Digital Communications and Networking Commons^™

Lightweight Data Aggregation Scheme Against Internal Attackers In Smart Grid Using Elliptic Curve Cryptography, Debiao He, Sherali Zeadally, Huaqun Wang, Qin Liu

Information Science Faculty Publications

Recent advances of Internet and microelectronics technologies have led to the concept of smart grid which has been a widespread concern for industry, governments, and academia. The openness of communications in the smart grid environment makes the system vulnerable to different types of attacks. The implementation of secure communication and the protection of consumers’ privacy have become challenging issues. The data aggregation scheme is an important technique for preserving consumers’ privacy because it can stop the leakage of a specific consumer’s data. To satisfy the security requirements of practical applications, a lot of data aggregation schemes were presented over the …

Tum: Towards Ubiquitous Multi-Device Localization For Cross-Device Interaction, Han Xu, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Ke Yi, Chunyi Peng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cross-device interaction is becoming an increasingly hot topic as we often have multiple devices at our immediate disposal in this era of mobile computing. Various cross-device applications such as file sharing, multi-screen display, and crossdevice authentication have been proposed and investigated. However, one of the most fundamental enablers remains unsolved: How to achieve ubiquitous multi-device localization? Though pioneer efforts have resorted to gesture-assisted or sensing-assisted localization, they either require extensive user participation or impose some strong assumptions on device sensing abilities. This introduces extra costs and constraints, and thus degrades their practicality. To overcome these limitations, we propose TUM, an …

Project Pradio, Trigg T. La Tour

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper examines the design and manufacturing of a device that allows two or more users to share a wireless audio stream. Effectively, this allows a group of people to listen to the same audio in a synchronized manner. The product was unable to be completed in the allotted time. Regardless, significant progress was made and valuable insight into the circuit board design process was gained.

Automation In Entertainment: Concept, Design, And Application, Ryan Thally

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The focus of this thesis is to explore the automation technology used in the modern entertainment industry. Upon completion of my thesis, I will deliver a working prototype of the chosen technology and present its capabilities in a choreographed show.

Software Updates To A Multiple Autonomous Quadcopter Search System (Maqss), Jared Speck, Toby Chan

Computer Engineering

A series of performance-based and feature implementation software updates to an existing multiple vehicle autonomous target search system is outlined in this paper. The search system, MAQSS, is designed to address a computational power constraint found on modern autonomous aerial platforms by separating real-time and computationally expensive tasks through delegation to multiple multirotor vehicles. A Ground Control Station (GCS) is also described as part of the MAQSS system to perform the delegation and provide a low workload user interface. Ultimately, the changes to MAQSS noted in this paper helped to improve the performance of the autonomous search mission, the accuracy …

Discovering Your Selling Points: Personalized Social Influential Tags Exploration, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan, Ju Fan, Dongxiang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social influence has attracted significant attention owing to the prevalence of social networks (SNs). In this paper, we study a new social influence problem, called personalized social influential tags exploration (PITEX), to help any user in the SN explore how she influences the network. Given a target user, it finds a size-k tag set that maximizes this user’s social influence. We prove the problem is NP-hard to be approximated within any constant ratio. To solve it, we introduce a sampling-based framework, which has an approximation ratio of 1−ǫ 1+ǫ with high probabilistic guarantee. To speedup the computation, we devise more …

Rules Based Analysis Engine For Application Layer Ids, David Scrobonia

Master's Theses

Web application attack volume, complexity, and costs have risen as people, companies, and entire industries move online. Solutions implemented to defend web applications against malicious activity have traditionally been implemented at the network or host layer. While this is helpful for detecting some attacks, it does not provide the gran- ularity to see malicious behavior occurring at the application layer. The AppSensor project, an application level intrusion detection system (IDS), is an example of a tool that operates in this layer. AppSensor monitors users within the application by observing activity in suspicious areas not able to be seen by traditional …

Expression And Reception: An Analytic Method For Assessing Message Production And Consumption In Cmc, Kang Namkoong, Dhavan V. Shah, Bryan Mclaughlin, Ming-Yuan Chih, Tae Joon Moon, Shawnika Hull, David H. Gustafson

Community & Leadership Development Faculty Publications

This article presents an innovative methodology to study computer-mediated communication (CMC), which allows analysis of the multi-layered effects of online expression and reception. The methodology is demonstrated by combining the following three data sets collected from a widely tested eHealth system, the Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System (CHESS): (1) a flexible and precise computer-aided content analysis; (2) a record of individual message posting and reading; and (3) longitudinal survey data. Further, this article discusses how the resulting data can be applied to online social network analysis and demonstrates how to construct two distinct types of online social networks—open and targeted …

