Programming Languages and Compilers Commons^™

The Effects Of Side-Channel Attacks On Post-Quantum Cryptography: Influencing Frodokem Key Generation Using The Rowhammer Exploit, Michael Jacob Fahr

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Modern cryptographic algorithms such as AES and RSA are effectively used for securing data transmission. However, advancements in quantum computing pose a threat to modern cryptography algorithms due to the potential of solving hard mathematical problems faster than conventional computers. Thus, to prepare for quantum computing, NIST has started a competition to standardize quantum-resistant public-key cryptography algorithms. These algorithms are evaluated for strong theoretical security and run-time performance. NIST is in the third round of the competition, and the focus has shifted to analyzing the vulnerabilities to side-channel attacks. One algorithm that has gained notice is the Round 3 alternate …

Effective Knowledge Graph Aggregation For Malware-Related Cybersecurity Text, Phillip Ryan Boudreau

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the rate at which malware spreads in the modern age, it is extremely important that cyber security analysts are able to extract relevant information pertaining to new and active threats in a timely and effective manner. Having to manually read through articles and blog posts on the internet is time consuming and usually involves sifting through much repeated information. Knowledge graphs, a structured representation of relationship information, are an effective way to visually condense information presented in large amounts of unstructured text for human readers. Thusly, they are useful for sifting through the abundance of cyber security information that …

Demonstration Of Cyberattacks And Mitigation Of Vulnerabilities In A Webserver Interface For A Cybersecure Power Router, Benjamin Allen

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Cyberattacks are a threat to critical infrastructure, which must be secured against them to ensure continued operation. A defense-in-depth approach is necessary to secure all layers of a smart-grid system and contain the impact of any exploited vulnerabilities. In this undergraduate thesis a webserver interface for smart-grid devices communicating over Modbus TCP was developed and exposed to SQL Injection attacks and Cross-Site Scripting attacks. Analysis was performed on Supply-Chain attacks and a mitigation developed for attacks stemming from compromised Content Delivery Networks. All attempted attacks were unable to exploit vulnerabilities in the webserver due to its use of input sanitization …

A Study Of Software Development Methodologies, Kendra Risener

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Software development methodologies are often overlooked by software engineers as aspects of development that are handled by project managers alone. However, if every member of the team better understood the development methodology being used, it increases the likelihood that the method is properly implemented and ultimately used to complete the project more efficiently. Thus, this paper seeks to explore six common methodologies: the Waterfall Model, the Spiral Model, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming. These are discussed in two main sections in the paper. In the first section, the frameworks are isolated and viewed by themselves. The histories, unique features, …

Gauging The State-Of-The-Art For Foresight Weight Pruning On Neural Networks, Noah James

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The state-of-the-art for pruning neural networks is ambiguous due to poor experimental practices in the field. Newly developed approaches rarely compare to each other, and when they do, their comparisons are lackluster or contain errors. In the interest of stabilizing the field of pruning, this paper initiates a dive into reproducing prominent pruning algorithms across several architectures and datasets. As a first step towards this goal, this paper shows results for foresight weight pruning across 6 baseline pruning strategies, 5 modern pruning strategies, random pruning, and one legacy method (Optimal Brain Damage). All strategies are evaluated on 3 different architectures …

Using A Bert-Based Ensemble Network For Abusive Language Detection, Noah Ballinger

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Over the past two decades, online discussion has skyrocketed in scope and scale. However, so has the amount of toxicity and offensive posts on social media and other discussion sites. Despite this rise in prevalence, the ability to automatically moderate online discussion platforms has seen minimal development. Recently, though, as the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) continue to improve, the potential of AI-based detection of harmful internet content has become a real possibility. In the past couple years, there has been a surge in performance on tasks in the field of natural language processing, mainly due to the development of …

