Digital Communications and Networking Commons^™

Correlated Network Of Networks Enhances Robustness Against Catastrophic Failures, Byungjoon Min, Muhua Zheng

Publications and Research

Networks in nature rarely function in isolation but instead interact with one another with a form of a network of networks (NoN). A network of networks with interdependency between distinct networks contains instability of abrupt collapse related to the global rule of activation. As a remedy of the collapse instability, here we investigate a model of correlated NoN. We find that the collapse instability can be removed when hubs provide the majority of interconnections and interconnections are convergent between hubs. Thus, our study identifies a stable structure of correlated NoN against catastrophic failures. Our result further suggests a plausible way …

Strategic Implications Of Blockchain, William R. Adams

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis introduces blockchain, the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, and discusses how best to conceptualize it relative to other technologies. Following an explanation of the fundamentals of blockchain, also known as the distributed ledger, I identify the characteristics of the technology. Building upon blockchain’s inherent strengths and limitations, I explore potential business applications of blockchain. Finally, I recommend that leaders continue to track the development and adoption of blockchain technology, even if they decide that implementing it does not align with their organization’s strategy at present.

Application Of Huffman Data Compression Algorithm In Hashing Computation, Lakshmi Narasimha Devulapalli Venkata,

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Cryptography is the art of protecting information by encrypting the original message into an unreadable format. A cryptographic hash function is a hash function which takes an arbitrary length of the text message as input and converts that text into a fixed length of encrypted characters which is infeasible to invert. The values returned by the hash function are called as the message digest or simply hash values. Because of its versatility, hash functions are used in many applications such as message authentication, digital signatures, and password hashing [Thomsen and Knudsen, 2005].

The purpose of this study is to apply …

The E-Agriculture Research Landscape In South Africa: A Systematic Literature Review, Alain Nzuzi Kintoki

The African Journal of Information Systems

Despite the growing interest in e-agriculture research in South Africa, academic studies have not sufficiently and deeply investigated the current e-agriculture research trends in the South African context. It is unclear how primary e-agriculture research in South Africa will aid both current and future generations to create new and better ways to transform agricultural development using this modern technology. This study sought to determine the current status of e-agriculture research in the South African context. A systematic literature review was used to gather and analyze data. The results indicate that 17 papers (26.5%) were published during the first two years …

To Relive The Web: A Framework For The Transformation And Archival Replay Of Web Pages, John Andrew Berlin

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

When replaying an archived web page (known as a memento), the fundamental expectation is that the page should be viewable and function exactly as it did at archival time. However, this expectation requires web archives to modify the page and its embedded resources, so that they no longer reference (link to) the original server(s) they were archived from but back to the archive. Although these modifications necessarily change the state of the representation, it is understood that without them the replay of mementos from the archive would not be possible. Unfortunately, because the replay of mementos and the modifications made …

Findings Of A User Study Of Automatically Generated Personas, Joni Salminen, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Soon-Gyo Jung, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We report findings and implications from a semi-naturalistic user study of a system for Automatic Persona Generation (APG) using large-scale audience data of an organization's social media channels conducted at the workplace of a major international corporation. Thirteen participants from a range of positions within the company engaged with the system in a use case scenario. We employed a variety of data collection methods, including mouse tracking and survey data, analyzing the data with a mixed method approach. Results show that having an interactive system may aid in keeping personas at the forefront while making customer-centric decisions and indicate that …

Virtualization In Wireless Sensor Networks: Fault Tolerant Embedding For Internet Of Things, Omprakash Kaiwartya, Abdul Hanan Abdullah, Yue Cao, Jaime Lloret, Sushil Kumar, Rajiv Ratn Shah, Mukesh Prasad, Shiv Prakash

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, virtualization in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has witnessed significant attention due to the growing service domain for IoT. Related literature on virtualization in WSNs explored resource optimization without considering communication failure in WSNs environments. The failure of a communication link in WSNs impacts many virtual networks running IoT services. In this context, this paper proposes a framework for optimizing fault tolerance in virtualization in WSNs, focusing on heterogeneous networks for service-oriented IoT applications. An optimization problem is formulated considering fault tolerance and communication delay as two conflicting objectives. An adapted non-dominated sorting based genetic algorithm (A-NSGA) is developed to …

