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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Infrastructure-Based Access Policy Enforcement Using Software-Defined Networks, Tyler Carden Culp
Infrastructure-Based Access Policy Enforcement Using Software-Defined Networks, Tyler Carden Culp
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis describes a method to enhance network security using software defined networks. Standard networks use perimeter-based defenses to block attackers from gaining access to internal systems. A key problem with standard networks is that once a malicious entity has gained access to the network, they are often able to freely move throughout the network and to attack internal systems with impunity. This problem can be mitigated by placing defenses such as firewalls between machines on the network, but this approach requires significant resources and constant maintenance. If the network infrastructure itself is leveraged as a defense by individualizing the …
Towards Enhanced Security For Automotive Operating Systems, Maksym Hryhorenko
Towards Enhanced Security For Automotive Operating Systems, Maksym Hryhorenko
Theses and Dissertations
Modern automotive infotainment systems are represented by highly complex components with broad functionality and network capabilities. As a result, they are becoming more exposed to the outer world, thus turning into potentially lucrative targets for remote cyber attacks. In the worst case scenario, an attacker could gain complete control over critical vehicle’s systems, for instance, steering, braking, engine, etc. This thesis proposes security hardening features based on ARM’s TrustZone technology for infotainment systems that ensures confidentiality and integrity of critical applications. In addition, we present a technique that allows to mitigate the impact of certain attacks on the car’s internal …
First Steps In Retrofitting A Versatile Software Testing Infrastructure To Android, Carol Anne Oliver
First Steps In Retrofitting A Versatile Software Testing Infrastructure To Android, Carol Anne Oliver
Theses and Dissertations
Are existing software testing technologies satisfying the needs of mobile software testing practitioners? This dissertation provides evidence that the existing technologies fall short of practitioner’s actual needs and analyzes some reasons why this is so. The first contribution presents a framework for analyzing the software testing needs of practitioners, which is then used to assess the existing software testing tools and body of research, revealing significant gaps. The second contribution proposes a vision for a new software testing technology for mobile apps, which is then applied to a real-world problem causing problems for software testing practitioners (namely, the verification of …
Collection And Analysis Of Digital Forensic Data From Devices In The Internet Of Things, Raed Alharbi
Collection And Analysis Of Digital Forensic Data From Devices In The Internet Of Things, Raed Alharbi
Theses and Dissertations
Despite the abundance articles that have been written about the Internet of Things (IoT), little attention has been given to how digital forensics approaches can be utilized to direct advanced investigations in IoT-based frameworks. As of yet, IoT has not completely adjusted to digital forensic strategies given the fact that current digital forensic tools and functions are not ready to tackle the complexity of IoT frameworks for the purpose of collecting, analyzing, and testing potential evidence from IoT environments that might be utilized as permissible evidence in a court. Hence, the issue addressed is that; currently, there is no accepted …
Development Of Portable Embedded Face Recognition Prototype, Prasad S. Garapati
Development Of Portable Embedded Face Recognition Prototype, Prasad S. Garapati
Theses and Dissertations
In this thesis, we focus on developing a prototype for collecting multispectral images for face recognition. With such application, the quality of the image is an important factor that affects the accuracy of the recognition. However, the sensory data either provided in RGB channel or in NIR channel. The images acquired in RGB and NIR were never aligned in previous developments during my literature study. Thus, I propose an embedded system prototype capable of acquiring NIR and RGB images providing multispectral information which is computation efficient for real time face recognition applications.
Mitigating Memory Randomization Weaknesses Via Moving Target Defense, Sultan M. Aldossary
Mitigating Memory Randomization Weaknesses Via Moving Target Defense, Sultan M. Aldossary
Theses and Dissertations
In this dissertation, we address the problem of weakness of address space layout randomization. The address space randomization technique was proposed to make determining the address of a shared library more difficult since each instance of the program is loaded into a random base address. However, when address space randomization layout (ASLR) is implemented on a 32-bit system, an attacker can use a brute force attack to guess the address of the shared library.The main goal of the research described in this dissertation is to study the use of a dispatching algorithm and multiple back-end servers as a moving target …
Automatic Anuran Species Recognition Via Vocalization, Katrina Smart
Automatic Anuran Species Recognition Via Vocalization, Katrina Smart
Theses and Dissertations
Species recognition of Anuran vocalization is an important problem in ecology, which is costly and time consuming. Recently, biologists have turned to machine learning techniques to automate the process. An automated process can be made even more helpful if available to use on a smart phone, which can be used in the field by scientists and citizen scientists alike. The problem of automatic frog call recognition is challenging because features need to be chosen that can properly separate different species’ very similar sounding vocalizations. This thesis offers the following contributions: 1. Three novel feature extraction methods, which do not require …
Robotic Arm Remote Control Framework, Anthony La Rosa
Robotic Arm Remote Control Framework, Anthony La Rosa
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis presents a robot control framework to aid in research using a robotic arm. The scope of this current study is to develop a framework to allow controlling the robotic arm from either a remote network or locally in the lab. A previous method of remote control was present using a Java applet that is no longer supported. The new framework allows communication through REST calls to a server controlling the robot and also tests direct commands to the robot controller to evaluate the overhead of all communication methods.
