Computer Sciences Commons^™

Contributing To Astropy: A Community Python Library For Astronomers, Asra Nizami

Macalester Journal of Physics and Astronomy

This paper discusses the author’s contributions to two packages affiliated with Astropy, a community Python library for astronomers. The packages the author contributed to were modeling, a sub-package within the core Astropy package, and WCSAxes, an Astropy affiliated package, outside the core package.

Hybrid Similarity Function For Big Data Entity Matching With R-Swoosh, Vimal Chandra Gorijala

Master's Projects

Entity Matching (EM) is the problem of determining if two entities in a data set refer to the same real-world object. For example, it decides if two given mentions in the data, such as “Helen Hunt” and “H. M. Hunt”, refer to the same real-world entity by using different similarity functions. This problem plays a key role in information integration, natural language understanding, information processing on the World-Wide Web, and on the emerging Semantic Web. This project deals with the similarity functions and thresholds utilized in them to determine the similarity of the entities. The work contains two major parts: …

Efficient Pair-Wise Similarity Computation Using Apache Spark, Parineetha Gandhi Tirumali

Master's Projects

Entity matching is the process of identifying different manifestations of the same real world entity. These entities can be referred to as objects(string) or data instances. These entities are in turn split over several databases or clusters based on the signatures of the entities. When entity matching algorithms are performed on these databases or clusters, there is a high possibility that a particular entity pair is compared more than once. The number of comparison for any two entities depend on the number of common signatures or keys they possess. This effects the performance of any entity matching algorithm. This paper …

Forensics Analysis Of Privacy Of Portable Web Browsers, Ahmad Ghafarian

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Web browser vendors offer a portable web browser option which is considered as one of the features that provides user privacy. Portable web browser is a browser that can be launched from a USB flash drive without the need for its installation on the host machine. Most popular web browsers have portable versions of their browsers as well. Portable web browsing poses a great challenge to computer forensic investigators who try to reconstruct the past browsing history, in case of any computer incidence. This research examines various sources in the host machine such as physical memory, temporary, recent, event files, …

Reverse Engineering A Nit That Unmasks Tor Users, Matthew Miller, Joshua Stroschein, Ashley Podhradsky

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper is a case study of a forensic investigation of a Network Investigative Technique (NIT) used by the FBI to deanonymize users of a The Onion Router (Tor) Hidden Service. The forensic investigators were hired by the defense to determine how the NIT worked. The defendant was ac- cused of using a browser to access illegal information. The authors analyzed the source code, binary files and logs that were used by the NIT. The analysis was used to validate that the NIT collected only necessary and legally authorized information. This paper outlines the publicly available case details, how the …

Malware In The Mobile Device Android Environment, Diana Hintea, Robert Bird, Andrew Walker

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

exploit smartphone operating systems has exponentially expanded. Android has become the main target to exploit due to having the largest install base amongst the smartphone operating systems and owing to the open access nature in which application installations are permitted. Many Android users are unaware of the risks associated with a malware infection and to what level current malware scanners protect them. This paper tests how efficient the currently available malware scanners are. To achieve this, ten representative Android security products were selected and tested against a set of 5,560 known and categorized Android malware samples. The tests were carried …

Forensic Analysis Of Smartphone Applications For Privacy Leakage, Diana Hintea, Chrysanthi Taramonli, Robert Bird, Rezhna Yusuf

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Smartphone and tablets are personal devices that have diffused to near universal ubiquity in recent years. As Smartphone users become more privacy-aware and -conscious, research is needed to understand how “leakage” of private information (personally identifiable information – PII) occurs. This study explores how leakage studies in Droid devices should be adapted to Apple iOS devices. The OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is examined for 50 apps in various categories. This study confirms that: (1) most apps transmit unencrypted sensitive PII, (2) SSL is used by some recipient websites, but without corresponding app compliance with SSL, and (3) most apps …

Inferring Previously Uninstalled Applications From Residual Partial Artifacts, Jim Jones, Tahir Khan, Kathryn Laskey, Alex Nelson, Mary Laamanen, Douglas White

