Computer Sciences Commons^™

Covert Botnet Design And Defense Analysis, Brandon Lyle Shirley

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Intrusion defense system (IDS) development has been largely reactionary in nature. This is especially troubling given that botnets are capable of compromising and controlling thousands of computers before security professionals develop a mitigation technique. As new exploits are created, new mitigation techniques are developed to detect infections and, where possible, remove them. This thesis breaks from this tradition of reacting to malware. Instead, it looks at possible malicious software models through analyzing existing defense systems for exploitable weaknesses.

First, this thesis presents a new specialized botnet that circumvents current network intrusion detection mechanisms. The proposed botnet coordinates external communication among …

Sos: Searching Help Pages Of R Packages, Spencer Graves, Sundar Dorai-Raj, Romain François

The R Journal

The sos package provides a means to quickly and flexibly search the help pages of contributed packages, finding functions and datasets in seconds or minutes that could not be found in hours or days by any other means we know. Its findFn function accesses Jonathan Baron’s R Site Search database and returns the matches in a data frame of class "findFn", which can be further manipulated by other sos functions to produce, for example, an Excel file that starts with a summary sheet that makes it relatively easy to prioritize alternative packages for further study. As such, it provides a …

Aspects Of The Social Organization And Trajectory Of The R Project, John Fox

The R Journal

Based partly on interviews with members of the R Core team, this paper considers the development of the R Project in the context of open-source software development and, more generally, voluntary activities. The paper de scribes aspects of the social organization of the R Project, including the organization of the R Core team; describes the trajectory of the R Project; seeks to identify factors crucial to the success of R; and speculates about the prospects for R.

Asymptest: A Simple R Package For Classical Parametric Statistical Tests And Confidence Intervals In Large Samples, J.-F. Coeurjolly, R. Drouilhet, P. Lafaye De Micheaux, J.-F. Robineau

The R Journal

asympTest is an R package implementing large sample tests and confidence intervals. One and two sample mean and variance tests (differences and ratios) are considered. The test statistics are all expressed in the same form as the Student t-test, which facilitates their presentation in the classroom. This contribution also fills the gap of a robust (to non-normality) alternative to the chi-square single variance test for large samples, since no such procedure is implemented in standard statistical software.

Automation In Cs1 With The Factoring Problem Generator, Joshua B. Parker

Master's Theses

As the field of computer science continues to grow, the number of students enrolled in related programs will grow as well. Though one-on-one tutoring is one of the more effective means of teaching, computer science instructors will have less and less time to devote to individual students. To address this growing concern, many tools that automate parts of an instructor’s job have been proposed. These tools can assist instructors in presenting concepts and grading student work, and they can help students learn to program more effectively. A growing group of intelligent tutoring systems attempts to tie all of this functionality …

Statistical Tools For Linking Engine-Generated Malware To Its Engine, Edna Chelangat Milgo

Theses and Dissertations

Malware-generating engines challenge typical malware analysts by requiring them to quickly extract and upload to their customers' machines, a signature for each of a possibly vast number of never-before-seen malware instances that an engine can generate in a short amount of time In this thesis we propose and evaluate two methods for linking variants of engine-generated malware to its engine. The proposed methods use the w-gram frequency vector (NFV) of the opcode mnemonics of an engine-generated malware in- stance as a feature vector for the instance. An NFV is a tuple that maps «-grams with their frequencies. The in-formation contained …

Tactical Analysis Of Attack In Physical And Digital Security Incidents:Towards A Model Of Asymmetry, Atif Ahmad

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

Asymmetric warfare is frequently described as a conflict where ‘weaker’ parties aim to offset their relatively inadequate resources by using particular strategies and tactics to their advantage. This research-in-progress paper develops a concept model of asymmetric warfare that represents the leverage available to the ‘weaker’ party over the ‘stronger’ party simply because the former is attacking rather than defending. Points of leverage include choice of timing, location, method of attack, best use of limited resources and time to prepare. The resulting concept model is used to discuss generic defensive strategies that can be applied by ‘stronger’ parties in the physical …

Ascent Of Asymmetric Risk In Information Security: An Initial Evaluation., Tobias Ruighaver, Matthew Warren, Atif Ahmad

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

Dramatic changes in the information security risk landscape over several decades have not yet been matched by similar changes in organizational information security, which is still mainly based on a mindset that security is achieved through extensive preventive controls. As a result, maintenance cost of information security is increasing rapidly, but this increased expenditure has not really made an attack more difficult. The opposite seems to be true, information security attacks have become easier to perpetrate and appear more like information warfare tactics. At the same time, the damage caused by a successful attack has increased significantly and may sometimes …

