Computer Sciences Commons^™

Partially Materialized Digest Scheme: An Efficient Verification Method For Outsourced Databases, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitris Sacharidis, Hwee Hwa Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the outsourced database model, a data owner publishes her database through a third-party server; i.e., the server hosts the data and answers user queries on behalf of the owner. Since the server may not be trusted, or may be compromised, users need a means to verify that answers received are both authentic and complete, i.e., that the returned data have not been tampered with, and that no qualifying results have been omitted. We propose a result verification approach for one-dimensional queries, called Partially Materialized Digest scheme (PMD), that applies to both static and dynamic databases. PMD uses separate indexes …

Tuning On-Air Signatures For Balancing Performance And Confidentiality, Baihua Zheng, Wang-Chien Lee, Peng Liu, Dik Lun Lee, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we investigate the trade off between performance and confidentiality in signature-based air indexing schemes for wireless data broadcast. Two metrics, namely, false drop probability and false guess probability, are defined to quantify the filtering efficiency and confidentiality loss of a signature scheme. Our analysis reveals that false drop probability and false guess probability share a similar trend as the tuning parameters of a signature scheme change and it is impossible to achieve a low false drop probability and a high false guess probability simultaneously. In order to balance the performance and confidentiality, we perform an analysis to …

Quc-Tree: Integrating Query Context Information For Efficient Music Retrieval, Jialie Shen, Dacheng Tao, Xuelong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we introduce a novel indexing scheme-query context tree (QUC-tree) to facilitate efficient query sensitive music search under different query contexts. Distinguished from the previous approaches, QUC-tree is a balanced multiway tree structure, where each level represents the data space at different dimensionality. Before the tree structure construction, principle component analysis (PCA) is applied for data analysis and transforming the raw composite features into a new feature space sorted by the importance of acoustic features. The PCA transformed data and reduced dimensions in the upper levels can alleviate suffering from dimensionality curse. To accurately mimic human perception, an …

Dynamic Web Service Selection For Reliable Web Service Composition, San-Yih Hwang, Ee Peng Lim, Chien-Hsiang Lee, Cheng-Hung Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper studies the dynamic web service selection problem in a failure-prone environment, which aims to determine a subset of Web services to be invoked at run-time so as to successfully orchestrate a composite web service. We observe that both the composite and constituent web services often constrain the sequences of invoking their operations and therefore propose to use finite state machine to model the permitted invocation sequences of Web service operations. We assign each state of execution an aggregated reliability to measure the probability that the given state will lead to successful execution in the context where each web …

The Price Of Stability In Selfish Scheduling Games, Lucas Agussurja, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Game theory has gained popularity as an approach to analysing and understanding distributed systems with self-interested agents. Central to game theory is the concept of Nash equilibrium as a stable state (solution) of the system, which comes with a price − the loss in efficiency. The quantification of the efficiency loss is one of the main research concerns. In this paper, we study the quality and computational characteristics of the best Nash equilibrium in two selfish scheduling models: the congestion model and the sequencing model. In particular, we present the following results: (1) In the congestion model: first, the best …

The Architecture Of Platforms: A Unified View, Carliss Y. Baldwin, C. Jason Woodard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Product and system designers have long exploited opportunities to create families of complex artifacts by developing and recombining modular components. An especially common design pattern has come to be associated with the concept of a ‘platform’, which we define as a set of stable components that supports variety and evolvability in a system by constraining the linkages among the other components. Our goal in this chapter is to shed light on the relationships between platforms and the systems in which they are embedded, in order to better understand firms and industries where platforms play an important role. We begin by …

A Covert Encryption Method For Applications In Electronic Data Interchange, Jonathan Blackledge, Dmitry Dubovitskiy

Articles

A principal weakness of all encryption systems is that the output data can be ‘seen’ to be encrypted. In other words, encrypted data provides a ‘flag’ on the potential value of the information that has been encrypted. In this paper, we provide a new approach to ‘hiding’ encrypted data in a digital image.

In conventional (symmetric) encryption, the plaintext is usually represented as a binary stream and encrypted using an XOR type operation with a binary cipher. The algorithm used is ideally designed to: (i) generate a maximum entropy cipher so that there is no bias with regard to any …

Book Review: Cyber Security And Global Information Assurance: Threat Analysis And Response Solutions, Gary C. Kessler

Publications

This document is Dr. Kessler's review of Cyber Security and Global Information Assurance: Threat Analysis and Response Solutions, edited by Kenneth J. Knapp. Information Science Reference, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-60566-326-5.

