Digital Communications and Networking Commons^™

Network Merge, Alexander York

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project will be simulating the merge of two company's networks. Company A will contain two sties connected with a VPN, and will extend this VPN to one site for Company B. This project will focus on researching how merging a network works, how routes are commonly redistributed across different routing protocols, and how each site can run their own but link servers(DHCP, DNS, etc.). Both sites will be secured from both outside and inside attacks through passwords and other network security features such as VLANs & BPDU Guard.

Monitoring A Small Network With Snmp, Dillon Taynor

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project takes a look at the implementation of three distinct free Network Monitoring Systems (NMSs) and their usage of monitoring a small, virtualized network using the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). The 3 free NMSs are PRTG, LibreNMS, and Zabbix. The network is virtualized within Cisco Modeling Labs. A literature review on relevant media is conducted alongside a review of the three NMSs based on installation difficulty, user friendliness, reporting ability, and their ability to respond to changes in the network. A brief discussion on the difference between an SNMPv2 and SNMPv3 packet is included as well.

Silent Sabotage: Identifying And Preventing Cyber Attacks From Inside Actors, Autumn Groen

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Cyber-attacks are becoming increasingly common and damaging as technology advances each year. Many businesses cannot afford the latest security technologies, and even with the highest security measures, there can still be room for employee error or insider threats that are not taken into account. It is crucial to keep these factors in mind when securing a business network of any size or financial standing.This project will aim to simulate a business environment by first building a small network with three routers and a switch, and implementing some of the common best practices for network hardening from credible organizations like NIST …

Cloud Computing Integration Into Mixed-Reality: Physical To Abstraction, Yassine Chahid, Patrick Slattery

Publications and Research

This research evaluates the progression of cloud computing and mixed-reality technologies, and to identify how these technologies influence advancements in the latter. Both cloud computing and mixed reality have significantly impacted the IT field and the services available to the public and various institutions. Cloud computing provides a valuable way to process information or allocate computational resources on otherwise limited hardware. Augmented or virtual reality hardware would greatly benefit from this by offloading resource-intensive tasks to other machines. The research methodology involves analyzing essential components of both innovations, divided into multiple categories. These components range from physical, hardware-based elements to …

Constructing And Probing A Fortified Network, Maxim Davis

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Computer networking is extremely valuable and is essential to modern infrastructure and life. Due to this fact, network security is also extremely vital and is also constantly under attack due to how precious information is in the modern world. In order to set up network security and harden systems from attack, many organizations establish guidelines, standards and techniques to defend against such threats. There is also the major issue of needing to constantly test these different standards and procedures regarding network security as if these security measures are not tested, the danger of potential threats is exponential. This project seeks …

Preserving User Data Privacy Through The Development Of An Android Solid Library, Alexandria Lim

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

In today’s world where any and all activity on the internet produces data, user data privacy and autonomy are not prioritized. Companies called data brokers are able to gather data elements of personal information numbering in the billions. This data can be anything from purchase history, credit card history, downloaded applications, and service subscriptions. This information can be analyzed and inferences can be drawn from analysis, categorizing people into groups that range in sensitivity — from hobbies to race and income classes. Not only do these data brokers constantly overlook data privacy, this mass amount of data makes them extremely …

Multifaceted Cybersecurity Analysis: Reconnaissance, Exploitation And Mitigation In A Controlled Network Environment, Austin Coontz

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This report details a network penetration test in a simulated environment using GNS3, focusing on the configuration of routers, switches, and hosts. The project successfully identified and exploited network vulnerabilities, including FTP access, misconfigured sudo permissions, and SMB protocol weaknesses. The penetration testing process utilized tools like fping and nmap for reconnaissance and vulnerability scanning, revealing the importance of device configurations in network security. The project concluded with mitigation strategies, emphasizing the need for secure access, robust password policies, and security controls. The experience underscored the significance of continuous learning and adaptation in the ever-evolving field of cybersecurity. The project …

