Digital Commons Network^™

Integration Analysis Of Nssm, Winlogon, And P2p Networks: Security Impact And Mitigation Strategies, Maisa Emneina

Theses and Dissertations

In today's digital world, where everything is interconnected, new security threats are constantly emerging. This thesis explores the security risks that come from the combination of three specific technologies: Non-Sucking Service Manager (NSSM), Winlogon Helper DLLs, and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. NSSM is a powerful tool for managing services, but it can also be used by attackers to find and exploit system weaknesses. Winlogon Helper DLLs are essential for the Windows logon process, making them a critical target for attacks. When you add P2P networks into the mix, which many applications use to share data, the potential for security issues increases …

Predicting Iot Distributed Ledger Fraud Transactions With A Lightweight Gan Network, Charles Rawlins, Jagannathan Sarangapani

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Decision-making and consensus in traditional blockchain protocols is formulated as a repeated Bernoulli trial that solves a computationally intense lottery puzzle, called Proof-of-Work (PoW) in Bitcoin. This approach has shown robustness through practice but does not scale with increasing network size and generation of new transactions. Resource constrained Internet of Things (IoT) networks are incompatible with full computation of schemes like Bitcoin's PoW. Our effort proposes a first step towards an alternative consensus using machine learning-based decision-making with prediction of fraud transactions to alleviate need for intense computation. To improve base approval probabilities for fraud detection in an ideal security …

Effective Data Sharing In An Edge-Cloud Model: Security Challenges And Solutions, Arijit Karati, Sajal K. Das

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The proposed protocol offers privacy-preserving authentication across several cloud platforms, flexible key management for consumer data protection, and effective user revocation. Performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed framework supports low latency, safe unified remote access, and data privacy in the contemporary edge-enabled environment.

Transformer Models With Explainability For It Telemetry And Business Events, Shiau Hong Lim, Laura Wynter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Temporal event data are commonly encountered in software applications across a wide range of domains, from IT telemetry and system logs to business process automation. Temporal event data in software applications carry information in various forms: both structured and unstructured, and with both regular and irregular occurrence frequency, making the representation of temporal event data challenging. Further chal-lenges come from the diversity in terms of the scale and volume of events that need to be summarized by the representation. We propose a general and unified approach to handle temporal event data for the purpose of learning a predictive transformer model. …

Secure And Flexible Wildcard Queries, Qing Wang, Donghui Hu, Meng Li, Guomin Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wildcard Keyword Searchable Encryption (WKSE) enables users to search desired encrypted files with wildcard queries. Previous schemes only enabled single-character wildcard queries or restricted multi-character wildcard queries. Even if the two types of queries are supported by several schemes, they are vulnerable to correlation attacks and composition attacks. In this paper, we propose a WKSE scheme Secure Flexible Wildcard Queries (SFWQ) that supports highly flexible wildcard queries and resists correlation and composition attacks. Specifically, we adopt the interval matching method instead of traditional position matching, so that SFWQ supports a variety of queries, including single-character wildcard queries, multi-character wildcard queries, …

Evilscreen Attack: Smart Tv Hijacking Via Multi-Channel Remote Control Mimicry, Yiwei Zhang, Siqi Ma, Tiancheng Chen, Juanru Li, Robert H. Deng, Elisa Bertino

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modern smart TVs often communicate with their remote controls (including the smartphone simulated ones) using multiple wireless channels (e.g., Infrared, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi). However, this multi-channel remote control communication introduces a new attack surface. An inherent security flaw is that remote controls of most smart TVs are designed to work in a benign environment rather than an adversarial one, and thus wireless communications between a smart TV and its remote controls are not strongly protected. Attackers can leverage such a flaw to abuse the remote control communication and compromise smart TV systems. In this paper, we propose EvilScreen, a novel …