Analyzing The Impact Of A Virtual Machine On A Host Machine, Greg Dorn, Chris Marberry, Scott Conrad, Philip Craiger

Publications

As virtualization becomes more prevalent in the enterprise and in personal computing, there is a great need to understand the technology as well as its ramifications for recovering digital evidence. This paper focuses on trace evidence related to the installation and execution of virtual machines (VMs) on a host machine. It provides useful information regarding the types and locations of files installed by VM applications, the processes created by running VMs and the structure and identity of VMs, ancillary files and associated artifacts.

Critical Infrastructure Protection Status And Action Items Of Turkey, Bilge Karabacak, Sevgi Ozkan

All Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Critical infrastructures are the physical and virtual systems essential to the minimum operations of the economy and the government. Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) is a critical agenda item for governments in the developed countries. In these countries, policies and procedures on CIP are already in place and required laws are in action as well. In Turkey, some official introductory studies have been performed in 2009. However, there are a number of steps that Turkey still has to take. In this study, key definitions are provided firstly. After the definitions, the efforts of USA, EU, OECD and NATO are summarized. The …

Raising Heart Rate With Dance Pad Based Computer Games, Martin Masek, Philip Hingston, Matthew Carrigy, Liam Collins, Kazunori Nosaka

Research outputs pre 2011

No abstract provided.

A Match-Based Approach To Optimize Conformance Test Sequence Generation Using Mp-Method, Jitian Xiao

Research outputs pre 2011

An important issue in protocol conformance testing is how to generate test sequences in an efficient and effective way that achieves the required fault detection coverage. We proposed an approach for finding shorter test sequences for protocol conformance testing based on the Wp method in our previous work. While the method generated good quality test sequences, an extra leading sequence may have to be added if the final test sequence generated was not started from the same starting state of the given FSM. A new approach is proposed in this paper to overcome this problem thus to improve the quality …

Scada Security - Slowly Circling A Disaster Area, Craig Valli, Andrew Woodward

Research outputs pre 2011

SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) networks control much of the industrialised nations production and supply complexes. Various government reports and investigations have highlighted the vulnerability of these systems. Many of these systems are on private networks which are increasingly being connected to systems that are accessible from other networks such as the Internet. SCADA systems have unique security and operational requirements. However, many of the most basic security measures are missing in these networks. This examines some of these issues and proposes some technologies that could help secure these networks from attack.

Scada Forensics With Snort Ids, Craig Valli

Research outputs pre 2011

This paper is a research in progress paper outlining an approach using open source IDS (Snort) and honeypot (nepenthes, honeyd) technologies to create a resilient layered defensive approach for SCADA and control systems networks.

Visualisation Of Honeypot Data Using Graphviz And Afterglow, Craig Valli

Research outputs pre 2011

This research in progress paper explores the use of Graphviz and Afterglow for the analysis of data emanating from a honeypot system. Honeypot systems gather a wide range of data that is often difficult to readily search for patterns and trends using conventional log file analysis techniques. The data from the honeypots has been statically extracted and processed through Afterglow scripts to produce inputs suitable for use by the DOT graph based tools contained within Graphviz. This paper explores some of the benefits and drawbacks of currently using this type of approach.

Insecurity By Obscurity: A Review Of Soho Router Literature From A Network Security Perspective, Patryk Szewczyk, Craig Valli

Research outputs pre 2011

Because of prevalent threats to SoHo based ADSL Routers, many more devices are compromised. Whilst an end-user may be at fault for not applying the appropriate security mechanisms to counter these threats, vendors should equally share the blame. This paper reveals that the lack of security related content and poor overall design could impact on end-users’ interpretation and willingness to implement security controls on their ADSL router. It argues that whilst the number of threats circulating the Internet is increasing, vendors are not improving their product literature.

