Computer Sciences Commons^™

Fireguard - A Secure Browser With Reduced Forensic Footprint, Don Griffiths, Peter James

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Fireguard is a secure portable browser designed to reduce both data leakage from browser data remnants and cyber attacks from malicious code exploiting vulnerabilites in browser plug-ins, extensions and software updates. A browser can leave data remnants on a host PC hard disk drive, often unbeknown to a user, in the form of cookies, histories, saved passwords, cached web pages and downloaded objects. Forensic analysis, using freely available computer forensic tools, may reveal sensitive and confidential information. A browser’s capability to increase its features through plug-ins and extensions and perform patch management or upgrade to a new release via a …

Avoiding Sanctions At The E-Discovery Meet-And-Confer In Common Law Countries, Milton Luoma, Vicki Luoma

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

The rules of civil procedure in common law countries have been amended to better deal with the requirements of electronic discovery. One of the key changes in case management is the scheduling of a meet-and-confer session where the parties to litigation must meet early in the case before any discovery procedures have begun to exchange information regarding the nature, location, formats, and pertinent facts regarding custody and control of a party’s electronically stored information (ESI). Failure to abide by the rules and participate in good faith at the meet-and-confer session can have dire consequences for the parties and lawyers involved. …

Remote Access Forensics For Vnc And Rdp On Windows Platform, Paresh Kerai

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

There has been a greater implementation of remote access technologies in recent years. Many organisations are adapting remote technologies such as Virtual Network Computing (VNC) and remote desktop (RDP) applications as customer support application. They use these applications to remotely configure computers and solve computer and network issues of the client on spot. Therefore, the system administrator or the desktop technician does not have to sit on the client computer physically to solve a computer issue. This increase in adaptation of remote applications is of interest to forensic investigators; this is because illegal activities can be performed over the connection. …

Digital Forensics Analysis Of Spectral Estimation Methods, Tolga Mataracioglu, Unal Tatar

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the intended recipient knows of the existence of the message. In today’s world, it is widely used in order to secure the information. Since digital forensics aims to detect, recover and examine the digital evidence and steganography is a method for hiding digital evidence, detecting the steganography is an important step in digital forensics process. In this paper, the traditional spectral estimation methods are introduced. The performance analysis of each method is examined by comparing all of the spectral estimation methods. …

An Analysis Of Malfeasant Activity Directed At A Voip Honeypot, Craig Valli

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

This paper analyses data collected over a nine month period in a simple VoIP honeypot based on simple design initially put forward by Usken(2009). The honeypot collected 2083 events of malfeasant activity directed towards commonly used VoIP ports. These events resulted in a range of activity being recorded from simple enumeration to advanced probing and attempts to compromise the victim honeypot. The analysis involved traditional statistics from packet analysis, using customised scripts for extraction of data and graphical analysis using i2 Analyst Workstation. The analysis has uncovered an escalation of network activity directed towards the honeypot over a nine month …

Development, Delivery And Dynamics Of A Digital Forensics Subject, Tanveer A. Zia

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Digital forensics is a newly developed subject offered at Charles Sturt University (CSU). This subject serves as one of the core subjects for Master of Information Systems Security (Digital Forensics stream) course. The subject covers the legislative, regulatory, and technical aspects of digital forensics. The modules provide students detailed knowledge on digital forensics legislations, digital crime, forensics processes and procedures, data acquisition and validation, e-discovery tools, e-evidence collection and preservation, investigating operating systems and file systems, network forensics, email and web forensics, presenting reports and testimony as an expert witness. This paper summarises the process of subject development, delivery, assessments, …

Towards An Automated Digital Data Forensic Model With Specific Reference To Investigation Processes, Johan Scholtz, Ajit Narayanan

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Existing digital forensics frameworks do not provide clear guidelines for conducting digital forensics investigation. However, had a framework existed, investigations based on known procedures and processes would follow strict prescribed standardisation. This should direct investigations following a set method for comparisons; ensuring future investigation is following one standard. Digital forensics lack confirmed and tested methods; this became obvious when we consider varied interpretations of the same case by participants using different investigation methods. Previous research covered several approaches to setting a forensics framework, which are mere adaptations of previous models. We found that only a few models present a framework …

