Computer Sciences Commons^™

Hidden Markov Models For Software Piracy Detection, Shabana Kazi

Master's Projects

The unauthorized copying of software is often referred to as software piracy. Soft- ware piracy causes billions of dollars of annual losses for companies and governments worldwide. In this project, we analyze a method for detecting software piracy. A meta- morphic generator is used to create morphed copies of a base piece of software. A hidden Markov Model is trained on the opcode sequences extracted from these mor- phed copies. The trained model is then used to score suspect software to determine its similarity to the base software. A high score indicates that the suspect software may be a modified …

Metamorphic Worm That Carries Its Own Morphing Engine, Sudarshan Madenur Sridhara

Master's Projects

Metamorphic malware changes its internal structure across generations, but its functionality remains unchanged. Well-designed metamorphic malware will evade signature detection. Recent research has revealed techniques based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) for detecting many types of metamorphic malware, as well as techniques for evading such detection. A worm is a type of malware that actively spreads across a network to other host systems. In this project we design and implement a prototype metamorphic worm that carries its own morphing engine. This is challenging, since the morphing engine itself must be morphed across replications, which imposes significant restrictions on the structure …

Keyword Search In Social Networks, Vijeth Patil

Master's Projects

People often tend to ask their friends whenever they want some information related to topics like events, restaurants, or movies as majority of the search engines do not yield the desired results which people are seeking [1]. At present, majority of the current Open Source search engines like those based on Nutch also do not yield desired or expected results. Popular search engine, Google recently incorporated the feature of providing information from your social circle but only limited to Google Plus in your search results. On the other hand, micro blogging site Twitter has emerged as a vital source of …

Full-Text Indexing For Heritrix, Darshan Karia

Master's Projects

It is useful to create personalized web crawls, and search through them later on to see the archived content and compare it with current content to see the difference and evolution of that portion of web. It is also useful for searching through the portion of web you are interested in an offline mode without need of going online. To accomplish that, in this project I focus towards indexing of the archive (ARC) files generated by an open source web-crawler named Heritrix. I developed a Java module to perform indexing on these archive files. I used large set of archive …

Online Collaborative Editor, Aditya Rao

Master's Projects

“Online collaborative editor” is a node.js based browser application that provides real time collaborative editing of files and improves pair programming. Current real time editors fail to provide simultaneous viewing and editing of files within the server and results in a complex version controlling system. Such systems are also vulnerable to deadlocks and race conditions. This project provides a platform for real time collaborative editors, which can support simultaneous editing and viewing of files and handle concurrency problems by using locking mechanism. The experiment results showed that node.js platform provides good performance for collaborative editing.

Virtual Kung Fu Sifu With Kinect, Naveen Kumar Keerthy

Master's Projects

In this computer world almost everything is made available online. All possible systems are making use of the Internet and so does the learning systems. People willing to learn any kind of arts, but have no time would look for a tutor who would be available at his/her ease. An attempt to satisfy the same is the project that I’ve implemented. My focus is mainly on Kung fu an ancient form of Chinese Martial arts. Learning Kung fu needs a lot of practice and therefore demands having a professional kung fu master monitoring all the time, which is very expensive. …

Social Networking For Botnet Command And Control, Ashutosh Singh

Master's Projects

A botnet is a group of compromised computers which is often a large group under the command and control of a malicious user, known as a botmaster. Botnets are generally recognized as a serious Internet threat. Botnets can be used for a wide variety of malicious attacks including spamming, distributed denial of service, and obtaining sensitive information such as authentication credentials or credit card information. This project involves building a botnet centered on Twitter. Our botnet uses individual bots controlled by commands tweeted by botmaster; the botnet can expand in a viral manner by following affected Twitter user’s friends. This …

Blog Information Classification, Nishant Patel

Master's Projects

nformation Classification is the categorization of the huge amount of data in an efficient and useful way. In the current scenario data is growing exponentially due to the rise of internet rich applications. One such source of information is the blogs. Blogs are web logs maintained by their authors that contain information related to a certain topic and also contain authors view about that topic. Micro blogs, on the other hands, are variations of blogs that contain smaller data as compared to blogs. Nevertheless, it also contains rich information. In this project, Twitter, a micro blogging website has been targeted …