Mtdscout : Complementing The Identification Of Insecure Methods In Android Apps Via Source-To-Bytecode Signature Generation And Tree-Based Layered Search, Zicheng Zhang, Haoyu Ma, Daoyuan Wu, Debin Gao, Xiao Yi, Yufan Chen, Yan Wu, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modern Android apps consist of both host app code and third-party libraries. Traditional static analysis tools conduct taint analysis for API misuses on the entire app code, while third-party library (TPL) detection tools focus solely on library code. Both approaches, however, are prone to some inherent false negatives: taint analysis tools may neglect third-party libraries or face timeouts/errors in whole app-based analysis, and TPL detection tools are not designed for pinpointing specific vulnerable methods. These challenges underscore the need for enhanced identification of insecure methods in Android apps, particularly for app markets addressing open-source security incidents. In this paper, we …

Verifiable Outsourced Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme For Cloud-Assisted Mobile E-Health System, Yinbin Miao, Feng Li, Xinghua Li, Jianting Ning, Hongwei Li, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The cloud-assisted mobile electronic health (e-health) system facilitates e-health data sharing between healthcare providers and patients, but also raises the security and privacy concerns of e-health data. Although Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) has been a promising technique to achieve fine-grained access control over encrypted e-health data, it still incurs high encryption and decryption burdens on mobile users such as smartphones and sensors. In addition, malicious cloud servers may conduct incorrect operations due to various interest incentives (e.g., leaking sensitive information to illegal users, saving computation and storage costs). To solve the above issues, in this paper we first propose an …

Privacy-Preserved Data Trading Via Verifiable Data Disturbance, Man Zhang, Xinghua Li, Yanbing Ren, Bin Luo, Yinbin Miao, Ximeng Liu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To motivate data owner (DO) to trade data, the existing data trading allows DO to sell the disturbed data to the data consumer (DC), where the disturbance parameter and the data price are negotiated by them, and DO independently adds the disturbance noise to data (usually continuous type) following the negotiation result. However, DOs may violate the negotiated parameter and add more noise to data while obtaining the negotiated price, which damages DC's disturbed data availability. This deficiency is rooted in the absence of supervision and verifiability on DOs’ independent disturbances. Aiming at the above problem, we devise a privacy-preserved …

Establishing Metrics To Encourage Broader Use Of Atomic Requirements – A Call For Exchange And Experimentation, William L. Honig

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

There are seemingly many advantages to being able to identify, document, test, and trace single or “atomic” requirements during system development and maintenance. Ongoing work with Agile development has focused on “user stories” that can capture individual features for implementation. However, it is still difficult to evaluate the quality of such requirements and teaching their creation is difficult.

Based on a working definition of atomic requirement, this paper proposes a set of metrics for their evaluation. Ten metrics designed to measure atomic requirements are presented here: five used on individual requirements statements and five applied to a requirements document or …

Hardening Interpretable Deep Learning Systems: Investigating Adversarial Threats And Defenses, Eldor Abdukhamidov, Mohammed Abuhamad, Simon S. Woo, Eric Chan-Tin, Tamer Abuhmed

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Deep learning methods have gained increasing attention in various applications due to their outstanding performance. For exploring how this high performance relates to the proper use of data artifacts and the accurate problem formulation of a given task, interpretation models have become a crucial component in developing deep learning-based systems. Interpretation models enable the understanding of the inner workings of deep learning models and offer a sense of security in detecting the misuse of artifacts in the input data. Similar to prediction models, interpretation models are also susceptible to adversarial inputs. This work introduces two attacks, AdvEdge and AdvEdge + …

Containerization On A Self-Supervised Active Foveated Approach To Computer Vision, Dario Dematties, Silvio Rizzi, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Scaling complexity and appropriate data sets availability for training current Computer Vision (CV) applications poses major challenges. We tackle these challenges finding inspiration in biology and introducing a Self-supervised (SS) active foveated approach for CV. In this paper we present our solution to achieve portability and reproducibility by means of containerization utilizing Singularity. We also show the parallelization scheme used to run our models on ThetaGPU–an Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) machine of 24 NVIDIA DGX A100 nodes. We describe how to use mpi4py to provide DistributedDataParallel (DDP) with all the needed information about world size as well as global …