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In this paper, we present an approach and experimental results to suggest the past presence of an application after the application has been uninstalled and the system has remained in use. Current techniques rely on the recovery of intact artifacts and traces, e.g., whole files, Windows Registry entries, or log file entries, while our approach requires no intact artifact recovery and leverages trace evidence in the form of residual partial files. In the case of recently uninstalled applications or an instrumented infrastructure, artifacts and traces may be intact and complete. In most cases, however, digital artifacts and traces are al- …

One-Time Pad Encryption Steganography System, Michael J. Pelosi, Gary Kessler, Michael Scott S. Brown

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In this paper we introduce and describe a novel approach to adaptive image steganography which is combined with One-Time Pad encryption, and demonstrate the software which implements this methodology. Testing using the state-of-the-art steganalysis software tool StegExpose concludes the image hiding is reliably secure and undetectable using reasonably-sized message payloads (≤25% message bits per image pixel; bpp). Payload image file format outputs from the software include PNG, BMP, JP2, JXR, J2K, TIFF, and WEBP. A variety of file output formats is empirically important as most steganalysis programs will only accept PNG, BMP, and possibly JPG, as the file inputs.

Keywords: …

Library Writers Reward Project, Saravana Kumar Gajendran

Master's Projects

Open-source library development exploits the distributed intelligence of participants in Internet communities. Nowadays, contribution to the open-source community is fading [16] (Stackalytics, 2016) as there is not much recognition for library writers. They can start exploring ways to generate revenue as they actively contribute to the open-source community.

This project helps library writers to generate revenue in the form of bitcoins for their contribution. Our solution to generate revenue for library writers is to integrate bitcoin mining with existing JavaScript libraries, such as jQuery. More use of the library leads to more revenue for the library writers. It uses the …

Movie Script Shot Lister, David Robert Smith

Master's Projects

The making of a motion picture almost always starts with the script, the written version of a story envisioned within the mind of its creator. The script is then broken down into shots. Each individual shot is filmed and then they are edited together to create the motion picture. The goal of the Movie Script Shot Lister thesis project is to be able to read in a script for a movie or television show, and automatically generate a shot list. While a script is text, a shot list is the blue print for how to visualize that script, so the …

Malicious Javascript Detection Using Statistical Language Model, Anumeha Shah

Master's Projects

The Internet has an immense importance in our day to day life, but at the same time, it has become the medium of infecting computers, attacking users, and distributing malicious code. As JavaScript is the principal language of client side pro- gramming, it is frequently used in conducting such attacks. Various approaches have been made to overcome the JavaScript security issues. Some advanced approaches utilize machine learning technology in combination with de-obfuscation and emula- tion. Many methods of analysis incorporate static analysis and dynamic analysis. Our solution is entirely based on static analysis, which avoids unnecessary runtime overhead.

The central …

Tracking User Activity While Safeguarding Data From Attackers, Justin Dahmubed

Master's Projects

Companies constantly look for ways to better understand customer activity on their websites. Website owners may want to be able to analyze customer activity without having to concern themselves with a government agency forcing them to reveal their information. Multiple analytical tools have been created, most notably Google Analytics.

In my thesis, I demonstrate how analytics data can be stored so that only the site owners can view the data about their customers. With my design, even the analytics site itself cannot decrypt the data after a given window of time has elapsed. The novel aspect of my design is …

Guest Editors' Introduction: Best Of Respect, Part 2, Tiffany Barnes, Jamie Payton, George K. Thiruvathukal, Jeff Forbes, Kristy Elizabeth Boyer

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The guest editors introduce best papers on broadening participation in computing from the RESPECT'15 conference. The five articles presented here are part two of a two-part series representing research on broadening participation in computing. These articles study participation in intersectional ways, through the perceptions and experiences of African-American middle school girls, the sense of belonging in computing for LGBTQ students, the impact of a STEM scholarship and community development program for low-income and first-generation college students, a leadership development program, and how African-American women individually take leadership to enable their success in computing.

