Other Computer Engineering Commons^™

Digital Forensics For Investigating Control-Logic Attacks In Industrial Control Systems, Nauman Zubair

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Programmable logic controllers (PLC) are required to handle physical processes and thus crucial in critical infrastructures like power grids, nuclear facilities, and gas pipelines. Attacks on PLCs can have disastrous consequences, considering attacks like Stuxnet and TRISIS. Those attacks are examples of exploits where the attacker aims to inject into a target PLC malicious control logic, which engineering software compiles as a reliable code. When investigating a security incident, acquiring memory can provide valuable insight such as runtime system activities and memory-based artifacts which may contain the attacker's footprints. The existing memory acquisition tools for PLCs require a hardware-level debugging …

Convolutional Neural Networks For Deflate Data Encoding Classification Of High Entropy File Fragments, Nehal Ameen

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Data reconstruction is significantly improved in terms of speed and accuracy by reliable data encoding fragment classification. To date, work on this problem has been successful with file structures of low entropy that contain sparse data, such as large tables or logs. Classifying compressed, encrypted, and random data that exhibit high entropy is an inherently difficult problem that requires more advanced classification approaches. We explore the ability of convolutional neural networks and word embeddings to classify deflate data encoding of high entropy file fragments after establishing ground truth using controlled datasets. Our model is designed to either successfully classify file …

Analysis Of Human Affect And Bug Patterns To Improve Software Quality And Security, Md Rakibul Islam

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The impact of software is ever increasing as more and more systems are being software operated. Despite the usefulness of software, many instances software failures have been causing tremendous losses in lives and dollars. Software failures take place because of bugs (i.e., faults) in the software systems. These bugs cause the program to malfunction or crash and expose security vulnerabilities exploitable by malicious hackers.

Studies confirm that software defects and vulnerabilities appear in source code largely due to the human mistakes and errors of the developers. Human performance is impacted by the underlying development process and human affects, such as …

Improved Iterative Truncated Arithmetic Mean Filter, Prathyusha Surampudi Venkata

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis discusses image processing and filtering techniques with emphasis on Mean filter, Median filter, and different versions of the Iterative Truncated Arithmetic Mean (ITM) filter. Specifically, we review in detail the ITM algorithms (ITM1 and ITM2) proposed by Xudong Jiang. Although filtering is capable of reducing noise in an image, it usually also results in smoothening or some other form of distortion of image edges and file details. Therefore, maintaining a proper trade off between noise reduction and edge/detail distortion is key. In this thesis, an improvement over Xudong Jiang’s ITM filters, namely ITM3, has been proposed and tested …

Improving A Particle Swarm Optimization-Based Clustering Method, Sharif Shahadat

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis discusses clustering related works with emphasis on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) principles. Specifically, we review in detail the PSO clustering algorithm proposed by Van Der Merwe & Engelbrecht, the particle swarm clustering (PSC) algorithm proposed by Cohen & de Castro, Szabo’s modified PSC (mPSC), and Georgieva & Engelbrecht’s Cooperative-Multi-Population PSO (CMPSO). In this thesis, an improvement over Van Der Merwe & Engelbrecht’s PSO clustering has been proposed and tested for standard datasets. The improvements observed in those experiments vary from slight to moderate, both in terms of minimizing the cost function, and in terms of run time.

A Balanced Secondary Structure Predictor, Md Nasrul Islam

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Secondary structure (SS) refers to the local spatial organization of the polypeptide backbone atoms of a protein. Accurate prediction of SS is a vital clue to resolve the 3D structure of protein. SS has three different components- helix (H), beta (E) and coil (C). Most SS predictors are imbalanced as their accuracy in predicting helix and coil are high, however significantly low in the beta. The objective of this thesis is to develop a balanced SS predictor which achieves good accuracies in all three SS components. We proposed a novel approach to solve this problem by combining a genetic algorithm …

An Empirical Study Of Semantic Similarity In Wordnet And Word2vec, Abram Handler

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis performs an empirical analysis of Word2Vec by comparing its output to WordNet, a well-known, human-curated lexical database. It finds that Word2Vec tends to uncover more of certain types of semantic relations than others -- with Word2Vec returning more hypernyms, synonomyns and hyponyms than hyponyms or holonyms. It also shows the probability that neighbors separated by a given cosine distance in Word2Vec are semantically related in WordNet. This result both adds to our understanding of the still-unknown Word2Vec and helps to benchmark new semantic tools built from word vectors.

Forensic Analysis Of Whatsapp On Android Smartphones, Neha S. Thakur

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Android forensics has evolved over time offering significant opportunities and exciting challenges. On one hand, being an open source platform Android is giving developers the freedom to contribute to the rapid growth of the Android market whereas on the other hand Android users may not be aware of the security and privacy implications of installing these applications on their phones. Users may assume that a password-locked device protects their personal information, but applications may retain private information on devices, in ways that users might not anticipate. In this thesis we will be concentrating on one such application called 'WhatsApp', a …

Data Exploration Interface For Digital Forensics, Varun Dontula

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The fast capacity growth of cheap storage devices presents an ever-growing problem of scale for digital forensic investigations. One aspect of scale problem in the forensic process is the need for new approaches to visually presenting and analyzing large amounts of data. Current generation of tools universally employ three basic GUI components—trees, tables, and viewers—to present all relevant information. This approach is not scalable as increasing the size of the input data leads to a proportional increase in the amount of data presented to the analyst.

We present an alternative approach, which leverages data visualization techniques to provide a more …