Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Effective Memory Management For Mobile Environments, Ahmed Mohamed Abd-Elhaffiez Hussein

Open Access Dissertations

Smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices exhibit vastly different constraints compared to regular or classic computing environments like desktops, laptops, or servers. Mobile devices run dozens of so-called “apps” hosted by independent virtual machines (VM). All these VMs run concurrently and each VM deploys purely local heuristics to organize resources like memory, performance, and power. Such a design causes conflicts across all layers of the software stack, calling for the evaluation of VMs and the optimization techniques specific for mobile frameworks.

In this dissertation, we study the design of managed runtime systems for mobile platforms. More specifically, we deepen the …

Convicted By Memory: Automatically Recovering Spatial-Temporal Evidence From Memory Images, Brendan D. Saltaformaggio

Open Access Dissertations

Memory forensics can reveal “up to the minute” evidence of a device’s usage, often without requiring a suspect’s password to unlock the device, and it is oblivious to any persistent storage encryption schemes, e.g., whole disk encryption. Prior to my work, researchers and investigators alike considered data-structure recovery the ultimate goal of memory image forensics. This, however, was far from sufficient, as investigators were still largely unable to understand the content of the recovered evidence, and hence efficiently locating and accurately analyzing such evidence locked in memory images remained an open research challenge.

In this dissertation, I propose breaking from …

A Study Of Security Issues Of Mobile Apps In The Android Platform Using Machine Learning Approaches, Lei Cen

Open Access Dissertations

Mobile app poses both traditional and new potential threats to system security and user privacy. There are malicious apps that may do harm to the system, and there are mis-behaviors of apps, which are reasonable and legal when not abused, yet may lead to real threats otherwise. Moreover, due to the nature of mobile apps, a running app in mobile devices may be only part of the software, and the server side behavior is usually not covered by analysis. Therefore, direct analysis on the app itself may be incomplete and additional sources of information are needed. In this dissertation, we …

Using Ubiquitous Data To Improve Smartwatches' Context Awareness, Yuankun Song

Open Access Theses

Nowadays, more and more data is being generated by various software applications, services and smart devices every second. The data contains abundant information about people’s daily lives. This research explored the possibility of improving smartwatches’ context awareness by using common ubiquitous data. The researcher developed a prototype system consisting of an Android application and a web application, and conducted an experiment where 10 participants performed several tasks with the help of a smartwatch. The result showed a significant improvement of the smartwatch’s context awareness running the prototype application, which used ubiquitous data to automatically execute proper actions according to contexts. …

Driftwatch Pollinator Mapping Application, Shreyas G. Sundararaman, Larry Theller, Bernard Engel

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Over 65% percent of food consumed in the United States is pollinated by bees. Unfortunately, due to poor farming practices, pesticides are sprayed in bee sensitive areas unknowingly and as a result, the bee population is dwindling at an alarming rate. With lesser bees to pollinate crops, produce is compromised on a very large scale and this could have disastrous impacts on the nation's needs for food. Apiarists and beehive owners face the major responsibility of ensuring that their hives aren't affected by dangerous insecticides and pesticides from the farming areas that they might visit during their crop pollination cycles …

Analysis Of Android Update Packages As A Method To Load Forensic Utilities And Malicious Applications To An Android Device, Mark Lohrum

Open Access Theses

Android devices are extremely popular and are projected to stay popular. Both forensic tools and malware exist designed specifically for Android devices. The purpose of this study is to explore a new method of loading forensic tools and malware to Android devices. This new method is the update module, which is used to install updates to the operating system. This thesis proposed and completed research to test four different custom update packages on three different Android devices. Two of the update packages contain forensic utilities and the other two contain malicious tools. An update package collecting web history using the …