Applying Grounded Theory Methods To Digital Forensics Research, Ahmed Almarzooqi, Andrew Jones, Richard Howley

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Deciding on a suitable research methodology is challenging for researchers. In this paper, grounded theory is presented as a systematic and comprehensive qualitative methodology in the emergent field of digital forensics research. This paper applies grounded theory in a digital forensics research project undertaken to study how organisations build and manage digital forensics capabilities. This paper gives a step-by-step guideline to explain the procedures and techniques of using grounded theory in digital forensics research. The paper gives a detailed explanation of how the three grounded theory coding methods (open, axial, and selective coding) can be used in digital forensics research. …

Covert6: A Tool To Corroborate The Existence Of Ipv6 Covert Channels, Raymond A. Hansen, Lourdes Gino, Dominic Savio

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Covert channels are any communication channel that can be exploited to transfer information in a manner that violates the system’s security policy. Research in the field has shown that, like many communication channels, IPv4 and the TCP/IP protocol suite have been susceptible to covert channels, which could be exploited to leak data or be used for anonymous communications. With the introduction of IPv6, researchers are acutely aware that many vulnerabilities of IPv4 have been remediated in IPv6. However, a proof of concept covert channel system was demonstrated in 2006. A decade later, IPv6 and its related protocols have undergone major …

Acceleration Of Statistical Detection Of Zero-Day Malware In The Memory Dump Using Cuda-Enabled Gpu Hardware, Igor Korkin, Iwan Nesterow

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper focuses on the anticipatory enhancement of methods of detecting stealth software. Cyber security detection tools are insufficiently powerful to reveal the most recent cyber-attacks which use malware. In this paper, we will present first an idea of the highest stealth malware, as this is the most complicated scenario for detection because it combines both existing anti-forensic techniques together with their potential improvements. Second, we will present new detection methods which are resilient to this hidden prototype. To help solve this detection challenge, we have analyzed Windows’ memory content using a new method of Shannon Entropy calculation; methods of …

Using Computer Behavior Profiles To Differentiate Between Users In A Digital Investigation, Shruti Gupta, Marcus Rogers

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Most digital crimes involve finding evidence on the computer and then linking it to a suspect using login information, such as a username and a password. However, login information is often shared or compromised. In such a situation, there needs to be a way to identify the user without relying exclusively on login credentials. This paper introduces the concept that users may show behavioral traits which might provide more information about the user on the computer. This hypothesis was tested by conducting an experiment in which subjects were required to perform common tasks on a computer, over multiple sessions. The …

Current Challenges And Future Research Areas For Digital Forensic Investigation, David Lillis, Brett A. Becker, Tadhg O’Sullivan, Mark Scanlon

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Given the ever-increasing prevalence of technology in modern life, there is a corresponding increase in the likelihood of digital devices being pertinent to a criminal investigation or civil litigation. As a direct consequence, the number of investigations requiring digital forensic expertise is resulting in huge digital evidence backlogs being encountered by law enforcement agencies throughout the world. It can be anticipated that the number of cases requiring digital forensic analysis will greatly increase in the future. It is also likely that each case will require the analysis of an increasing number of devices including computers, smartphones, tablets, cloud-based services, Internet …

Forensic Analysis Of Ares Galaxy Peer-To-Peer Network, Frank Kolenbrander, Nhien-An Le-Khac, Tahar Kechadi

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Child Abuse Material (CAM) is widely available on P2P networks. Over the last decade several tools were made for 24/7 monitoring of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks to discover suspects that use these networks for downloading and distribution of CAM. For some countries the amount of cases generated by these tools is so great that Law Enforcement (LE) just cannot handle them all. This is not only leading to backlogs and prioritizing of cases but also leading to discussions about the possibility of disrupting these networks and sending warning messages to potential CAM offenders. Recently, investigators are reporting that they are creating …

Keynote Speaker, Chuck Easttom

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Conference Keynote Speaker, Chuck Easttom

Monarch: A Reimagined Browser For The Modern Web, Daniel R. Whitcomb

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Web browsers have become fast and flexible enough to allow web applications to be viable competition to native applications. Now that the web as a platform has become formidable, it has changed the types of web applications being produced, and the ways in which native applications are being built. This observation leads me to propose the concept of the App Web - a category of the world wide web which increases productivity - and its place in the current application experience. Monarch is a system designed to merge the advantages of native and web applications, improving experiences for both the …

Multiple Sequence Alignment With Pro Le Hidden Markov Models, Shubhangi Rakhonde

Master's Projects

The human genome consists of various patterns and sequences that are of biolog- ical signi cance. Capturing these patterns can help us in resolving various mysteries related to the genome, like how genomes evolve, how diseases occur due to genetic mutation, how viruses mutate to cause new disease and what is the cure for these diseases. All these applications are covered in the study of bioinformatics.

