Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Group Selection And Key Management Strategies For Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption, Russell F. Martin

Theses

Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CPABE) was introduced by Bethencourt, Sahai, and Waters, as an improvement of Identity Based Encryption, allowing fine grained control of access to encrypted files by restricting access to only users whose attributes match that of the monotonic access tree of the encrypted file. Through these modifications, encrypted files can be placed securely on an unsecure server, without fear of malicious users being able to access the files, while allowing each user to have a unique key, reducing the vulnerabilites associated with sharing a key between multiple users.

However, due to the fact that CPABE was designed for …

Rule-Based Conditional Trust With Openpgp., Andrew Jackson

Theses

This thesis describes a new trust model for OpenPGP encryption. This trust model uses conditional rule-based trust to establish key validity and trust. This thesis describes "Trust Rules" that may be used to sort and categorize keys automatically without user interaction. "Trust Rules" are also capable of integrating key revocation status into its calculations so it too is automated. This thesis presents that conditional trust established through "Trust Rules" can enforce stricter security while reducing the burden of use and automating the process of key validity, trust, and revocation.

A Forensic Comparison: Windows 7 And Windows 8, Peter J. Wilson

Theses

Whenever a new operating system or new version of an operating system is released, forensic investigators must re-examine the new operating system or new version. They do so to determine if there are significant differences that will impact and change the way they perform their investigations. With the release of Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows 8, and its update, Windows 8.1, understanding the similarities and differences between Windows 8 and previous operating systems such as Windows 7 is critical. This paper forensically examines Windows 7 and Windows 8 to determine those similarities and differences.

Segmentation And Model Generation For Large-Scale Cyber Attacks, Steven E. Strapp

Theses

Raw Cyber attack traffic can present more questions than answers to security analysts. Especially with large-scale observables it is difficult to identify which packets are relevant and what attack behaviors are present. Many existing works in Host or Flow Clustering attempt to group similar behaviors to expedite analysis; these works often phrase the problem directly as offline unsupervised machine learning. This work proposes online processing to simultaneously model coordinating actors and segment traffic that is relevant to a target of interest, all while it is being received. The goal is not just to aggregate similar attack behaviors, but to provide …

Understanding Effects Of Presentation On Concept Learning In Technology Supported Learning, Nivedita Singh

Theses

The world of technology has had a significant impact on learning and instructional domain. Today, a large number of devices and software are specifically designed to afford faster and effective learning and instruction. They have not only erased the physical boundaries to resources in education but have also helped create new interactions and engagements for learners and instructors. With this changed scenario, the content or instructional material also needs our attention to become usable and compatible with the changed learning styles and preferences of the learners today. Not only does the content need to seamlessly integrate with the delivery methodology …

Performance Comparison Of Five Rna-Seq Alignment Tools, Yuanpeng Lu

Theses

Aligning millions of short reads to a reference genome is a critical task in high throughput sequencing. In recent years, a large number of mapping algorithms have been developed, all of which have in common that they align a vast number of reads to genomic or transcriptomic sequences. RNA-Seq data is discrete in nature, therefore with reasonable gene models and comparative metrics RNA-Seq data can be simulated to sufficient accuracy to enable meaningful benchmarking of alignment algorithms. To provide guidance in the choice of alignment algorithms, five different alignment tools for RNA-Seq data are evaluated. In order to compare the …

Polyaseeker: A Computational Framework For Identifying Polyadenylation Cleavage Site From Rna-Seq, Xiao Ling

Theses

Alternative polyadenylation (APA) of mRNA plays a crucial role for post-transcriptional gene regulation. Recently, advances in next generation sequencing technology have made it possible to efficiently characterize the transcriptome and identify the 3’end of polyadenylated RNAs. However, no comprehensive bioi nformatic pipelines have fulfilled this goal. The PolyASeeker, a computational framework for identifying polyadenylation cleavage sites from RNA-Seq data is proposed in this thesis. By using the simulated RNA-seq dataset, a novel method is developed to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework versus the traditional A-stretch approach, and compute accurate Precisions and Recalls that previous estimation could not get. …

A Gpu Program To Compute Snp-Snp Interactions In Genome-Wide Association Studies, Srividya Ramakrishnan

Theses

With the recent advances in the next generation sequencing technologies, short read sequences of human genome are made more accessible. Paired end sequencing of short reads is currently the most sensitive method for detecting somatic mutations that arise during tumor development. In this study, a novel approach to optimize the detection of structural variants using a new short read alignment program is presented.

Pairwise interaction effects of the Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) have proven to uncover the underlying complex disease traits. Computing the disease risk based on the interaction effects of SNPs on a case - control study is a …

Genome Wide Search For Pseudo Knotted Non-Coding Rnas, Meghana S. Vasavada

Theses

Non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) are the functional RNA molecules that are involved in many biological processes including gene regulation, chromosome replication and RNA modification. Searching genomes using computational methods has become an important asset for prediction and annotation of ncRNAs. To annotate an individual genome for a specific family of ncRNAs, a computational tool is interpreted to scan through the genome and align its sequence segments to some structure model for the ncRNA family. With the recent advances in detecting an ncRNA in the genome, heuristic techniques are designed to perform an accurate search and sequence-structure alignment. This study uses a …

Rna-Sequence Analysis Of Human Melanoma Cells, Jharna Miya

Theses

RNA-sequencing refers to the use of high throughput sequencing technologies that are used to sequence cDNA in order to get the complete information of a sample’s RNA content. The objective of this study is to analyze this data in different aspects and to characterize gene expression. Besides this characterization, the data was also used to investigate the effect of sequencing depth on gene expression measurements.

This research focuses on quantitative measurement of expression levels of genes and their transcripts. In this study, complementary DNA fragments of cultured human melanoma cells are sequenced and a total of 139,501,106 million 200-bp reads …

Improving Usability: Evaluating The Effect Of Changing Environmental Factors On Cognitive Load, Robin J. Deegan

Theses

Mobile devices are now truly ubiquitous. Their pervasiveness in all facets of our lives brings many advantages. Principle to these advantages is the notion that mobile devices can be used “Anytime, Anywhere”. The size, portability, battery life and computational power of mobile devices mean that they can be used for a diverse range of uses in an equally diverse range of environments.

Usability is primarily concerned with “ease of use” and “learnability”. Mobile devices are challenging this notion of Usability as they are used in new ways. Firstly mobile devices arc used in complex distracting environments and these distractions interfere …