Computer Engineering Commons^™

Energy-Efficient Hmac For Wireless Communications, Cesar Enrique Castellon Escobar

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis introduces the Farming Lightweight Protocol (FLP) optimized for energy-restricted environments that depend upon secure communication, such as multi-robot information gathering systems within the vision of ``smart'' agriculture. FLP uses a hash-based message authentication code (HMAC) to achieve data integrity. HMAC implementations, resting upon repeated use of the SHA256 hashing operator, impose additional resource requirements and thus also impact system availability. We address this particular integrity/availability trade-off by proposing an energy-saving algorithmic engineering method on the internal SHA256 hashing operator. The energy-efficient hash is designed to maintain the original security benefits yet reduce the negative effects on system availability. …

Assessing The Performance Of A Particle Swarm Optimization Mobility Algorithm In A Hybrid Wi-Fi/Lora Flying Ad Hoc Network, William David Paredes

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research on Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs) has increased due to the availability of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and the electronic components that control and connect them. Many applications, such as 3D mapping, construction inspection, or emergency response operations could benefit from an application and adaptation of swarm intelligence-based deployments of multiple UAVs. Such groups of cooperating UAVs, through the use of local rules, could be seen as network nodes establishing an ad-hoc network for communication purposes.

One FANET application is to provide communication coverage over an area where communication infrastructure is unavailable. A crucial part of a FANET implementation is …

Open Voting Client Architecture And Op-Ed Voting: A Novel Framework For Solving Requirement Conflicts In Secret Ballot Elections, Aaron M. Wilson

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Building voting systems for secret ballot elections has many challenges and is the subject of significant academic research efforts. These challenges come from conflicting requirements. In this paper, we introduce a novel architectural approach to voting system construction that may help satisfy conflicting requirements and increase voter satisfaction. Our design, called Open Voting Client Architecture, defines a voting system architectural approach that can harness the power of individualized voting clients. In this work, we contribute a voting system reference architecture to depict the current voting system construction and then use it to define Open Voting Client Architecture. We then detail …

Energy Considerations In Blockchain-Enabled Applications, Cesar Enrique Castellon Escobar

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Blockchain-powered smart systems deployed in different industrial applications promise operational efficiencies and improved yields, while mitigating significant cybersecurity risks pertaining to the main application. Associated tradeoffs between availability and security arise at implementation, however, triggered by the additional resources (e.g., memory, computation) required by each blockchain-enabled host. This thesis applies an energy-reducing algorithmic engineering technique for Merkle Tree root and Proof of Work calculations, two principal elements of blockchain computations, as a means to preserve the promised security benefits but with less compromise to system availability. Using pyRAPL, a python library to measure computational energy, we experiment with both the …

Multi-Robot Informative Path Planning In Unknown Environments Through Continuous Region Partitioning, Amitabh Bhattacharya

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research activity is primarily focused to obtain information from an environment with the help of a group of coordinated robots. Each robot is responsible to plan its path independently but the robots, as an overall system, have a common goal of maximum information collection. This domain of research is known as Multi-Robot Informative Path Planning (MIPP). MIPP is very motivating due to its challenging nature and numerous real-world applications. It has shown its presence from semiautomatic applications like robotic search and rescue to fully automatic applications like interplanetary missions.

We consider the NP-Hard problem of MIPP in an unknown …

Sorting By Strip Moves And Strip Swaps, Chandrika Pandurang Rao

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Genome rearrangement problems in computational biology [19, 29, 27] and zoning algorithms in optical character recognition [14, 4] have been modeled as combinatorial optimization problems related to the familiar problem of sorting, namely transforming arbitrary permutations to the identity permutation. The term permutation is used for an arbitrary arrangement of the integers 1, 2,···, n, and the term identity permutation for the arrangement of 1, 2,···, n in increasing order. When a permutation is viewed as the string of integers from 1 through n, any substring in it that is also a substring in the identity permutation will …

A Topic Modeling Approach For Code Clone Detection, Mohammed Salman Khan

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis work, the potential benefits of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) as a technique for code clone detection has been described. The objective is to propose a language-independent, effective, and scalable approach for identifying similar code fragments in relatively large software systems. The main assumption is that the latent topic structure of software artifacts gives an indication of the presence of code clones. It can be hypothesized that artifacts with similar topic distributions contain duplicated code fragments and to prove this hypothesis, an experimental investigation using multiple datasets from various application domains were conducted. In addition, CloneTM, an LDA-based …