Information Security Disclosure: A Case Study, I Rosewall, M J. Warren

Australian Information Security Management Conference

New social networking systems such as Facebook are an ever evolving and developing means of social interaction, which is not only being used to disseminate information to family, friends and colleagues but as a way of meeting and interacting with "strangers" through the advent of a large number of social applications. This paper will focus upon the impact of Generation F - the Facebook Generation and their attitudes to security. The paper will be based around discussing the findings of a major UK case study and the implications that this has. The case study identifies 51 recommendations to improve the …

Strong Authentication For Web Services Using Smartcards, D S. Stienne, Nathan Clarke, Paul Reynolds

Australian Information Security Management Conference

The popularity of the Internet and the variety of services it provides has been immense. Unfortunately, many of these services require the user to register and subsequently login to the system in order to access them. This has resulted in the user having to remember a multitude of username and password combinations in order to use the service securely. However, literature has clearly demonstrated this is not an effective approach, as users will frequently choose simple passwords, write them down, share them or use the same password for multiple systems. This paper proposes a novel concept where Internet users authenticate …

Security Issues Challenging Facebook, S Leitch, M Warren

Australian Information Security Management Conference

The advancement in Internet and bandwidth capability has resulted in a number of new applications to be developed; many of these newer applications are described as being Web 2. A Web 2 application such as Facebook has allowed people around the world to interact together. One of the interesting aspects of Facebook is the use of third parties applications and the interactions that this allows.Not surprisingly, the problems that exist in the real world such as theft, fraud, vandalism also exist in online Web 2 environments. This paper explores and categorises several security issues within the Facebook environment. It contributes …

Improving An Organisations Existing Information Technology Policy To Increase Security, Shane Talbot, Andrew Woodward

Australian Information Security Management Conference

A security policy which includes the appropriate phases of implementation, enforcement, auditing and review is vital to protecting an organisations information security. This paper examined the information security policy of a government organisation in response to a number of perceived shortcomings. The specific issues identified relating to the organisations security policy as a result of this investigation were as follows: a culture of ignoring policies, minimal awareness of policies, minimal policy enforcement, policy updating and review ad hoc at best, policy framework, lengthy policy development and approval process, no compliance program, no formal non-compliance reporting and an apparent inconsistent enforcement …

Assessment Of Internationalised Domain Name Homograph Attack Mitigation, Peter Hannay, Christopher Bolan

Australian Information Security Management Conference

With the advent of internationalised domains the threat posed by non-english character sets has eventuated. Whilst this phenomenon remains well known in the development and internet industry the actual implementations of popular applications have been tested to determine their resilience to homograph based attack. The research found that most provided features that overcome such attacks, but there remain a few notable exceptions. Should an attacker take advantage of such oversights a victim would likely not be able to spot a fraudulent site or email and thus provide a perfect platform for subsequent attack.

The 2009 Personal Firewall Robustness Evaluation, Ken Pydayya, Peter Hannay, Patryk Szewczyk

Australian Information Security Management Conference

The evolution of the internet as a platform for commerce, banking, general information and personal communications has resulted in a situation where many individuals who may not have previously required internet access now require this connectivity as part of their everyday lives. In addition to this the widespread adoption of mobile broadband has lead to an increasing number of individuals having public facing IP addresses with no firewall appliances present. This situation has dramatically increased reliance on personal firewalls as the first and often last defence against intruders (human and malware alike). The evaluation performed demonstrates the capabilities of current …

Electronic-Supply Chain Information Security: A Framework For Information, Alizera Bolhari

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Over the last few years, the materials and distribution management has developed into a broader strategic approach known as electronic supply chain management by means of information technology. This paper attempts to visibly describe supply chain management information security concepts which are necessary for managers to know about. So, the depth of information presented in this paper is calibrated for managers, not technical security employees or agents. Global supply chains are exposed to diverse types of risks that rise along with increasing globalization. Electronic supply chains will be more vulnerable from information security (IS) aspect among other types of supply …

Exploring The Relationship Between Organizational Culture And Information Security Culture, Joo S. Lim, Shanton Chang, Sean Maynard, Atif Ahmad

