Computer Sciences Commons^™

Security And The Transnational Information Polity, Michael M. Losavio, Adel Said Elmaghraby

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Global information and communications technologies create criminal opportunities in which criminal violation and physical proximity are decoupled. As in all our endeavors, the good become the prey of the bad. Murderous and venal exploitation of ICT has followed from the inception of the Internet, threatening all the good it brings and the trust we need so badly as a people. As the work continues to expand the implementation of Smart Cities and the Internet of Things, there will be more opportunities for exploitation of these technologies. We examine the social and liberty risks our data and technology-driven responses may entail.

Vurle: Automatic Vulnerability Detection And Repair By Learning From Examples, Ma Siqi, Ferdian Thung, David Lo, Cong Sun, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Vulnerability becomes a major threat to the security of many systems. Attackers can steal private information and perform harmful actions by exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities often remain undetected for a long time as they may not affect typical systems’ functionalities. Furthermore, it is often difficult for a developer to fix a vulnerability correctly if he/she is not a security expert. To assist developers to deal with multiple types of vulnerabilities, we propose a new tool, called VuRLE, for automatic detection and repair of vulnerabilities. VuRLE (1) learns transformative edits and their contexts (i.e., code characterizing edit locations) from examples of …

On-Demand Developer Documentation, Martin P. Robillard, Andrian Marcus, Christoph Treude, Gabriele Bavota, Oscar Chaparro, Neil Ernst, Marco Aurélio Gerosa, Michael Godfrey, Michele Lanza, Mario Linares-Vasquez, Gail C. Murphy, Laura Moreno, David Shepherd, Edmund Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We advocate for a paradigm shift in supporting the information needs of developers, centered around the concept of automated on-demand developer documentation. Currently, developer information needs are fulfilled by asking experts or consulting documentation. Unfortunately, traditional documentation practices are inefficient because of, among others, the manual nature of its creation and the gap between the creators and consumers. We discuss the major challenges we face in realizing such a paradigm shift, highlight existing research that can be leveraged to this end, and promote opportunities for increased convergence in research on software documentation.

Parallel Personalized Pagerank On Dynamic Graphs, Wentian Guo, Yuchen Li, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Personalized PageRank (PPR) is a well-known proximitymeasure in graphs. To meet the need for dynamic PPRmaintenance, recent works have proposed a local updatescheme to support incremental computation. Nevertheless,sequential execution of the scheme is still too slow for highspeedstream processing. Therefore, we are motivated todesign a parallel approach for dynamic PPR computation.First, as updates always come in batches, we devise a batchprocessing method to reduce synchronization cost among everysingle update and enable more parallelism for iterativeparallel execution. Our theoretical analysis shows that theparallel approach has the same asymptotic complexity asthe sequential approach. Second, we devise novel optimizationtechniques to e↵ectively reduce runtime …

Xsearch: A Domain-Specific Cross-Language Relevant Question Retrieval Tool, Bowen Xu, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo, Xuan-Bach D. Le

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

During software development process, Chinese developers often seek solutions to the technical problems they encounter by searching relevant questions on Q&A sites. When developers fail to find solutions on Q&A sites in Chinese, they could translate their query and search on the English Q&A sites. However, Chinese developers who are non-native English speakers often are not comfortable to ask or search questions in English, as they do not know the proper translation of the Chinese technical words into the English technical words. Furthermore, the process of manually formulating cross-language queries and determining the importance of query words is a tedious …

S3: Syntax- And Semantic-Guided Repair Synthesis Via Programming By Examples, Xuan-Bach D. Le, Duc-Hiep Chu, David Lo, Claire Le Goues, Willem Visser

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A notable class of techniques for automatic program repair is known as semantics-based. Such techniques, e.g., Angelix, infer semantic specifications via symbolic execution, and then use program synthesis to construct new code that satisfies those inferred specifications. However, the obtained specifications are naturally incomplete, leaving the synthesis engine with a difficult task of synthesizing a general solution from a sparse space of many possible solutions that are consistent with the provided specifications but that do not necessarily generalize. We present S3, a new repair synthesis engine that leverages programming-by-examples methodology to synthesize high-quality bug repairs. The novelty in S3 that …

