Computer Engineering Commons^™

After Five Years Of E-Discovery Missteps: Sanctions Or Safe Harbor?, Milton Luoma, Vicki Luoma

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In 2003 the Zubulake case became the catalyst of change in the world of e-discovery. In that case Judge Shira Scheindlin of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York set guidelines for e-discovery that served as the basis for amending the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) in December 2006. The amendments incorporated a number of concepts that were described by Judge Scheindlin in the Zubulake case. ( Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC, 2003) Since the Zubulake case and the FRCP amendments, numerous cases have interpreted these rules changes, but one of the main points …

Multi-Parameter Sensitivity Analysis Of A Bayesian Network From A Digital Forensic Investigation, Richard E. Overill, Echo P. Zhang, Kam-Pui Chow

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

A multi-parameter sensitivity analysis of a Bayesian network (BN) used in the digital forensic investigation of the Yahoo! email case has been performed using the principle of ‘steepest gradient’ in the parameter space of the conditional probabilities. This procedure delivers a more reliable result for the dependence of the posterior probability of the BN on the values used to populate the conditional probability tables (CPTs) of the BN. As such, this work extends our previous studies using singleparameter sensitivity analyses of BNs, with the overall aim of more deeply understanding the indicative use of BNs within the digital forensic and …

Facilitating Forensics In The Mobile Millennium Through Proactive Enterprise Security, Andrew R. Scholnick

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This work explores the impact of the emerging mobile communication device paradigm on the security-conscious enterprise, with regard to providing insights for proactive Information Assurance and facilitation of eventual Forensic analysis. Attention is given to technology evolution in the areas of best practices, attack vectors, software and hardware performance, access and activity monitoring, and architectural models.

Keywords: Forensics, enterprise security, mobile communication, best practices, attack vectors.

Vector Coprocessor Sharing Techniques For Multicores: Performance And Energy Gains, Spiridon Florin Beldianu

Dissertations

Vector Processors (VPs) created the breakthroughs needed for the emergence of computational science many years ago. All commercial computing architectures on the market today contain some form of vector or SIMD processing.

Many high-performance and embedded applications, often dealing with streams of data, cannot efficiently utilize dedicated vector processors for various reasons: limited percentage of sustained vector code due to substantial flow control; inherent small parallelism or the frequent involvement of operating system tasks; varying vector length across applications or within a single application; data dependencies within short sequences of instructions, a problem further exacerbated without loop unrolling or other …

Energy-Efficient Multi-Criteria Packet Forwarding In Multi-Hop Wireless Networks, Komlan Egoh

Dissertations

Reliable multi-hop packet forwarding is an important requirement for the implementation of realistic large-scale wireless ad-hoc networks. However, packet forwarding methods based on a single criterion, such as the traditional greedy geographic forwarding, are not sufficient in most realistic wireless settings because perfect-reception-within-rangecannot be assumed. Furthermore, methods where the selection of intermediate relaying nodes is performed at the transmitter-side do not adapt well to rapidly changing network environments. Although a few link-aware geographic forwarding schemes have been reported in the literature, the tradeoffs between multiple decision criteria and their impact on network metrics such as throughput, delay and energy …

High-Performance Matrix Multiplication On Intel And Fgpa Platforms, Gang Li

Theses

Matrix multiplication is at the core of high-performance numerical computation. Software methods of accelerating matrix multiplication fall into two categories. One is based on calculation simplification. The other one is based on increasing the memory access efficiency. Also matrix multiplication can be accelerated using vector processors. In this investigation, various matrix multiplication algorithms and the vector-based hardware acceleration method are analyzed and compared in terms of performance and memory requirements. Results are shown for Intel and Xilinx FPGA platforms. They show that when the CPU is fast, Goto's algorithm runs faster than Strassen's algorithm because the data access speed is …

Cloud Forensics Investigation: Tracing Infringing Sharing Of Copyrighted Content In Cloud, Yi-Jun He, Echo P. Zhang, Lucas C.K. Hui, Siu Ming Yiu, K.P. Chow

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Cloud Computing is becoming a significant technology trend nowadays, but its abrupt rise also creates a brand new front for cybercrime investigation with various challenges. One of the challenges is to track down infringing sharing of copyrighted content in cloud. To solve this problem, we study a typical type of content sharing technologies in cloud computing, analyze the challenges that the new technologies bring to forensics, formalize a procedure to get digital evidences and obtain analytical results based on the evidences to track down illegal uploader. Furthermore, we propose a reasoning model based on the probability distribution in a Bayesian …