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Managing Information Security is becoming more challenging in today’s business because people are both a cause of information security incidents as well as a key part of the protection from them. As the impact of organizational culture (OC) on employees is significant, many researchers have called for the creation of information security culture (ISC) in organizations to influence the actions and behaviour of employees towards better organizational information security. Although researchers have called for the creation of ISC to be embedded in organizations, nonetheless, literature suggests that little past research examining the relationship between the nature of OC and ISC. …

Angular Rigidity In 3d: Combinatorial Characterizations And Algorithms, Audrey Lee-St.John, Ileana Streinu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Constraint-based CAD software, used by engineers to design sophisticated mechanical systems, relies on a wide range of geometrical constraints. In this paper we focus on one special case: angular constraints in 3D. We give a complete combinatorial characterization for generic minimal rigidity in two new models: line- plane-and-angle and body-and-angle structures. As an immediate consequence, we obtain efficient algorithms for analyzing angular rigidity.

The R Journal (December 2009) 1(2): Complete Issue, The R Foundation

The R Journal

Contributed Research Articles

Aspects of the Social Organization and Trajectory of the R Project, John Fox

Party on! Carolin Strobl, Torsten Hothorn and Achim Zeileis

ConvergenceConcepts: An R Package to Investigate Various Modes of Convergence, Pierre Lafaye de Micheaux and Benoit Liquet

asympTest: A Simple R Package for Classical Parametric Statistical Tests and Confidence Intervals in Large Samples, J.-F. Coeurjolly, R. Drouilhet, P. Lafaye de Micheaux and J.-F. Robineau

copas: An R package for Fitting the Copas Selection Model, J. Carpenter, G. Rücker and G. Schwarzer

Transitioning to R: Replicating SAS, Stata, and SUDAAN Analysis Techniques in Health Policy Data, …

An Animation Framework For Improving The Comprehension Of Tinyos Programs, Sravanthi Dandamudi

All Theses

To meet the increasing demand for monitoring of the physical world, there has been an increase in the development of wireless sensor network applications. The TinyOS platform has emerged as a de facto standard for developing these applications. The platform offers a number of advantages, with its support for concurrency, power-efficient operation, and resource-constrained hardware chief among them. However, the benefits come at a price. Even without the TinyOS platform, the inherent parallel and distributed nature of these applications makes it difficult for developers to reason about program behavior. Further, the TinyOS programming model adopts
asynchronous, split-phase execution semantics. Developers …

Semantic Search, Anup Sawant

All Theses

The thesis describes a Semantic approach towards web search through a stand-alone Java application. An Ontology Web Language(OWL) model is used to build a knowledge database related to different types of Organisms. The goal is to guide the Google web search engine using this OWL model. In the rst approach towards Semantic web search, an inference engine called CLIPS is used and in the second aproach, the Protege-OWL API is used. The thesis goes in detail about the design,
working and comparison of these two approaches. The thesis also deals with design approach for enhancement of the OWL model, once …

A Contrast Pattern Based Clustering Quality Index For Categorical Data, Qingbao Liu, Guozhu Dong

Kno.e.sis Publications

Since clustering is unsupervised and highly explorative, clustering validation (i.e. assessing the quality of clustering solutions) has been an important and long standing research problem. Existing validity measures have significant shortcomings. This paper proposes a novel contrast pattern based clustering quality index (CPCQ) for categorical data, by utilizing the quality and diversity of the contrast patterns (CPs) which contrast the clusters in clusterings. High quality CPs can characterize clusters and discriminate them against each other. Experiments show that the CPCQ index (1) can recognize that expert-determined classes are the best clusters for many datasets from the UCI repository; (2) does …

Anomaly Detection Techniques For Ad Hoc Networks, Chaoli Cai

Dissertations

Anomaly detection is an important and indispensable aspect of any computer security mechanism. Ad hoc and mobile networks consist of a number of peer mobile nodes that are capable of communicating with each other absent a fixed infrastructure. Arbitrary node movements and lack of centralized control make them vulnerable to a wide variety of unknown and known attacks from inside as well as from outside. In this dissertation we propose two efficient statistical techniques for anomaly detection for these networks.

