Computer Sciences Commons^™

Life (Logical Iosforensics Examiner): An Open Source Iosbackup Forensics Examination Tool, Ibrahim Baggili, Shadi Al Awawdeh, Jason Moore

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In this paper, we present LiFE (Logical iOS Forensics Examiner), an open source iOS backup forensics examination tool. This tool helps both researchers and practitioners alike in both understanding the backup structures of iOS devices and forensically examining iOS backups. The tool is currently capable of parsing device information, call history, voice messages, GPS locations, conversations, notes, images, address books, calendar entries, SMS messages, Aux locations, facebook data and e-mails. The tool consists of both a manual interface (where the user is able to manually examine the backup structures) and an automated examination interface (where the tool pulls out evidence …

Why Penetration Testing Is A Limited Use Choice For Sound Cyber Security Practice, Craig Valli, Andrew Woodward, Peter Hannay, Mike Johnstone

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Penetration testing of networks is a process that is overused when demonstrating or evaluating the cyber security posture of an organisation. Most penetration testing is not aligned with the actual intent of the testing, but rather is driven by a management directive of wanting to be seen to be addressing the issue of cyber security. The use of penetration testing is commonly a reaction to an adverse audit outcome or as a result of being penetrated in the first place. Penetration testing used in this fashion delivers little or no value to the organisation being tested for a number of …

Awareness Of Scam E-Mails: An Exploratory Research Study, Tejashree D. Datar, Kelly A. Cole, Marcus K. Rogers

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The goal of this research was to find the factors that influence a user’s ability to identify e-mail scams. It also aimed to understand user’s awareness regarding e-mail scams and actions that need to be taken if and when victimized. This study was conducted on a university campus with 163 participants. This study presented the participants with two scam e-mails and two legitimate e-mails and asked the participants to correctly identify these e-mails as scam or legitimate. The study focused on the ability of people to differentiate between scam and legitimate e-mails. The study attempted to determine factors that influence …

A Systematic Security Evaluation Of Android’S Multi-User Framework, Edward Paul Ratazzi, Yousra Aafer, Amit Ahlawat, Hao Hao, Yifei Wang, Wenliang Du

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Like many desktop operating systems in the 1990s, Android is now in the process of including support for multiuser scenarios. Because these scenarios introduce new threats to the system, we should have an understanding of how well the system design addresses them. Since the security implications of multi-user support are truly pervasive, we developed a systematic approach to studying the system and identifying problems. Unlike other approaches that focus on specific attacks or threat models, ours systematically identifies critical places where access controls are not present or do not properly identify the subject and object of a decision. Finding these …

Global Edf Scheduling For Parallel Real-Time Tasks, Jing Li

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

As multicore processors become ever more prevalent, it is important for real-time programs to take advantage of intra-task parallelism in order to support computation-intensive applications with tight deadlines. In this thesis, we consider the Global Earliest Deadline First (GEDF) scheduling policy for task sets consisting of parallel tasks. Each task can be represented by a directed acyclic graph (DAG) where nodes represent computational work and edges represent dependences between nodes. In this model, we prove that GEDF provides a capacity augmentation bound of 4-2/m and a resource augmentation bound of 2-1/m. The capacity augmentation bound acts as a linear-time schedulability …

Digital Circuit Projects: An Overview Of Digital Circuits Through Implementing Integrated Circuits - Second Edition, Charles W. Kann

Open Educational Resources

Digital circuits, often called Integrated Circuits or ICs, are the central building blocks of a Central Processing Unit (CPU). To understand how a computer works, it is essential to understand the digital circuits which make up the CPU. This text introduces the most important of these digital circuits; adders, decoders, multiplexers, D flip-flops, and simple state machines.

What makes this textbook unique is that it puts the ability to understand these circuits into the hands of anyone, from hobbyists to students studying Computer Science. This text is designed to teach digital circuits using simple projects the reader can implement. But …

Decaf: A New Event Detection Logic For The Purpose Of Fusing Delineated-Continuous Spatial Information, Kerry Q. Hart

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Geospatial information fusion is the process of synthesizing information from complementary data sources located at different points in space and time. Spatial phenomena are often measured at discrete locations by sensor networks, technicians, and volunteers; yet decisions often require information about locations where direct measurements do not exist. Traditional methods assume the spatial phenomena to be either discrete or continuous, an assumption that underlies and informs all subsequent analysis. Yet certain phenomena defy this dichotomy, alternating as they move across spatial and temporal scales. Precipitation, for example, appears continuous at large scales, but it can be temporally decomposed into discrete …

