OS and Networks Commons^™

Vehicle-Based Disconnected Data Distribution, Aditya Singhania

Master's Projects

The world today is highly connected and there is an immense dependency on this connectivity to accomplish basic everyday tasks. However much of the world lacks connectivity. Even in well-connected locations, natural disasters can cause infrastructure disruption. To combat these situations, Delay Tolerant Networks

(DTNs) employ to store and forward techniques along with intermittently connected transports to provide data connectivity. DTNs focus on intermittently connected networks however what if the regions are never connected? For example, Region A - is never connected to the internet, and Region B – has internet connectivity. Using a vehicle that travels between the two …

Ubiquitous Application Data Collection In A Disconnected Distributed System, Deepak Munagala

Master's Projects

Despite some incredible advancements in technology, a significant population of the world does not have internet connectivity. These people lack access to crucial information that is easily available to the rest of the world. To solve this problem, we implement a Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) that allows users in disconnected regions access to the internet. This is enabled by collecting all data requests on the users’ phones and passing them to a device that can carry them to a connected region. This device can then collect the necessary information and give it back to the users in the disconnected region. …

Yelp Restaurant Popularity Score Calculator, Sneh Bindesh Chitalia

Master's Projects

Yelp is a popular social media platform that has gained much traction over the last few years. The critical feature of Yelp is it has information about any small or large-scale business, as well as reviews received from customers. The reviews have both a 1 to 5 star rating, as well as text. For a particular business, any user can view the reviews, but the stars are what most users check because it is an easy and fast way to decide. Therefore, the star rating is a good metric to measure a particular business’s value. However, there are other attributes …

A Data Delivery Mechanism For Disconnected Mobile Applications, Shashank Hegde

Master's Projects

Previous attempts to bring the data of the internet to environments that do not have continuous connectivity to the internet have made use of special hardware which requires additional expenditure on installation. We will develop a software-based infrastructure running on existing Android smartphones to exchange application data between a disconnected user’s phone and corresponding application servers on the internet. The goal of this project is to implement client and server modules for this infrastructure to run on a disconnected phone and the internet respectively. These modules will multiplex application data to be sent into packages and distribute the data present …

Security And Routing In A Disconnected Delay Tolerant Network, Anirudh Kariyatil Chandakara

Master's Projects

Providing internet access in disaster-affected areas where there is little to no internet connectivity is extremely difficult. This paper proposes an architecture that utilizes existing hardware and mobile applications to enable users to access the Internet while maintaining a high level of security. The system comprises a client application, a transport application, and a server running on the cloud. The client combines data from all supported applications into a single bundle, which is encrypted using an end-to-end encryption technique and sent to the transport. The transport physically moves the bundles to a connected area and forwards them to the server. …

Automated Evaluation For Distributed System Assignments, Nimesh Nischal

Master's Projects

A distributed system can exist in numerous states, including many erroneous permutations that could have been addressed in the code. As distributed systems such as cloud computing and microservices gain popularity, involving distributed com- puting assignments is becoming increasingly crucial in Computer Science and related fields. However, designing such systems poses various challenges, such as considering parallel executions, error-inducing edge cases, and interactions with external systems. Typically, distributed assignments require students to implement a system and run multiple instances of the same code to behave as distributed. However, such assign- ments do not encourage students to consider the potential edge …

Hard Real-Time Linux On A Raspberry Pi For 3d Printing, Alvin Nguyen

Master's Projects

The project presents how a Raspberry Pi with hard real-time enabled Linux can control stepper motors to operate the kinematics of a 3D (three-dimensional) printer. The consistent performance of the Raspberry Pi with the PREEMPT-RT (real-time) patch can satisfy real hard-time requirements for 3D printing kinematics, without introducing dedicated microcontrollers. The Klipper 3D printer firmware enables one of the Raspberry Pi processors to act as the Klipper MCU, the primary controller for the hardware components. This project introduces a software implementation of the control logic for controlling the stepper motors, which utilizes the PCA9685 pwm driver and TB6612 motor drivers …

A Novel Handover Method Using Destination Prediction In 5g-V2x Networks, Pooja Shyamsundar