Formalization Of The Ad Hominem Argumentation Scheme, Douglas Walton

CRRAR Publications

In this paper, several examples from the literature, and one central new one, are used as case studies of texts of discourse containing an argumentation scheme that has now been widely investigated in literature on argumentation. Argumentation schemes represent common patterns of reasoning used in everyday conversational discourse. The most typical ones represent defeasible arguments based on nonmonotonic reasoning. Each scheme has a matching set of critical questions used to evaluate a particular argument fitting that scheme. The project is to study how to build a formal computational model of this scheme for the circumstantial ad hominem argument using argumentation …

Srpt Is 1.86-Competitive For Completion Time Scheduling, Christine Chung, Tim Nonner, Alexander Souza

Computer Science Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Transfer Learning Techniques For Deep Neural Nets, Steven M. Gutstein

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Inductive learners seek meaningful features within raw input. Their purpose is to accurately categorize, explain or extrapolate from this input. Relevant features for one task are frequently relevant for related tasks. Reuse of previously learned data features to help master new tasks is known as &lsquo transfer learning &rsquo. People use this technique to learn more quickly and easily. However, machine learning tends to occur from scratch.

In this thesis, two machine learning techniques are developed, that use transfer learning to achieve significant accuracy for recognition tasks with extremely small training sets and, occasionally, no task specific training. These methods …

Ontology-Driven Discovery Of Scientific Computational Entities, Pearl W. Brazier

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Many geoscientists use modern computational resources, such as software applications, Web services, scientific workflows and datasets that are readily available on the Internet, to support their research and many common tasks. These resources are often shared via human contact and sometimes stored in data portals; however, they are not necessarily available for metadata annotations that can assist in collaborative research or machine processing. Scientists' knowledge of their resources and processes are at risk of being lost. A scientist-driven discovery environment, which assumes a level of technical expertise generally possessed by a geoscientist, is needed to enable discovery and comparisons of …

Modeling Geographic Awareness Of Road Networks For Consistency Verification, Ari Kassin

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Problems related to transportation and inspection of valuable or sensitive assets such as commercial products and materials, cultural items and works of art, and hazardous materials share similarities and can be modeled by a core set of abstract entities including a payload, a vehicle, a driver, and an inspector. To make the load handling capabilities of security monitoring and inspection systems more scalable, security can be increased by reducing the variability of transportation routes to a finite set of authorized routes between trip origin and destination locations. Then trip anomalies, which are unexpected trip variations, can be used in inspection …

A Deadline-Driven Epidemic Data Collection Protocol Suitable For Tracking Interpersonnel Rendezvous, Avranil Tah

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This thesis describes a peer-to-peer wireless data collection algorithm that uses epidemic communication to propagate time-sensitive sequentially sampled data records from sensors toward infrastructure connected upload stations via mobile data mules. These records are labeled with sequence numbers and delivery deadlines, and are transmitted in sequential order. Delivery deadlines enable transmission prioritization and trigger alarms warning of violations.

The sequential ordering of records simplifies the protocols transmission-control and garbage collection mechanisms: only two monotonically increasing scalar sequence indices associated with a particular sensor must be exchanged between peers prior to selecting which records need to be communicated. One of these …

Stochastic Analysis Of Energy Consumption In Wireless Sensor Networks, Yunbo Wang, Mehmet C. Vuran, Steve Goddard

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Limited energy resources in increasingly sophisticated wireless sensor networks (WSNs) call for a comprehensive crosslayer analysis of energy consumption in a multi-hop network. For reliability analysis in such networks, the statistical information about energy consumption and lifetime is required. However, traditional energy analysis approaches only focus on the average energy consumed. In this paper, instead, we provide a stochastic analysis of the energy consumption in a random network environment. Accordingly, a comprehensive cross-layer analysis framework, which employs a stochastic queueing model, is developed. Using this framework, the distribution of energy consumption for nodes in WSNs during a given time period …

Communication-Aware Load Balancing For Parallel Applications On Clusters, Xiao Qin, Hong Jiang, Adam Manzanares, Xiaojun Ruan, Shu Yin

