Computer Sciences Commons^™

Understanding Transition Towards Information Security Culture Change, Leanne Ngo, Wanlei Zhou, Matthew Warren

Research outputs pre 2011

Transitioning towards an information security culture for organisations has not been adequately explored in the current security and management literature. Many authors have proposed how information security culture can be created, fostered and managed within organisations, but have failed to adequately address the transition process towards information security culture change, particularly for small medium enterprises (SMEs). This paper aims to (1) recapitulate key developments and trends within information security culture literature; (2) explore in detail the transition process towards organisational change; (3) adapt the transition process with respects to the key players involved in transition and propose a transition model …

Smart Card Authentication For Mobile Devices, Wayne Jansen, Serban Gavrila, Clément Séveillac

Research outputs pre 2011

While mobile handheld devices provide productivity benefits, they also pose new risks. User authentication is the best safeguard against the risk of unauthorized use and access to a device’s contents. This paper describes two novel types of smart card with unconventional form factors, designed to take advantage of common interfaces built into many current handheld devices.

Non-Repudiation In Pure Mobile Ad Hoc Network, Yi-Chi Lin, Jill Slay

Research outputs pre 2011

Within the last decade, the use of wireless technologies has become more prevalent. Wireless networks have flexible architectures with data transferred via radio waves and can be divided into two categories; infrastructure-based wireless networks and mobile ad hoc network.

The mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an autonomous system which can be dynamically built without pre-existing infrastructure or a trusted third party (TTP). Due to these infrastructure-less and self-organized characteristics, MANET encounters different problems from infrastructure-based wired network, such as key management, power shortage, and security issues. This paper will further divide MANETs into pure ad hoc networks which do …

Benchmarking E-Business Security: A Model And Framework, Graeme Pye, Matthew J. Warren

Research outputs pre 2011

The dynamic nature of threats and vulnerabilities within the E-business environment can impede online functionality, compromise organisational or customer information, contravene security implementations and thereby undermine online customer confidence. To negate these problems, E-business security has to become proactive, by reviewing and continuously improving security to strengthen E-business security measures and policies. This can be achieved through benchmarking the security measures and policies utilised within the E-business, against recognised information technology (IT) and information security (IS) security standards.

An Investigation Into The Paradox Of Organisational Flexibility Versus Security: A Research Project, Rosanna Fanciulli

Research outputs pre 2011

The trend towards utilising geographically and temporally dispersed personnel has grown quickly over the past decade; enabled by swift advances in computing, telecommunications, and networking technologies. The impact of these developments on corporate strategies and forms has manifested itself in a move to de-legitimise the rigid structure of a traditional bureaucracy and move towards one that is more flexible. These new technologies and organisational structures, however, also bring with them Information Security threats and risks. It is critical that managers become informed and equipped to deal with these issues. This paper presents an ongoing study designed to determine the major …

Architecture For Self-Estimation Of Security Level In Ad Hoc Network Nodes, Reijo Savola

Research outputs pre 2011

Inherent freedom due to a lack of central authority of self-organised mobile ad hoc networks introduces challenges to security and trust management. In these kinds of scenarios, the nodes themselves are naturally responsible for their own security – or they could trust certain known nodes, called “micro-operators”. We propose an architecture for security management in self-organising mobile ad hoc networks that is based on the nodes’ own responsibility and node-level security monitoring. The aim is to predict, as well as to monitor the security level concentrating on the principal effects contributing to it.

My Problem Or Our Problem? Exploring The Use Of Information Sharing As A Component Of A Holistic Approach To E-Security In Response To The Growth Of ‘Malicious Targeted Attacks’, Aaron Olding, Paul Turner

Research outputs pre 2011

There is now a growing recognition amongst e-security specialists that the e-security environment faced by organisations is changing rapidly. This environment now sees a situation where maliciously targeted attacks are conducted by ‘guns for hire’ (hackers) and/or criminal organisations (Illett 2005; Keiser 2005). As a consequence, conventional organisational approaches to e-security are becoming increasingly problematic and inadequate. There is a need to raise awareness of these issues amongst organisations and to contribute to the generation of effective integrated solutions that address this emerging e-security environment without sacrificing user privacy and/or breaching user trust. This paper considers the potential role of …

Detecting Rogue Access Points That Endanger The Maginot Line Of Wireless Authentication, Zhiqi Tao, A. B. Ruighaver

