Computer Sciences Commons^™

Sehs: Simultaneous Energy Harvesting And Sensing Using Piezoelectric Energy Harvester, Dong Ma, Guohan Lan, Weitao Xu, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Piezoelectric energy harvesting (PEH), which converts ambient motion, stress, and vibrations into usable electricity, may help combat battery issues in a growing number of industrial and wearable Internet of things (IoTs). Recently, many works have convincingly demonstrated that PEH can also act as a self-powered sensor for detecting a wide range of machine and human contexts. These developments suggest that the same PEH hardware could be potentially used for simultaneous energy harvesting and sensing (SEHS), offering a new design space for low cost and low power IoT devices. Unfortunately, realization of SEHS is challenging as the energy harvesting process distorts …

Every Step You Take, I’Ll Be Watching You: Practical Stepauth-Entication Of Rfid Paths, Kai Bu, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Path authentication thwarts counterfeits in RFID-based supply chains. Its motivation is that tagged products taking invalid paths are likely faked and injected by adversaries at certain supply chain partners/steps. Existing solutions are path-grained in that they simply regard a product as genuine if it takes any valid path. Furthermore, they enforce distributed authentication by offloading the sets of valid paths to some or all steps from a centralized issuer. This not only imposes network and storage overhead but also leaks transaction privacy. We present StepAuth, the first step-grained path authentication protocol that is practically efficient for authenticating products with strict …

A Novel Representation And Compression For Queries On Trajectories In Road Networks, Xiaochun Yang, Bin Wang, Kai Yang, Chengfei Liu, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recording and querying time-stamped trajectories incurs high cost of data storage and computing. In this paper, we explore several characteristics of the trajectories in road mbox{networks}, which have motivated the idea of coding trajectories by associating timestamps with relative spatial path and locations. Such a representation contains large number of duplicate information to achieve a lower entropy compared with the existing representations, thereby drastically cutting the storage cost. We propose several techniques to compress spatial path and locations separately, which can support fast positioning and achieve better compression ratio. For locations, we propose two novel encoding schemes such that the …

Detecting Speakers In Video Footage, Michael Williams

Master's Theses

Facial recognition is a powerful tool for identifying people visually. Yet, when the end goal is more specific than merely identifying the person in a picture problems can arise. Speaker identification is one such task which expects more predictive power out of a facial recognition system than can be provided on its own. Speaker identification is the task of identifying who is speaking in video not simply who is present in the video. This extra requirement introduces numerous false positives into the facial recognition system largely due to one main scenario. The person speaking is not on camera. This paper …

Leveraging Resources On Anonymous Mobile Edge Nodes, Ahmed Salem

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Smart devices have become an essential component in the life of mankind. The quick rise of smartphones, IoTs, and wearable devices enabled applications that were not possible few years ago, e.g., health monitoring and online banking. Meanwhile, smart sensing laid the infrastructure for smart homes and smart cities. The intrusive nature of smart devices granted access to huge amounts of raw data. Researchers seized the moment with complex algorithms and data models to process the data over the cloud and extract as much information as possible. However, the pace and amount of data generation, in addition to, networking protocols transmitting …

A Holistic Computational Approach To Boosting The Performance Of Protein Search Engines, Majdi Ahmad Mosa Maabreh

Dissertations

Despite availability of several proteins search engines, due to the increasing amounts of MS/MS data and database sizes, more efficient data analysis and reduction methods are important. Improving accuracy and performance of protein identification is a main goal in the community of proteomic research. In this research, a holistic solution for improvement in search performance is developed.

Most current search engines apply the SEQUEST style of searching protein databases to define MS/MS spectra. SEQUEST involves three main phases: (i) Indexing the protein databases, (ii) Matching and Ranking the MS/MS spectra and (iii) Filtering the matches and reporting the final proteins. …

Support Assurance-Based Software Development For Mission Critical Domains Using The Model Driven Architecture, Chung-Ling Lin

Dissertations

In the past decades, software development for mission critical applications has drawn great attention not only in various mission critical communities but also software engineering communities. One of the important reasons is that the failure of these systems can lead to some serious consequences such as huge financial loss and even loss of life. Therefore, software certification has become an important activity for mission critical applications in that software assurance for such a system should be certified. With the increasing complexity of a software system in mission critical sectors, certifiers have found hard time to understand how a software system …

Exploring The Use Of Hierarchal Statistical Analysis And Deep Neural Networks To Detect And Mitigate Covert Timing Channels, Omar Darwish

Dissertations

Covert timing channels provide a mechanism to transmit unauthorized information across different processes. It utilizes the inter-arrival times between the transmitted packets to hide the communicated data. It can be exploited in a variety of malevolent scenarios such as leaking military secrets, trade secrets, and other forms of Intellectual Property (IP). They can be also used as a vehicle to attack existing computing systems to disseminate software viruses or worms while bypassing firewalls, intrusion detection and protection systems, and application filters. Therefore, the detection and mitigation of covert channels is a key issue in modern Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. Many …

Using Agent-Based Implementation Of Active Data Bundles For Protecting Privacy In Healthcare Information Systems, Raed M. Salih

Dissertations

Sharing healthcare information—including electronic health/medical records (EHRs/EMRs)—among healthcare information systems is necessary for improving the quality of healthcare. However, facilitating data exchange increases privacy threats—due to easier copying and dissemination of healthcare information.