Automated Man-In-The-Middle Attack Against Wi‑Fi Networks, Martin Vondráček, Jan Pluskal, Ondřej Ryšavý

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Currently used wireless communication technologies suffer security weaknesses that can be exploited allowing to eavesdrop or to spoof network communication. In this paper, we present a practical tool that can automate the attack on wireless security. The developed package called wifimitm provides functionality for the automation of MitM attacks in the wireless environment. The package combines several existing tools and attack strategies to bypass the wireless security mechanisms, such as WEP, WPA, and WPS. The presented tool can be integrated into a solution for automated penetration testing. Also, a popularization of the fact that such attacks can be easily automated …

Estimating Defensive Cyber Operator Decision Confidence, Markus M. Borneman

Theses and Dissertations

As technology continues to advance the domain of cyber defense, signature and heuristic detection mechanisms continue to require human operators to make judgements about the correctness of machine decisions. Human cyber defense operators rely on their experience, expertise, and understanding of network security, when conducting cyber-based investigations, in order to detect and respond to cyber alerts. Ever growing quantities of cyber alerts and network traffic, coupled with systemic manpower issues, mean no one has the time to review or change decisions made by operators. Since these cyber alert decisions ultimately do not get reviewed again, an inaccurate decision could cause …

Progressive Network Deployment, Performance, And Control With Software-Defined Networking, Daniel J. Casey

Theses and Dissertations

The inflexible nature of traditional computer networks has led to tightly-integrated systems that are inherently difficult to manage and secure. New designs move low-level network control into software creating software-defined networks (SDN). Augmenting an existing network with these enhancements can be expensive and complex. This research investigates solutions to these problems. It is hypothesized that an add-on device, or "shim" could be used to make a traditional switch behave as an OpenFlow SDN switch while maintaining reasonable performance. A design prototype is found to cause approximately 1.5% reduction in throughput for one ow and less than double increase in latency, …

Assessing The Competing Characteristics Of Privacy And Safety Within Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks, Jacob W. Connors

Theses and Dissertations

The introduction of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication has the promise of decreasing vehicle collisions, congestion, and emissions. However, this technology places safety and privacy at odds; an increase of safety applications will likely result in the decrease of consumer privacy. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has proposed the Security Credential Management System (SCMS) as the back end infrastructure for maintaining, distributing, and revoking vehicle certificates attached to every Basic Safety Message (BSM). This Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) scheme is designed around the philosophy of maintaining user privacy through the separation of functions to prevent any one subcomponent from identifying …

Evaluation Of Resiliency In A Wide-Area Backup Protection System Via Model Checking, Kolby H. Elliot

Theses and Dissertations

Modern civilization relies heavily on having access to reliable power sources. Recent history has shown that present day protection systems are not adequate. Numerous backup protection (BP) systems have been proposed to mitigate the impact of primary protection system failures. Many of these novel BP systems rely on autonomous agents communicating via wide-area networks. These systems are highly complex and their control logic is based on distributed computing. Model checking has been shown to be a powerful tool in analyzing the behavior of distributed systems. In this research the model checker SPIN is used to evaluate the resiliency of an …

Bandwidth Analysis Of A Tightly-Packed Crossed-Dipole Array For Satellite Communications, Lawrence J. Lee

Theses and Dissertations

A bandwidth analysis of a tightly-packed crossed-dipole array antenna is presented in this thesis. A parametric study is described which varies the element spacing in the array and the resulting change in the terminal impedances is reported. The increased mutual coupling seen by the elements as a result of smaller element spacings is shown to minimize the variation in the value of the elements terminal currents across a 0.3 GHz to 3.0 GHz frequency range. This small variation in current translates into a minimal variation in the terminal impedances for a fixed excitation voltage. This is shown to be an …

