Computer Sciences Commons^™

Automatic Execution Path Finding Tool, Fan Yang

Master's Projects

Today, there are many hackers trying to break software using reverse engineering tech- niques. To better protect software, we need to understand reverse engineering methods. This project presents a tool that automatically analyzes executable code in a manner simi- lar to the way an attack might analyze code.

Using reverse engineering techniques, executables can be disassembled to yield an as- sembly code representation of the program. Assembly code is much more human reada- ble than binary code. With assembly code, an attacker can attempt to modify the program to do something other than what was intended by the developer.

The …

Sql Querie Recommendations: A Query Fragment-Based Approach, Jayad Akbarnejad, Magdalini Eirinaki, Suju Koshy, Duc On, Neoklis Polyzotis

Faculty Publications

Relational database systems are becoming increasingly popular in the scientific community to support the interactive exploration of large volumes of data. In this scenario, users employ a query interface (typically, a web-based client) to issue a series of SQL queries that aim to analyze the data and mine it for interesting information. First-time users, however, may not have the necessary knowledge to know where to start their exploration. Other times, users may simply overlook queries that retrieve important information. In this work we describe a framework to assist non-expert users by providing personalized query recommendations. The querying behavior of the …

Personal Vs. Social, Magdalini Eirinaki

Faculty Publications

The last few years we witnessed an impressive growth in social networks and in applications that add value to their amassed information. At the same time, the continuing expansion of mobile platforms and applications (e.g. iPhone), combined with the overwhelming supply of information and services, makes effective personalization and context-awareness much required features. One may consider "personal" and "social" data management as comprising two distinct directions with conflicting characteristics. However, it can be argued that they complement each other and that in future applications they will ultimately converge. This "personal vs. social" predicament presents a number of interesting topics that …

Geometrical Structure And Analysis Of Association Rule, Rajat Sar

Master's Projects

Association rule mining helps us to identify the association between items from a large transactional data set. It has always been a time consuming process because of repeatedly scanning of the data set. Apriori Algorithm [1] and FP-Tree Algorithm [2] are the two methods to find out the association of items in a large transactional item set. Both the above algorithm works differently (Apriori follows Bottom-Up Approach & FP-Tree follows Top-Down Approach) in order to get the association. Associations of items generated from the above two algorithms can be represented in geometry. The geometrical form of associations is called Simplical …

Detecting Undetectable Computer Viruses, Sujandharan Venkatachalam

Master's Projects

Signature-based detection relies on patterns present in viruses and provides a relatively simple and efficient method for detecting known viruses. At present, most anti-virus systems rely primarily on signature detection. Metamorphic viruses are one of the most difficult types of viruses to detect. Such viruses change their internal structure, which provides an effective means of evading signature detection. Previous work has provided a rigorous proof that a fairly simple metamorphic engine can generate viruses that will evade any signature-based detection. In this project, we first implement a metamorphic engine that is provably undetectable—in the sense of signature-based detection. We then …

Geometrical Structure And Analysis Of Association Rules, Sar Rajat

Master's Projects

Association rule mining helps us to identify the association between items from a large transactional data set. It has always been a time consuming process because of repeatedly scanning of the data set. Apriori Algorithm [1] and FP-Tree Algorithm [2] are the two methods to find out the association of items in a large transactional item set. Both the above algorithm works differently (Apriori follows Bottom-Up Approach & FP-Tree follows Top-Down Approach) in order to get the association. Associations of items generated from the above two algorithms can be represented in geometry. The geometrical form of associations is called Simplical …

Improved Software Activation Using Multithreading, Jian Rui Zhang

Master's Projects

Software activation is an anti-piracy technology designed to verify that software products have been legitimately licensed [1]. It is supposed to be quick and simple while simultaneously protecting customer privacy. The most common form of software activation is through the entering of legitimate product serial numbers by users, which sometimes are also known as product keys. This technique is employed by various software, from small shareware programs to large commercial programs such as Microsoft Office. However, software activation based on a serial number appears to be weak, as various cracks for a majority of programs are available and can be …