Enhancing Tumor Classification Through Machine Learning Algorithms For Breast Cancer Diagnosis, Lawrence Agbota, Edmund F. Agyemang, Priscilla Kissi-Appiah, Lateef Moshood, Akua Osei- Nkwantabisa, Vincent Agbenyeavu, Abraham Nsiah, Augustina Adjei

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

In cancer diagnosis, machine learning helps improve cancer detection by providing doctors with a second perspective and allowing for faster and more accurate determination and decisions. Numerous studies have used both classic machine learning approaches and deep learning to address cancer classification. In this study, we examine the efficacy of five commonly used machine learning algorithms; both traditional and deep learning models namely, Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree and Deep Neural Networks (DNN). We analyze their ability to properly classify tumors as Benign or Malignant using the Wisconsin breast cancer dataset (WBCD). Random Forest …

Enhancing Evolutionary Computation Through Phylogenetic Analysis, Chenfei Peng

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

In this paper, we will provide an overview of the paper “Phylogeny-informed fitness estimation for test-based parent selection” by Lalejini, et al. [7] Phylogenies, or ancestry trees, provide a detailed look into the evolutionary journey of a population. In evolutionary computation, a phylogeny can represent the progress of an evolutionary algorithm through a search space. Although phylogenetic analysis is mainly used to deepen the understanding of evolutionary algorithms after they have been run, this study explores its potential use in real-time to enhance parent selection during evolutionary searches. The research by Lalejini, et al. introduces the concept of phylogeny-informed fitness …

The Confluence, Volume3, Issue 2, Full Issue

The Confluence

No abstract provided.

Face Mask Detection Based On Deep Learning: A Review, Shahad Fadhil Abbas, Shaimaa Hameed Shaker, Firas. A. Abdullatif

Journal of Soft Computing and Computer Applications

The coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak caused widespread disruption. The World Health Organization has recommended wearing face masks, along with other public health measures, such as social distancing, following medical guidelines, and thermal scanning, to reduce transmission, reduce the burden on healthcare systems, and protect population groups. However, wearing a mask, which acts as a barrier or shield to reduce transmission of infection from infected individuals, hides most facial features, such as the nose, mouth, and chin, on which face detection systems depend, which leads to the weakness of these systems. This paper aims to provide essential insights for researchers and …

An Inference-Centric Approach To Natural Language Processing And Cognitive Modeling, Animesh Nighojkar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Reasoning over natural text is highly nuanced, and interpretations can vary widely depending on cultural background, financial status, age, gender, or even mood. This doctoral dissertation seeks to not only mimic human reasoning behaviors but also improve the task used in natural language processing (NLP) to capture naturalistic reasoning, known as the Natural Language Inference (NLI) task. NLI involves determining whether a hypothesis is true (entailment), false (contradiction), or indeterminate (neutral) based on a given premise. Initially, we will investigate the extent to which NLP systems designed to capture semantic equivalence actually measure meaning equivalence. After establishing that they do …

Addressing Social Inequalities Using Ai, Big Data, And Machine Learning, Erica L. Jensen, Lakell Archer, Sumaya Ali

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

No abstract provided.

Assessment And Prediction Of Meteorological Drought Using Machine Learning Algorithms And Climate Data, Khalid En-Nagre, Mourad Aqnouy, Ayoub Ouarka, Syed Ali Asad Naqvi, Ismail Bouizrou, Jamal Eddine Stitou El Messari, Aqil Tariq, Walid Soufan, Wenzhao Li, Hesham El-Askary

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Monitoring drought in semi-arid regions due to climate change is of paramount importance. This study, conducted in Morocco’s Upper Drâa Basin (UDB), analyzed data spanning from 1980 to 2019, focusing on the calculation of drought indices, specifically the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) at multiple timescales (1, 3, 9, 12 months). Trends were assessed using statistical methods such as the Mann-Kendall test and the Sen’s Slope estimator. Four significant machine learning (ML) algorithms, including Random Forest, Voting Regressor, AdaBoost Regressor, and K-Nearest Neighbors Regressor, were evaluated to predict the SPEI values for both three …