A Study Of Cloud Haskell With Applications To Mapreduce, Shreyas Ramnath
A Study Of Cloud Haskell With Applications To Mapreduce, Shreyas Ramnath
Theses and Dissertations
In this thesis, we developed a MapReduce application for performing word count in files. We compared the performance of the implementations done using Control.Parallel - built-in Haskell library for parallel/concurrent computations, Cloud Haskell - a distributed framework/DSL for Haskell and the Java Streams API (immutable datatypes). During profiling of our implementations, we found that for a lower number of words in input files the difference in speed of the Control.Parallel and Cloud Haskell implementations were negligible. So to get a better idea we profiled the implementations 12 times for each word size (excluded the highest and lowest values) in the …
A Recommender System For Improving Program Security Through Source Code Mining And Knowledge Extraction, Fitzroy Nembhard
A Recommender System For Improving Program Security Through Source Code Mining And Knowledge Extraction, Fitzroy Nembhard
Theses and Dissertations
The security of computer programs and systems is a very critical issue. Threats against computer networks and software are on the rise. Therefore, businesses and IT professionals should take steps to ensure that their information systems are as secure as possible. However, many programmers and software engineers do not think about adding security to their programs until their projects are near completion, which results in vulnerable and insecure systems that could be exploited by attackers. This dissertation presents a recommender system to help programmers write more secure code. We created a model that mines and categories source code from existing …
Data Mining Algorithms For Decision Support Based On User Activities, Ebad Ahmadzadeh
Data Mining Algorithms For Decision Support Based On User Activities, Ebad Ahmadzadeh
Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation covers four data mining problems with applications in decision support based on user activity data. The first problem is an efficient approach to maximizing spread of information in social networks with applications in decision support for marketing where the goal is to find the best set of users, based on a limited budget, to maximize the word of mouth. The data for this problem is based on user activities in social networks that lead to formation of friendship (or follower-followee) graphs. The second problem is identifying action-outcome relationships to facilitate building a knowledge base of actions that could …
A Comprehensive Data-Driven Characterization Of Organ Transplantation, Diego Marconi Pinheiro Ferreira Silva
A Comprehensive Data-Driven Characterization Of Organ Transplantation, Diego Marconi Pinheiro Ferreira Silva
Theses and Dissertations
Organ transplantation yearly saves thousands of lives worldwide; yet, 22 people still die each day only in the USA due to the ever-increasing imbalance between the supply and demand of organs. Currently, this organ-allocation gap is mainly tackled by optimally allocating organs based on major survivability factors (i.e., efficiency), by providing the population equal access to transplantation (i.e., equity), and by promoting population health literacy (i.e., awareness). Efficiency, equity, and awareness impact each other; yet, the state-of-the-art in organ transplantation still lacks the characterization of awareness, and the trade-off between these aspects are not fully-understood. Given the current availability of …
A Development Environment To Integrate Big Data With Deep Learning, Daljeet Kaur Kaushal
A Development Environment To Integrate Big Data With Deep Learning, Daljeet Kaur Kaushal
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis describes a development environment that integrates big data architectures and deep learning models to facilitate rapid experimentation. The thesis makes three major contributions: First, it describes a big-data architecture that supports big data collection and organization supporting deep learning models. Second, it describes a language used to create a data view that converts the various big data streams into a view that can be used by a deep learning system. Third, it demonstrates the system’s effectiveness by applying the tool to several different deep learning applications.