Security In Peer-To-Peer Sip Voip, Richa Marwaha

Master's Projects

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is one of the fastest growing technologies in the world. It is used by people all over the world for communication. But with the growing popularity of internet, security is one of the biggest concerns. It is important that the intruders are not able to sniff the packets that are transmitted over the internet through VoIP. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the most popular and commonly used protocol of VoIP. Now days, companies like Skype are using Peer-to-Peer SIP VoIP for faster and better performance. Through this project I am improving an already existing Peer-to-Peer …

Clustering And Validation Of Microarray Data Using Consensus Clustering, Sarbinder Kallar

Master's Projects

Clustering is a popular method to glean useful information from microarray data. Unfortunately the results obtained from the common clustering algorithms are not consistent and even with multiple runs of different algorithms a further validation step is required. Due to absence of well defined class labels, and unknown number of clusters, the unsupervised learning problem of finding optimal clustering is hard. Obtaining a consensus of judiciously obtained clusterings not only provides stable results but also lends a high level of confidence in the quality of results. Several base algorithm runs are used to generate clusterings and a co-association matrix of …

Email Data Mining: An Approach To Construct An Organization Position-Wise Structure While Performing Email Analysis, Bhargav Vadher

Master's Projects

In this age of social networking, it is necessary to define the relationships among the members of a social network. Various techniques are already available to define user- to-user relationships across the network. Over time, many algorithms and machine learning techniques were applied to find relationships over social networks, yet very few techniques and information are available to define a relation directly over raw email data. Few educational societies have developed a way to mine the email log files and have found the inter-relation between the users by means of clusters. Again, there is no solid technique available that can …

The Activelecture System, Sanuja Dabade

Master's Projects

For an instructor, it has always been a challenging task to keep students engaged during the lecture and assess them in real time. Instructors use different methodologies to address the challenge of keeping students engaged during the class and increase their participation. Widely used methodologies for active learning include clickers and Tablet PCs. Clickers are small handheld devices which are used to collect student responses and present these responses graphically. Tablet PCs provide a functionality to use natural handwriting to provide feedback. Web browsers are a cost effective approaches. I have used a web based technology to create active learning …

Bookmarklet Builder For Offline Data Retrieval, Sheetal Naidu

Master's Projects

Bookmarklet Builder for Offline Data Retrieval is a computer application which will allow users to view websites even when they are offline. It can be stored as a URL of a bookmark in the browser. Bookmarklets exist for storing single web pages in hand-held devices and these web pages are stored as PDF files. In this project we have developed a tool that can save entire web page applications as bookmarklets. This will enable users to use these applications even when they are not connected to the Internet. The main technology beyond Javascript used to achieve this is the data: …

Parallel Programming Recipes, Thuy C. Nguyenphuc

Master's Projects

Parallel programming has become vital for the success of commercial applications since Moore’s Law will now be used to double the processors (or cores) per chip every technology generation. The performance of applications depends on how software executions can be mapped on the multi-core chip, and how efficiently they run the cores. Currently, the increase of parallelism in software development is necessary, not only for taking advantage of multi-core capability, but also for adapting and surviving in the new silicon implementation. This project will provide the performance characteristics of parallelism for some common algorithms or computations using different parallel languages. …

How Smart Is Your Android Smartphone?, Deepika Mulani

Master's Projects

Smart phones are ubiquitous today. These phones generally have access to sensitive personal information and, consequently, they are a prime target for attackers. A virus or worm that spreads over the network to cell phone users could be particularly damaging. Due to a rising demand for secure mobile phones, manufacturers have increased their emphasis on mobile security. In this project, we address some security issues relevant to the current Android smartphone framework. Specifically, we demonstrate an exploit that targets the Android telephony service. In addition, as a defense against the loss of personal information, we provide a means to encrypt …

Document Builder, Thien Tran

Master's Projects

In this paper, we consider problems related to on-demand content publishing and maintenance. Specifically, we are concerned with the recent concept of structural Content Management Systems (CMS) and its design principles. We focus on Apache Ant, a popular document generator tool for the Java development industry. However, Ant has not been widely extended beyond its capacity to deal with computer programs, which limits its utility. We analyze the Ant build script structure, study its usage, and implement an on-demand document generator for Ant. The focus is to provide a better document build model based on Ant, which can provide document …

