Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

An Optimized And Scalable Blockchain-Based Distributed Learning Platform For Consumer Iot, Zhaocheng Wang, Xueying Liu, Xinming Shao, Abdullah Alghamdi, Md. Shirajum Munir, Sujit Biswas

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

Consumer Internet of Things (CIoT) manufacturers seek customer feedback to enhance their products and services, creating a smart ecosystem, like a smart home. Due to security and privacy concerns, blockchain-based federated learning (BCFL) ecosystems can let CIoT manufacturers update their machine learning (ML) models using end-user data. Federated learning (FL) uses privacy-preserving ML techniques to forecast customers' needs and consumption habits, and blockchain replaces the centralized aggregator to safeguard the ecosystem. However, blockchain technology (BCT) struggles with scalability and quick ledger expansion. In BCFL, local model generation and secure aggregation are other issues. This research introduces a novel architecture, emphasizing …

Dds-Cerberus: Improving Security In Dds Middleware Using Kerberos Tickets, Andrew T. Park

Theses and Dissertations

The military deploys many IoT in battlefield operations to provide information on terrain and enemy combatants. It also deploys automated robots or UAVs where securing and trusting collected data is essential. Choosing the middleware that handles this message transfer is crucial for real-time operations. Networks with multiple entities, including IoT devices, UAVs, and small computers, require robust middleware facilitating message sending in real-time. Ideally, the middleware would provide QoS to handle lost packets and retransmissions in lossy environments, especially between low-power machines. DDS is a middleware that implements real-time and QoS capabilities by sending messages, not based on endpoints but …

Countering Internet Packet Classifiers To Improve User Online Privacy, Sina Fathi-Kazerooni

Dissertations

Internet traffic classification or packet classification is the act of classifying packets using the extracted statistical data from the transmitted packets on a computer network. Internet traffic classification is an essential tool for Internet service providers to manage network traffic, provide users with the intended quality of service (QoS), and perform surveillance. QoS measures prioritize a network's traffic type over other traffic based on preset criteria; for instance, it gives higher priority or bandwidth to video traffic over website browsing traffic. Internet packet classification methods are also used for automated intrusion detection. They analyze incoming traffic patterns and identify malicious …

Wrinkles In Time : An Exploration Of Non-Uniform Temporal Resolution In Network Data, Daniel John Ditursi

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The continued proliferation of timestamped network data demands increasing sophistication in the analysis of that data. In particular, the literature amply demonstrates that the choice of temporal resolution has a profound impact on the solutions produced by many different methods in this domain -- answers differ when data is viewed second-by-second as opposed to week-by-week. Additionally, research also shows quite clearly that the rates at which network events happen are not constant -- some times are "faster" or "slower" than others, and these variations are not necessarily predictable. Given the above, it is clear that there must be problem settings …

Inference In Networking Systems With Designed Measurements, Chang Liu

Doctoral Dissertations

Networking systems consist of network infrastructures and the end-hosts have been essential in supporting our daily communication, delivering huge amount of content and large number of services, and providing large scale distributed computing. To monitor and optimize the performance of such networking systems, or to provide flexible functionalities for the applications running on top of them, it is important to know the internal metrics of the networking systems such as link loss rates or path delays. The internal metrics are often not directly available due to the scale and complexity of the networking systems. This motivates the techniques of inference …

Network Pruning For Scaling Dynamic Community Detection, Gaurav Ghosh

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Local community detection is an important tool for the analysis of networks of different genres. The goal is to identify only the best communities in a network instance as opposed to computing a partitioning of the whole network. The majority of the work on local community detection has focused on static networks with less attention on networks that evolve over time. Given a trace of temporal interaction among nodes in a network, how can we detect a period of high interaction for a specific group of nodes? To help temporal community detection with the need to search in the time …

Synchronous Subgraphs In Networks, Navita Jain

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Community detection is a central problem in network analysis. The majority of existing work defines communities as subsets of nodes that are structurally well-connected and isolated from the rest of the network. Apart from their underlying connectivity, nodes in real-world networks exhibit temporal activity: user posts in social networks, browsing activity on web pages and neuron activations in brain networks to name a few. While edges encode potential for community interactions, participation in the community can be quantified by synchronized member activity. Given both the network structure and individual node activity, how can we detect communities that are both well-connected …

Efficient Execution Of Top-K Closeness Centrality Queries, Paul W. Olsen

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Many of today's applications can benefit from the discovery of the most central entities in real-world networks.