Cloud Information Summarization With Mobile Interface, Hrishikesh Paranjape

Master's Projects

There is a large driver for making existing data accessible everywhere, not just for people who happen to be at connected computers. This project aims to design, develop, and test Information Summarization System with its mobile application, which will allow end user the quick mobile access to underlying data on the web. The mobile application allows users to search for information about topic of their interest. This application will make use of existing established search engines to summarize the information on requested topic. The computation will be done on the cloud and communication between client and server will be done …

Ad-Hoc Stream Adaptive Protocol, Ray Xie

Master's Projects

With the growing market of smart-phones, sophisticated applications that do extensive computation are common on mobile platform; and with consumers’ high expectation of technologies to stay connected on the go, academic researchers and industries have been making efforts to find ways to stream multimedia contents to mobile devices. However, the restricted wireless channel bandwidth, unstable nature of wireless channels, and unpredictable nature of mobility, has been the major road block for wireless streaming advance forward. In this paper, various recent studies on mobility and P2P system proposal are explained and analyzed, and propose a new design based on existing P2P …

Knowledge Engineering In Search Engines, Yun-Chieh Lin

Master's Projects

With large amounts of information being exchanged on the Internet, search engines have become the most popular tools for helping users to search and filter this information. However, keyword-based search engines sometimes obtain information, which does not meet user’ needs. Some of them are even irrelevant to what the user queries. When the users get query results, they have to read and organize them by themselves. It is not easy for users to handle information when a search engine returns several million results. This project uses a granular computing approach to find knowledge structures of a search engine. The project …

Promoter Prediction Based On E. Coli Characteristics, Li Wen

Master's Projects

This project uses the characteristic in TATA-less regions on E. coli sequences to predict the promoter region before TSS, which indicate that the real gene has been located. It uses several well-known algorithms and methods such as the sliding window algorithm, and a clustering method to predict promoters. It also contains D2K algorithm and method to compare predicted result with other online promoter package result.

Metagenome – Processing And Analysis, Sheetal Gosrani

Master's Projects

Metagenome means “multiple genomes” and the study of culture independent genomic content in environment is called metagenomics. Because of the advent of powerful and economic next generation sequencing technology, sequencing has become cheaper and faster and thus the study of genes and phenotypes is transitioning from single organism to that of a community present in the natural environmental sample. Once sequence data are obtained from an environmental sample, the challenge is to process, assemble and bin the metagenome data in order to get as accurate and complete a representation of the populations present in the community or to get high …

Cryptanalysis Of Typex, Kelly Chang

Master's Projects

Rotor cipher machines played a large role in World War II: Germany used Enigma; America created Sigaba; Britain developed Typex. The breaking of Enigma by Polish and (later) British cryptanalysts had a huge impact on the war. Despite be- ing based on the commercial version of the Enigma, there is no documented successful attack on Typex during its time in service. This project covers the Typex machine. We consider the development of Typex, we discuss how Typex works, and we present and analyze two distinct cryptanalytic attacks on the cipher. The first attack assumes the rotor wirings are known and …

Defeating Masquerade Detection, Avani Kothari

Master's Projects

A masquerader is an attacker who has obtained access to a legitimate user’s computer and is pretending to be that user. The masquerader’s goal is to conduct an attack while remaining undetected. Hidden Markov models (HMM) are well-known machine learning techniques that have been used successfully in a wide variety of fields, including speech recognition, malware detection, and intrusion detection systems. Previous research has shown that HMM trained on a user’s UNIX commands can provide an effective means of masquerade detection. Na ̈ Bayes is a simple classifier based on Bayes Theorem, ıve which relies on the command frequency. In …