Improving Flextype: Ambiguous Text Input For Users With Visual Impairments, Dylan Gaines, Keith Vertanen

Michigan Tech Publications

We present an improved version of the FlexType interface for nonvisual text input. FlexType enables nonvisual text input on mobile touchscreen devices by allowing users to select from a small number of character groups with gestures instead of targeting letters at specific screen locations. Based on an interview with users who are blind or low vision, we added a letter-entry mode to enable easier entry of difficult words such as proper nouns. We conducted a longitudinal study with users who are legally blind to compare FlexType to users' typical text input methods. While we found FlexType was significantly slower than …

From Graph Theory For Robust Deep Networks To Graph Learning For Multimodal Cancer Analysis, Asim Waqas

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the intersection of graph theory and deep learning, focusing on enhancing the robustness of deep neural networks (DNNs) and applying these advancements to complex problems like cancer diagnosis and treatment. We investigate the structural properties of graphs and their influence on neural network performance, particularly in multimodal learning. The work delves into the design space of DNN architectures using graph-theoretic measures, transforming graphs into DNN architectures for various tasks, and examining their robustness against noise and adversarial attacks. The study extends to medical imaging, highlighting advanced DNN architectures like U-Net for brain tumor segmentation. It addresses the …

A Simple Mobile Plausibly Deniable System Using Image Steganography And Secure Hardware, Lichen Xia, Jinghui Liao, Niusen Chen, Bo Chen, Weisong Shi

Michigan Tech Publications

Traditional encryption methods cannot defend against coercive attacks in which the adversary captures both the user and the possessed computing device, and forces the user to disclose the decryption keys. Plausibly deniable encryption (PDE) has been designed to defend against this strong coercive attacker. At its core, PDE allows the victim to plausibly deny the very existence of hidden sensitive data and the corresponding decryption keys upon being coerced. Designing an efficient PDE system for a mobile platform, however, is challenging due to various design constraints bound to the mobile systems. Leveraging image steganography and the built-in hardware security feature …

An Empirical Study On Detecting And Explaining Global Structural Change In Evolving Graph Using Martingale, Tarun Teja Kairamkonda

Theses and Dissertations

There is a growing interest in practical applications involving networks of interacting entities such as sensor networks, social networks, urban traffic networks, and power grids, all of which can be represented using evolving graphs. Changes in these evolving graphs can signify shifts in the behavior of interacting entities or alterations in the patterns of their interactions. Identifying and detecting these changes is crucial for addressing potential challenges or opportunities in various domains. In this study, we propose an approach for detecting structure change in evolving graphs based on the martingale change detection framework on multiple graph features extracted over time. …

Making Proteomics Accessible: Rokaixplorer For Interactive Analysis Of Phospho-Proteomic Data, Serhan Yılmaz, Filipa Blasco Tavares Pereira Lopes, Daniela Schlatzer, Marzieh Ayati, Mark R. Chance, Mehmet Koyutürk

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present RokaiXplorer, an intuitive web tool designed to address the scarcity of user-friendly solutions for proteomics and phospho-proteomics data analysis and visualization. RokaiXplorer streamlines data processing, analysis, and visualization through an interactive online interface, making it accessible to researchers without specialized training in proteomics or data science. With its comprehensive suite of modules, RokaiXplorer facilitates phospho-proteomic analysis at the level of phosphosites, proteins, kinases, biological processes, and pathways. The tool offers functionalities such as data normalization, statistical testing, activity inference, pathway enrichment, subgroup analysis, automated report generation, and multiple visualizations, including volcano plots, bar plots, heat maps, and network …

Ct-To-Mri Synthesis For High-Dose-Rate Brachytherapy Treatment Planning, Rachel Nicole Gordon