Enhancing And Reinforcing Security And Usability Of User Account Authentication Using Fingerprints As Username Credential, Mohammad Hassan Algarni
Enhancing And Reinforcing Security And Usability Of User Account Authentication Using Fingerprints As Username Credential, Mohammad Hassan Algarni
Theses and Dissertations
With the process of logging in, the users gain access to a computer system after identifying and authenticating themselves. The user credentials are required to login, and they are typically some form of a username and a matching password. The username for logging in an account is textual. This text can be either email address or some alphanumeric or numeric or characters chosen by the user. However, if the email account of a user is compromised, the attacker can click on Forgot Password link available on the user interface of the target account. If the compromised email account has the …
Standardizing The Requirements Specification Of Multi-Agent Systems, Khaled Ali M Slhoub
Standardizing The Requirements Specification Of Multi-Agent Systems, Khaled Ali M Slhoub
Theses and Dissertations
Development of multi-agent systems is negatively impacted by the lack of process standardization across the major development phases, such as the requirements analysis phase. This issue creates a key barrier for agent technology stakeholders regarding comprehending and analyzing complexity associated with agent-oriented specification. Instead, such fundamental low-level infrastructure is loosely attended to in an ad-hoc fashion, and important aspects of requirements analysis are often neglected altogether. The IEEE Std 830 model is a recommended practice aimed at describing how to write better quality requirements specification of conventional software. Knowing that agent-based computing is a natural evolution of the conventional approaches …
An Authentication Framework For Wearable Devices, Abdullah Alharbi
An Authentication Framework For Wearable Devices, Abdullah Alharbi
Theses and Dissertations
The popularity of wearable devices (WDs) has been growing rapidly in recent years because of the convenience they add to users lives. Although WDs may be considered an extension of mobile computing devices (e.g., smartphones), their form factor is very different: WDs are always available and expected to be accessible, and they often lack typical input means such as a keyboard. Therefore, they need to be treated, in terms of authentication, differently than other computing devices since we cannot simply apply possibly unsuitable traditional authentication methods such as password that were designed for other modalities. In this dissertation, we introduce …
A Novel Approach To Containerize Existing Applications, Vineet Haresh Palan
A Novel Approach To Containerize Existing Applications, Vineet Haresh Palan
Theses and Dissertations
Cloud computing has dominated the way different services are offered, utilized and managed over the internet. Typically, applications run inside the virtual machines in an isolated environment. However, there is always a hardware virtualization overhead for running these virtual machines. Recently, Linux containers have gathered attention because of their significantly lower overhead when compared with VM through OS-level virtualization. They mainly provide high availability, isolation, portability, interoperability and scalability. Thus, everyone is trying to move their existing applications onto Linux containers with the help of available tools and framework. However, these tools fail to gather all the relevant information required …
Towards Intelligent Intrusion Detection Systems For Cloud Computing, Mohammed J. Aljebreen
Towards Intelligent Intrusion Detection Systems For Cloud Computing, Mohammed J. Aljebreen
Theses and Dissertations
Statistics presented in the background chapter show the tremendous number of security breaches that occurred in recent years. Furthermore, securing the new advanced technologies has become more challenging. Cloud computing and containers are among those emerging technologies that have introduced security challenges, and it is necessary that they be addressed. One of the main features of both cloud and container technologies is the sharing of resources of both hardware and software. The challenge becomes more complex when running containers in a cloud environment. Thus, advancing the security of container in the cloud environment is necessary, especially becasause of the lack …
On The Automation Of Cyber Experimentation, Dhanish Mehta
On The Automation Of Cyber Experimentation, Dhanish Mehta
Theses and Dissertations
There are a variety of tools available to users to perform cyber experimentation, and many of them automate some aspects of the experimentation lifecycle. However, they either support a minimal subset of the tools across various experimentation environments, or solve a particular problem in the cyber experiment lifecycle. In pursuit of making cyber experimentation easier and more efficient, we introduce a new framework that can design, create, execute and analyze experiments and is agnostic of the underlying environments. We show the effectiveness of our framework by presenting a prototype implementation and perform two case studies using the prototype implementation. We …
Identifying The Most Relevant Arguments From User Meta-Data, Roussi Roussev
Identifying The Most Relevant Arguments From User Meta-Data, Roussi Roussev
Theses and Dissertations