Side-Channel Analysis On Post-Quantum Cryptography Algorithms, Tristen Teague

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The advancements of quantum computers brings us closer to the threat of our current asymmetric cryptography algorithms being broken by Shor's Algorithm. NIST proposed a standardization effort in creating a new class of asymmetric cryptography named Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). These new algorithms will be resistant against both classical computers and sufficiently powerful quantum computers. Although the new algorithms seem mathematically secure, they can possibly be broken by a class of attacks known as side-channels attacks (SCA). Side-channel attacks involve exploiting the hardware that the algorithm runs on to figure out secret values that could break the security of the system. …

Towards A Large-Scale Intelligent Mobile-Argumentation And Discovering Arguments, Controversial Topics And Topic-Oriented Focal Sets In Cyber-Argumentation, Najla Althuniyan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

User-generated content (UGC) platforms host different forms of information, such as audio, video, pictures, and text. They have many online applications, such as social media, blogs, photo and video sharing, customer reviews, debate, and deliberation platforms. Usually, the content of these platforms is provided and consumed by users. Most of these platforms, mainly social media and blogs, are often used for online discussion. These platforms offer tools for users to share and express opinions. Commonly, people from different backgrounds and origins discuss opinions about various issues over the Internet. Furthermore, discussions among users contain substantial information from which knowledge about …

Privacy-Preserving Cloud-Assisted Data Analytics, Wei Bao

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays industries are collecting a massive and exponentially growing amount of data that can be utilized to extract useful insights for improving various aspects of our life. Data analytics (e.g., via the use of machine learning) has been extensively applied to make important decisions in various real world applications. However, it is challenging for resource-limited clients to analyze their data in an efficient way when its scale is large. Additionally, the data resources are increasingly distributed among different owners. Nonetheless, users' data may contain private information that needs to be protected.

Cloud computing has become more and more popular in …

City Goers: An Exploration Into Creating Seemingly Intelligent A.I. Systems, Matthew Brooke

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Artificial Intelligence systems have come a long way over the years. One particular application of A.I. is its incorporation in video games. A key goal of creating an A.I. system in a video game is to convey a level of intellect to the player. During playtests for Halo: Combat Evolved, the developers at Bungie noticed that players deemed tougher enemies as more intelligent than weaker ones, despite the fact that there were no differences in behavior in the enemies. The tougher enemies provided a greater illusion of intelligence to the players. Inspired by this, I set out to create a …

An Automated Method To Enrich And Expand Consumer Health Vocabularies Using Glove Word Embeddings, Mohammed Ibrahim

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Clear language makes communication easier between any two parties. However, a layman may have difficulty communicating with a professional due to not understanding the specialized terms common to the domain. In healthcare, it is rare to find a layman knowledgeable in medical jargon, which can lead to poor understanding of their condition and/or treatment. To bridge this gap, several professional vocabularies and ontologies have been created to map laymen medical terms to professional medical terms and vice versa. Many of the presented vocabularies are built manually or semi-automatically requiring large investments of time and human effort and consequently the slow …

Argumentation Stance Polarity And Intensity Prediction And Its Application For Argumentation Polarization Modeling And Diverse Social Connection Recommendation, Joseph Winstead Sirrianni

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cyber argumentation platforms implement theoretical argumentation structures that promote higher quality argumentation and allow for informative analysis of the discussions. Dr. Liu’s research group has designed and implemented a unique platform called the Intelligent Cyber Argumentation System (ICAS). ICAS structures its discussions into a weighted cyber argumentation graph, which describes the relationships between the different users, their posts in a discussion, the discussion topic, and the various subtopics in a discussion. This platform is unique as it encodes online discussions into weighted cyber argumentation graphs based on the user’s stances toward one another’s arguments and ideas. The resulting weighted cyber …

Teaching Introductory Programming Concepts Through A Gesture-Based Interface, Lora Streeter

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Computer programming is an integral part of a technology driven society, so there is a tremendous need to teach programming to a wider audience. One of the challenges in meeting this demand for programmers is that most traditional computer programming classes are targeted to university/college students with strong math backgrounds. To expand the computer programming workforce, we need to encourage a wider range of students to learn about programming.