One of the very common tasks in bioinformatics involves simultaneous alignment of a number of biological sequences. In bioinformatics, this is widely known as Mul- tiple Sequence Alignment. Multiple sequence alignments help in grouping …

Hill's Diagrammatic Method And Reduced Graph Powers, Gregory D. Smith, Richard Hammack

Biology and Medicine Through Mathematics Conference

No abstract provided.

Counting Solutions To Discrete Non-Algebraic Equations Modulo Prime Powers, Abigail Mann

Mathematical Sciences Technical Reports (MSTR)

As society becomes more reliant on computers, cryptographic security becomes increasingly important. Current encryption schemes include the ElGamal signature scheme, which depends on the complexity of the discrete logarithm problem. It is thought that the functions that such schemes use have inverses that are computationally intractable. In relation to this, we are interested in counting the solutions to a generalization of the discrete logarithm problem modulo a prime power. This is achieved by interpolating to p-adic functions, and using Hensel's lemma, or other methods in the case of singular lifting, and the Chinese Remainder Theorem.

Mining Pm2.5 And Traffic Conditions For Air Quality, Xu Du, Aparna S. Varde

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Fine particle pollution is related to road traffic conditions. In this work, we analyze Particulate Matter with a diameter less than 2.5 micrometers, calledPM2.5, along with traffic conditions. This is done for multicity data to study the relationships in the context of environmental modeling. The goal behind this modeling is to support prediction of PM2.5 concentration and resulting air quality. We deploy data mining algorithms in association rules, clustering and classification to discover knowledge from the concerned data sets. The results are used to develop a prototype tool for the prediction of PM2.5 and hence air quality for public health …

Hive - An Agent Based Modeling Framework, Roohi Bharti

Master's Projects

This thesis begins by defining agent based modeling. Agent based models are used to model the emergent behavior of complex systems with many interacting components, known as agents. Several model examples are given using NetLogo, which is a popular agent-based modeling platform. A model of concurrent computation is described that uses message passing as the only form of communication between the model’s components, which are called actors. The model is called an actor model. Actors are primitive objects of concurrency in an actor model. In particular, we describe the actor model implemented by Akka, which is Scala’s new actor library. …

Processing Posting Lists Using Opencl, Radha Kotipalli

Master's Projects

One of the main requirements of internet search engines is the ability to retrieve relevant results with faster response times. Yioop is an open source search engine designed and developed in PHP by Dr. Chris Pollett. The goal of this project is to explore the possibilities of enhancing the performance of Yioop by substituting resource-intensive existing PHP functions with C based native PHP extensions and the parallel data processing technology OpenCL. OpenCL leverages the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) of a computer system for performance improvements.

Some of the critical functions in search engines are resource-intensive in terms of processing power, …

Secure Declassification In Faceted Javascript, Tam Wing

Master's Projects

Information leaks currently represent a major security vulnerability. Malicious code, when injected into a trusted environment and executed in the context of the victim’s privileges, often results in the loss of sensitive information. To address this security issue, this paper focuses on the idea of information flow control using faceted execution [3]. This mechanism allows the interpreter to efficiently keep track of variables across multiple security levels, achieving termination-insensitive non-interference (TINI). With TINI, a program can only leak one bit of data, caused by the termination of a program. One key benefit of having faceted execution is that flow policy …

Interactive Computer Science Exercises In Edx, Hong Le

Master's Projects

This project focuses on improving online learning courses for Computer Science. My approach is to create a platform in which interactive exercises can be implemented for students to work on. Methodology includes creating plugins for interactive exercises using XBlock, a component architecture for building independent online courses on edX. The exercises are based on existing exercises like CodeCheck and Wiley’s InterActivities Exercise System. In order to integrate these exercises, I implemented CodeCheck XBlock and Interactive XBlock. These Xblocks allow students to work on interactive exercises on edX, and instructors to view and download students’ submissions.