Vcksm: Verifiable Conjunctive Keyword Search Over Mobile E-Health Cloud In Shared Multi-Owner Settings, Yinbin Miao, Jianfeng Ma, Ximeng Liu, Qi Jiang, Junwei Zhang, Limin Shen, Zhiquan Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searchable encryption (SE) is a promising technique which enables cloud users to conduct search over encrypted cloud data in a privacy-preserving way, especially for the electronic health record (EHR) system that contains plenty of medical history, diagnosis, radiology images, etc. In this paper, we focus on a more practical scenario, also named as the shared multi-owner settings, where each e-health record is co-owned by a fixed number of parties. Although the existing SE schemes under the unshared multi-owner settings can be adapted to this shared scenario, these schemes have to build multiple indexes,which definitely incur higher computational overhead. To save …

Automated Android Application Permission Recommendation, Lingfeng Bao, David Lo, Xin Xia, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The number of Android applications has increased rapidly as Android is becoming the dominant platform in the smartphone market. Security and privacy are key factors for an Android application to be successful. Android provides a permission mechanism to ensure security and privacy. This permission mechanism requires that developers declare the sensitive resources required by their applications. On installation or during runtime, users are required to agree with the permission request. However, in practice, there are numerous popular permission misuses, despite Android introducing official documents stating how to use these permissions properly. Some data mining techniques (e.g., association rule mining) have …

Evopass: Evolvable Graphical Password Against Shoulder-Surfing Attacks, Xingjie Yu, Zhan Wang, Yingjiu Li, Liang Li, Wen Tao Zhu, Li Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The passwords for authenticating users are susceptible to shoulder-surfing attacks in which attackers learn users' passwords through direct observations without any technical support. A straightforward solution to defend against such attacks is to change passwords periodically or even constantly, making the previously observed passwords useless. However, this may lead to a situation in which users run out of strong passwords they can remember, or they are forced to choose passwords that are weak, correlated, or difficult to memorize. To achieve both security and usability in user authentication, we propose EvoPass, the first evolvable graphical password authentication system. EvoPass transforms a …

Unobtrusive Monitoring To Detect Depression For Elderly With Chronic Illnesses, Jung-Yoon Kim, Na Liu, Hwee Xian Tan, Chao-Hsien Chu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mental health related disorders are common diseases, especially among the elder. Among the various mental health diseases, one potential threat to ageing-in-place is the risk of depression. In this paper, we propose a simple unobtrusive sensing system using passive infra-red motion sensors to monitor the activities of daily living of elderly, who are living alone. A feature extraction module comprising of three layers-states, events, and activities, and the corresponding algorithms are proposed to extract features. Four popular classification models-neural network, C4.5 decision tree, Bayesian network, and support vector machine are then applied to detect the severity of depression. We implement …

Personalized Microtopic Recommendation On Microblogs, Yang Li, Jing Jiang, Ting Liu, Minghui Qiu, Xiaofei Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microblogging services such as Sina Weibo and Twitter allow users to create tags explicitly indicated by the # symbol. In Sina Weibo, these tags are called microtopics, and in Twitter, they are called hashtags. In Sina Weibo, each microtopic has a designate page and can be directly visited or commented on. Recommending these microtopics to users based on their interests can help users efficiently acquire information. However, it is non-trivial to recommend microtopics to users to satisfy their information needs. In this article, we investigate the task of personalized microtopic recommendation, which exhibits two challenges. First, users usually do not …

Stylizing Face Images Via Multiple Exemplars, Yibing Song, Linchao Bao, Shengfeng He, Qingxiong Yang, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We address the problem of transferring the style of a headshot photo to face images. Existing methods using a single exemplar lead to inaccurate results when the exemplar does not contain sufficient stylized facial components for a given photo. In this work, we propose an algorithm to stylize face images using multiple exemplars containing different subjects in the same style. Patch correspondences between an input photo and multiple exemplars are established using a Markov Random Field (MRF), which enables accurate local energy transfer via Laplacian stacks. As image patches from multiple exemplars are used, the boundaries of facial components on …

Loopster: Static Loop Termination Analysis, Xiaofei Xie, Bihuan Chen, Liang Zou, Shang-Wei Lin, Yang Liu, Xiaohong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Loop termination is an important problem for proving the correctness of a system and ensuring that the system always reacts. Existing loop termination analysis techniques mainly depend on the synthesis of ranking functions, which is often expensive. In this paper, we present a novel approach, named Loopster, which performs an efficient static analysis to decide the termination for loops based on path termination analysis and path dependency reasoning. Loopster adopts a divide-and-conquer approach: (1) we extract individual paths from a target multi-path loop and analyze the termination of each path, (2) analyze the dependencies between each two paths, and then …

