Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Computer-Aided Training (Cat) System For Short Track Speed Skating, Chenguang Liu

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Short track speed skating was adopted by the International Skating Union in 1967, and upgraded to full winter Olympic sport status in 1992. Even though its history is short compared with long track speed skating, it became popular around the world because it is more intense and more entertaining for audiences. The demands of having a CAT system for gathering and analyzing competition data automatically is raising drastically due to its growing popularity all around the world.

There have been some commercial systems for some other sports, which are able to provide extrinsic feedback information to coaches and athletes. However, …

Applying Information Visualization To Computer Security Applications, Robert Bruce Whitaker

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis presents two phases of research in applying visualization to network security challenges. The first phase included discovering the most useful and powerful features in existing computer security visualizations and incorporating them into the AdviseAid visualization platform, an existing software package. The incorporation of such a complete feature set required novel resolution of software engineering, human factors, and computer graphics issues. We also designed additional novel features, such as plugin interfaces, allowing for rapid prototyping and experimentation with novel visualization features and capabilities. The second phase of the research focused on the development of novel visualization techniques themselves. These …

Covert Botnet Design And Defense Analysis, Brandon Lyle Shirley

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Intrusion defense system (IDS) development has been largely reactionary in nature. This is especially troubling given that botnets are capable of compromising and controlling thousands of computers before security professionals develop a mitigation technique. As new exploits are created, new mitigation techniques are developed to detect infections and, where possible, remove them. This thesis breaks from this tradition of reacting to malware. Instead, it looks at possible malicious software models through analyzing existing defense systems for exploitable weaknesses.

First, this thesis presents a new specialized botnet that circumvents current network intrusion detection mechanisms. The proposed botnet coordinates external communication among …