Master's Theses

High-dose-rate (HDR) brachytherapy is a radiation treatment modality that places radioactive sources directly in cancerous regions. Radiation treatment planning for HDR prostate brachytherapy utilizes both CT and MRI to visualize the path of the radioactive source and the prostate gland, respectively. In this work, we propose GAN-CM, a method for conditional CT-to-MRI translation that is based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The proposed method uses the typical generator-discriminator design of GANs with a modified generator that incorporates semantic masks obtained from the domain image. The use of semantic masks allows GAN-CM to better capture the anatomical details and tissue characteristics …

Fspde: A Full Stack Plausibly Deniable Encryption System For Mobile Devices, Jinghui Liao, Niusen Chen, Lichen Xia, Bo Chen, Weisong Shi

Michigan Tech Publications

In today’s digital landscape, the ubiquity of mobile devices underscores the urgent need for stringent security protocols in both data transmission and storage. Plausibly deniable encryption (PDE) stands out as a pivotal solution, particularly in jurisdictions marked by rigorous regulations or increased vulnerabilities of personal data. However, the existing PDE systems for mobile platforms have evident limitations. These include vulnerabilities to multi-snapshot attacks over RAM and flash memory, an undue dependence on non-secure operating systems, traceable PDE entry point, and a conspicuous PDE application prone to reverse engineering. To address these limitations, we have introduced FSPDE, the first Full-Stack mobile …

Specification, Enforcement, And Measurement Of Integrity Policies, Kevin Dennis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The first step to improving an organization's security posture is to define the organization's security goals. At a technical level, these goals are expressed as security policies. Security policies are predicates over programs, that return true or false if the program adheres to the policy. Defining these policies correctly is thus essential to ensuring the overarching security goals are met, but it is often quite difficult to translate human-oriented goals into their technical policy counterparts. In addition, these policies must be specified so that they are enforceable while minimizing false positives and false negatives. Integrity policies, which specify how data …

Unmasking The Vulnerabilities Of Deep Learning Models: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis Of Adversarial Attacks And Defenses, Firuz Juraev, Mohammed Abuhamad, Eric S. Chan-Tin, George K. Thiruvathukal, Tamer Abuhmed

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Deep Learning (DL) is rapidly maturing to the point that it can be used in safety- and security-crucial applications, such as self-driving vehicles, surveillance, drones, and robots. However, adversarial samples, which are undetectable to the human eye, pose a serious threat that can cause the model to misbehave and compromise the performance of such applications. Addressing the robustness of DL models has become crucial to understanding and defending against adversarial attacks. In this study, we perform comprehensive experiments to examine the effect of adversarial attacks and defenses on various model architectures across well-known datasets. Our research focuses on black-box attacks …

Liability For Use Of Artificial Intelligence In Medicine, Nicholson W. Price Ii, Sara Gerke, I. Glenn Cohen

Book Chapters

While artificial intelligence (AI) has substantial potential to improve medical practice, errors will certainly occur, sometimes resulting in injury. Who will be liable? Questions of liability for AI-related injury raise not only immediate concerns for potentially liable parties but also broader systemic questions about how AI will be developed and adopted. The landscape of liability is complex, involving healthcare providers and institutions and the developers of AI systems. In this chapter, we consider these three principal loci of liability. At the outset, we note a few issues that shape our analysis.

Trust, Transparency, And Transport: The Impact Of Privacy Protection On The Acceptance Of Last-Mile Drone Delivery, Jurgen Heinz Famula

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A common set of problems commercial delivery companies face is finding ways to increase the efficiency and reliability of the “last mile” of a package’s journey, all while reducing operating costs. This need for efficiency has driven many companies to explore using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, to get packages to their final destination. Although UAVs have great potential to help increase efficiency in commercial package delivery, this comes at a potential cost to the privacy of people who intersect the flight paths of these unmanned vehicles. This thesis explores the effect of a mobile phone application for commercial …