Understanding Stack Overflow Code Fragments, Christoph Treude, Martin P. Robillard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code fragments posted in answers on Q&A forums can form an important source of developer knowledge. However, effective reuse of code fragments found online often requires information other than the code fragment alone. We report on the results of a survey-based study to investigate to what extent developers perceive Stack Overflow code fragments to be self-explanatory. As part of the study, we also investigated the types of information missing from fragments that were not self-explanatory. We find that less than half of the Stack Overflow code fragments in our sample are considered to be self-explanatory by the 321 participants who …

Ind-Pca Secure Kem Is Enough For Password-Based Authenticated Key Exchange (Short Paper), Haiyang Xue, Bao Li, Xianhui Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There are several frameworks for password-based authenticated key exchange (PAKE) protocols with common reference string following the work of Katz, Ostrovsky and Yung (Eurocrypt’01), and it seems that the IND-CCA secure encryption is inevitable when constructing PAKE in standard model.In this paper, we show that IND-PCA secure key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) is enough for PAKE, which is weaker and easier to be constructed than IND-CCA secure encryption. Our refined PAKE consists of a smooth projective hash function on IND-CPA secure encryption and an IND-PCA secure KEM. Based on DDH assumption, the total communication of PAKE consists of 6 group elements …

Code Coverage And Postrelease Defects: A Large-Scale Study On Open Source Projects, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, David Lo, Julia Lawall, Nachiappan Nagappan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Testing is a pivotal activity in ensuring the quality of software. Code coverage is a common metric used as a yardstick to measure the efficacy and adequacy of testing. However, does higher coverage actually lead to a decline in postrelease bugs? Do files that have higher test coverage actually have fewer bug reports? The direct relationship between code coverage and actual bug reports has not yet been analyzed via a comprehensive empirical study on real bugs. Past studies only involve a few software systems or artificially injected bugs (mutants). In this empirical study, we examine these questions in the context …

Genomic Security (Lest We Forget), Tatiana Bradley, Xuhua Ding, Gene Tsudik

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Genomic privacy has attracted much attention from the research community, because its risks are unique and breaches can lead to terrifying leakage of sensitive information. The less-explored topic of genomic security must address threats of digitized genomes being altered, which can have dire consequences in medical or legal settings.

Programming Frameworks For Mobile Sensing, Hillol Debnath

Dissertations

The proliferation of smart mobile devices in people’s daily lives is making context-aware computing a reality. A plethora of sensors available in these devices can be utilized to understand users’ context better. Apps can provide more relevant data or services to the user based on improved understanding of user’s context. With the advent of cloud-assisted mobile platforms, apps can also perform collaborative computation over the sensing data collected from a group of users. However, there are still two main issues: (1) A lack of simple and effective personal sensing frameworks: existing frameworks do not provide support for real-time fusing of …

Ua8 It Security Bulletin, Wku Information Technology

WKU Administration Documents

WKU Information Technology security bulletin issued to faculty & staff via email.

• Ciampa, Mark. Ransomware
• Securing the Human
• New to WKU?
• Phone Scams
• Phishing
• SMiShing
• Handling Sensitive Data
• University Policy

Matrix Completion Algorithms With Applications In Biomedicine, E-Commerce And Social Science, Yiran Wang

Theses

This thesis investigates matrix completion algorithms with applications in biomedicine, e-commerce and social science. In general, matrix completion algorithms work well for low rank matrices. Such matrices find many applications in recommender systems and social network analysis. On the other hand, biological networks often yield high rank matrices. For example, the adjacency matrix representing interactions between transcription factors and target genes in the cell is a highly sparse matrix, in which most entries correspond to absent interactions and only a few entries correspond to present interactions. This sparse matrix is a high rank or even full rank matrix. Matrix completion …

Defining Consciousness, Adam Bateman

Missouri S&T’s Peer to Peer

A researcher trying to develop a conscious artificial intelligence or examine consciousness in plants would be completely unable to do so without first obtaining a clear, concise, and global definition. This idea is what originally inspired my research. The main method of research to be used will be to thoroughly examine scholarly articles pertaining to consciousness and different theories of the mind. After gathering data and different ideas, I will create a definition that is plausible, and is optimized in terms of being useful to researchers. Currently, the issue is that there are an incredible amount of mental features that …

Biosensors For Cancer Detection Applications, Shannon Griffin

Missouri S&T’s Peer to Peer

Cancer is one of the most deadly diseases, and current detection options are ineffective. Recently, a large amount of research has been conducted for the development of biosensors able to detect cancer biomarkers. Many biosensors have been created for cancer detecting purposes. I examined literature reviews outlining current biosensing methods. These reviews provided an overview of the sensing techniques that are currently in existence as well as evaluations of their effectiveness. I also read experimental reports that outline the construction of biosensors fabricated in laboratories and the results of their testings. These papers help to showcase the feasibility and effectiveness …