Research outputs pre 2011

The rapid growth in deployment of wireless networks in recent years may be an indication that many organizations believe that their system will be adequately secured by the implementation of enhanced encryption and authentication. However, in our view, the emphasis on cryptographic solutions in wireless security is repeating the history of the “Maginot Line”. Potential attackers of wireless networks currently will find many ways to get access to wireless networks to compromise the confidentiality of information without the need to crack the encryption. In this paper we analyze how rogue access points threaten the security of an organization’s wireless network …

Mapping Properties Of Co-Existentially Closed Continua, Paul Bankston

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

A continuous surjection between compacta is called co-existential if it is the second of two maps whose composition is a standard ultracopower projection. A continuum is called co-existentially closed if it is only a co-existential image of other continua. This notion is not only an exact dual of Abraham Robinson's existentially closed structures in model theory, it also parallels the definition of other classes of continua defined by what kinds of continuous images they can be. In this paper we continue our study of co-existentially closed continua, especially how they (and related continua) behave in certain mapping situations.

The Inns President's Welcome, Donald C. Wunsch

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Behavioral Footprinting: A New Dimension To Characterize Self-Propagating Worms, Xuxian Jiang, Dongyan Xu

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Multivariate Analysis Of Prokaryotic Amino Acid Usage Bias: A Computational Method For Understanding Protein Building Block Selection In Primitive Organisms, Douglas Whitmore Raiford Iii

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Organisms expend a significant fraction of their overall energy budget in the creation of proteins, particularly for those that are produced in large quantities. Recent research has demonstrated that genes encoding these proteins are shaped by natural selection to produce the proteins with low cost building blocks (amino acids) whenever possible. The negative correlation between protein production rate and their energetic costs has been established for two bacterial genomes: Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis. This thesis provides scientific validation of this theory by automating the analysis and extending the research to additional genomes. Investigations into building block selection are highly …

Affective Design In Technical Communication, Michael Alan Rosen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Traditional human-computer interaction (HCI) is based on 'cold' models of user cognition; that is, models of users as purely rational beings based on the information processing metaphor; however, an emerging perspective suggests that for the field of HCI to mature, its practitioners must adopt models of users that consider broader human needs and capabilities. Affective design is an umbrella term for research and practice being conducted in diverse domains, all with the common thread of integrating emotional aspects of use into the creation of information products. This thesis provides a review of the current state of the art in affective …

Maintaining The Identity Of Dynamically Embodied Agents, Alan Martin, Gregory O'Hare, Brian Duffy, Bianca Schoen-Phelan, John Bradley

Conference papers

Virtual agents are traditionally constrained in their embod- iment, as they are restricted to one form of body. We propose allowing them to change their embodiment in order to expand their capabili- ties. This presents users with a number of di±culties in maintaining the identity of the agents, but these can be overcome by using identity cues, certain features that remain constant across embodiment forms. This pa- per outlines an experiment that examines these identity cues, and shows that they can be used to help address this identity problem.

Pre-Computation Approach To Nonlinear Simulations Of Deformable Objects, Jernej Barbic

Link Foundation Modeling, Simulation and Training Fellowship Reports

My research area involves building real-time interactive simulations of solid deformable objects. For example, liver tissue should defo1m realistically during a vi1tual surgery simulation. A virtual assembly simulation can catch airplane construction design flaws early on during the manufacturing process. Deformable objects are also useful in computer games, for example to model the motion of trees in the wind. Researchers in computational physics, mechanics, and applied mathematics have been developing algorithms for simulations of deformable objects for the past 40 years. However, the partial differential equations of solid continuum mechanics that govern deformations of physical objects are very involved and …

Fuzzy Membership Function Initial Values: Comparing Initialization Methods That Expedite Convergence, Stephanie Scheibe Lee

Theses and Dissertations

Fuzzy attributes are used to quantify imprecise data that model real world objects. To effectively use fuzzy attributes, a fuzzy membership function must be defined to provide the boundaries for the fuzzy data. The initialization of these membership function values should allow the data to converge to a stable membership value in the shortest time possible. The paper compares three initialization methods, Random, Midpoint and Random Proportional, to determine which method optimizes convergence. The comparison experiments suggest the use of the Random Proportional method.