The goal of this research is to design and implement a gesture-driven interface to teach computer programming to young and non-traditional students. We designed our user interface based on the feedback …

Tamscript - High Level Programming Interface For The Abstract Tile Assembly Model, Perry Mills

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper describes a programming interface, TAMScript, for use with the PyTAS simulator. The interface allows for the dynamic generation of tile types as the simulation progresses, with the goal of reducing complexity for researchers. This paper begins with an introduction to the PyTAS software and a description of the 3D model which it simulates. Next, the changes made to support a dynamic generation scheme are detailed, and some of the potential benefits of this scheme are outlined. Then several of the example scripts which have been written using the TAMScript interface are reviewed. Finally, the potential for future research …

Just In Time Assembly (Jita) - A Run Time Interpretation Approach For Achieving Productivity Of Creating Custom Accelerators In Fpgas, Sen Ma

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The reconfigurable computing community has yet to be successful in allowing programmers to access FPGAs through traditional software development flows. Existing barriers that prevent programmers from using FPGAs include: 1) knowledge of hardware programming models, 2) the need to work within the vendor specific CAD tools and hardware synthesis. This thesis presents a series of published papers that explore different aspects of a new approach being developed to remove the barriers and enable programmers to compile accelerators on next generation reconfigurable manycore architectures. The approach is entitled Just In Time Assembly (JITA) of hardware accelerators. The approach has been defined …

Wip, Armon Nayeraini

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Games have been shown to be capable tools in teaching. Additionally, programming can be a hard skill to learn. The objective of this research was to create a game that helps student learn coding concepts by playing a video game. The result of our work is a fully functional game that introduces the beginning concepts of programming: sequential, conditional, iterative operations.

Study Of Parallel Programming Models On Computer Clusters With Accelerators, Chenggang Lai

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In order to reach exascale computing capability, accelerators have become a crucial part in developing supercomputers. This work examines the potential of two latest acceleration technologies, Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) Architecture and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). This thesis applies three benchmarks under 3 different configurations, MPI+CPU, MPI+GPU, and MPI+MIC. The benchmarks include intensely communicating application, loosely communicating application, and embarrassingly parallel application. This thesis also carries out a detailed study on the scalability and performance of MIC processors under two programming models, i.e., offload model and native model, on the Beacon computer cluster.

According to different benchmarks, the results …

Distortion Tolerant Source Code Using Viterbi Algorithm, Christopher Hankins

Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Convolutional codes are used in digital communication systems in order to protect information from distortion and increase system reliability. One of the most efficient methods for decoding convolutional codes is based on the Viterbi Algorithm. Considering the fundamental similarities between these channel codes and source codes, it is logical to postulate that the Viterbi Algorithm may also provide a basis for the implementation of an efficient lossy source code. In this thesis, the Viterbi Algorithm is used to used to compress digital data from a symmetric Bernoulli source. The Viterbi source code is simulated and shown to produce results which …

Parallelizing Scale Invariant Feature Transform On A Distributed Memory Cluster, Stanislav Bobovych

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is a computer vision algorithm that is widely-used to extract features from images. We explored accelerating an existing implementation of this algorithm with message passing in order to analyze large data sets. We successfully tested two approaches to data decomposition in order to parallelize SIFT on a distributed memory cluster.

Holistic Characterization Of Parallel Programming Models In A Distributed Memory Environment, Christopher Bryan

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The popularity of cluster computing has increased focus on usability, especially in the area of programmability. Languages and libraries that require explicit message passing have been the standard. New languages, designed for cluster computing, are coming to the forefront as a way to simplify parallel programming. Titanium and Fortress are examples of this new class of programming paradigms. This work holistically characterizes these languages and contrasts them with the standard model of parallel programming, and presents benchmark results of small computational kernels written in these languages and models.