Learning Directional Co-Occurrence For Human Action Classification, Hong Liu, Mengyuan Liu, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spatio-temporal interest point (STIP) based methods have shown promising results for human action classification. However, state-of-art works typically utilize bag-of-visual words (BoVW), which focuses on the statistical distribution of features but ignores their inherent structural relationships. To solve this problem, a descriptor, namely directional pair-wise feature (DPF), is proposed to encode the mutual direction information between pairwise words, aiming at adding more spatial discriminant to BoVW. Firstly, STIP features are extracted and classified into a set of labeled words. Then in each frame, the DPF is constructed for every pair of words with different labels, according to their assigned directional …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Spring 2014, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge. The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …

Surface Reconstruction Using Differential Invariant Signatures, Sophors Khut

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

This thesis addresses the problem of reassembling a broken surface. Three di- mensional curve matching is used to determine shared edges of broken pieces. In practice, these pieces may have different orientation and position in space, so edges cannot be directly compared. Instead, a differential invariant signature is used to make the comparison. A similarity score between edge signatures determines if two pieces share an edge. The Procrustes algorithm is applied to find the translations and rotations that best fit shared edges. The method is implemented in Matlab, and tested on a broken spherical surface.

Ear Contour Detection And Modeling Using Statistical Shape Models, Satish Ravindran

All Theses

Ear detection is an actively growing area of research because of its applications in human head tracking and biometric recognition. In head tracking, it is used to augment face detectors and to perform pose estimation. In biometric systems, it is used both as an independent modality and in multi-modal biometric recognition. The ear shape is the preferred feature used to perform detection because of its unique structure in both 2D color images and 3D range images. Ear shape models have also been used in literature to perform ear detection, but at a cost of a loss in information about the …

Design Of A Custom Software Application To Monitor And Communicate Cnc Machining Process Information To Aid In Chatter Identification, Valerie Pezzullo

All Theses

In any manufacturing environment, it is important to be able to monitor the Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining process so that high quality parts can be produced in the least amount of time in order to be profitable. This involves acquiring the proper parameters needed from the machine's controller, which can prove to be difficult with proprietary machine tools that tend to limit access to the internal data collected by the controller. This closed approach to controller design also means that many technological advances that have recently become prevalent in society are not being adopted in the manufacturing industry, preventing …

Life (Logical Ios Forensics Examiner): An Open Source Ios Backup Forensics Examination Tool, Ibrahim Baggili, Shadi Al Awawdeh, Jason Moore

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this paper, we present LiFE (Logical iOS Forensics Examiner), an open source iOS backup forensics examination tool. This tool helps both researchers and practitioners alike in both understanding the backup structures of iOS devices and forensically examining iOS backups. The tool is currently capable of parsing device information, call history, voice messages, GPS locations, conversations, notes, images, address books, calendar entries, SMS messages, Aux locations, facebook data and e-mails. The tool consists of both a manual interface (where the user is able to manually examine the backup structures) and an automated examination interface (where the tool pulls out evidence …

Co-Emulation Of Scan-Chain Based Designs Utilizing Sce-Mi Infrastructure, Bill Jason Pidlaoan Tomas

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Simulation times of complex System-on-Chips (SoC) have grown exponentially as designs reach the multi-million ASIC gate range. Verification teams have adopted emulation as a prominent methodology, incorporating high-level testbenches and FPGA/ASIC hardware for system-level testing (SLT). In addition to SLT, emulation enables software teams to incorporate software applications with cycle-accurate hardware early on in the design cycle. The Standard for Co-Emulation Modeling Interface (SCE-MI) developed by the Accelera Initiative, is a widely used communication protocol for emulation which has been accepted by major electronic design automation (EDA) companies.