A Query-Oriented Approach To Graph Series Distribution And Replication : Dissertation, Alan G. Labouseur

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Most real-world networks evolve over time. We are surrounded by them: social networks, citation networks, transportation networks, the Web, and more.These evolving, dynamic networks can be modeled as series of graphs (graph snapshots) that represent those networks at different points in time. While many single-graph systems are available today, they lack support for efficiently managing series of large graph snapshots. Our G* system enables efficient storage and querying of these graph snapshots by taking advantage of their commonalities.

Gradebadge: Development Of A Cloud-Based Reward Application, Erwin Toni Soekianto

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this project is to investigate the use of cloud-based services to deliver cutting edge applications. For this purpose, a prototype of a reward application using badges, called Gradebadge, was developed to illustrate and explore this emerging paradigm.

Evaluation Of Traditional Security Solutions In The Scada Environment, Robert D. Larkin

Theses and Dissertations

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems control and monitor the electric power grid, water treatment facilities, oil and gas pipelines, railways, and other Critical Infrastructure (CI). In recent years, organizations that own and operate these systems have increasingly interconnected them with their enterprise network to take advantage of cost savings and operational benefits. This trend, however, has introduced myriad vulnerabilities associated with the networking environment. As a result, the once isolated systems are now susceptible to a wide range of threats that previously did not exist. To help address the associated risks, security professionals seek to incorporate mitigation solutions …

Quantifying Computer Network Security, Ian Burchett

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Simplifying network security data to the point that it is readily accessible and usable by a wider audience is increasingly becoming important, as networks become larger and security conditions and threats become more dynamic and complex, requiring a broader and more varied security staff makeup. With the need for a simple metric to quantify the security level on a network, this thesis proposes: simplify a network’s security risk level into a simple metric. Methods for this simplification of an entire network’s security level are conducted on several characteristic networks. Identification of computer network port vulnerabilities from NIST’s Network Vulnerability Database …

Latency-Driven Distribution: Infrastructure Needs Of Participatory Entertainment Applications, Farzad Safaei, P. Boustead, C. D. Nguyen, J. Brun, M. Dowlatshahi

Professor Farzad Safaei

This article evaluates network and server infrastructure requirements to support real-time flows associated with networked entertainment applications. These include the state information flow to update the status of the virtual environment and immersive communication flows such as voice, video, gesture, and haptics communication. The article demonstrates that scaling these applications to large geographical spreads of participants requires distribution of computation to meet the latency constraints of the applications. This latency-driven distribution of computation is essential even when there are no limitations on the availability of computational resources in one location. The article provides detailed results on distributed server architectures for …

Revision Of Remote (Recursively Estimating Multi-Threaded Observation Tool Enterprise) For Commercialization, Jeongtaek Hong

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this study is to have ReMoTe be commercialized or released as open source at some future date to the general public. ReMoTe will provide an enhanced user interface that will allow users easy to use functions and setup their projects and define their thread and phases. ReMoTe will have the ability to handle muliple projects, and specify any number of phases for any thread.

A Visualization Approach For Message Passing In Parallel Computing Systems, Arunkumar Sadasivan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Information Visualization has been used as an effective method in transforming textual information into a visual form that enables users to effectively communicate and understand the information. MPI (Message Passing Interface) usually involves a large amount of data, which necessitates exploring innovative ideas to visualize such data effectively.

In this thesis, we implement a graph visualization tool called MPROV to effectively visualize communication patterns of message passing using log files from MPI applications. The tool provides several interaction techniques to effectively reduce the amount of data displayed on the screen. We have also developed protocol conformance checking, which verifies the …

A Distributed Network Logging Topology, Nicholas E. Fritts

Theses and Dissertations

Network logging is used to monitor computer systems for potential problems and threats by network administrators. Research has found that the more logging enabled, the more potential threats can be detected in the logs (Levoy, 2006). However, generally it is considered too costly to dedicate the manpower required to analyze the amount of logging data that it is possible to generate. Current research is working on different correlation and parsing techniques to help filter the data, but these methods function by having all of the data dumped in to a central repository. Central repositories are limited in the amount of …