Auto-Generation Of Use Case Controllers, Pushkar Marathe

Master's Projects

The thesis is based on the concept of generating machine executable code from UML diagrams. There has been some research done on the same topic but it is mainly focused on class diagrams. My main focus will be on the use case diagrams, and sequence diagrams. Sequence diagrams give us the details of any process in a step-by-step fashion which makes it easier to extract the required information regarding the use cases and the controllers which help us generate the code. The process follows three steps, first being generation of UML diagrams. Secondly, these are converted into XMI (XML Metadata …

Metamorphic Viruses With Built-In Buffer Overflow, Ronak Shah

Master's Projects

Metamorphic computer viruses change their structure—and thereby their signature—each time they infect a system. Metamorphic viruses are potentially one of the most dangerous types of computer viruses because they are difficult to detect using signature-based methods. Most anti-virus software today is based on signature detection techniques. In this project, we create and analyze a metamorphic virus toolkit which creates viruses with a built-in buffer overflow. The buffer overflow serves to obfuscate the entry point of the actual virus, thereby making detection more challenging. We show that the resulting viruses successfully evade detection by commercial virus scanners. Several modern operating systems …

A Framework For Active Learning: Revisited, Yue Chen

Master's Projects

Over the past decade, algorithm visualization tools have been researched and developed to be used by Computer Science instructors to ease students’ learning curve for new concepts. However, limitations such as rigid animation frameworks, lack of user interaction with the visualization created, and learning a new language and environment, have severely reduced instructors’ desire to use such a tool. The purpose of this project is to create a tool that overcomes these limitations. Instructors do not have to get familiar with a new framework and learn another language. The API used to create algorithm animation for this project is through …

Scala Server Faces, Vikas Vittal Rao

Master's Projects

Progress in the Java language has been slow over the last few years. Scala is emerging as one of the probable successors for Java with features such as type inference, higher order functions, closure support and sequence comprehensions. This allows object-oriented yet concise code to be written using Scala. While Java based MVC frameworks are still prevalent, Scala based frameworks along with Ruby on Rails, Django and PHP are emerging as competitors. Scala has a web framework called Lift which has made an attempt to borrow the advantages of other frameworks while keeping code concise. Since Sun’s MVC framework, Java …

Wisenetor: A Scalable Wireless Sensor Network Simulator, Gauri Krishna Gokhale

Master's Projects

WiSeNetor is a teaching and a research tool that simulates a scalable wireless sensor network on a single computer, based on the “Spamulator” (Aycock, J., Crawford, H., & deGraaf, R., 2008) which simulates the Internet on a single computer. Routing protocols and network discovery algorithms used in mesh networks and cluster tree networks can be demonstrated using this tool. WiSeNetor contains a network creation module, simulated network devices and it simulates routing algorithms. The network creation module spawns a network according to user specified network type, where the type can be a cluster tree or mesh. In this process, neighbor …

Automatic Grading Of Programming Assignments, Ashlesha Patil

Master's Projects

Solving practical problems is one of the important aspects of learning programming languages. But the assessment of programming problems is not straightforward. It involves time consuming and tedious steps required to compile and test the solution. In this project, I have developed a online tool, Javabrat that allows the students and language learners to practice Java and Scala problems. Javabrat automatically assesses the user's program and provides the instant feedback to the user. The users can also contribute their own programming problems to the existing problem set. I have also developed a plugin for a learning management system, Moodle. This …

Enhancing Open-Source Localization, Farzana Forhad

Master's Projects

Pootle is a web portal which is designed to be a web translation tool. We can run Pootle like an internet server and run a local copy on an intranet. Pootle has a user friendly interface which ensures better quality and easier translation of projects. Users can log into the Pootle and create their own projects under any language, and they can also add or retrieve any language from any project or any project from any language. Although Pootle has many advantages, it also has its drawbacks, and one of the biggest drawbacks of Pootle is that whatever translation is …

Mobile Search Engine Using Clustering And Query Expansion, Huy Nguyen

Master's Projects

Internet content is growing exponentially and searching for useful content is a tedious task that we all deal with today. Mobile phones lack of screen space and limited interaction methods makes traditional search engine interface very inefficient. As the use of mobile internet continues to grow there is a need for an effective search tool. I have created a mobile search engine that uses clustering and query expansion to find relevant web pages efficiently. Clustering organizes web pages into groups that reflect different components of a query topic. Users can ignore clusters that they find irrelevant so they are not …