Who R U? Identity Theft And Unl Students, Marcia L. Dority Baker, Cheryl O'Dell

Information Technology Services: Publications

How can academic institutions help educate their students about the risks of identity theft? Or teach students to better understand how one’s online presence can hold so much joy and angst? For one campus, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the opportunity came from a middle school teacher engaging his students in a future problem-solving activity. UNL had the opportunity to create a 45-minute presentation on identity theft for local public school students who would be spending the day on campus researching this topic.

While preparing the presentation, we realized a top 10 list on identity theft for UNL students would be …

Making Random - Cryptography And The Generation Of Random Sequences, Samuel Barton

Thinking Matters Symposium Archive

The algorithm utilizes the behavior of modern operating systems to generate random bits by putting the process to sleep for 10 microseconds, and then comparing the actual number of microseconds slept to the expected amount. The reason why this works for generating \random" bits is that modern operating systems do not wake processes exactly when they request. This is due to process scheduling. The algorithm uses the randomness in actual sleep time to generate each bit.

The bits are not truly random, as if a person were able to force the algorithm to always execute, then we would not have …

The Design And Implementation Of A Pcie-Based Less Label Switch, Amy C. Williams

Senior Honors Theses

With the explosion of the Internet of Things, the number of smart, embedded devices has grown exponentially in the last decade, with growth projected at a commiserate rate. These devices create strain on the existing infrastructure of the Internet, creating challenges with scalability of routing tables and reliability of packet delivery. Various schemes based on Location-Based Forwarding and ID-based routing have been proposed to solve the aforementioned problems, but thus far, no solution has completely been achieved. This thesis seeks to improve current proposed LORIF routers by designing, implementing, and testing and a PCIe-based LESS switch to process unrouteable packets …

A Framework For Categorization Of Industrial Control System Cyber Training Environments, Evan G. Plumley

Theses and Dissertations

First responders and professionals in hazardous occupations undergo training and evaluations for the purpose of mitigating risk and damage. For example, helicopter pilots train with multiple categorized simulations that increase in complexity before flying a real aircraft. However in the industrial control cyber incident response domain, where incident response professionals help detect, respond and recover from cyber incidents, no official categorization of training environments exist. To address this gap, this thesis provides a categorization of industrial control training environments based on realism. Four levels of environments are proposed and mapped to Blooms Taxonomy. This categorization will help organizations determine which …

Active Response Using Host-Based Intrusion Detection System And Software-Defined Networking, Jonathon S. Goodgion

Theses and Dissertations

This research proposes AHNSR: Active Host-based Network Security Response by utilizing Host-based Intrusion Detection Systems (HIDS) with Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to enhance system security by allowing dynamic active response and reconstruction from a global network topology perspective. Responses include traffic redirection, host quarantining, filtering, and more. A testable SDN-controlled network is constructed with multiple hosts, OpenFlow enabled switches, and a Floodlight controller, all linked to a custom, novel interface for the Open-Source SECurity (OSSEC) HIDS framework. OSSEC is implemented in a server-agent architecture, allowing scalability and OS independence. System effectiveness is evaluated against the following factors: alert density and a …

Framework For Industrial Control System Honeypot Network Traffic Generation, Htein A. Lin

Theses and Dissertations

Defending critical infrastructure assets is an important but extremely difficult and expensive task. Historically, decoys have been used very effectively to distract attackers and in some cases convince an attacker to reveal their attack strategy. Several researchers have proposed the use of honeypots to protect programmable logic controllers, specifically those used to support critical infrastructure. However, most of these honeypot designs are static systems that wait for a would-be attacker. To be effective, honeypot decoys need to be as realistic as possible. This paper introduces a proof-of-concept honeypot network traffic generator that mimics genuine control systems. Experiments are conducted using …

Applying Cyber Threat Intelligence To Industrial Control Systems, Matthew P. Sibiga

Theses and Dissertations

A cybersecurity initiative known as cyber threat intelligence (CTI) has recently been developed and deployed. The overall goal of this new technology is to help protect network infrastructures. Threat intelligence platforms (TIPs) have also been created to help facilitate CTI effectiveness within organizations. There are many benefits that both can achieve within the information technology (IT) sector. The industrial control system (ICS) sector can also benefit from these technologies as most ICS networks are connected to IT networks. CTI and TIPs become resourceful when using indicators of compromise (IOCs) from known ICS malware attacks and an open source intrusion detection …

