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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Digital Quorum Sensing For Self-Organizing Malware, Mark E. Fioravanti Ii Dec 2016

Digital Quorum Sensing For Self-Organizing Malware, Mark E. Fioravanti Ii

Theses and Dissertations

INTRODUCTION: Malware authors present an interesting problem for the security community as they evolve and adapt to overcome network and host defenses. The determined adversary is a special class of malware author who may attempt to disrupt national interests. These adversaries may seek potentially novel Command and Control (C2) channels to coordinate their activities. Isolated and air-gapped networks pose an interesting challenge that these adversaries must adapt to in order to maintain persistence on these networks. In this work we propose that a determined adversary may seek to implement a digital quorum sensing system inspired by the quorum sensing systems …


Cross-Spectral Biometric Performance Analysis On High-Resolution Face Images, Praveen Kumar Pandian Shanmuganathan Dec 2016

Cross-Spectral Biometric Performance Analysis On High-Resolution Face Images, Praveen Kumar Pandian Shanmuganathan

Theses and Dissertations

Biometrics is increasingly being used to authenticate the identity of individuals in critical use case devices like smart phones, laptops, and several other access-control systems in our day-to-day lives. Additionally, biometrics is also used in forensic and security sensitive areas to detect and identify suspects involved in bombings, robberies, and several police investigations. In each of these critical scenarios, the high-quality full-frontal face images of the subjects are not accurately captured as those subjects do not intend to register their identity to the Closed-Circuit Cameras. Hence in such cases, identification of the suspects becomes difficult even though we have the …


A Self-Organized Approach For Detecting Communities In Networks, Ben Collingsworth Dec 2016

A Self-Organized Approach For Detecting Communities In Networks, Ben Collingsworth

Theses and Dissertations

The community structure of networks reveals hidden information about the whole network structure that cannot be discerned using other topological properties. Yet, the importance of identifying community structure in networks to many fields such as medicine, social sciences and national security, calls for better approaches for performing this identification. The prevalent community detection algorithms, such as the one proposed by Girvan and Newman, utilize a centralized approach that is unlikely to scale to very large networks and does not handle dynamic networks. Further, existing algorithms provide limited information regarding community overlap, where an individual participates in multiple communities. We propose …


Proactive Approach For The Prevention Of Ddos Attacks In Cloud Computing Environments, Brad Alshehry Dec 2016

Proactive Approach For The Prevention Of Ddos Attacks In Cloud Computing Environments, Brad Alshehry

Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary security systems attempt to provide protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks; however, they mostly use a variety of computing and hardware resources for load distribution and request delays. As a result, ordinary users and website visitors experience timeouts, captchas, and lowspeed connections. In this paper, we propose a new multilayer system for protection against DDoS in the cloud that utilizes Threat Intelligence techniques and a proactive approach to detect traffic behavior anomalies. The first layer of the model analyzes the source IP address in the header of incoming traffic packets and the second layer analyzes the speed of requests …


Soteria: A Persuasive Esecurity Assistant, Punica Bhardwaj Dec 2016

Soteria: A Persuasive Esecurity Assistant, Punica Bhardwaj

Theses and Dissertations

“…security is only as good as the weakest link, and people are the weakest link in the chain.” – B Schneier, 2002 Humans are often referred to as the “weakest link” in the security chain because of the poor security decisions taken by them. There can be many reasons for these decisions, such as lack of understandability of the software, lack of education, and lack of relevant information required to do that particular action. In this Thesis, we focus on the lack of relevant information required at the time of performing the action. In order to provide the user with …


Studies With Dynamic Nuclear Imaging Image Reconstruction Algorithm, Haoran Chang Dec 2016

Studies With Dynamic Nuclear Imaging Image Reconstruction Algorithm, Haoran Chang

Theses and Dissertations

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a useful method for those non-negative multivariate data. In nuclear imaging, NMF, which is also called factor analysis, is used to analyze the 4D image of positron emission tomography and single positron emission computed tomography. Normally, we use factor analysis of dynamic structure (FADS) for the dynamic reconstruction [1]. However, this reconstruction algorithm is extremely dependent on the initial data, which means the result may be unstable when the initial data is not good enough. There are several ways for the initializing, such as splined initialized (SIFADS) [2] and clustering initialized (CIFA) [3][4]. In this …


Gbann-V: Genetically Based Artificial Neural Network With Validation For Optimal Feature Selection And Data Mining, Eric W. Worden Dec 2016

Gbann-V: Genetically Based Artificial Neural Network With Validation For Optimal Feature Selection And Data Mining, Eric W. Worden

Theses and Dissertations

In data mining and machine learning systems, highly predictive feature attributes help researchers and data analysts classify the problem space in the most optimal way. In this thesis paper, a feature subset selection classifier system for data mining and machine learning will be presented. This feature subset selection system will test data from the PIMA Indian Diabetes Data and the Breiman Waveform Data Set. The system collects the input features and then processes them through an evolutionary search process in order to reduce the feature space into an optimal feature set. Reducing irrelevant attributes can decrease the complexity and processing …


Robotic Arm Tracing Curves Recognized By Camera, Timothy Karl Findling Dec 2016

Robotic Arm Tracing Curves Recognized By Camera, Timothy Karl Findling

Theses and Dissertations

Applications such like soldering require robot arms to follow the soldering line as present on a surface. We assume here that the surface to be soldered is remote from the robotic arm, that the soldering is performed via a laser beam, and that the line to be followed can be a curve that may self-intersect (e.g. a crack in the material). We describe research conducted using a robotic arm pointing a laser for tracing a remote line on a smooth surface. The image of the line is converted to a one pixel width skeleton line generated from images using a …


Directed Feedback For Simulation-Based Training In Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery, Anand Malpani Sep 2016

Directed Feedback For Simulation-Based Training In Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery, Anand Malpani

Link Foundation Modeling, Simulation and Training Fellowship Reports

Surgical educators have recommended the need for objective and automated teaching tools for technical skills training. Current training platforms provide automated or manual global assessments that are based on postoperative performance review. Approaches like these lack task segment specific feedback that informs the trainee of where, why and what went wrong that led to the lower performance scores, if at all. Coaching with targeted feedback is crucial not only for new trainees, but also equally critical for experienced surgeons to retain their skills and maintain higher levels of performance. The objective of my thesis project is to develop a virtual …


Analysis Tools And Defense Mechanisms For Dos Hash Attacks, Pratick Henry Bakhtiani Jun 2016

Analysis Tools And Defense Mechanisms For Dos Hash Attacks, Pratick Henry Bakhtiani

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on creating tools for the gathering and management of data for analyzing Denial of Service attacks on the advertisement-based synchronization mechanism used in the DirectDemocracyP2P application. In this report we present two tools that were developed as part of this eort: AttackerClient and Decoding and Distribution. These tools are used to perform the attack and analyze the captured network packets of the attack data, storing them in a database. The Decoding and Distribution tool can distinguish between dierent types of messages. It can also assemble fragmented messages from UDP chunks. The created tools help to manage a …


Robust Structured Tracking, Ivan Bogun Apr 2016

Robust Structured Tracking, Ivan Bogun

Theses and Dissertations

Model-free visual tracking is an important problem in computer vision. The abundance of applications make the problem attractive, and, as a result, significant progress was made, especially in the recent years. A number of reasons make tracking a hard problem: change of lighting conditions throughout the video, change of scale and rotation of the object, as well as frequent and occlusions. In this dissertation, we build upon a tracker known as Struck, which is based on a structured support vector machine. To make the structured tracker robust, we improve it in a number of ways. To make the structured tracker …