Pattern Recognition Via Machine Learning With Genetic Decision-Programming, Carl C. Hoff

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

In the intersection of pattern recognition, machine learning, and evolutionary computation is a new search technique by which computers might program themselves. That technique is called genetic decision-programming. A computer can gain the ability to distinguish among the things that it needs to recognize by using genetic decision-programming for pattern discovery and concept learning. Those patterns and concepts can be easily encoded in the spines of a decision program (tree or diagram). A spine consists of two parts: (1) the test-outcome pairs along a path from the program's root to any of its leaves and (2) the conclusion in that …

Security Of An Ill-Posed Operator Based Scheme For Image Authentication, Yongdong Wu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This letter analyzes the security of an image authentication scheme which exploits the instability of an ill-posed operator. Since the ill-posed operator produces only a limited number of authentic images regardless of the number of watermarks, an attacker can impersonate an image owner to generate authentic images at a high probability. Our experiments demonstrate that our attack is both practical and effective.

Exploiting The Advantages Of Object-Based Dsm In A Heterogeneous Cluster Environment, Xuli Liu, Hong Jiang, Leen-Kiat Soh

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

In recent years, increasing effort has been made by the cluster and grid computing community to build object- based Distributed Shared Memory systems (DSM) in a cluster environment. In most of these systems, a shared object is simply used as a data-exchanging unit so as to alleviate the false-sharing problem, and the advantages of sharing objects remain to be fully exploited. Thus, this paper is motivated to investigate the potential advantages of object-based DSM. For example, the performance of a distributed application may be significantly improved by adaptively and judiciously setting the size of the shared objects, i.e., granularity. This …

Real-Time Divisible Load Scheduling For Cluster Computing, Xuan Lin, Ying Lu, Jitender S. Deogun, Steve Goddard

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Cluster Computing has emerged as a new paradigm for solving large-scale problems. To enhance QoS and provide performance guarantees in cluster computing environments, various workload models and real-time scheduling algorithms have been investigated. The divisible load model, propagated by divisible load theory, models computations that can be arbitrarily divided into independent pieces and provides a good approximation of many real-world applications. However, researchers have not yet investigated the problem of providing performance guarantees to divisible load applications. Two contributions are made in this paper: (1) divisible load theory is extended to compute the minimum number of processors required to meet …

Disseminating Usability Design Knowledge Through Ontology-Based Pattern Languages, Scott Henninger, Padmapriya Ashokkumar

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Usability patterns represent knowledge about known ways to design graphical user interfaces that are usable and meet the needs and expectations of users. There is currently a plethora of usability patterns published in books, private repositories and the World-Wide Web. The dominance of pattern discovery efforts has neglected the emerging need to organize the patterns so they can become a proactive resource for developing interfaces. This paper presents an approach using Semantic Web concepts that turns informal patterns into formal representations capable of supporting systematic design methods. Through this method, loosely coupled pattern collections can be turned into strongly coupled …

Dgkd: Distributed Group Key Distribution With Authentication Capability, Pratima Adusumilli, Xukai Zou, Byrav Ramamurthy

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Group key management (GKM} is the most important issue in secure group communication (SCC). The existing GKM protocols fall into three typical classes: centralized group key distribution (CGKD), decentralized group key management (DGKM), and distributed/contributory group key agreement (CGKA). Serious problems remains in these protocols, as they require existence of central trusted entities (such as group controller or subgroup controllers), relaying of messages (by subgroup controllers), or strict member synchronization (JOT multiple round stepwise key agreement), thus suffering from the single point of failure and attack, performance bottleneck, or mis-operations in the situation of transmission delay or network failure. In …

Disseminating Usability Design Knowledge Through Ontology-Based Pattern Languages, Scott Henninger, Padmapriya Ashokkumar

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Usability patterns represent knowledge about known ways to design graphical user interfaces that are usable and meet the needs and expectations of users. There is currently a plethora of usability patterns published in books, private repositories and the World-Wide Web. The dominance of pattern discovery efforts has neglected the emerging need to organize the patterns so they can become a proactive resource for developing interfaces. This paper presents an approach using Semantic Web concepts that turns informal patterns into formal representations capable of supporting systematic design methods. Through this method, loosely coupled pattern collections can be turned into strongly coupled …

Crtdh: An Efficient Key Agreement Scheme For Secure Group Communications In Wireless Ad Hoc Networks, Ravi K Balachandran, Byrav Ramamurthy, Xukai Zou, N.V. Vinodchandran