Lightweight Three-Factor Authentication And Key Agreement Protocol For Internet-Integrated Wireless Sensor Networks, Qi Jiang, Sherali Zeadally, Jianfeng Ma, Debiao He

Information Science Faculty Publications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will be integrated into the future Internet as one of the components of the Internet of Things, and will become globally addressable by any entity connected to the Internet. Despite the great potential of this integration, it also brings new threats, such as the exposure of sensor nodes to attacks originating from the Internet. In this context, lightweight authentication and key agreement protocols must be in place to enable end-to-end secure communication. Recently, Amin et al. proposed a three-factor mutual authentication protocol for WSNs. However, we identified several flaws in their protocol. We found that their …

Efficient Revocable Id-Based Signature With Cloud Revocation Server, Xiaoying Jia, Debiao He, Sherali Zeadally, Li Li

Information Science Faculty Publications

Over the last few years, identity-based cryptosystem (IBC) has attracted widespread attention because it avoids the high overheads associated with public key certificate management. However, an unsolved but critical issue about IBC is how to revoke a misbehaving user. There are some revocable identity-based encryption schemes that have been proposed recently, but little work on the revocation problem of identity-based signature has been undertaken so far. One approach for revocation in identity-based settings is to update users' private keys periodically, which is usually done by the key generation center (KGC). But with this approach, the load on the KGC will …

Isbord: Internet Searching Based On Resource Description, Zhiwei Yan, Sherali Zeadally, Guanggang Geng

Information Science Faculty Publications

Based on the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) concept and the mature model of the current TCP/IP-based Internet, we propose content searching based on universal and scalable resource description, namely ISBORD (Internet Searching based on Resource Description). This novel concept aims to improve the efficiency of content searching and simplifies the end-user functionality to support the evolution of the content-centric Internet.

On The Development Of A One-Time Pad Generator For Personalising Cloud Security, Paul Tobin, Lee Tobin, Michael Mckeever, Jonathan Blackledge

Conference papers

Cloud computing security issues are being reported in newspapers, television, and on the Internet, on a daily basis. Furthermore, in 2013, Edward Snowden alleged backdoors were placed in a number of encryption systems by the National Security Agency causing confidence in public encryption to drop even further. Our solution allows the end-user to add a layer of unbreakable security by encrypting the data locally with a random number generator prior to uploading data to the Cloud. The prototype one-time pad generator is impervious to cryptanalysis because it generates unbreakable random binary sequences from chaos sources initiated from a natural noise. …

Source-Channel Coding For Coordination Over A Noisy Two-Node Network, Sarah A. Obead

Theses

Recently, the concept of coordinating actions between distributed agents has emerged in the information theory literature. It was first introduced by Cuff in 2008 for the point-to-point case of coordination. However, Cuff’s work and the vast majority of the follow-up research are based on establishing coordination over noise-free communication links. In contrast, this thesis investigates the open problem of coordination over noisy point-to-point links. The aim of this study is to examine Shannon’s source-channel separation theorem in the context of coordination. To that end, a general joint scheme to achieve the strong notion of coordination over a discrete memoryless channel …

Promoting Information Resources To Students: Using Wordpress To Maintain Library Data Sets, Derek Stadler

Publications and Research

Although it began as a blog tool, WordPress has grown into a complete content management system with thousands of interactive themes available. Since it uses the MySQL database management system, the open-source software suits the needs of library websites by aggregating a college library’s complete database inventory. Rather than update several HTML pages within a site when new vendors are added or a URL is changed, information from vendors can be maintained in a database table and then displayed to students, highlighting available resources and information. The presentation highlights the use of some simple WordPress plugins to manage many aggregators …

Communication Through Social Technologies: A Study Of Israeli Women, Jeretta Horn Nord 405-747-0320, Dafni Biran Achituv, Joanna Paliszkiewicz

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Social technologies have changed the way we communicate allowing users to interact, share knowledge, reach out to friends and family, keep up with the news, and even promote and support a business. A study of Israeli women was conducted to determine how social technologies platforms — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+ — are used and the benefits realized. Women worldwide face challenges including economic, educational, health, and political. Israel women, like women in every other country in the world, are challenged with gender inequity. Do women who use social technologies believe that these platforms provide empowerment leading to greater …

Annual Report 2016-2017, Depaul University College Of Computing And Digital Media

CDM Annual Reports

The College of Computing and Digital Media has always prided itself on curriculum, creative work, and research that stays current with changes in our various fields of instruction. As we looked back on our 2016-17 academic year, the need to chronicle the breadth and excellence of this work became clear. We are pleased to share with you this annual report, our first, highlighting our accomplishments.