Arguments are essential objects in a debate. In the DirectDemocracyP2P system, they occur in association with signatures for petitions. The arguments of a signer on a given issue are grouped into one single justification, are classified by the type of signature, in our case supporting or opposing, and can be subject to various types of relations such as refute, subsume or more recent. Given those signatures and relations, the addressed problems are: (i) what makes a good supporting or opposing justification (ii) how to recommend the best justification to a new voter, (iii) how to recommend a compact list of …
Distributed Coordination For Autonomous Guided Vehicles In Multi-Agent Systems With Shared Resources, Atefeh Mahdavi
Distributed Coordination For Autonomous Guided Vehicles In Multi-Agent Systems With Shared Resources, Atefeh Mahdavi
Theses and Dissertations
The decentralized path planning technique proposed in this thesis solves major challenges in the domain of MAS. These challenges are trajectory planning and collision avoidance. Generally, in a shared infrastructure where several agents aim to use limited capacity resources, finding a set of optimal and conflict-free paths for each single agent is the most critical part. The purpose of this research is designing a decentralized framework to coordinate the behavior of a number of agents in dynamic environments where continual planning and scheduling are required. In this research, a set of tasks will be assigned to the agents. Based on …
Privus: Take Back Your Privacy The Effect Of A User-Centered Approach On Privacy Management, Aral Tasher
Privus: Take Back Your Privacy The Effect Of A User-Centered Approach On Privacy Management, Aral Tasher
Theses and Dissertations
Rapid innovations in science and engineering have created a greater opportunity for disruptive technologies to be established at a faster rate. Less than a decade ago mobile, phones were a mere tool for communication, nowadays, we rely on their successors to remind us about our next appointment, what we need from the grocery store, or even where we parked our car. But this assistance comes with a cost; in order to help us, our devices rely on using our personal information like GPS, contacts list and personal notes, –in some cases more information than what the app needs. While there …
Building Panoramic Image Mosaics Of Coral Reefs, Yan Li
Building Panoramic Image Mosaics Of Coral Reefs, Yan Li
Theses and Dissertations
Panoramic image mosaic is an important tool for accessing the preserving condition of coral reefs sites. In recent years, a number of methods and applications are made to create panoramic image mosaics by stitching a sequence of images together to get a wider field of view. However, it is not appropriate to apply existing methods and applications to our dataset directly. The main reason is that our underwater videos are acquired not by underwater machines, but coral-conservation researchers. In this case, the stitching process becomes more challenging due to a number of problems: illumination changes, large parallax, water drift, as …
Machine Learning For Classifying Malware In Closed-Set And Open-Set Scenarios, Mehadi Seid Hassen
Machine Learning For Classifying Malware In Closed-Set And Open-Set Scenarios, Mehadi Seid Hassen
Theses and Dissertations
Anti-malware vendors regularly receive large amount of suspected malware files to be examined. However, the sheer number of files makes manual analysis time-consuming. Therefore, it is important to automate this process. Two of the main automation approaches are malware classification and clustering, where similar malware samples are grouped into malware families. Grouping malware into families allows malware analysts to examine fewer representative samples from each family, hence streamlining the malware defense process. In this dissertation, we focus on two aspects of the automated malware defense. For the first part of our work, we focus on malware classification in a closed …
A Comparison Study Of Disease Spreading Models, Douglas Nogueira Oliveira
A Comparison Study Of Disease Spreading Models, Douglas Nogueira Oliveira
Theses and Dissertations
Epidemic diseases have become one of the major sources of concern in modern society. Diseases such as HIV and H1N1 have infected millions of people around the world. Many studies have attempted to describe the dynamics of disease spreading. Despite the numerous models, most only analyze one aspect of a given model, such as the impact of the topology of a contagious network, or, the spreading rate of disease. Although useful, these types of analyses do not provide insights into how different models could be combined to better understand the phenomenon, or how the modeling decisions affect the dynamics of …
Transfer Learning With Convolutional Neural Networks Applied To Periocular Biometrics, Kushal Vangara
Transfer Learning With Convolutional Neural Networks Applied To Periocular Biometrics, Kushal Vangara
Theses and Dissertations
Biometrics technologies are designed for recognition of the unique physiological and behavioral features of an individual for identification and verification applications. There have been noteworthy advances in this field to recognize individuals based on their biometric trait(s) for authentication and verification applications. Despite these advances, there are many challenging issues which impede the potential of biometric systems and therefore limit the systems performance. Traditional biometric system design involves a selection of handcrafted features for recognition tasks which are not efficient as the size of the system scales up. Face and iris biometrics are reliable for many identification and verification applications …