Computer and Systems Architecture Commons^™

Defensive Cyber Battle Damage Assessment Through Attack Methodology Modeling, Ryan T. Ostler

Theses and Dissertations

Due to the growing sophisticated capabilities of advanced persistent cyber threats, it is necessary to understand and accurately assess cyber attack damage to digital assets. This thesis proposes a Defensive Cyber Battle Damage Assessment (DCBDA) process which utilizes the comprehensive understanding of all possible cyber attack methodologies captured in a Cyber Attack Methodology Exhaustive List (CAMEL). This research proposes CAMEL to provide detailed knowledge of cyber attack actions, methods, capabilities, forensic evidence and evidence collection methods. This product is modeled as an attack tree called the Cyber Attack Methodology Attack Tree (CAMAT). The proposed DCBDA process uses CAMAT to analyze …

Scalable Correct Memory Ordering Via Relativistic Programming, Josh Triplett, Philip William Howard, Paul E. Mckenney, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We propose and document a new concurrent programming model, relativistic programming. This model allows readers to run concurrently with writers, without blocking or using expensive synchronization. Relativistic programming builds on existing synchronization primitives that allow writers to wait for current readers to finish with minimal reader overhead. Our methodology models data structures as graphs, and reader algorithms as traversals of these graphs; from this foundation we show how writers can implement arbitrarily strong ordering guarantees for the visibility of their writes, up to and including total ordering.

Generalized Construction Of Scalable Concurrent Data Structures Via Relativistic Programming, Josh Triplett, Paul E. Mckenney, Philip W. Howard, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We present relativistic programming, a concurrent programming model based on shared addressing, which supports efficient, scalable operation on either uniform shared-memory or distributed shared- memory systems. Relativistic programming provides a strong causal ordering property, allowing a series of read operations to appear as an atomic transaction that occurs entirely between two ordered write operations. This preserves the simple immutable-memory programming model available via mutual exclusion or transactional memory. Furthermore, relativistic programming provides joint-access parallelism, allowing readers to run concurrently with a writer on the same data. We demonstrate a generalized construction technique for concurrent data structures based on relativistic programming, …

Rough Consensus And Running Code: Integrating Engineering Principles Into Internet Policy Debates, Christopher S. Yoo

Federal Communications Law Journal

Symposium: Rough Consensus and Running Code: Integrating Engineering Principles into Internet Policy Debates, held at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Technology Innovation and Competition on May 6-7, 2010.

The End-To-End Argument And Application Design: The Role Of Trust, David D. Clark, Marjory S. Blumenthal

Federal Communications Law Journal

Symposium: Rough Consensus and Running Code: Integrating Engineering Principles into Internet Policy Debates, held at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Technology Innovation and Competition on May 6-7, 2010.

Policy debates about the evolution of the Internet show varying degrees of understanding about the underlying technology. A fundamental principle of the design of the Internet, from the early 1980s, is the so-called "end-to-end argument" articulated in a seminal technical paper. Intended to provide guidance for what kind of capability is built into a network as opposed to the devices that use the network, the end-to-end argument has been invoked in …

Universal Engineering Programmer – An In-House Development Tool For Developing And Testing Implantable Medical Devices In St. Jude Medical, Khoa Tat Do

Master's Theses

During development and testing of the functionality of the pacemaker and defibrillator device, engineers in the St. Jude Medical Cardiac Rhythm Management Division use an in-house development tool called Universal Engineering Programmer (UEP) to ensure the device functions as expected, before it can be used to test on an animal or a human during the implantation process.  In addition, some applications of UEP are incorporated into the official releases of the device product.  UEP has been developed and used by engineers across departments in the St. Jude Medical Cardiac Rhythm Management Division (CRMD).  This thesis covers the flexible and reusable …

Interoperable Credentials Management For Wholesale Banking, Glenn Benson, Shiu-Kai Chin, Sean Croston, Karthick Jayaraman, Susan Older

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

A gap exists between wholesale-banking business practices and security best practices: wholesale banks operate within the boundaries of contract law, while security best practices often relies upon a benevolent trusted party outside the scope of straightforward contracts. While some business domains may be able to bridge this gap, the ultra-high-value transactions used in business-to-business banking substantially increase the size of the gap. The gap becomes most apparent when regarded from the perspective of interoperability. If a single user applies the same credential to sign high-value transactions at multiple banks, then the trusted-party model becomes overly cumbersome and conflicts with an …

Technology Management Trends In Law Schools, Carol A. Watson, Larry Reeves

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Discusses the role of librarians in law school technology management and analyzes technology staffing survey results for 2002, 2006, and 2010. While survey results indicate a trend toward establishing separate information technology departments within law schools, librarians are and will continue to be actively involved in law school technology.