Exploring Potential Flaws And Dangers Involving Machine Learning Technology, David Nicholas Skoff

Missouri S&T’s Peer to Peer

This paper seeks to explore the ways in which machine learning and AI may influence the world in the future and the potential for the technology to be misused or exploited. In 1959 Arthur Samuel defined machine learning as “the field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed” (Munoz). This paper will also seek to find out if there is merit to the current worry that robots will take over some jobs based in cognitive abilities. In the past, a human was required to perform these jobs, but with the rise of more complex …

Network Security: Internet Protocol Version Six Security, Hannah Reinbolt

Missouri S&T’s Peer to Peer

It is no secret that the pool of public internet addresses available with Internet Protocol version Four (IPv4) is gone. (Morphy, 2011) Thus the migration to the more roomy Internet Protocol version Six (IPv6) has begun. This migration is a complex process including different security procedures and updates that require time and knowledge. This paper will dive into scientific writings, with databases like Scopus and IEEE, about various security risks in the IPv6 protocol such as tunneling practices, router issues and issues with Internet Protocol Security (IPsec). This paper will overview security practices to better clarify common vulnerabilities in IPv6. …

Some Tricks In Parameter Selection For Extreme Learning Machine, Weipeng Cao, Jinzhu Gao, Zhong Ming, Shubin Cai

All Faculty Presentations - School of Engineering and Computer Science

Extreme learning machine (ELM) is a widely used neural network with random weights (NNRW), which has made great contributions to many fields. However, the relationship between the parameters and the performance of ELM has not been fully investigated yet, i.e. the impact of the number of hidden layer nodes, the randomization range of the weights between the input layer and hidden layer, the randomization range of the threshold of hidden nodes, and the type of activation functions. In this paper, eight benchmark functions are used to study this relationship. We have some interesting findings, such as more hidden layer nodes …

Understanding The Uncanny: Both Atypical Features And Category Ambiguity Provoke Aversion Toward Humanlike Robots, Megan K. Strait, Victoria A. Floerke, Wendy Ju, Keith Maddox, Jessica D. Remedios, Malte F. Jung, Heather L. Urry

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Robots intended for social contexts are often designed with explicit humanlike attributes in order to facilitate their reception by (and communication with) people. However, observation of an “uncanny valley”—a phenomenon in which highly humanlike entities provoke aversion in human observers—has lead some to caution against this practice. Both of these contrasting perspectives on the anthropomorphic design of social robots find some support in empirical investigations to date. Yet, owing to outstanding empirical limitations and theoretical disputes, the uncanny valley and its implications for human-robot interaction remains poorly understood. We thus explored the relationship between human similarity and people's aversion toward …

Forensic State Acquisition From Internet Of Things (Fsaiot): A General Framework And Practical Approach For Iot Forensics Through Iot Device State Acquisition, Christopher S. Meffert, Devon R. Clark, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

IoT device forensics is a difficult problem given that manufactured IoT devices are not standardized, many store little to no historical data, and are always connected; making them extremely volatile. The goal of this paper was to address these challenges by presenting a primary account for a general framework and practical approach we term Forensic State Acquisition from Internet of Things (FSAIoT). We argue that by leveraging the acquisition of the state of IoT devices (e.g. if an IoT lock is open or locked), it becomes possible to paint a clear picture of events that have occurred. To this end, …

History Of Computing, George K. Thiruvathukal, David B. Dennis

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The social and organizational history of humanity is intricately entangled with the history of technology in general and the technology of information in particular. Advances in this area have often been closely involved in social and political transformations. While the contemporary period is often referred to by such names as the Computing and Information Age, this is the culmination of a series of historical transformations that have been centuries in the making. This course will provide a venue for students to learn about history through the evolution of number systems and arithmetic, calculating and computing machines, and advanced communication technology …

Research On Improving Navigation Safety Based On Big Data And Cloud Computing Technology For Qiongzhou Strait, Rui Wang

Maritime Safety & Environment Management Dissertations (Dalian)

No abstract provided.

The Future Is Coming : Research On Maritime Communication Technology For Realization Of Intelligent Ship And Its Impacts On Future Maritime Management, Jiacheng Ke

Maritime Safety & Environment Management Dissertations (Dalian)

No abstract provided.