In order to take into account incomplete testing samples and the interaction among multiple features, we present BANBAD •- a …

Recursive Decomposition Of Progress Graphs, David A. Cape, Bruce M. Mcmillin, Benjamin W. Passer, Mayur Thakur

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Search of a state transition system is traditionally how deadlock detection for concurrent programs has been accomplished. This paper examines an approach to deadlock detection that uses geometric semantics involving the topo-logical notion of dihomotopy to partition the state space into components; after that the reduced state space is exhaustively searched. Prior work partitioned the state space inductively. in this paper we show that a recursive technique provides greater reduction of the size of the state transition system and therefore more efficient deadlock detection. If the preprocessing can be done efficiently, then for large problems we expect to see more …

Review Of Browser Extensions, A Man-In-The-Browser Phishing Techniques Targeting Bank Customers, Nattakant Utakrit

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Initially, online scammers (phishers) used social engineering techniques to send emails to solicit personal information from customer in order to steal money from their Internet banking account. Data, such as passwords or bank account details, could be further used for other criminal activities. For instance, the scammers may intend to leave the victim’s information behind after they have successfully committed the crime so that the police can suspect the visible evidence as a suspicious criminal. Many customers are now aware of the need to protect their banking details from the phishers by not providing any sensitive information. Recently, phishing attacks …

Protein Secondary Structure Prediction Using Parallelized Rule Induction From Coverings, Leong Lee, Cyriac Kandoth, Jennifer Leopold, Ronald L. Frank

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Protein 3D structure prediction has always been an important research area in bioinformatics. In particular, the prediction of secondary structure has been a well-studied research topic. Despite the recent breakthrough of combining multiple sequence alignment information and artificial intelligence algorithms to predict protein secondary structure, the Q3 accuracy of various computational prediction algorithms rarely has exceeded 75%. In a previous paper [1], this research team presented a rule-based method called RT-RICO (Relaxed Threshold Rule Induction from Coverings) to predict protein secondary structure. The average Q3 accuracy on the sample datasets using RT-RICO was 80.3%, an improvement over comparable computational methods. …

A Spoofing Attack Against An Epc Class One Rfid System, Christopher Bolan

Australian Information Security Management Conference

In computing the term spoofing historically referred to the creation of TCP/IP packets using another device’s valid IP address to gain an advantage. The Electronic Product Code (EPC) RFID system was investigated to test the efficacy of spoofing a valid tag response to basic requests. A radio frequency transmission device was constructed to determine whether a valid reader could distinguish between the response of an actual tag and a spoofed response. The results show that the device was able to successfully deceive the EPC reader and further, to replace actual tag responses with a spoofed response. The potential for such …

Open Access Fiber To The Home Networking, Roger E. Timmerman

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of open-access networks appeals to communities that want to invest in and improve their access to modern telecommunications services. By investing in, or building their own open-access telecommunications networks, communities can create an environment where several telecommunications service providers can co-exist on a common open-access infrastructure. This model promotes innovation and competition among several smaller service providers rather than having a monopoly or oligopoly from those companies that can afford the investment of infrastructure in the community. This research provides an analysis of two large open-access fiber-to-the-home networks in Utah to determine a set of recommendations and best-practices …

Evaluating Head Gestures For Panning 2-D Spatial Information, Matthew O. Derry

Master's Theses

New, often free, spatial information applications such as mapping tools, topological imaging, and geographic information systems are becoming increasingly available to the average computer user. These systems, which were once available only to government, scholastic, and corporate institutions with highly skilled operators, are driving a need for new and innovative ways for the average user to navigate and control spatial information intuitively, accurately, and efficiently. Gestures provide a method of control that is well suited to navigating the large datasets often associated with spatial information applications. Several different types of gestures and different applications that navigate spatial data are examined. …

A Neural Network Approach To Border Gateway Protocol Peer Failure Detection And Prediction, Cory B. White

Master's Theses

The size and speed of computer networks continue to expand at a rapid pace, as do the corresponding errors, failures, and faults inherent within such extensive networks. This thesis introduces a novel approach to interface Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) computer networks with neural networks to learn the precursor connectivity patterns that emerge prior to a node failure. Details of the design and construction of a framework that utilizes neural networks to learn and monitor BGP connection states as a means of detecting and predicting BGP peer node failure are presented. Moreover, this framework is used to monitor a BGP network …

Culture Jamming: From Activism To Hactivism, Kay Hearn, Rachel J. Mahncke, Patricia A. Williams

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

A new kind of Internet threat has emerged. Hacking is increasingly being used as a weapon by individuals to promote their political ideologies by engaging in distributed citizen-based warfare. Their aim is to disrupt communications using internet enabled networks and organisations. Examples of these online assaults during 2009 were evident during the Iranian protests and the Melbourne International Film Festival. Such attacks use denial of service techniques and utilised social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter and You Tube to post links to access hacking instructions. Posts on social networking websites and news stories from a variety of sources online, …