Information-Quality Aware Routing In Event-Driven Sensor Networks, Hwee Xian Tan, Mun-Choon Chan, Wendong Xiao, Peng-Yong Kong, Chen-Khong Tham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Upon the occurrence of a phenomenon of interest in a wireless sensor network, multiple sensors may be activated, leading to data implosion and redundancy. Data aggregation and/or fusion techniques exploit spatio-temporal correlation among sensory data to reduce traffic load and mitigate congestion. However, this is often at the expense of loss in Information Quality (IQ) of data that is collected at the fusion center. In this work, we address the problem of finding the least-cost routing tree that satisfies a given IQ constraint. We note that the optimal least-cost routing solution is a variation of the classical NP-hard Steiner tree …

Theory Of Entropic Security Decay: The Gradual Degradation In Effectiveness Of Commissioned Security Systems, Michael P. Coole

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

As a quantitative auditing tool for Physical Protection Systems (PPS) the Estimated Adversary Sequence Interruption (EASI) model has been available for many years. Nevertheless, once a systems macro-state measure has been commissioned (Pi) against its defined threat using EASI, there must be a means of articulating its continued efficacy (steady state) or its degradation over time. The purpose of this multi-phase study was to develop the concept and define the term entropic security decay. Phase one presented documentary benchmarks for security decay. This phase was broken into three stages; stage one presented General Systems Theory (GST) as a systems benchmark …

Networks - Ii: Overhead Analysis Of Security Implementation Using Ipsec, Muhammad Awais Azam, Zaka -Ul- Mustafa, Usman Tahir, S. M. Ahsan, Muhammad Adnan Naseem, Imran Rashid, Muhammad Adeel

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Authentication, access control, encryption and auditing make up the essential elements of network security. Researchers have dedicated a large amount of efforts to implement security features that fully incorporate the use of all these elements. Currently, data networks mainly provide authentication and confidentiality services. Confidentiality alone is not able to protect the system, thus, suitable security measures must be taken. However, this security is itself an overhead which must be accounted for. A trade-off must exist between performance and security. This trade-off must be carefully managed so as not to deteriorate the systems being secured. This calls for the true …

Artificial Intelligence – I: A Two-Step Approach For Improving Efficiency Of Feedforward Multilayer Perceptrons Network, Shoukat Ullah, Zakia Hussain

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

An artificial neural network has got greater importance in the field of data mining. Although it may have complex structure, long training time, and uneasily understandable representation of results, neural network has high accuracy and is preferable in data mining. This research paper is aimed to improve efficiency and to provide accurate results on the basis of same behaviour data. To achieve these objectives, an algorithm is proposed that uses two data mining techniques, that is, attribute selection method and cluster analysis. The algorithm works by applying attribute selection method to eliminate irrelevant attributes, so that input dimensionality is reduced …

Utility-Based Adaptation In Mission-Oriented Wireless Sensor Networks, Sharanya Eswaran, Archan Misra, Thomas La Porta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper extends the distributed network utility maximization (NUM) framework to consider the case of resource sharing by multiple competing missions in a military-centric wireless sensor network (WSN) environment. Prior work on NUM-based optimization has considered unicast flows with sender-based utilities in either wireline or wireless networks. We extend the NUM framework to consider three key new features observed in mission-centric WSN environments: i) the definition of an individual mission's utility as a joint function of data from multiple sensor sources ii) the consumption of each senders (sensor) data by multiple receivers (missions) and iii) the multicast-tree based dissemination of …

Latency-Driven Distribution: Infrastructure Needs Of Participatory Entertainment Applications, Farzad Safaei, P. Boustead, C. D. Nguyen, J. Brun, M. Dowlatshahi

Paul Boustead

This article evaluates network and server infrastructure requirements to support real-time flows associated with networked entertainment applications. These include the state information flow to update the status of the virtual environment and immersive communication flows such as voice, video, gesture, and haptics communication. The article demonstrates that scaling these applications to large geographical spreads of participants requires distribution of computation to meet the latency constraints of the applications. This latency-driven distribution of computation is essential even when there are no limitations on the availability of computational resources in one location. The article provides detailed results on distributed server architectures for …

An Ad Hoc Adaptive Hashing Technique For Non-Uniformly Distributed Ip Address Lookup In Computer Networks, Christopher Martinez, Wei-Ming Lin

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Hashing algorithms have been widely adopted for fast address look-up, which involves a search through a database to find a record associated with a given key. Hashing algorithms transforms a key into a hash value hoping that the hashing renders the database a uniform distribution with respect to the hash value. The closer to uniform hash values, the less search time required for a query. When the database is key-wise uniformly distributed, any regular hashing algorithm (bit-extraction, bit-group XOR, etc.) leads to a statistically perfect uniform hash distribution. When the database has keys with a non-uniform distribution, performance of regular …