Online Monitoring Using Kismet, Sumit Kumar

Master's Projects

Colleges and universities currently use online exams for student evaluation. Stu- dents can take assigned exams using their laptop computers and email their results to their instructor; this process makes testing more efficient and convenient for both students and faculty. However, taking exams while connected to the Internet opens many opportunities for plagiarism and cheating. In this project, we design, implement, and test a tool that instructors can use to monitor the online activity of students during an in-class online examination. This tool uses a wireless sniffer, Kismet, to capture and classify packets in real time. If a student attempts …

Cryptsim: Simulators For Classic Rotor Ciphers, Miao Ai

Master's Projects

In this project, web-based visual simulators have been implemented for three classic rotor cipher machines: Enigma, Typex, and Sigaba. Enigma was used by Germany during World War II, while Typex is a British cipher that was based on the commercial version of the Enigma. Sigaba is a relatively complex machine that was used by the Americans during the 1940s and into the 1950s. Sigaba is the most secure of the three ciphers, there was no successful attack on Sigaba during its service lifetime. Our web-based visual simulators are functionally equivalent to the actual electro- mechanical machines. Each simulator allows the …

Identifying Influential Bloggers, Sivanaga Prasad Shola

Master's Projects

This project addresses the problem of identifying influential bloggers in a web blog community. It investigates the problem of identifying influential bloggers by scoring each blog post, posted by bloggers, based on influential factors and ranking bloggers accordingly. There exists preliminary models that attempted to solve the problem but they lack some of important aspects of the blogosphere. In this project we try to combine and improve the methodologies and ideas present in the previous models. We have introduced a new influence factor, which is a combination of facebook likes and shares, into the literature that can further evaluate blog …

Cross-Lingual Text Classification With Model Translation And Document Translation, Zhang Zhang

Master's Projects

Most enterprise search engines employ data mining classifiers to classify documents. Along with the economic globalization, many companies are starting to have overseas branches or divisions. Those branches are using local languages in documents and emails. When a classifier tries to categorize those documents in another language, the trained model in mono-lingual will not work. The most direct solution would be to translate those documents in other languages into one language by the machine translator. But this solution suffers from inaccuracy of the machine translation, and the over-head work is economically inefficient. Another approach is to translate the feature extracted …

Stock Market Analysis, Sachin Kamath

Master's Projects

Stock market plays a pivotal role in financial aspect of the nation's growth, but stock market is highly volatile and complex in nature. It is affected by significant political issues, analyst calls, news articles , company's future plans of expansions and growth and many more. Hence, any investor would be interested in understanding the stock market overtime and how the factors mentioned above affect the behavior of the stock market.

On Every business day, millions of traders invest in stock market. Most of these investors lose money and others gain. However, considering any trading day, loss or gain is absolutely …

Desktop Sharing Portal, Ming-Chen Tsai

Master's Projects

Desktop sharing technologies have existed since the late 80s. It is often used in scenarios where collaborative computing is beneficial to participants in the shared environment by the control of the more knowledgeable party. But the steps required in establishing a session is often cumbersome to many. Selection of a sharing method, obtaining sharing target’s network address, sharing tool’s desired ports, and firewall issues are major hurdles for a typical non-IT user. In this project, I have constructed a web-portal that helps collaborators to easily locate each other and initialize sharing sessions. The portal that I developed enables collaborated sessions …

An Algorithm For Data Reorganization In A Multi-Dimensional Index, Urvashi Samaresh Nair

Master's Projects

In spatial databases, data are associated with spatial coordinates and are retrieved based on spatial proximity. A spatial database uses spatial indexes to optimize spatial queries. An essential ingredient for efficient spatial query processing is spatial clustering of data and reorganization of spatial data. Traditional clustering algorithms and reorganization utilities lack in performance and execution. To solve this problem we have developed an algorithm to convert a two dimensional spatial index into a single dimensional value and then a reorganization is done on the spatial data. This report describes this algorithm as well as various experiments to validate its effectiveness.