Scan-chain is a design-for-test (DFT) methodology used for testing digital circuits. To …

Tapjacking Threats And Mitigation Techniques For Android Applications, Vanessa Cooper

Dissertations, Theses and Capstone Projects (Full IR Collection)

With the increased dependency on web applications through mobile devices, malicious attack techniques have now shifted from traditional web applications running on desktop or laptop (allowing mouse click- based interactions) to mobile applications running on mobile devices (allowing touch-based interactions). Clickjacking is a type of malicious attack originating in web applications, where victims are lured to click on seemingly benign objects in web pages. However, when clicked, unintended actions are performed without the user’s knowledge. In particular, it is shown that users are lured to touch an object of an application triggering unintended actions not actually intended by victims. This …

A Novel, Tag-Based File-System, Aaron Laursen

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

For decades, computer use has largely focused on managing and manipulating files-- creating and consuming media, browsing the web, software development, and even, with such systems as UNIX and Plan$9$, direct device access can largely be reduced to locating, creating, reading, and writing files. To facilitate these operations, developers have created a vast assortment of file-systems, each presenting a unique framework underlying nearly everything people do with a computer.

For various reasons, these file-systems have historically represented only incremental improvements and alterations from their predecessors, leaving the basic design and interaction models relatively unchanged. Because of this, most common file-systems …

Aircraft Access To System-Wide Information Management Infrastructure, Mohammad Moallemi, Remzi Seker, Mohamed Mahmoud, Jayson Clifford, John Pesce, Carlos Castro, Massood Towhidnejad, Jonathan Standley, Robert Klein

Publications

Within the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) NextGen project, System Wide Information Management (SWIM) program is the essential core in facilitating the collaborative access to the aviation information by various stakeholders. The Aircraft Access to SWIM (AAtS) initiative is an effort to connect the SWIM network to the aircraft to exchange the situational information between the aircraft and the National Airspace System (NAS). This paper summarizes the highlevel design and implementation of the AAtS infrastructure; namely the communication medium design, data management system, pilot peripheral, as well as the security of the data being exchanged and the performance of the entire …

Variable Bounds Analysis Of A Climate Model Using Software Verification Techniques, Peter Revesz, Robert Woodward

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Software verification techniques often use some approximation method that identifies the limits of the possible range of values that variables in a computer program can take during execution. Current climate models are complex computer programs that are typically iterated time-step by time-step to predict the next value of the climate-related variables. Because these iterative methods are necessarily computed only for a fixed number of iterations, they are unable to answer many long-range questions that may be posed regarding climate change, for example, whether there are natural fluctuations or whether a tipping point is reached after which there is no return …

On The Database Lookup Problem Of Approximate Matching, Frank Breitinger, Harald Baier, Douglas White

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Investigating seized devices within digital forensics gets more and more difficult due to the increasing amount of data. Hence, a common procedure uses automated file identification which reduces the amount of data an investigator has to look at by hand. Besides identifying exact duplicates, which is mostly solved using cryptographic hash functions, it is also helpful to detect similar data by applying approximate matching.

Let x denote the number of digests in a database, then the lookup for a single similarity digest has the complexity of O(x). In other words, the digest has to be compared against …

On Understanding Diffusion Dynamics Of Patrons At A Theme Park, Jiali Du, Akshat Kumar, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work, we focus on the novel application of learning the diffusion dynamics of visitors among attractions at a large theme park using only aggregate information about waiting times at attractions. Main contributions include formulating optimisation models to compute diffusion dynamics. We also developed algorithm capable of dealing with noise in the data to populate parameters in the optimization model. We validated our approach using cross validation on a real theme park data set. Our approach provides an accuracy of about 80$% for popular attractions, providing solid empirical support for our diffusion models.

A Quantitative Analysis Of Decision Process In Social Groups Using Human Trajectories, Truc Viet Le, Siyuan Liu, Hoong Chuin Lau, Ramayya Krishnan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A group's collective action is an outcome of the group's decision-making process, which may be reached by either averaging of the individual preferences or following the choices of certain members in the group. Our problem here is to decide which decision process the group has adopted given the data of the collective actions. We propose a generic statistical framework to infer the group's decision process from the spatio-temporal data of group trajectories, where each "trajectory" is a sequence of group actions. This is achieved by systematically comparing each agent type's influence on the group actions based on an array of …

Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning In Average-Reward Dynamic Dcops, Duc Thien Nguyen, William Yeoh, Hoong Chuin Lau, Shlomo Zilberstein

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Researchers have introduced the Dynamic Distributed Constraint Optimization Problem (Dynamic DCOP) formulation to model dynamically changing multi-agent coordination problems, where a dynamic DCOP is a sequence of (static canonical) DCOPs, each partially different from the DCOP preceding it. Existing work typically assumes that the problem in each time step is decoupled from the problems in other time steps, which might not hold in some applications. Therefore, in this paper, we make the following contributions: (i) We introduce a new model, called Markovian Dynamic DCOPs (MD-DCOPs), where the DCOP in the next time step is a function of the value assignments …