Ipad2 Logical Acquisition: Automated Or Manual Examination?, Somaya Ali, Sumaya Alhosani, Farah Alzarooni, Ibrahim Baggili

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Due to their usage increase worldwide, iPads are on the path of becoming key sources of digital evidence in criminal investigations. This research investigated the logical backup acquisition and examination of the iPad2 device using the Apple iTunes backup utility while manually examining the backup data (manual examination) and automatically parsing the backup data (Lantern software - automated examination). The results indicate that a manual examination of the logical backup structure from iTunes reveals more digital evidence, especially if installed application data is required for an investigation. However, the researchers note that if a quick triage is needed of an …

A Fuzzy Hashing Approach Based On Random Sequences And Hamming Distance, Frank Breitinger, Harald Baier

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Hash functions are well-known methods in computer science to map arbitrary large input to bit strings of a fixed length that serve as unique input identifier/fingerprints. A key property of cryptographic hash functions is that even if only one bit of the input is changed the output behaves pseudo randomly and therefore similar files cannot be identified. However, in the area of computer forensics it is also necessary to find similar files (e.g. different versions of a file), wherefore we need a similarity preserving hash function also called fuzzy hash function. In this paper we present a new approach for …

The Xbox 360 And Steganography: How Criminals And Terrorists Could Be "Going Dark", Ashley Podhradsky, Rob D’Ovidio, Cindy Casey

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Video game consoles have evolved from single-player embedded systems with rudimentary processing and graphics capabilities to multipurpose devices that provide users with parallel functionality to contemporary desktop and laptop computers. Besides offering video games with rich graphics and multiuser network play, today's gaming consoles give users the ability to communicate via email, video and text chat; transfer pictures, videos, and file;, and surf the World-Wide-Web. These communication capabilities have, unfortunately, been exploited by people to plan and commit a variety of criminal activities. In an attempt to cover the digital tracks of these unlawful undertakings, anti-forensic techniques, such as steganography, …

Double-Compressed Jpeg Detection In A Steganalysis System, Jennifer L. Davidson, Pooja Parajape

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The detection of hidden messages in JPEG images is a growing concern. Current detection of JPEG stego images must include detection of double compression: a JPEG image is double compressed if it has been compressed with one quality factor, uncompressed, and then re-compressed with a different quality factor. When detection of double compression is not included, erroneous detection rates are very high. The main contribution of this paper is to present an efficient double-compression detection algorithm that has relatively lower dimensionality of features and relatively lower computational time for the detection part, than current comparative classifiers. We use a model-based …

Toward Alignment Between Communities Of Practice And Knowledge-Based Decision Support, Jason Nichols, David Biros, Mark Weiser

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The National Repository of Digital Forensics Information (NRDFI) is a knowledge repository for law enforcement digital forensics investigators (LEDFI). Over six years, the NRDFI has undertaken significant design revisions in order to more closely align the architecture of the system with theory addressing motivation to share knowledge and communication within ego-centric groups and communities of practice. These revisions have been met with minimal change in usage patterns by LEDFI community members, calling into question the applicability of relevant theory when the domain for knowledge sharing activities expands beyond the confines of an individual organization to a community of practice. When …

A Proposal For Incorporating Programming Blunder As Important Evidence In Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison Test, P. Vinod Bhattathiripad

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper investigates an unexplored concept in Cyber Forensics, namely, a Programming Blunder. Programming Blunder is identified as a variable or a code segment or a field in a database table, which is hardly used or executed in the context of the application or the user’s functionality. Blunder genes can be found in many parts of any program. It is the contention of this paper that this phenomenon of blunders needs to be studied systematically from its very genetic origins to their surface realizations in contrast to bugs and flaws, especially in view of their importance in software copyright infringement …

Update On The State Of The Science Of Digital Evidence Examination, Fred Cohen

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper updates previous work on the level of consensus in foundational elements of digital evidence examination. Significant consensus is found present only after definitions are made explicit, suggesting that, while there is a scientific agreement around some of the basic notions identified, the use of a common language is lacking.