Quality Of Service Impacts Of A Moving Target Defense With Software-Defined Networking, Samuel A. Mayer

Theses and Dissertations

An analysis of the impact a defensive network technique implemented with software-defined networking has upon quality of service experienced by legitimate users. The research validates previous work conducted at AFIT to verify claims of defensive efficacy and then tests network protocols in common use (FTP, HTTP, IMAP, POP, RTP, SMTP, and SSH) on a network that uses this technique. Metrics that indicate the performance of the protocols under test are reported with respect to data gathered in a control network. The conclusions of these experiments enable network engineers to determine if this defensive technique is appropriate for the quality of …

Policy-Preferred Paths In As-Level Internet Topology Graphs, Mehmet Engin Tozal

Theory & Applications of Graphs

Using Autonomous System (AS) level Internet topology maps to determine accurate AS-level paths is essential for network diagnostics, performance optimization, security enforcement, business policy management and topology-aware application development. One significant drawback that we have observed in many studies is simplifying the AS-level topology map of the Internet to an undirected graph, and then using the hop distance as a means to find the shortest paths between the ASes. A less significant drawback is restricting the shortest paths to only valley-free paths. Both approaches usually inflate the number of paths between ASes; introduce erroneous paths that do not conform to …

Keep It Simple, Keep It Safe - Research On The Impacts Of Increasing Complexity Of Modern Enterprise Applications, Shawn Ware, David Phillips

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

As the Cybersecurity program within UNO continues to adapt to the ever-changing world of information systems and information security, the Cybersecurity Capstone has recently become an active, community-involvement project, where real-world organizations can receive valuable, useful research and information from students on their way towards a degree. This presentation encompasses two such projects from the Cybersecurity Capstone, looking at how modern, more complex systems can often increase system vulnerability.

Modeling Adversarial Insider Vehicles In Mix Zones, Nicholas Plewtong

Master's Theses

Security is a necessity when dealing with new forms of technology that may not have been analyzed from a security perspective. One of the latest growing technological advances are Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs). VANETs allow vehicles to communicate information to each other wirelessly which allows for an increase in safety and efficiency for vehicles. However, with this new type of computerized system comes the need to maintain security on top of it.

In order to try to protect location privacy of the vehicles in the system, vehicles change pseudonyms or identifiers at areas known as mix zones. This thesis implements …

Skylux Smartphone Controlled Skylight, James A. Green Vi

Computer Engineering

There are numerous electric skylight openers available for purchase for home-use, but the majority of them are remote based, or operated by a wall-unit. Furthermore, these devices are in hard to reach places, so if one were to lose the remote on a remote operated system, the only option is to contact the manufacturer for a new device. As such, my senior project, in collaboration with Colton Sundstrom’s senior project, build upon our existing capstone project in order to allow operation of the Internet of Things (IoT) device over the internet. Our client, Richard Murray, was unsatisfied with the current …

Cru Android App, Dylan Sun

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The Cru app is focused on connecting students and faculty to one of the many Cru ministries here in San Luis Obispo. The app is capable of connecting individuals to a specific community group and ministry teams, gathering information about upcoming Cru events and gatherings, and direct rideshare capabilities. The Cru Android App utilizes Java and other industry standard technologies to fully deliver a well-rounded user experience and to be connected with Cru. In this project, I increased Cru app’s access control abilities and updated the app overall to be ready for an alpha release.

Hiddencode: Hidden Acoustic Signal Capture With Vibration Energy Harvesting, Guohao Lan, Dong Ma, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The feasibility of using vibration energy harvesting (VEH) as an energy-efficient receiver for short-range acoustic data communication has been investigated recently. When data was encoded in acoustic signal within the energy harvesting frequency band and transmitted through a speaker, a VEH receiver was capable of decoding the data by processing the harvested energy signal. Although previous work created new opportunities for simultaneous energy harvesting and communication using the same hardware, the communication makes annoying sounds as the energy harvesting frequency band lies within the sensitive region of human auditory system. In this work, we present a novel modulation scheme to …