Leveraging Ansible To Locate Network Devices, Elijah Hadden

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This report demonstrates the collection of Layer 2 and Layer 3 network device information using Ansible and explains the limitations identified performing such a procedure. Maintaining dynamic documentation of network information using automation would benefit network security with improvements to attack surface visibility and cyberattack incident response time. After the procedure was conducted, it was determined that Ansible alone is incapable of producing the intended information base due to the way it handles numerical variables. This report identifies limitations in Ansible’s ability to manipulate large quantities of network information and necessitates further discussion regarding what Ansible can and should be …

Defense Of A Small Network, Isabella Adkins

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

A sample network will be virtually created consisting of three routers, one switch, and three hosts. The network will be secured using various methods such as enabling passwords and encryption. After the network has been properly secured, various attacks will be attempted with the goal of breaking into the network. These attacks include reconnaissance (gathering information), penetrating the network using the tool Metasploit, and attempting to get a credential phishing email to end users. If successful in the attacks, the network will be revisited and analyzed for any weaknesses or oversights.

Machine Learning For Unmanned Aerial System (Uas) Networking, Jian Wang

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Fueled by the advancement of 5G new radio (5G NR), rapid development has occurred in many fields. Compared with the conventional approaches, beamforming and network slicing enable 5G NR to have ten times decrease in latency, connection density, and experienced throughput than 4G long term evolution (4G LTE). These advantages pave the way for the evolution of Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) on a large scale. The reduction of consumption, the advancement of control engineering, and the simplification of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) enable the UAS networking deployment on a large scale to become feasible. The UAS networking can finish multiple complex …

Technological Challenges And Innovations In Cybersecurity And Networking Technology Program, Syed R. Zaidi, Ajaz Sana, Aparicio Carranza

Publications and Research

This era is posing a unique challenge to the Cybersecurity and related Engineering Technology areas, stimulated by the multifaceted technological boom expressed in accelerated globalization, digital transformation, the cloud, mobile access apps, and the Internet of Things (IoT)—where more and more devices are connected to the Internet every day. As the use of new Internet-based technologies increase; so does the risk of theft and misuse of sensitive information. This demands the awareness of cyber-criminality and the need for cyber hygiene in corporations, small businesses, and the government. As the need for experienced cybersecurity specialists has skyrocketed in recent years and …

Creature Care, Alexander Weber

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Caring for a pet is a formidable responsibility that requires intense care and monitoring in order to protect and prolong the life of the animal. Traditionally, caring for a reptile presents a unique challenge for pet owners, who not only need to care for the animal but for the environment as well. Individual species distinctly require precise monitoring and control of environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity, and air quality; and deviation from the nominal values often leads to serious health problems for the reptile. To simplify reptile ownership, a system was designed that measures the critical parameters of a …

Dynamic Routing And Network Monitoring For The Polywog Protocol, Ryan Lawrence, Josh Pfeffer

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This document analyzes the implementation of dynamic routing for router nodes in a mesh network. It examines the algorithm used to populate both the minimum-distance and the routing tables. Furthermore, it describes the node configurations used for testing and applications for mesh networks.

Additionally, this document describes the implementation and testing of network monitoring in a mesh network. It discusses the steps used to forward active nodes in the network between router nodes, a gateway node, and a network monitor.

Lastly, this paper details our future plans for implementing additional features for a network monitor.

Improving Hpc Communication Library Performance On Modern Architectures, Matthew G. F. Dosanjh

Computer Science ETDs

As high-performance computing (HPC) systems advance towards exascale (10^18 operations per second), they must leverage increasing levels of parallelism to achieve their performance goals. In addition to increased parallelism, machines of that scale will have strict power limitations placed on them. One direction currently being explored to alleviate those issues are many-core processors such as Intel’s Xeon Phi line. Many-core processors sacrifice clock speed and core complexity, such as out of order pipelining, to increase the number of cores on a die. While this increases floating point throughput, it can reduce the performance of serialized, synchronized, and latency sensitive code …