Keywords: Digital forensics examination, terminology, scientific methodology, testability, validation, classification, scientific consensus

A Scalable Inline Cluster Deduplication Framework For Big Data Protection, Yinjin Fu, Hong Jiang, Nong Xiao

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Cluster deduplication has become a widely deployed technology in data protection services for Big Data to satisfy the requirements of service level agreement (SLA). However, it remains a great challenge for cluster deduplica- tion to strike a sensible tradeoff between the conflicting goals of scalable dedu- plication throughput and high duplicate elimination ratio in cluster systems with low-end individual secondary storage nodes. We propose Σ-Dedupe, a scalable inline cluster deduplication framework, as a middleware deployable in cloud da- ta centers, to meet this challenge by exploiting data similarity and locality to op- timize cluster deduplication in inter-node and intra-node scenarios, …

Remote Chemical And Elemental Analyss By Ultra Fast Spectroscopy, Dennis R. Alexander

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Systems and methods are provided for monitoring materials using ultra fast laser pulses. Ultra fast laser pulses, such as femtosecond or attosecond laser pulses, are applied to the materials and laser pulses that result from interactions between the ultra fast laser pulses and the materials are collected. Spectral content of the resulting pulses is generated and presented. The elemental composition of the materials is determined using the spectral content.

A Crowdsourcing Approach To Labelling A Mood Induced Speech Corpus, John Snel, Alexey Tarasov, Charlie Cullen, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

This paper demonstrates the use of crowdsourcing to accumulate ratings from na ̈ıve listeners as a means to provide labels for a naturalistic emotional speech dataset. In order to do so, listening tasks are performed with a rating tool, which is delivered via the web. The rating requirements are based on the classical dimensions, activation and evaluation, presented to the participant as two discretised 5-point scales. Great emphasis is placed on the participant’s overall understanding of the task, and on the ease-of-use of the tool so that labelling accuracy is reinforced. The accumulation process is ongoing with a goal to …

Multiple Structure Alignment With Mstali, Paul Shealy, Homayoun Valafar

Faculty Publications

Background

Multiple structure alignments have received increasing attention in recent years as an alternative to multiple sequence alignments. Although multiple structure alignment algorithms can potentially be applied to a number of problems, they have primarily been used for protein core identification. A method that is capable of solving a variety of problems using structure comparison is still absent. Here we introduce a program msTALI for aligning multiple protein structures. Our algorithm uses several informative features to guide its alignments: torsion angles, backbone C^α atom positions, secondary structure, residue type, surface accessibility, and properties of nearby atoms. The algorithm allows …

Application Of Intelligent-Objects Simulation To Manufacturing Process Efficiency Analysis: A Case Study, Justin Hamilton

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Science and Technology at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science by Justin Hamilton on May 12, 2012.

Design, Development, And Evaluation Of An Easily Customized Staff Scheduling System, Lakmal Molligoda

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Science and Technology at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science by Lakmal Molligoda on May 10, 2012.

An Enhanced Self-Adaptive Mapreduce Scheduling Algorithm, Xiaoyu Sun

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

MapReduce is a framework for processing huge amounts of data in a distributed environment and Hadoop is Apache’s open source implementation of MapReduce, which is widely used. However, Hadoop’s performance is currently limited by its default task scheduler, which assumes that cluster nodes are homogeneous when estimating the task progress and choosing slow tasks for re-execution. In practice, the homogeneity assumption does not always hold. Longest Approximate Time to End (LATE) is a scheduling algorithm that takes heterogeneity into account. It, however, still depends on a static method to estimate the task execution time. As a result, neither Hadoop default …

Denial Of Convenience Attack To Smartphones Using A Fake Wi-Fi Access Point, Erich Dondyk

HIM 1990-2015

In this thesis, we consider a novel denial of service attack targeted at popular smartphone operating systems. This type of attack, which we call a Denial of Convenience (DoC) attack, prevents non-technical savvy victims from utilizing data services by exploiting the connectivity management protocol of smartphones' operating systems when encountered with a Wi-Fi access point. By setting up a fake Wi-Fi access point without Internet access (using simple devices such as a laptop), an adversary can prompt a smartphone with enabled Wi-Fi features to automatically terminate a valid mobile broadband connection and connect to this fake Wi-Fi access point. This, …