Master's Projects

This paper proposes a novel approach to handover optimization in fifth generation vehicular networks. A key principle in designing fifth generation vehicular network technology is continuous connectivity. This makes it important to ensure that there are no gaps in communication for mobile user equipment. Handovers can cause disruption in connectivity as the process involves switching from one base station to another. Issues in the handover process include poor load management for moving traffic resulting in low bandwidth or connectivity gaps, too many hops resulting in multiple unneccessary handovers, short dwell times and ineffective base station selection resulting in delays and …

Codis: Community Detection Via Distributed Seed-Set Expansion On Graph Streams, Austin Anderson

Master's Projects

Community detection has been and remains a very important topic in several fields. From marketing and social networking to biological studies, community detec- tion plays a key role in advancing research in many different fields. Research on this topic originally looked at classifying nodes into discrete communities, but eventually moved forward to placing nodes in multiple communities. Unfortunately, community detection has always been a time-inefficient process, and recent data sets have been simply to large to realistically process using traditional methods. Because of this, recent methods have turned to parallelism, but all these methods, while offering sig- nificant decrease in …

Enabling Use Of Signal In A Disconnected Village Environment, Evan Chopra

Master's Projects

A significant portion of the world still does not have a stable internet connection. Those people should have the ability to communicate with their loved ones who may not live near by or to share ideas with friends. To power this achievable reality, our lab has set out on making infrastructure for enabling delay tolerant applications. This network will communicate using existing smartphones that will relay the information to a connected environment. The proof of concept application our lab is using is Signal as it offers end to end encryption messaging and an open source platform our lab can develop.

5g Mobility Management Using Satellites In Leo (Low Earth Orbit), Peter Knight

Master's Projects

As technology moves forward we find ourselves demanding faster and better quality internet. Towards that end, 5G was developed. While cell towers are already being built with 5G in mind, some of the built-in limitations of 5G mean that we may be seeing satellites with it in the near future. This development would require a drastic change in the current algorithms used for handovers. These algorithms fail to take into account the high relative velocity of the satellites and result in many unnecessary handovers which increases the likelihood of a dropped connection. This paper will propose and evaluate the effectiveness …

Taming The Data In The Internet Of Vehicles, Shahab Tayeb

Mineta Transportation Institute Publications

As an emerging field, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has a myriad of security vulnerabilities that must be addressed to protect system integrity. To stay ahead of novel attacks, cybersecurity professionals are developing new software and systems using machine learning techniques. Neural network architectures improve such systems, including Intrusion Detection System (IDSs), by implementing anomaly detection, which differentiates benign data packets from malicious ones. For an IDS to best predict anomalies, the model is trained on data that is typically pre-processed through normalization and feature selection/reduction. These pre-processing techniques play an important role in training a neural network to optimize …

Achieving Fairness Through Load-Balancing In Social Cloud Computing Networks, Kaiyi Huang

Master's Projects

Cloud-based computing networks have taken over the digital landscape. From small non-profits to large multinational corporations, more and more entities have been offloading computing effort to the cloud in order to take advantage of the increased cost-efficiency and scalability of cloud computing. One of the new types of cloud that have emerged is the P2P cloud, which disengages from a traditional datacenter setup by allowing users to instead share their own computing hardware into a cloud to take advantage of cloud computing’s advantages at an even lower cost. However, this new paradigm comes with a slew of challenges, notably, security …

Dynamic Resource Management Of Fog-Cloud Computing For Iot Support, Mariia Surmenok

Master's Projects

The internet of things (IoT) is an integrated part of contemporary life. It includes wearable devices, such as smart watches and cell phones, as well as sensors for Smart City. Fog computing can improve the efficiency and battery life of IoT devices by offloading tasks to fog cloud. It is important to have fog clusters near the IoT device for faster data offload. The goal of this project is to develop dynamic resource allocation for on-demand fog computing cluster to efficiently deploy tasks from IoT. This report studies the different research papers about the current state of resource management in …

Witness For Two-Site Enabled Coordination, Sriram Priyatham Siram

Master's Projects

Many replicated data services utilize majority quorums to safely replicate data changes in the presence of server failures. Majority quorum-based services require a simple majority of the servers to be operational for the service to stay available. A key limitation of the majority quorum is that if a service is composed of just two servers, progress cannot be made even if a single server fails because the majority quorum size is also two. This is called the Two-Server problem. A problem similar to the Two-Server problem occurs when a service’s servers are spread across only two failure domains. Servers in …

Higher-Order Link Prediction Using Node And Subgraph Embeddings, Kalpnil Anjan

Master's Projects

Social media, academia collaborations, e-commerce websites, biological structures, and other real-world networks are modeled as graphs to represent their entities and relationships in an abstract way. Such graphs are becoming more complex and informative, and by analyzing them we can solve various problems and find hidden insights. Some applications include predicting relationships and potential links between nodes, classifying nodes, and finding the most influential nodes in the graph, etc.