Enhancing Simulation Composability And Interoperability Using Conceptual/Semantic/Ontological Models, Andreas Tolk, John A. Miller

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) Two emerging trends in Modeling and Simulation (M&S) are beginning to dovetail in a potentially highly productive manner, namely conceptual modeling and semantic modeling. Conceptual modeling has existed for several decades, but its importance has risen to the forefront in the last decade (Taylor and Robinson, 2006; Robinson, 2007). Also, during the last decade, progress on the Semantic Web has begun to influence M&S, with the development of general modeling ontologies (Miller et al, 2004), as well as ontologies for modeling particular domains (Durak, 2006). An ontology, which is a formal specification of a conceptualization (Gruber et al, …

Software Reuse For Modeling And Simulation, Emily Andrew, Charles D. Turnitsa, Andreas Tolk

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

In Modeling and Simulation, as a distinct area of software engineering, there is much interest in being able to reuse software components. However, the practice of simulation development and maintenance is different from software engineering because of several factors. In this paper, a brief overview of the foundations of interoperability, and how they apply to the reuse of model based software is explored, as well as examination of current practices to include M&S software repositories. Some recommendations, based on research at the Virginia Modeling Analysis and Simulation Center (VMASC) and practice at the Raytheon Company Network Centric Services, are made.

Executable Architecture Research At Old Dominion University, Andreas Tolk, Johnny J. Garcia, Edwin A. Shuman

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

Executable Architectures allow the evaluation of system architectures not only regarding their static, but also their dynamic behavior. However, the systems engineering community do not agree on a common formal specification of executable architectures. To close this gap and identify necessary elements of an executable architecture, a modeling language, and a modeling formalism is topic of ongoing PhD research. In addition, systems are generally defined and applied in an operational context to provide capabilities and enable missions. To maximize the benefits of executable architectures, a second PhD effort introduces the idea of creating an executable context in addition to the …

Ua3/9/2 I.T. Division Annual Report + Tactical Plan, Wku Information Technology

WKU Administration Documents

Annual report of WKU Information Technology Division submitted to WKU President Gary Ransdell. Report is housed in UA3/9/2 Subject Files.

Relativistic Red-Black Trees, Philip William Howard, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Operating system performance and scalability on sharedmemory many-core systems depends critically on efficient access to shared data structures. Scalability has proven difficult to achieve for many data structures. In this paper we present a novel and highly scalable concurrent red-black tree. Red-black trees are widely used in operating systems, but typically exhibit poor scalability. Our red-black tree has linear read scalability, uncontended read performance that is at least 25% faster than other known approaches, and deterministic lookup times for a given tree size, making it suitable for realtime applications.

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

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

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.

Do We Need M&S Science?, Jose J. Padilla, Saikou Y. Diallo, Andreas Tolk

VMASC Publications

No abstract provided.

A New Approach To Algebraic Coding Theory Through The Applications Of Soft Sets, Florentin Smarandache, Mumtaz Ali

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Algebraic codes play a signifcant role in the minimisation of data corruption which caused by defects such as inference, noise channel, crosstalk, and packet loss. In this paper, we introduce soft codes (soft linear codes) through the application of soft sets which is an approximated collection of codes. We also discuss several types of soft codes such as type-1 soft codes, complete soft codes etc. Further, we construct the soft generator matrix and soft parity check matrix for the soft linear codes. Moreover, we develop two techniques for the decoding of soft codes.

Network Security Toolkit Including Heuristic Solutions For Trust System Placement And Network Obfuscation, Gabriel H. Greve

Theses and Dissertations

For Part I, a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) network consists of a group stations and substations in a portion of the power grid. The use of Internet technology in SCADA communications as well as other factors has caused vulnerabilities. One idea to help mitigate this risk is to strategically place trust nodes to compartmentalize and secure the SCADA systems without disturbing its finely honed processes. The trust nodes combine firewall and intrusion detection technology to provide more secure communication. An optimal solution to this problem has already been developed using a mixed-integer linear programming model. Because the problem …

Use Of Mobile Phone Computing For Development Of Student 21st Century Skills, Susan M. Merritt, R. Lara Lee

Cornerstone 2 Reports : Community Outreach and Empowerment Through Service Learning and Volunteerism

Mobile phone computing enables immediate capture and transfer of data, images, notes and experiences from the field to a repository where retrieval, analysis, edits, aggregation, and further development are possible. Immediate findings and later results can be shared on the Web with local and global communities, and development of integrated service learning projects in concert with underserved communities is possible using this mode of information gathering and sharing.

Mobile phone computing incorporates moments when participants build tomorrow's skills while addressing today's learning goals. Use of digital tools and supporting resources bring real world problems into focus. Mobile phone computing enables …

Development Of A Cubesat Payload To Model Particle Dampening In Space: Design And Implementation Of Software For Cp7, Daniel Walker

Computer Engineering

The California Polytechnic State University CubeSat student research & development group, PolySat, is currently in a mature development stage of a single unit CubeSat designated CP7. The CP7 mission implements a scientific payload designed to characterize particle dampers in microgravity conditions. When subjected to vibration, the momentum exchanges and frictional forces of the particles create a damping effect that can be optimized to suit a number of applications over a broad frequency and amplitude range. In space based applications, particle dampers would serve as a robust and simple device to eliminate jitter in optical assemblies and other sensitive instrumentation. This …

Utilization Of Automated Gcc Optimization For Dual-Width Instruction Sets On The Arm Architecture, Shane Watson

Computer Engineering

One of the most important considerations in embedded systems is code size. This consideration is obviously imposed by external factors such as cost and physical space, but what it boils down to is that we want our devices to be as powerful as they can within a (typically limited) specific form factor. This limits the amount of space we have for memory and as such we should always be considering the code size of our application and making sure it’s as efficient as possible. We also then need to consider other factors such as performance and power consumption. This is …