A Multi-Modal Sensing And Communication Platform For Continental-Scale Migratory Bird Tracking, David J. Anthony

Department of Computer Electronics and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis presents a novel platform for tracking migratory birds on a continental scale. Cellular technology is used to augment the short-range radios that have traditionally been used in wireless sensor networks. The platform utilizes multiple sensors, including a GPS and solid state compass. By using these sensors, the platform is capable of not only tracking a bird’s migration path, but also provides information on a bird’s behavior during its life-cycle. Testing methodology utilizing simulations and aspect-oriented programming is used to reveal faults in the platform prior to deployment on wild animals. In collaboration with the International Crane Foundation, and …

Enhancing The Interdisciplinary Curriculum In Cybersecurity By Engaging High-Impact Educational Practices, Li-Chiou Chen, Andreea Cotoranu

Cornerstone 3 Reports : Interdisciplinary Informatics

No abstract provided.

Locating Local Extrema Under Interval Uncertainty: Multi-D Case, Karen Villaverde, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, we need to locate local maxima and/or local minima of a function which is only know with interval uncertainty. For example, in radioastronomy, components of a radiosource are usually identified by locations at which the observed brightness reaches a local maximum. In clustering, different clusters are usually identified with local maxima of the probability density function (describing the relative frequency of different combinations of values). In the 1-D case, a feasible (polynomial-time) algorithm is known for locating local extrema under interval (and fuzzy) uncertainty. In this paper, we extend this result to the general multi-dimensional case.

Bluebeats, Aaron Martinez, Jake Muir, Mishal Shah, Richard Wissemann

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Our group’s senior project is called BlueBeats. The BlueBeats product was created in order to provide a wireless audio gateway between Bluetooth enabled devices. Users of BlueBeats can use an Android or computer application to interface with the BlueBeats device. The Android and computer applications allow the user to easily scan for devices, add/remove devices from their personal list, and pair/connect with a selected Bluetooth enabled device. Once the user is connected to the BlueBeats device, he/she has two options. The first option occurs when the user connects the BlueBeats device to a device with speakers (using 3.5mm audio jack …

Digital Imperatives In Marketing: The Integration Of Communications And Technology To Target Consumers While Protecting Privacy, Catherine Dwyer, Randi Priluck

Cornerstone 3 Reports : Interdisciplinary Informatics

No abstract provided.

Vikis: The Can Collecting Robot, Eric Edwards, Leah Humiston, Jason Foulk

Computer Engineering

RoboRodentia is an annual school-wide robotics competition that has been held during Cal Poly’s Open House for the past thirteen years. The competition rules change from year to year as the objective of the competition changes, but an important aspect of the competition is that the robots run completely autonomously. This paper describes the development, design, and implementation of the RoboRodentia robot from Team Vikis. The technical specifications, robot components, individual responsibilities, and results are described in depth within this document.

Dynamical Model Of Harmonic Generation In Centrosymmetric Semiconductors At Visible And Uv Wavelengths, Michael Scalora, Maria Antonietta Vincenti, Domenico De Ceglia, N. Akozbek, Vito Roppo, M. J. Bloemer, Joseph W. Haus

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

We study second and third harmonic generation in centrosymmetric semiconductors at visible and UV wavelengths in bulk and cavity environments. Second harmonic generation is due to a combination of spatial symmetry breaking, the magnetic portion of the Lorentz force, and quadrupolar contributions from inner core electrons. The material is assumed to have a nonzero, third-order nonlinearity that gives rise to most of the third harmonic signal. Using the parameters of bulk silicon we predict that cavity environments modify the dependence of second harmonic generation on incident angle, while improving third harmonic conversion efficiency by several orders of magnitude relative to …

Probabilistic Qos Analysis In Wireless Sensor Networks, Yunbo Wang

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Emerging applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) require real-time quality of service (QoS) guarantees to be provided by the network. Traditional analysis work only focuses on the first-order statistics, such as the mean and the variance of the QoS performance. However, due to unique characteristics of WSNs, a cross-layer probabilistic analysis of QoS performance is essential. In this dissertation, a comprehensive cross-layer probabilistic analysis framework is developed to investigate the probabilistic evaluation and optimization of QoS performance provided by WSNs. In this framework, the distributions of QoS performance metrics are derived, which are natural tools to discover the probabilities to …