A large amount of research is being done in the field of predicting links between two nodes. However, predicting a future relationship among three or more nodes in a graph is …

Overlapping Community Detection In Social Networks, Akshar Panchal

Master's Projects

Social networking sites are important to connect with the world virtually. As the number of users accessing these sites increase, the data and information keeps on increasing. There are communities and groups which are formed virtually based on different factors. We can visualize these communities as networks of users or nodes and the relationships or connections between them as edges. This helps in evaluating and analyzing different factors that influence community formation in such a dense network. Community detection helps in revealing certain characteristics which makes these groups in the network unique and different from one another. We can use …

Cyberbullying Classification Based On Social Network Analysis, Anqi Wang

Master's Projects

With the popularity of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, people widely share their opinions and comments over the Internet. Exten- sive use of social media has also caused a lot of problems. A representative problem is Cyberbullying, which is a serious social problem, mostly among teenagers. Cyber- bullying occurs when a social media user posts aggressive words or phrases to harass other users, and that leads to negatively affects on their mental and social well-being. Additionally, it may ruin the reputation of that media. We are considering the problem of detecting posts that are aggressive. Moreover, …

Fake News Analysis And Graph Classification On A Covid-19 Twitter Dataset, Kriti Gupta

Master's Projects

Earlier researches have showed that the spread of fake news through social media can have a huge impact to society and also to individuals in an extremely negative way. In this work we aim to study the spread of fake news compared to real news in a social network. We do that by performing classical social network analysis to discover various characteristics, and formulate the problem as a binary classification, where we have graphs modeling the spread of fake and real news. For our experiments we rely on how news are propagated through a popular social media services such as …

Using Oracle To Solve Zookeeper On Two-Replica Problems, Ching-Chan Lee

Master's Projects

The project introduces an Oracle, a failure detector, in Apache ZooKeeper and makes it fault-tolerant in a two-node system. The project demonstrates the Oracle authorizes the primary process to maintain the liveness when the majority’s rule becomes an obstacle to continue Apache ZooKeeper service. In addition to the property of accuracy and completeness from Chandra et al.’s research, the project proposes the property of see to avoid losing transactions and the property of mutual exclusion to avoid split-brain issues. The hybrid properties render not only more sounder flexibility in the implementation but also stronger guarantees on safety. Thus, the Oracle …

Network Traffic Based Botnet Detection Using Machine Learning, Anand Ravindra Vishwakarma

Master's Projects

The field of information and computer security is rapidly developing in today’s world as the number of security risks is continuously being explored every day. The moment a new software or a product is launched in the market, a new exploit or vulnerability is exposed and exploited by the attackers or malicious users for different motives. Many attacks are distributed in nature and carried out by botnets that cause widespread disruption of network activity by carrying out DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, email spamming, click fraud, information and identity theft, virtual deceit and distributed resource usage for cryptocurrency mining. …

Graph Classification With Kernels, Embeddings And Convolutional Neural Networks, Monica Golahalli Seenappa, Katerina Potika, Petros Potikas

Faculty Publications, Computer Science

In the graph classification problem, given is a family of graphs and a group of different categories, and we aim to classify all the graphs (of the family) into the given categories. Earlier approaches, such as graph kernels and graph embedding techniques have focused on extracting certain features by processing the entire graph. However, real world graphs are complex and noisy and these traditional approaches are computationally intensive. With the introduction of the deep learning framework, there have been numerous attempts to create more efficient classification approaches. We modify a kernel graph convolutional neural network approach, that extracts subgraphs (patches) …

Black Box Analysis Of Android Malware Detectors, Guruswamy Nellaivadivelu, Fabio Di Troia, Mark Stamp

Faculty Publications, Computer Science

If a malware detector relies heavily on a feature that is obfuscated in a given malware sample, then the detector will likely fail to correctly classify the malware. In this research, we obfuscate selected features of known Android malware samples and determine whether these obfuscated samples can still be reliably detected. Using this approach, we discover which features are most significant for various sets of Android malware detectors, in effect, performing a black box analysis of these detectors. We find that there is a surprisingly high degree of variability among the key features used by popular malware detectors.