Java Design Pattern Obfuscation, Praneeth Kumar Gone

Master's Projects

Software Reverse Engineering (SRE) consists of analyzing the design and imple- mentation of software. Typically, we assume that the executable file is available, but not the source code. SRE has many legitimate uses, including analysis of software when no source code is available, porting old software to a modern programming language, and analyzing code for security vulnerabilities. Attackers also use SRE to probe for weaknesses in closed-source software, to hack software activation mecha- nisms (or otherwise change the intended function of software), to cheat at games, etc. There are many tools available to aid the aspiring reverse engineer. For example, …

A Genetic Algorithm Scheduling Approach For Virtual Machine Resources In A Cloud Computing Environment, Shailesh Sawant

Master's Projects

In the present cloud computing environment, the scheduling approaches for VM (Virtual Machine) resources only focus on the current state of the entire system. Most often they fail to consider the system variation and historical behavioral data which causes system load imbalance. To present a better approach for solving the problem of VM resource scheduling in a cloud computing environment, this project demonstrates a genetic algorithm based VM resource scheduling strategy that focuses on system load balancing. The genetic algorithm approach computes the impact in advance, that it will have on the system after the new VM resource is deployed …

Interface Design For Graphics Editor On Multi- Touch Point Systems, Srujitha Mullapudi

Master's Projects

The main objective of the project is to use the touch sensitive device capability of the iPad to give a better user experience and functionalities for the artists. In this project, I have explored different interactions that can give a better experience for artist when compared to traditional computer-mouse interaction. In the traditional Computer-mouse interaction it is very difficult for the user to draw smooth curves, without having to use built-in functions for drawing curves. In this application the user can use the touch panel to do free drawing, the user can basically feel the device as a object for …

Augmented-Life Phone Organizer, Chao-Hsin Shih

Master's Projects

Augmented-Life Phone Organizer (ALPO) is a geo-based mobile application for users to search for businesses and make corresponding actions such as calling, navigating, or viewing comments about the business. Users can take image notes and attach them to a virtual wall, so others can view the image at the same GPS coordinates later. Users can also view all business images and augmented notes superimposed on the real world through a mobile device screen and camera. We have measured application usability and feature practicality by conducting function tests on three users, and the results are encouraging.

Generation Of Forests On Terrain With Dynamic Lighting And Shadowing, Jonathan Ben-David

Master's Projects

The purpose of this research project is to exhibit an efficient method of creating dynamic lighting and shadowing for the generation of forests on terrain. In this research project, I use textures which contain images of trees from a bird’s eye view in order to create a high scale forest. Furthermore, by manipulating the transparency and color of the textures according to the algorithmic calculations of light and shadow on terrain, I provide the functionality of dynamic lighting and shadowing. Finally, by analyzing the OpenGL pipeline, I design my code in order to allow efficient rendering of the forest.

Actibot: A Botnet To Evade Active Detection, Xinjun Zhang

Master's Projects

In recent years, botnets have emerged as a serious threat on the Internet. Botnets are commonly used for exploits such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, identity theft, spam, and click fraud. The immense size of botnets, some consisting of hundreds of thousands of compromised computers, increases the speed and severity of attacks. Unlike passive behavior anomaly detection techniques, active botnet detection aims to collect evidence actively, in order to reduce detection time and increase accuracy. In this project, we develop and analyze a botnet that we call ActiBot, which can evade some types of active detection mechanisms. Future …

Url Recommender Using Parallel Processing, Ravi Kishore Penta

Master's Projects

The main purpose of this project is to section similar news and articles from a vast variety of news articles. Let’s say, you want to read about latest news related to particular topic like sports. Usually, user goes to a particular website and goes through some news but he won’t be able to cover all the news coverage in a single website. So, he would be going through some other news website to checking it out and this continues. Also, some news websites might be containing some old news and the user might be going through that. To solve this, …

Association Mining In Database Machine, Jindou Jiao

Master's Projects

Association rule is wildly used in most of the data mining technologies. Apriori algorithm is the fundamental association rule mining algorithm. FP-growth tree algorithm improves the performance by reduce the generation of the frequent item sets. Simplex algorithm is a advanced FP-growth algorithm by using bitmap structure with the simplex concept in geometry. The bitmap structure implementation is particular designed for storing the data in database machines to support parallel computing the association rule mining.