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

As a result of the growing popularity of wireless networks, in particular ad hoc networks, security over such networks has become very important. In this paper, we study the problem of secure group communications (SGC) and key management over ad hoc networks. We identify the key features of any SGC protocol for such networks. We also propose an efficient key agreement scheme for SGC. The scheme solves two important problems that exist in most current SGC schemes: requirement of member serialization and existence of a central entity. Besides this, the protocol also has many highly desirable properties such as contributory …

Same-Destination-Intermediate Grouping Vs. End-To-End Grouping For Waveband Switching In Wdm Mesh Networks, Mengke Li, Wang Yao, Byrav Ramamurthy

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

We investigate waveband switching (WBS) with different grouping strategies in wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) mesh networks. End-to-end waveband switching (ETEWBS) and same-destination-intermediate waveband switching (SD-IT-WBS) are analyzed and compared in terms of blocking probability and cost savings. First, an analytical model for ETEWBS is proposed to determine the network blocking probability in a mesh network. For SD-IT-WBS, a simple waveband switching algorithm is presented. An analytical model to determine the network blocking probability is proposed for SD-IT-WBS based on the algorithm. The analytical results are validated by comparing with simulation results. Both results match well and show that ETE-WBS slightly outperforms …

A Novel Cost-Efficient On-Line Intermediate Waveband-Switching Scheme In Wdm Mesh Networks, Mengke Li, Wang Yao, Byrav Ramamurthy

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Waveband switching (WBS) is an important technique to save switching and transmission cost in wavelength -division multiplexed (WDM) optical networks. A cost-efficient WBS scheme would enable network carriers to increase the network throughput (revenue) while achieving significant cost savings. We identify the critical factors that determine the WBS network throughput and switching cost and propose a novel intermediate waveband switching (IT-WBS) algorithm, called the minimizing-weighted-cost (MWC) algorithm. The MWC algorithm defines a cost for each candidate route of a call. By selecting the route with the smallest weighted cost, MWC balances between minimizing the call blocking probability and minimizing the …

Discontinuous Waveband Switching In Wdm Optical Networks, Bhavana Lekkala, Byrav Ramamurthy

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Routing techniques used in wavelength routed optical networks (WRN) do not give an efficient solution with Waveband routed optical networks (WBN) as the objective of routing in WRN is to reduce the blocking probability and that in WBN is to reduce the number of switching ports. Routing in WBN can be divided two parts, finding the route and grouping the wavelength assigned into that route with some existing wavelengths/wavebands. In this paper, we propose a heuristic for waveband routing, which uses a new grouping strategy called discontinuous waveband grouping to group the wavelengths into a waveband. The main objective of …

Performance Analysis Of Sparse Traffic Grooming In Wdm Mesh Networks, Wang Yao, Mengke Li, Byrav Ramamurthy

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Sparse traffic grooming is a practical problem to be addressed in heterogeneous multi-vendor optical WDM networks where only some of the optical cross-connects (OXCs) have grooming capabilities. Such a network is called as a sparse grooming network. The sparse grooming problem under dynamic traffic in optical WDM mesh networks is a relatively unexplored problem. In this work, we propose the maximize-lightpath-sharing multi-hop (MLS-MH) grooming algorithm to support dynamic traffic grooming in sparse grooming networks. We also present an analytical model to evaluate the blocking performance of the MLS-MH algorithm. Simulation results show that MLSMH outperforms an existing grooming algorithm, the …

An Empirical Study Of Fault Localization For End-User Programmers, Joseph R. Ruthruff, Margaret Burnett, Gregg Rothermel

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

End users develop more software than any other group of programmers, using software authoring devices such as e-mail filtering editors, by-demonstration macro builders, and spreadsheet environments. Despite this, there has been little research on finding ways to help these programmers with the dependability of their software. We have been addressing this problem in several ways, one of which includes supporting end-user debugging activities through fault localization techniques. This paper presents the results of an empirical study conducted in an end-user programming environment to examine the impact of two separate factors in fault localization techniques that affect technique effectiveness. Our results …

Technical Reports (1999 - 2005)

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Authors of Technical Reports (1999-2005):
Choueiry, Berthe
Elbaum, Sebastian
Goddard, Steve
Henninger, Scott
Jiang, Hong
Rothermel, Gregg
Scott, Stephen
Seth, Sharad
Soh, Leen-Kiat
Variyam, Vinodchandran