Evolution Of Integration, Build, Test, And Release Engineering Into Devops And To Devsecops, Vishnu Pendyala

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Software engineering operations in large organizations are primarily comprised of integrating code from multiple branches, building, testing the build, and releasing it. Agile and related methodologies accelerated the software development activities. Realizing the importance of the development and operations teams working closely with each other, the set of practices that automated the engineering processes of software development evolved into DevOps, signifying the close collaboration of both development and operations teams. With the advent of cloud computing and the opening up of firewalls, the security aspects of software started moving into the applications leading to DevSecOps. This chapter traces the journey …

Bootbandit: A Macos Bootloader Attack, Armen Boursalian, Mark Stamp

Faculty Publications, Computer Science

Historically, the boot phase on personal computers left systems in a relatively vulnerable state. Because traditional antivirus software runs within the operating system, the boot environment is difficult to protect from malware. Examples of attacks against bootloaders include so‐called “evil maid” attacks, in which an intruder physically obtains a boot disk to install malicious software for obtaining the password used to encrypt a disk. The password then must be stored and retrieved again through physical access. In this paper, we discuss an attack that borrows concepts from the evil maid. We assume exploitation can be used to infect a bootloader …

Network Alignment In Heterogeneous Social Networks, Priyanka Kasbekar

Master's Projects

Online Social Networks (OSN) have numerous applications and an ever growing user base. This has led to users being a part of multiple social networks at the same time. Identifying a similar user from one social network on another social network will give in- formation about a user’s behavior on different platforms. It further helps in community detection and link prediction tasks. The process of identifying or aligning users in multiple networks is called Network Alignment. More the information we have about the nodes / users better the results of Network Alignment. Unlike other related work in this field that …

Predictive Analysis For Cloud Infrastructure Metrics, Paridhi Agrawal

Master's Projects

In a cloud computing environment, enterprises have the flexibility to request resources according to their application demands. This elastic feature of cloud computing makes it an attractive option for enterprises to host their applications on the cloud. Cloud providers usually exploit this elasticity by auto-scaling the application resources for quality assurance. However, there is a setup-time delay that may take minutes between the demand for a new resource and it being prepared for utilization. This causes the static resource provisioning techniques, which request allocation of a new resource only when the application breaches a specific threshold, to be slow and …

Community Detection Via Neighborhood Overlap And Spanning Tree Computations, Ketki Kulkarni, Aris Pagourtzis, Katerina Potika, Petros Potikas, Dora Souliou

Faculty Publications, Computer Science

Most social networks of today are populated with several millions of active users, while the most popular of them accommodate way more than one billion. Analyzing such huge complex networks has become particularly demanding in computational terms. A task of paramount importance for understanding the structure of social networks as well as of many other real-world systems is to identify communities, that is, sets of nodes that are more densely connected to each other than to other nodes of the network. In this paper we propose two algorithms for community detection in networks, by employing the neighborhood overlap metric …

Management And Security Of Iot Systems Using Microservices, Tharun Theja Kammara

Master's Projects

Devices that assist the user with some task or help them to make an informed decision are called smart devices. A network of such devices connected to internet are collectively called as Internet of Things (IoT). The applications of IoT are expanding exponentially and are becoming a part of our day to day lives. The rise of IoT led to new security and management issues. In this project, we propose a solution for some major problems faced by the IoT devices, including the problem of complexity due to heterogeneous platforms and the lack of IoT device monitoring for security and …

Dynamic Hierarchical Cache Management For Cloud Ran And Multi- Access Edge Computing In 5g Networks, Deepika Pathinga Rajendiran

Master's Projects

Cloud Radio Access Networks (CRAN) and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) are two of the many emerging technologies that are proposed for 5G mobile networks. CRAN provides scalability, flexibility, and better resource utilization to support the dramatic increase of Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices. MEC aims to provide low latency, high bandwidth and real- time access to radio networks. Cloud architecture is built on top of traditional Radio Access Networks (RAN) to bring the idea of CRAN and in MEC, cloud computing services are brought near users to improve the user’s experiences. A cache is added in both CRAN …