Last year, we began offering three new graduate programs and two new certificate programs. We also planned six degree programs and three new certificate programs for implementation in the current academic year. CDM faculty were …

Qos Recommendation In Cloud Services, Xianrong Zheng, Li Da Xu, Sheng Chai

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

As cloud computing becomes increasingly popular, cloud providers compete to offer the same or similar services over the Internet. Quality of service (QoS), which describes how well a service is performed, is an important differentiator among functionally equivalent services. It can help a firm to satisfy and win its customers. As a result, how to assist cloud providers to promote their services and cloud consumers to identify services that meet their QoS requirements becomes an important problem. In this paper, we argue for QoS-based cloud service recommendation, and propose a collaborative filtering approach using the Spearman coefficient to recommend cloud …

Using Mediawiki, The Semantic Mediawiki Extension And Relfinder For Heritage Data Management: A Rock Art Case Study, Robert A. Haubt

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This paper looks at the usefulness of the MediaWiki and relevant wiki extensions for rock art data management and research. The paper follows a framework provided by the Global Rock Art Database www.rockartdatabase.com and examines a new database model for a semantic data management approach. Through practical examples it explores the usefulness of wikis in the data management life cycle from data planning to collection, storage and dissemination and examines interconnections within each phase of the cycle. The paper proposes a combined use of the Semantic MediaWiki extension and the RelFinder for visualization of semantic relationships, which could assist researchers …

Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks 2016, Qindong Sun, Schancang Li, Shanshan Zhao, Hongjian Sun, Li Xu, Arumugam Nallamathan

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

The industrial wireless sensor network (IWSN) is the next frontier in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), which is able to help industrial organizations to gain competitive advantages in industrial manufacturing markets by increasing productivity, reducing the costs, developing new products and services, and deploying new business models.

When Machines Decide: Justice.Exe Learning Modules, Praxis Lab Team

Law School Historical Documents

Learning modules for the Praxis Lab Honors Course

When Machines Decide: Creating Justice.Exe, Randy Dryer, Suresh Venkatasubramanian, Austin Anderson, Abigail Busath, Logan Cox, Morgan Cox, Logan Erickson, Zachary Grena, Joseph Hutchins, Skyler Jayson, Andrew Yang

Law School Historical Documents

Our Praxis Lab centered on the increasingly important need for algorithmic literacy, transparency and oversight, particularly in the context of the use of algorithms in the criminal justice system. Accordingly, we (1) designed an educational simulation to illustrate the function of algorithms in the context of criminal sentencing; (2) created several pre-packaged course modules that faculty in a variety of disciplines could integrate into their existing curriculum to educate students about algorithms and their increasing role in modern society; and (3) curated a set of best practices designed to promote the transparency and oversight of algorithmic systems.

Guaranteed Rendezvous For Cognitive Radio Networks Based On Cycle Length, Li Gou

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Rendezvous is a fundamental process establishing a communication link on common channel between a pair of nodes in the cognitive radio networks. How to reach rendezvous efficiently and effectively is still an open problem. In this work, we propose a guaranteed cycle lengths based rendezvous (CLR) algorithm for cognitive radio networks. When the cycle lengths of the two nodes are coprime, the rendezvous is guaranteed within one rendezvous period considering the time skew between the two nodes. When T_i and T_j are not coprime, i.e., T_i=T_j, the deadlock checking and node IDs are combined …

High Performance Multiview Video Coding, Caoyang Jiang

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Following the standardization of the latest video coding standard High Efficiency Video Coding in 2013, in 2014, multiview extension of HEVC (MV-HEVC) was published and brought significantly better compression performance of around 50% for multiview and 3D videos compared to multiple independent single-view HEVC coding. However, the extremely high computational complexity of MV-HEVC demands significant optimization of the encoder. To tackle this problem, this work investigates the possibilities of using modern parallel computing platforms and tools such as single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) instructions, multi-core CPU, massively parallel GPU, and computer cluster to significantly enhance the MVC encoder performance. The aforementioned computing tools …