Humanity Hyper-Externalized, Josh Gloe

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

First Step Mental Health App, Joshua Martin, James Faraday, Mackenzie Lopez

Undergraduate Research Symposium

The goal of this project is to create a tool that provides students at Minnesota State University, Mankato with mental health information through a freely available smartphone application (App). Our approach uses a software engineering design process that focuses on who our customers are, what resources are available, and how we can best connect the two to improve student lives. We identified the stakeholders involved and worked with campus mental health professionals to help shape our App. While there is a broad range of mental health topics, we have focused on materials related to depression. The first process gives the …

Major Advancements In Personal Computing, Brandon Brooks

Senior Seminars

This research essay expounds on the history and the journey of the Personal Computer. You will read about some of the most important items that the author felt contributed to the advancement of the PC over the years. The dates of the information ranges from the late 1960s up until the last year or so. The author talks about hardware components and software components, but the bulk of the material in this paper explains the history of each major milestone and what contributed to making it better, or more useful than the last. Each sub-topic will bring us closer to …

Software Architecture And Development For Controlling A Hubo Humanoid Robot, Manas Ajit Paldhe

Open Access Theses

Due to their human-like structure, humanoid robots are capable of doing some complex tasks. Since a humanoid robot has a large number of actuators and sensors, controlling it is a difficult task. For various tasks like balancing, driving a car, and interacting with humans, real-time response of the robot is essential. Efficiently controlling a humanoid robot requires a software that guarantees real-time interface and control mechanism so that real-time response of the robot is possible. Addition- ally, to reduce the development effort and time, the software should be open-source, multi-lingual and should have high-level constructs inbuilt in it.

Currently Robot …

Analysis Of Eye Tracking Data Obtained By Customers’ Product Evaluations, Shweta Sanjay Sareen

Open Access Theses

Within the mechanical engineering discipline, product representational studies have been used to inform engineers on the suitability of their product designs for prospective customers. Mainly based in customers' oral responses, engineers would modify the product design accordingly. The incorporation of eye tracking data, in addition to the oral responses, in these product representational studies is a recent addition. This case study performs data analysis of a product representational study conducted by Reid, MacDonald and Du (2012), which considers the impact of 2D and 3D product representation on customer judgments with associated eye gaze patterns. The aim of this thesis is …

Reliability Guided Resource Allocation For Large-Scale Supercomputing Systems, Shruti Umamaheshwaran

Open Access Theses

In high performance computing systems, parallel applications request a large number of resources for long time periods. In this scenario, if a resource fails during the application runtime, it would cause all applications using this resource to fail. The probability of application failure is tied to the inherent reliability of resources used by the application. Our investigation of high performance computing systems operating in the field has revealed a significant difference in the measured operational reliability of individual computing nodes. By adding awareness of the individual system nodes' reliability to the scheduler along with the predicted reliability needs of parallel …

A Farm Management Information System With Task-Specific, Collaborative Mobile Apps And Cloud Storage Services, Jonathan Tyler Welte

Open Access Theses

Modern production agriculture is beginning to advance beyond deterministic, scheduled operations between relatively few people to larger scale, information-driven efficiency in order to respond to the challenges of field variability and meet the needs of a growing population. Since no two farms are the same with respect to information and management structure, a specialized farm management information system (FMIS) which is tailored to the realities on the ground of individual farms is likely to be more effective than generalized FMIS available today.

This thesis presents the design of a FMIS using proven user-centered design principles. This approach resulted in the …

Predictive Analytics For Outpatient Appointments, Nang Laik Ma, Khataniar Seemanta, Dan Wu, Serene Seng Ying Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Healthcare is a very important industry where analytics has been applied successfully to generate insights about patients, identify bottleneck and to improve the business efficiency. In this paper, we aim to look at the patient appointment process as the hospital is experiencing high volume of ?no shows. ?No shows have a high impact on longer appointment lead time for patients, poor patient satisfaction and loss of revenue for hospital. We use data analytics to identify pattern of ?no shows, develop a statistical model to predict the probability of ?no shows and finally operationalizing the model to embed the analytics solution …