Multicast Encryption Infrastructure For Security In Sensor Networks, Richard R. Brooks, Brijesh Pillai, Matthew Pirretti, Michele C. Weigle

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Designing secure sensor networks is difficult. We propose an approach that uses multicast communications and requires fewer encryptions than pairwise communications. The network is partitioned into multicast regions; each region is managed by a sensor node chosen to act as a keyserver. The keyservers solicit nodes in their neighborhood to join the local multicast tree. The keyserver generates a binary tree of keys to maintain communication within the multicast region using a shared key. Our approach supports a distributed key agreement protocol that identifies the compromised keys and supports membership changes with minimum system overhead. We evaluate the overhead of …

Evaluating Multicore Algorithms On The Unified Memory Model, John E. Savage, Mohammad Zubair

Computer Science Faculty Publications

One of the challenges to achieving good performance on multicore architectures is the effective utilization of the underlying memory hierarchy. While this is an issue for single-core architectures, it is a critical problem for multicore chips. In this paper, we formulate the unified multicore model (UMM) to help understand the fundamental limits on cache performance on these architectures. The UMM seamlessly handles different types of multiple-core processors with varying degrees of cache sharing at different levels. We demonstrate that our model can be used to study a variety of multicore architectures on a variety of applications. In particular, we use …

Everyone Is A Curator: Human-Assisted Preservation For Ore Aggregations, Frank Mccown, Michael L. Nelson, Herbert Van De Sompel

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) has recently created the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) project that defines Resource Maps (ReMs) for describing aggregations of web resources. These aggregations are susceptible to many of the same preservation challenges that face other web resources. In this paper, we investigate how the aggregations of web resources can be preserved outside of the typical repository environment and instead rely on the thousands of interactive users in the web community and the Web Infrastructure (the collection of web archives, search engines, and personal archiving services) to facilitate preservation. Inspired by Web 2.0 services such as …

Correlation Of Music Charts And Search Engine Rankings, Martin Klein, Olena Hunsicker, Michael Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We investigate the question whether expert rankings of real-world entities correlate with search engine (SE) rankings of corresponding web resources. We compare Billboards "Hot 100 Airplay" music charts with SE rankings of associated web resources. Out of nine comparisons we found two strong, two moderate, two weak and one negative correlation. The remaining two comparisons were inconclusive.

Object Reuse And Exchange, Michael L. Nelson, Carl Lagoze, Herbert Van De Sompel, Pete Johnston, Robert Sanderson, Simeon Warner, Jürgen Sieck (Ed.), Michael A. Herzog (Ed.)

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The Open Archives Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) project defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources. The OAI-ORE abstract data model is conformant with the Architecture of the World Wide Web and leverages concepts from the Semantic Web, including RDF descriptions and Linked Data. In this paper we provide a brief review of a motivating example and its serialization in Atom.

A Max-Min Multiobjective Technique To Optimize Model Based Test Suite, Usman Farooq, Chiou P. Lam

Research outputs pre 2011

Generally, quality software production seeks timely delivery with higher productivity at lower cost. Redundancy in a test suite raises the execution cost and wastes scarce project resources. In model-based testing, the testing process starts with earlier software developmental phases and enables fault detection in earlier phases. The redundancy in the test suites generated from models can be detected earlier as well and removed prior to its execution. The paper presents a novel max-min multiobjective technique incorporated into a test suite optimization framework to find a better trade-off between the intrinsically conflicting goals. For illustration two objectives i.e. coverage and size …

Evolving The Quality Of A Model-Based Test Suite, Usman Farooq, Chiou P. Lam

Research outputs pre 2011

Redundant test cases in newly generated test suites often remain undetected until execution and waste scarce project resources. In model-based testing, the testing process starts early on in the developmental phases and enables early fault detection. The redundancy in the test suites generated from models can be detected earlier as well and removed prior to its execution. The article presents a novel model-based test suite optimization technique involving UML activity diagrams by formulating the test suite optimization problem as an Equality Knapsack Problem. The aim here is the development of a test suite optimization framework that could optimize the model-based …

Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma For Species, Philip Hingston

Research outputs pre 2011

The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) is widely used to study the evolution of cooperation between self-interested agents. Existing work asks how genes that code for cooperation arise and spread through a single-species population of IPD playing agents. In this paper, we focus on competition between different species of agents. Making this distinction allows us to separate and examine macroevolutionary phenomena. We illustrate with some species-level simulation experiments with agents that use well-known strategies, and with species of agents that use team strategies.