improve our transportation systems, monitor our air quality and the spread of diseases, respond to natural disasters, and a bevy of other applications. However, IoT sensor data is error-prone due to a number of reasons: sensors may be deployed in hazardous environments, may deplete their energy resources, have mechanical faults, or maybe become the targets of malicious attacks by adversaries. While previous research has attempted to improve the quality of …