On Learning And Visualizing Lexicographic Preference Trees, Ahmed S. Moussa

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Preferences are very important in research fields such as decision making, recommendersystemsandmarketing. The focus of this thesis is on preferences over combinatorial domains, which are domains of objects configured with categorical attributes. For example, the domain of cars includes car objects that are constructed withvaluesforattributes, such as ‘make’, ‘year’, ‘model’, ‘color’, ‘body type’ and ‘transmission’.Different values can instantiate an attribute. For instance, values for attribute ‘make’canbeHonda, Toyota, Tesla or BMW, and attribute ‘transmission’ can haveautomaticormanual. To this end,thisthesis studiesproblemsonpreference visualization and learning for lexicographic preference trees, graphical preference models that often are compact over complex domains of objects built of …

Trapping Aco Applied To Mri Of The Heart, Shannon Lloyd Birchell

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The research presented here supports the ongoing need for automatic heart volume calculation through the identification of the left and right ventricles in MRI images. The need for automated heart volume calculation stems from the amount of time it takes to manually processes MRI images and required esoteric skill set. There are several methods for region detection such as Deep Neural Networks, Support Vector Machines and Ant Colony Optimization. In this research Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) will be the method of choice due to its efficiency and flexibility. There are many types of ACO algorithms using a variety of heuristics …

Modeling Context-Adaptive Energy-Aware Security In Mobile Devices, Preeti Singh

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As increasing functionality in mobile devices leads to rapid battery drain, energy management has gained increasing importance. However, differences in user’s usage contexts and patterns can be leveraged for saving energy. On the other hand, the increasing sensitivity of users’ data, coupled with the need to ensure security in an energy-aware manner, demands careful analyses of trade-offs between energy and security. The research described in this thesis addresses this challenge by 1)modeling the problem of context-adaptive energy-aware security as a combinatorial optimization problem (Context-Sec); 2) proving that the decision version of this problem is NP-Complete, via a reduction from a …

Assessing Ratio-Based Fatigue Indexes Using A Single Channel Eeg, Lucas B. Coffey

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Driver fatigue is a state of reduced mental alertness which impairs the performance of a range of cognitive and psychomotor tasks, including driving. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, driver fatigue was responsible for 72,000 accidents that lead to more than 800 deaths in 2015. A reliable method of driver fatigue detection is needed to prevent such accidents. There has been a great deal of research into studying driver fatigue via electroencephalography (EEG) to analyze brain wave data. These research works have produced three competing EEG data-based ratios that have the potential to detect driver fatigue.

Research has …

Architectures For Real-Time Automatic Sign Language Recognition On Resource-Constrained Device, James M. Blair

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Powerful, handheld computing devices have proliferated among consumers in recent years. Combined with new cameras and sensors capable of detecting objects in three-dimensional space, new gesture-based paradigms of human computer interaction are becoming available. One possible application of these developments is an automated sign language recognition system. This thesis reviews the existing body of work regarding computer recognition of sign language gestures as well as the design of systems for speech recognition, a similar problem. Little work has been done to apply the well-known architectural patterns of speech recognition systems to the domain of sign language recognition. This work creates …

Implementation Of Cache Attack On Real Information Centric Networking System, Faustina J. Anto Morais

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Network security is an ongoing major problem in today’s Internet world. Even though there have been simulation studies related to denial of service and cache attacks, studies of attacks on real networks are still lacking in the research. In this thesis, the effects of cache attacks in real information-centric networking systems were investigated. Cache attacks were implemented in real networks with different cache sizes and with Least Recently Used, Random and First In First Out algorithms to fill the caches in each node. The attacker hits the cache with unpopular content, making the user request that the results be fetched …

Mobile Cloud Computing: A Comparison Study Of Cuckoo And Aiolos Offloading Frameworks, Inan Kaddour

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Currently, smart mobile devices are used for more than just calling and texting. They can run complex applications such as GPS, antivirus, and photo editor applications. Smart devices today offer mobility, flexibility, and portability, but they have limited resources and a relatively weak battery. As companies began creating mobile resource intensive and power intensive applications, they have realized that cloud computing was one of the solutions that they could utilize to overcome smart device constraints. Cloud computing helps decrease memory usage and improve battery life. Mobile cloud computing is a current and expanding research area focusing on methods that allow …

Towards Designing Energy Efficient Symmetric Key Protocols, Sai Raghu Talluri

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Energy consumption by various modern symmetric key encryption protocols (DES,