Development Of A Custom Call Management System For The Service Department Of Premiere Copier Inc., Markas Korotkovas

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Premiere Copier needs a system that will facilitate the functionality required by the current business process as well as being more robust, reliable and scalable. The new system has to mitigate all the problem areas mentioned in the section 1.2.3. The complete list of the requirements is presented in the Section 3.1.1. This project is the first real life experience for the one man developing team as well. Working through the whole development life cycle of the application, fulfilling the roles of project manager, developer and designer at the same time presents an excellent educational opportunity as well.

Mitigating Tcp Degradation Over Intermittent Link Failures Using Intermediate Buffers, M. Brent Reynolds

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis addresses the improvement of data transmission performance in a challenged network. It is well known that the popular Transmission Control Protocol degrades in environments where one or more of the links along the route is intermittently available. To avoid this degradation, this thesis proposes placing at least one node along the path of transmission to buffer and retransmit as needed to overcome the intermittent link. In the four-node, three-link testbed under particular conditions, file transmission time was reduced 20 fold in the case of an intermittent second link when the second node strategically buffers for retransmission opportunity.

Development Of A Methodology For Customizing Insider Threat Auditing On A Microsoft Windows Xp® Operating System, Terry E. Levoy

Theses and Dissertations

Most organizations are aware that threats from trusted insiders pose a great risk to their organization and are very difficult to protect against. Auditing is recognized as an effective technique to detect malicious insider activities. However, current auditing methods are typically applied with a one-size-fits-all approach and may not be an appropriate mitigation strategy, especially towards insider threats. This research develops a 4-step methodology for designing a customized auditing template for a Microsoft Windows XP operating system. Two tailoring methods are presented which evaluate both by category and by configuration. Also developed are various metrics and weighting factors as a …

Volunteer System Project: Regis University Networking Lab Practicum, Desirea Duarte Ulibarri

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The Regis University Networking Lab Practicum (NLP) allows MSCIT graduate students the opportunity to gain hands-on experience in IT topics in a controlled computer network environment. The NLP also introduces students to a wide range of external IT projects such as the Volunteer System Project. The Volunteer System Project was the construction of a database system for a non-profit organization. The Volunteer System captures all of the personnel data, work time and project affiliation information and is a critical tool in managing and maintaining a successful volunteer workforce. The performance of the original spreadsheet-based Volunteer System was declining and could …

Efficient Scheduling For Sdmg Cioq Switches, Mei Yang, S. Q. Zheng

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

Combined input and output queuing (CIOQ) switches are being considered as high-performance switch architectures due to their ability to achieve 100% throughput and perfectly emulate output queuing (OQ) switch performance with a small speedup factor S. To realize a speedup factor S, a conventional CIOQ switch requires the switching fabric and memories to operate S times faster than the line rate. In this paper, we propose to use a CIOQ switch with space-division multiplexing expansion and grouped input/output ports (SDMG CIOQ switch for short) to realize speedup while only requiring the switching fabric and memories to operate at the line …

Use Of Cross-Connect Clusters To Optimize Routing In Stm-64-Based Sdh Optical Network Systems, Bret William Durrett

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

With the migration to Synchronous Digital Hierarchy, which uses the concept of logical rings, for backbone transmission systems, one of the major concerns that has been brought up repeatedly is a method in which to bring sub-rate circuits from one ring to another without having to decompose the entire backbone data stream to its individual circuits. This is critically important since the backbone data rate can be as high as 10 Gigabits per second or greater and may carry several thousand circuits, ranging in data rate from less than 2.4 Kilobits per second to 2.5 Gbps (STM-16). One potential means …

Poster Session A: Address Auto-Configuration In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks Using Olsr, M.U. Saleem, Shoaib Mukhtar

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks is dynamic multi-hop network that is formed by a set of mobile wireless nodes that are sharing the same bandwidth. So every node possibly acts as a host as well as a router. In traditional networks, hosts can depend on the central servers like DHCP for IP assignment and management, but it cannot be extended to MANET due to its distributed and dynamic nature. Many solutions have been proposed, amongst them some are try to extend the stateless configuration of IPv6 for MANET; others distribute IP addresses among nodes (using binary distribution). Most of these proposed …