Computer Engineering Commons^™

Reflecting On Recurring Failures In Iot Development, Dharun Anandayuvaraj, James C. Davis

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

As IoT systems are given more responsibility and autonomy, they offer greater benefits, but also carry greater risks. We believe this trend invigorates an old challenge of software engineering: how to develop high-risk software-intensive systems safely and securely under market pressures? As a first step, we conducted a systematic analysis of recent IoT failures to identify engineering challenges. We collected and analyzed 22 news reports and studied the sources, impacts, and repair strategies of failures in IoT systems. We observed failure trends both within and across application domains. We also observed that failure themes have persisted over time. To alleviate …

Reflections On Software Failure Analysis, Paschal C. Amusuo, Aishwarya Sharma, Siddharth R. Rao, Abbey Vincent, James C. Davis

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Failure studies are important in revealing the root causes, behaviors, and life cycle of defects in software systems. These studies either focus on understanding the characteristics of defects in specific classes of systems or the characteristics of a specific type of defect in the systems it manifests in. Failure studies have influenced various software engineering research directions, especially in the area of software evolution, defect detection, and program repair.

In this paper, we reflect on the conduct of failure studies in software engineering. We reviewed a sample of 52 failure study papers. We identified several recurring problems in these studies, …

Sok: Analysis Of Software Supply Chain Security By Establishing Secure Design Properties, Chinenye Okafor, Taylor R. Schorlemmer, Santiao Torres-Arias, James C. Davis

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper systematizes knowledge about secure software supply chain patterns. It identifies four stages of a software supply chain attack and proposes three security properties crucial for a secured supply chain: transparency, validity, and separation. The paper describes current security approaches and maps them to the proposed security properties, including research ideas and case studies of supply chains in practice. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches relative to known attacks and details the various security frameworks put out to ensure the security of the software supply chain. Finally, the paper highlights potential gaps in actor and operation-centered …

Exploiting Input Sanitization For Regex Denial Of Service, Efe Barlas, Xin Du, James C. Davis

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Web services use server-side input sanitization to guard against harmful input. Some web services publish their sanitization logic to make their client interface more usable, e.g., allowing clients to debug invalid requests locally. However, this usability practice poses a security risk. Specifically, services may share the regexes they use to sanitize input strings — and regex-based denial of service (ReDoS) is an emerging threat. Although prominent service outages caused by ReDoS have spurred interest in this topic, we know little about the degree to which live web services are vulnerable to ReDoS.

In this paper, we conduct the first black-box …

Discrepancies Among Pre-Trained Deep Neural Networks: A New Threat To Model Zoo Reliability, Diego Montes, Pongpatapee Peerapatanapokin, Jeff Schultz, Chengjun Guo, Wenxin Jiang, James C. Davis

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Training deep neural networks (DNNs) takes significant time and resources. A practice for expedited deployment is to use pre-trained deep neural networks (PTNNs), often from model zoos.collections of PTNNs; yet, the reliability of model zoos remains unexamined. In the absence of an industry standard for the implementation and performance of PTNNs, engineers cannot confidently incorporate them into production systems. As a first step, discovering potential discrepancies between PTNNs across model zoos would reveal a threat to model zoo reliability. Prior works indicated existing variances in deep learning systems in terms of accuracy. However, broader measures of reliability for PTNNs from …

An Empirical Study On The Impact Of Deep Parameters On Mobile App Energy Usage, Qiang Xu, James C. Davis, Y Charlie Hu, Abhilash Jindal

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Improving software performance through configuration parameter tuning is a common activity during software maintenance. Beyond traditional performance metrics like latency, mobile app developers are interested in reducing app energy usage. Some mobile apps have centralized locations for parameter tuning, similar to databases and operating systems, but it is common for mobile apps to have hundreds of parameters scattered around the source code. The correlation between these "deep" parameters and app energy usage is unclear. Researchers have studied the energy effects of deep parameters in specific modules, but we lack a systematic understanding of the energy impact of mobile deep parameters. …

Design Of Computer Vision Systems For Optimizing The Threat Detection Accuracy, Sina Gholamnejad Davani