3-DES, AES and, Blowfish) is studied from an algorithmic perspective. The work

is directed towards redesigning or modifying the underlying algorithms for these

protocols to make them consume less energy than they currently do. This research

takes the approach of reducing energy consumption by parallelizing the

consecutive memory accesses of symmetric key encryption algorithms. To achieve

parallelization, an existing energy complexity model is applied to symmetric key

encryption algorithms. Inspired by the popular DDR3 architecture, the model assumes

that main memory is divided into multiple banks, each of which can …

An Empirical Investigation Of Collaborative Web Search Tool On Novice's Query Behavior, Mareh Fakhir Al-Sammarraie

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the past decade, research efforts dedicated to studying the process of collaborative web search have been on the rise. Yet, a limited number of studies have examined the impact of collaborative information search processes on novices’ query behaviors. Studying and analyzing factors that influence web search behaviors, specifically users’ patterns of queries when using collaborative search systems can help with making query suggestions for group users. Improvements in user query behaviors and system query suggestions help in reducing search time and increasing query success rates for novices.

This thesis investigates the influence of collaboration between experts and novices as …

Performance Evaluation Of Hadoop Based Big Data Applications With Hibench Benchmarking Tool On Iaas Cloud Platforms, Karthika Muthiah Ms.

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cloud computing is a computing paradigm where large numbers of devices are connected through networks that provide a dynamically scalable infrastructure for applications, data and storage. Currently, many businesses, from small scale to big companies and industries, are changing their operations to utilize cloud services because cloud platforms could increase company’s growth through process efficiency and reduction in information technology spending [Coles16]. Companies are relying on cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure, etc., for their business development.

Due to the emergence of new technologies, devices, and communications, the amount of data produced is growing …

Generating A Normalized Database Using Class Normalization, Daniel Sushil Sudhindaran

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Relational databases are the most popular databases used by enterprise applications to store persistent data to this day. It gives a lot of flexibility and efficiency. A process called database normalization helps make sure that the database is free from redundancies and update anomalies. In a Database-First approach to software development, the database is designed first, and then an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tool is used to generate the programming classes (data layer) to interact with the database. Finally, the business logic code is written to interact with the data layer to persist the business data to the database. However, in …

Security Analysis Of Ecc Based Protocols, Chanchal Khatwani

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is extensively used in various multifactor authentication protocols. In this work, various recent ECC based authentication and key exchange protocols are subjected to threat modeling and static analysis to detect vulnerabilities, and to enhance them to be more secure against threats. This work demonstrates how currently used ECC based protocols are vulnerable to attacks. If protocols are vulnerable, damages could include critical data loss and elevated privacy concerns. The protocols considered in thiswork differ in their usage of security factors (e.g. passwords, pins, and biometrics), encryption and timestamps. The threatmodel considers various kinds of attacks including …

Empirical Evaluation Of Cloud Iaas Platforms Using System-Level Benchmarks, Niharika Deval

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cloud Computing is an emerging paradigm in the field of computing where scalable IT enabled capabilities are delivered ‘as-a-service’ using Internet technology. The Cloud industry adopted three basic types of computing service models based on software level abstraction: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Infrastructure-as-a-Service allows customers to outsource fundamental computing resources such as servers, networking, storage, as well as services where the provider owns and manages the entire infrastructure. This allows customers to only pay for the resources they consume. In a fast-growing IaaS market with multiple cloud platforms offering IaaS services, the user's decision on the selection …

Improving Search Ranking Using A Composite Scoring Approach, Larry D. Snedden

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, the improvement to relevance in computerized search results is studied. Information search tools return ranked lists of documents ordered by the relevance of the documents to the user supplied search. Using a small number of words and phrases to represent complex ideas and concepts causes user search queries to be information sparse. This sparsity challenges search tools to locate relevant documents for users. A review of the challenges to information searches helps to identify the problems and offer suggestions in improving current information search tools. Using the suggestions put forth by the Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval …

Active Analytics: Adapting Web Pages Automatically Based On Analytics Data, William R. Carle Ii

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Web designers are expected to perform the difficult task of adapting a site’s design to fit changing usage trends. Web analytics tools give designers a window into website usage patterns, but they must be analyzed and applied to a website's user interface design manually. A framework for marrying live analytics data with user interface design could allow for interfaces that adapt dynamically to usage patterns, with little or no action from the designers. The goal of this research is to create a framework that utilizes web analytics data to automatically update and enhance web user interfaces. In this research, we …

Challenging The Efficient Market Hypothesis With Dynamically Trained Artificial Neural Networks, Kevin M. Harper