CSE Journal Articles

Cluster computing has emerged as a primary and cost-effective platform for running parallel applications, including communication-intensive applications that transfer a large amount of data among the nodes of a cluster via the interconnection network. Conventional load balancers have proven effective in increasing the utilization of CPU, memory, and disk I/O resources in a cluster. However, most of the existing load-balancing schemes ignore network resources, leaving an opportunity to improve the effective bandwidth of networks on clusters running parallel applications. For this reason, we propose a communication-aware load-balancing technique that is capable of improving the performance of communication-intensive applications by increasing …

Spreadsheets Grow Up: Three Spreadsheet Engineering Methodologies For Large Financial Planning Models, Thomas A. Grossman Jr., O Ozluk

Business Analytics and Information Systems

Many large financial planning models are written in a spreadsheet programming language (usually Microsoft Excel) and deployed as a spreadsheet application. Three groups, FAST Alliance, Operis Group, and BPM Analytics (under the name “Spreadsheet Standards Review Board”) have independently promulgated standardized processes for efficiently building such models. These spreadsheet engineering methodologies provide detailed guidance on design, construction process, and quality control. We summarize and compare these methodologies. They share many design practices, and standardized, mechanistic procedures to construct spreadsheets. We learned that a written book or standards document is by itself insufficient to understand a methodology. These methodologies represent a …

Modeling And Analyzing Faults To Improve Election Process Robustness, B I. Simidchieva, Sophie J. Engle, M Clifford, A C. Jones, S Peisert, M Bishop, L A. Clarke, L J. Osterweil

Computer Science

This paper presents an approach for continuous process improvement and illustrates its application to improving the robustness of election processes. In this approach, the Little-JIL process definition language is used to create a precise and detailed model of an election process. Given this process model and a potential undesirable event, or hazard, a fault tree is automatically derived. Fault tree analysis is then used to automatically identify combinations of failures that might allow the selected potential hazard to occur. Once these combinations have been identified, we iteratively improve the process model to increase the robustness of the election process against …

A Novel Weighted-Graph-Based Grouping Algorithm For Metadata Prefetching, Peng Gu, Jun Wang, Yifeng Zhu, Hong Jiang, Pengju Shang

CSE Journal Articles

Although data prefetching algorithms have been extensively studied for years, there is no counterpart research done for metadata access performance. Existing data prefetching algorithms, either lack of emphasis on group prefetching, or bearing a high level of computational complexity, do not work well with metadata prefetching cases. Therefore, an efficient, accurate, and distributed metadata-oriented prefetching scheme is critical to leverage the overall performance in large distributed storage systems. In this paper, we present a novel weighted-graph-based prefetching technique, built on both direct and indirect successor relationship, to reap performance benefit from prefetching specifically for clustered metadata servers, an arrangement envisioned …

Classroomwiki: A Collaborative Wiki For Instructional Use With Multiagent Group Formation, Nobel Khandaker, Leen-Kiat Soh

CSE Journal Articles

Abstract—Wikis today are being used as a tool to conduct collaborative writing assignments in classrooms. However, typical Wikis do not adequately address the assessment of individual student contributions toward their groups or provide any automated group formation mechanism. To improve these aspects, we have designed and implemented ClassroomWiki – a Web-based collaborative Wiki writing tool. For the students, ClassroomWiki provides a Web interface for writing and revising their group’s Wiki and a topic-based forum for discussing their ideas during collaboration. When the students collaborate, ClassroomWiki tracks all student activities and builds detailed student models that represent their contributions toward their …

Xlp: A Cross-Layer Protocol For Efficient Communication In Wireless Sensor Networks, Mehmet C. Vuran, Ian F. Akyildiz

CSE Journal Articles

Severe energy constraints of battery-powered sensor nodes necessitate energy-efficient communication in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). However, the vast majority of the existing solutions is based on classical layered protocols approach, which leads to significant overhead. It is much more efficient to have a unified scheme which blends common protocol layer functionalities into a cross-layer module. In this paper, a cross layer protocol (XLP) is introduced, which achieves congestion control, routing, and medium access control in a cross-layer fashion. The design principle of XLP is based on the cross-layer concept of initiative determination, which enables receiver-based contention, initiative-based forwarding, local …