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation considers computer vision (CV) systems in which a central monitoring station receives and analyzes the video streams captured and delivered wirelessly by multiple cameras. It addresses how the bandwidth can be allocated to various cameras by presenting a cross-layer solution that optimizes the overall detection or recognition accuracy. The dissertation presents and develops a real CV system and subsequently provides a detailed experimental analysis of cross-layer optimization. Other unique features of the developed solution include employing the popular HTTP streaming approach, utilizing homogeneous cameras as well as heterogeneous ones with varying capabilities and limitations, and including a new …

Sdn-Enabled Efficient Resource Utilization In A Secure, Trustworthy And Privacy Preserving Iov-Fog Environment, Jamal N. Alotaibi

Wayne State University Dissertations

The development of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) is aided by the advent of Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV), which is a decentralized network that allows connected vehicles and vehicular ad hoc networks to share data (VANETs). However, today's IoV networks face a number of challenges, including effective resource utilization, security and privacy, trust, information irregularity, etc. In addition, IoV applications have a wide range of Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements, making it difficult to develop an efficient solution to deal with big data in IoV. Furthermore, the solution should be scalable and extendable, as well as lightweight and cost-effective to maintain. By outsourcing computationally-intensive operations …

Smart Uv-C Disinfectant Module, Nicole Baldy, Luke Rogers, Haitham Saleh

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The Smart UV Disinfectant device shall sanitize objects which are 18”x14”x8” or smaller and less than 20 lbs. using UV-C light. This device should contain many safety measures to prevent human and animal exposure to the UV-C light and have no public touchpoints to operate the interface. In order to achieve the first objective, this device shall contain a "sanitizing chamber" which completely encloses the object to be sanitized to prevent outside exposure with detection of any lifeforms inside of the chamber; for the second objective, it will contain a wireless interface to an Android application which can be used …

Smart Bike Aftermarket System (Sbams), Noah Lamadanie, Jack Bullock, Dawson Beachy, John Albrecht

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The Smart Bike Aftermarket System will be a set of connected modules, which, when installed on a standard bicycle, will allow it to mimic some of the safety and quality-of-life functionalities of an E-bike. The most notable of these safety features is an ability to detect vehicles approaching from behind and alert the user of potential collisions. The system will also implement lighting (Headlights, taillights, and turn signals), and a coupled application so a user can view more advanced information about their cycling. The primary advantage of this system over a standard E-bike is that it will have a lower …

Cardbot, Jakob Reiter, Grant Crump, Drake Drivere, Adam Miner

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Many people enjoy playing cards but playing cards in the times of COVID-19 is difficult. There are many designs for dealing and shuffling robots, but few include sanitization and autonomous operation. This design is for a BlackJack card dealing and shuffling robot that will be autonomous and will sanitize the playing cards using UV-C LEDs. This will assist in keeping the user safe while playing a game of BlackJack

Efficient And Accurate Cordic Pipelined Architecture Chip Design Based On Binomial Approximation For Biped Robot, Rih-Lung Chung, Yen Hsueh, Shih-Lun Chen, Patricia Angela R. Abu

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

Recently, much research has focused on the design of biped robots with stable and smooth walking ability, identical to human beings, and thus, in the coming years, biped robots will accomplish rescue or exploration tasks in challenging environments. To achieve this goal, one of the important problems is to design a chip for real-time calculation of moving length and rotation angle of the biped robot. This paper presents an efficient and accurate coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC)-based efficient chip design to calculate the moving length and rotation angle for each step of the biped robot. In a previous work, the …

Identifying Code Reading Strategies In Debugging Using Sta With A Tolerance Algorithm, Christine Lourrine S. Tablatin, Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to identify the common code reading strategies of the high and low performing students engaged in a debugging task. Using Scanpath Trend Analysis (STA) with a tolerance on eye tracking data, common scanpaths of high and low performing students were generated. The common scanpaths revealed differences in the code reading patterns and code reading strategies of high and low performing students. High performing students follow a bottom-up code reading strategy when debugging complex programs with logical and semantic errors. A top-down code reading strategy is employed when debugging programs with simple control structures, few …

Predicting Pair Success In A Pair Programming Eye Tracking Experiment Using Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis, Maureen M. Villamor, Maria Mercedes T. Rodrigo