Ipv6 And Ospf Networks Lab, Kevin Jeremy Watson

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Musictrakr, Benjamin Lin

Computer Engineering

MusicTrackr is an IoT device that musicians attach to their instruments. The device has a start and stop button that allows users to record their playing sessions. Each recorded session is sent wirelessly to a cloud database. An accompanying website displays all of the recorded sessions, organized by date. After picking a specific date, the user can view graphs showing total practice time and average session length as well play back any recordings during that date. In addition, the user may add comments to any specific date or recording. Lastly, the user may tag a specific date with a color …

Home Networking With Enterprise Equipment, Alex Lowers

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project tested various wired and wireless topologies and benchmarked download speeds and quality for various types of media. For music, topology had a negligible impact. High quality video streams were impacted by latency introduced in the wireless topologies. Likewise, video game streaming, especially games of high graphical fidelity, were negatively impacted when streamed over a wireless network. For all types of media, a fully wired topology is recommended.

Implementing Is-Is Routing And Dhcp Services In An Ipv4 Network, Laura Thompson

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This research project explores the operation of the IS-IS routing protocol, as well as DHCP and DNS services provided by a Raspberry Pi computer. IS-IS is a routing protocol that is commonly ignored in most training and certification programs, because it is most frequently used by service providers. However, IS-IS solutions are also deployed in some large enterprise networks, making experience with the protocol a valuable skill.

In order to gain a deeper understanding of the routing domains, route propagation, and general operation of IS-IS, additional services were implemented in this project. A Raspberry Pi computer was used as an …

Conception, Design And Construction Of A Remote Wifi Vehicle Using Arduino, Clayton Broman

Physics

The scope of this senior project was to make a wireless vehicle controlled via Internet Protocol. This vehicle operates remotely and without direct line of sight. Commands are sent from a program running on a laptop and transmitted using a wireless router. Visual data is retrieved from a network camera, mounted on the vehicle, in real-time, to see where you are going.

Lyfi, Kianoosh Salami, Justin Cotton, Elush Shirazpour

Electrical Engineering

This paper will cover the steps necessary to design, build, and manage networkable smart light switches over WiFi via a mobile application. It contains a microcontroller running a real time operating system, a WiFi module, a Java server with SQLite databasing, and a mobile phone application.

LyFi is designed to turn on/off and dim household lights while only requiring the same installation procedure as a less capable dimmer switch. Once installed and connected to a network, LyFi will self-discover and configure. The server automatically propogates a database of nodes where any mobile device running an application can receive an updated …

Sports-Tool, Bryant Ung

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Creating events and finding people to play sports is a hard thing to do. The solution to this problem is to provide a web based interactive site that allows people to create and join different type of events and interact with each other by creating teams.

Design And Usability Of Social Networking Web Sites, Robert Pessagno

Graphic Communication

This study began by designing the layout of a new social networking Web site and putting it to practical use. A team of computer science students at Cal Poly developed this social networking site for their senior project, and called it Friend Riot. The new and innovative features that Friend Riot consists of set it apart from other popular social networking Web sites, but its interface was lacking a good design. When the new design was implemented, it was tested against the competition: Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.

The purpose of this study is to determine the effects that Web design …

General Direction Routing Protocol, Sean Michael Lydon

Master's Theses

The General Direction Routing Protocol (GDRP) is a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

multi-path routing protocol which abstracts localization information (commonly GPS

coordinates) into relative direction information in order to perform routing decisions. By

generating relative direction information GDRP is able to operate with fewer precision

requirements than other protocols. This abstraction also allows the integration of other emerging

hardware-based localization techniques, for example, Beamforming Sensor Arrays.

GDRP does not specifically address the next hop a packet should take, but instead specifies a

direction it should travel. This direction abstraction allows for multiple paths to be taken through

the network thus …

Hierarchical Routing In Manets Using Simple Clustering, Adam Carnine

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis presents both a review of current MANET routing protocols and a new MANET routing algorithm. The routing protocols reviewed include representative samples from the three primary forms of routing found in MANETS: proactive routing, reactive routing and hybrid routing. Secure algorithms are given special treatment in the review. In addition several protocol enhancements are discussed.

The proposed routing protocol is designed to support networks of a medium size, containing over 200 nodes but less than 3,000 nodes. The design is intentionally simple to allow ease of implementation in comparison with other MANET protocols that provide similar functionality.