Reliable Broadcasting In Vanet, Pat Jangyodsuk

Master's Projects

Vehicular Adhoc NETwork (VANET) is a rapid growing wireless ad-hoc network model where the vehicles play the nodes role in a network. Major application of VANET including hazard warning application requires effective broadcast mechanism. Typically, selection of the next relaying hop is the major problem in VANET broadcasting. To get the smallest propagational delay, the number of relaying hops must be minimize. Meanwhile, the transmission reliability must also be preserved. Both of these two constrains must be taken into consideration. However, these two aspects often collide to each other since increasing one of them always result in decreasing of another. …

Food Phone Application, Shengyu Li

Master's Projects

This project is about implementing a food menu application for users to search and upload food information by using a mobile phone. People sometimes may just know what food they wish to eat instead of the restaurants' name. Without knowing any restaurants' names, our food application's search only requires the name of the dish (e.g., hamburger, spaghetti, etc) in order to get the list of restaurants that serve these items and their corresponding information (e.g., location, hours, phone number, item's price, etc.). An advantage of using my food application is the system not only includes Google Map, but any information …

Open Source Analysis Of Biomedical Figures, David Shao

Master's Projects

With a selection of biomedical literature available for open access, a natural pairing seems to be the use of open source software to automatically analyze content, in particular, the content of gures. Considering the large number of possible tools and approaches, we choose to focus on the recognition of printed characters. As the problem of optical character recognition (OCR) under rea- sonable conditions is considered to be solved, and as open source software is fully capable of isolating the location of characters and identifying most of them accurately, we instead use OCR as an application area for the relatively recent …

Exhaustive Statistical Analysis For Detection Of Metamorphic Malware, Aditya Govindaraju

Master's Projects

Malware is a serious threat to the security of the system. With the widespread use of the World Wide Web, there has been a tremendous increase in virus attacks, making computer security an essential for every personal computer. The rat-race between virus writers and detectors has led to improved viruses and detection techniques. In recent years, metamorphic malwares have posed serious challenge to anti-virus writers. Current signature based detection techniques, heuristic based techniques are not comprehensive solutions. A formidable solution to detection of metamorphic malware is void. This paper investigates the problem of malware detection, specifically metamorphic malwares. The paper …

Approximate Disassembly, Dhivyakrishnan Radhakrishnan

Master's Projects

For the past two decades, computer viruses have been a constant security threat. A computer virus is a type of malware that may damage computer systems by destroying data, crashing the system, or through other malicious activity. Among the different types of viruses, metamorphic viruses are one of the most difficult to detect since such viruses change their internal structures with each mutation, making signature-based detection infeasible. Many construction kits are available that can be used to easily generate metamorphic strains of any given virus. Previous work has shown that metamorphic viruses are detectable using Hidden Markov Models (HMM). In …

Triangle Network Motifs Predict Complexes By Complementing High-Error Interactomes With Structural Information, Bill Andreopoulos, Christof Winter, Dirk Labudde, Michael Schroeder

Faculty Publications, Computer Science

BackgroundA lot of high-throughput studies produce protein-protein interaction networks (PPINs) with many errors and missing information. Even for genome-wide approaches, there is often a low overlap between PPINs produced by different studies. Second-level neighbors separated by two protein-protein interactions (PPIs) were previously used for predicting protein function and finding complexes in high-error PPINs. We retrieve second level neighbors in PPINs, and complement these with structural domain-domain interactions (SDDIs) representing binding evidence on proteins, forming PPI-SDDI-PPI triangles.ResultsWe find low overlap between PPINs, SDDIs and known complexes, all well below 10%. We evaluate the overlap of PPI-SDDI-PPI triangles with known complexes from …

Video Conferencing Tool, Sapna Blesson

Master's Projects

Video Conferencing Tool (VCT) is a web-based video chat application that allows users anywhere in the world to join real-time streaming video chat rooms. This product is similar to social networking sites that allow web-based video conferencing. The main advantage of VCT compared to existing tools is that it is easy to use and does not require users to download and set up additional hardware. Since this product is a browser-based solution, it allows users from multiple platforms like Windows, Linux, or Mac to join a chat room. My VCT allows users to create new public or private chat rooms …