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

Pair programming is a model of collaborative learning. It has become a well-known pedagogical practice in teaching introductory programming courses because of its potential benefits to students. This study aims to investigate pair patterns in the context of pair program tracing and debugging to determine what characterizes collaboration and how these patterns relate to success, where success is measured in terms of performance task scores. This research used eye-tracking methodologies and techniques such as cross-recurrence quantification analysis. The potential indicators for pair success were used to create a model for predicting pair success. Findings suggest that it is possible to …

Building An Understanding Of Human Activities In First Person Video Using Fuzzy Inference, Bradley A. Schneider

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Activities of Daily Living (ADL’s) are the activities that people perform every day in their home as part of their typical routine. The in-home, automated monitoring of ADL’s has broad utility for intelligent systems that enable independent living for the elderly and mentally or physically disabled individuals. With rising interest in electronic health (e-Health) and mobile health (m-Health) technology, opportunities abound for the integration of activity monitoring systems into these newer forms of healthcare. In this dissertation we propose a novel system for describing ’s based on video collected from a wearable camera. Most in-home activities are naturally defined by …

Secure Authenticated Key Exchange For Enhancing The Security Of Routing Protocol For Low-Power And Lossy Networks, Sarah Mohammed Alzahrani

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The current Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) standard provides three security modes Unsecured Mode (UM), Preinstalled Secure Mode (PSM), and Authenticated Secure Mode (ASM). The PSM and ASM are designed to prevent external routing attacks and specific replay attacks through an optional replay protection mechanism. RPL's PSM mode does not support key replacement when a malicious party obtains the key via differential cryptanalysis since it considers the key to be provided to nodes during the configuration of the network. This thesis presents an approach to implementing a secure authenticated key exchange mechanism for RPL, which ensures …

Realistic Virtual Human Character Design Strategy And Experience For Supporting Serious Role-Playing Simulations On Mobile Devices, Sindhu Kumari

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Promoting awareness of social determinants of health (SDoH) among healthcare providers is important to improve the patient care experience and outcome as it helps providers understand their patients in a better way which can facilitate more efficient and effective communication about health conditions. Healthcare professionals are typically educated about SDoH through lectures, questionaries, or role-play-based approaches; but in today’s world, it is becoming increasingly possible to leverage modern technology to create more impactful and accessible tools for SDoH education. Wright LIFE (Lifelike Immersion for Equity) is a simulation-based training tool especially created for this purpose. It is a mobile app …

Design, Analysis, And Optimization Of Traffic Engineering For Software Defined Networks, Mohammed Ibrahim Salman

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Network traffic has been growing exponentially due to the rapid development of applications and communications technologies. Conventional routing protocols, such as Open-Shortest Path First (OSPF), do not provide optimal routing and result in weak network resources. Optimal traffic engineering (TE) is not applicable in practice due to operational constraints such as limited memory on the forwarding devices and routes oscillation. Recently, a new way of centralized management of networks enabled by Software-Defined Networking (SDN) made it easy to apply most traffic engineering ideas in practice. \par Toward creating an applicable traffic engineering system, we created a TE simulator for experimenting …

Automatically Generating Searchable Fingerprints For Wordpress Plugins Using Static Program Analysis, Chuang Li

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This thesis introduces a novel method to automatically generate fingerprints for WordPress plugins. Our method performs static program analysis using Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) of WordPress plugins. The generated fingerprints can be used for identifying these plugins using search engines, which have support critical applications such as proactively identifying web servers with vulnerable WordPress plugins. We have used our method to generate fingerprints for over 10,000 WordPress plugins and analyze the resulted fingerprints. Our fingerprints have also revealed 453 websites that are potentially vulnerable. We have also compared fingerprints for vulnerable plugins and those for vulnerability-free plugins.

Semantics-Driven Abstractive Document Summarization, Amanuel Alambo

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The evolution of the Web over the last three decades has led to a deluge of scientific and news articles on the Internet. Harnessing these publications in different fields of study is critical to effective end user information consumption. Similarly, in the domain of healthcare, one of the key challenges with the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for clinical practice has been the tremendous amount of clinical notes generated that can be summarized without which clinical decision making and communication will be inefficient and costly. In spite of the rapid advances in information retrieval and deep learning techniques towards …