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A review of the literature applying Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) based Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to market forecasting leads to three observations: 1) It is clear that simple ANNs, like other nonlinear machine learning techniques, are capable of approximating general market trends 2) It is not clear to what extent such forecasted trends are reliably exploitable in terms of profits obtained via trading activity 3) Most research with ANNs reporting profitable trading activity relies on ANN models trained over one fixed interval which is then tested on a separate out-of-sample fixed interval, and it is not clear to what extent these …

Towards Designing Energy-Efficient Secure Hashes, Priyanka Dhoopa Harish

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In computer security, cryptographic algorithms and protocols are required to ensure security of data and applications. This research investigates techniques to reduce the energy consumed by cryptographic hash functions. The specific hash functions considered are Message Digest-2 (MD2), Message Digest-5 (MD5), Secure Hash Algorithm-1 (SHA-1) and Secure Hash Algorithm-2 (SHA-2).

The discussion around energy conservation in handheld devices like laptops and mobile devices is gaining momentum. Research has been done at the hardware and operating system levels to reduce the energy consumed by these devices. However, research on conserving energy at the application level is a new approach. This research …

An Empirical Performance Analysis Of Iaas Clouds With Cloudstone Web 2.0 Benchmarking Tool, Neha Soni

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Web 2.0 applications have become ubiquitous over the past few years because they provide useful features such as a rich, responsive graphical user interface that supports interactive and dynamic content. Social networking websites, blogs, auctions, online banking, online shopping and video sharing websites are noteworthy examples of Web 2.0 applications. The market for public cloud service providers is growing rapidly, and cloud providers offer an ever-growing list of services. As a result, developers and researchers find it challenging when deciding which public cloud service to use for deploying, experimenting or testing Web 2.0 applications. This study compares the scalability and …

Use Of Ibm Collaborative Lifecycle Management Solution To Demonstrate Traceability For Small, Real-World Software Development Project, Lovelesh Chawla

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Standish Group Study of 1994 showed that 53 percent of software projects failed outright and another 31 percent were challenged by extreme budget and/or time overrun. Since then different responses to the high rate of software project failures have been proposed. SEI’s CMMI, the ISO’s 9001:2000 for software development, and the IEEE’s JSTD-016 are some examples of such responses. Traceability is the one common feature that these software development standards impose.

Over the last decade, software and system engineering communities have been researching subjects such as developing more sophisticated tooling, applying information retrieval techniques capable of semi-automating the trace …

Virtualization Components Of The Modern Hypervisor, Sean Mcadams

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Virtualization is the foundation on which cloud services build their business. It supports the infrastructure for the largest companies around the globe and is a key component for scaling software for the ever-growing technology industry. If companies decide to use virtualization as part of their infrastructure it is important for them to quickly and reliably have a way to choose a virtualization technology and tweak the performance of that technology to fit their intended usage. Unfortunately, while many papers exist discussing and testing the performance of various virtualization systems, most of these performance tests do not take into account components …

Unknown Exception Handling Tool Using Humans As Agents, Mwaka Mahanga

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In a typical workflow process, exceptions are the norm. Exceptions are defined as deviations from the normal sequence of activities and events. Exceptions can be divided into two broad categories: known exceptions (i.e., expected and predefined deviations) and unknown exceptions (i.e., unexpected and undefined deviations). Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) has become the de facto standard for executing business workflows with the use of web services. BPEL includes exception handling methods that are sufficient for known exception scenarios. Depending on the exception and the specifics of the exception handling tools, processes may either halt or move to completion. Instances of …

Hadoop Based Data Intensive Computation On Iaas Cloud Platforms, Sruthi Vijayakumar

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cloud computing is a relatively new form of computing which uses virtualized resources. It is dynamically scalable and is often provided as pay for use service over the Internet or Intranet or both. With increasing demand for data storage in the cloud, the study of data-intensive applications is becoming a primary focus. Data intensive applications are those which involve high CPU usage, processing large volumes of data typically in size of hundreds of gigabytes, terabytes or petabytes. The research in this thesis is focused on the Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) and Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) using HiBench Hadoop …

A Targeted Denial Of Service Attack On Data Caching Networks, Jeffrey B. Gouge

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the rise of data exchange over the Internet, information-centric networks have become a popular research topic in computing. One major research topic on Information Centric Networks (ICN) is the use of data caching to increase network performance. However, research in the security concerns of data caching networks is lacking. One example of a data caching network can be seen using a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET).

Recently, a study has shown that it is possible to infer military activity through cache behavior which is used as a basis for a formulated denial of service attack (DoS) that can be …