We propose a solution that provides privacy protection for patients’ EHRs/EMRs disseminated among different authorized healthcare information systems. Our solution builds upon the existing construct named an Active Data Bundle (ADB). In the proposed solution, ADBs keep EHRs/EMRs as sensitive data; include metadata describing sensitive data and prescribing their use; and encompass a policy enforcement engine (called a virtual machine or VM), which …

A Comparison Study Of Disease Spreading Models, Douglas Nogueira Oliveira

Theses and Dissertations

Epidemic diseases have become one of the major sources of concern in modern society. Diseases such as HIV and H1N1 have infected millions of people around the world. Many studies have attempted to describe the dynamics of disease spreading. Despite the numerous models, most only analyze one aspect of a given model, such as the impact of the topology of a contagious network, or, the spreading rate of disease. Although useful, these types of analyses do not provide insights into how different models could be combined to better understand the phenomenon, or how the modeling decisions affect the dynamics of …

Preface

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Hierarchical Bloom Filter Trees For Approximate Matching, David Lillis, Frank Breitinger, Mark Scanlon

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Bytewise approximate matching algorithms have in recent years shown significant promise in detecting files that are similar at the byte level. This is very useful for digital forensic investigators, who are regularly faced with the problem of searching through a seized device for pertinent data. A common scenario is where an investigator is in possession of a collection of "known-illegal" files (e.g. a collection of child abuse material) and wishes to find whether copies of these are stored on the seized device. Approximate matching addresses shortcomings in traditional hashing, which can only find identical files, by also being able to …

Front Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Automated Man-In-The-Middle Attack Against Wi‑Fi Networks, Martin Vondráček, Jan Pluskal, Ondřej Ryšavý

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Currently used wireless communication technologies suffer security weaknesses that can be exploited allowing to eavesdrop or to spoof network communication. In this paper, we present a practical tool that can automate the attack on wireless security. The developed package called wifimitm provides functionality for the automation of MitM attacks in the wireless environment. The package combines several existing tools and attack strategies to bypass the wireless security mechanisms, such as WEP, WPA, and WPS. The presented tool can be integrated into a solution for automated penetration testing. Also, a popularization of the fact that such attacks can be easily automated …

Testing Memory Forensics Tools For The Macintosh Os X Operating System, Charles B. Leopard, Neil C. Rowe, Michael R. Mccarrin

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Memory acquisition is essential to defeat anti-forensic operating-system features and investigate cyberattacks that leave little or no evidence in secondary storage. The forensic community has developed tools to acquire physical memory from Apple’s Macintosh computers, but they have not much been tested. This work tested three major OS X memory-acquisition tools. Although the tools could capture system memory accurately, the open-source tool OSXPmem appeared advantageous in size, reliability, and support for memory configurations and versions of the OS X operating system.

Back Matter

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Cover

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Masthead

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Subscription Information

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Drone Forensic Analysis Using Open Source Tools, M A Hannan Bin Azhar, Thomas Edward Allen Barton, Tasmina Islam

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Carrying capabilities of drones and their easy accessibility to public have led to an increase in crimes committed using drones in recent years. For this reason, the need for forensic analysis of drones captured from the crime scenes and the devices used for these drones is also paramount. This paper presents the extraction and identification of important artefacts from the recorded flight data as well as the associated mobile devices using open source tools and some basic scripts developed to aid the analysis of two popular drone systems- the DJI Phantom 3 Professional and Parrot AR. Drone 2.0. Although different …

A Fall Prevention System For The Elderly And Visually Impaired, Yueng Santiago De La Hoz Isaza

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The World Health Organization claims that there are more than 285 million blind and visually impaired people in the world. In the US, 25 million Americans suffer from total or partial vision loss. As a result of their impairment, they struggle with mobility problems, especially the risk of falling. According to the National Council On Aging, falls are among the primary causes for fatal injury and they are the most common cause of non-fatal trauma-related hospital admissions among older adults. Visibility, an organization that helps visually impaired people, reports that people with visual impairments are twice as likely to fall …

A Model For Donation Verification, Bin Fu, Fengjuan Zhu, John P. Abraham

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this paper, we introduce a model for donation verification. A randomized algorithm is developed to check if the money claimed being received by the collector is (1 - ϵ)-approximation to the total amount money contributed by the donors. We also derive some negative results that show it is impossible to verify the donations under some circumstances.

Dynamic Energy-Aware Database Storage And Operations, Peyman Behzadnia

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Energy consumption has become a first-class optimization goal in design and implementation of data-intensive computing systems. This is particularly true in the design of database management systems (DBMS), which is one of the most important servers in software stack of modern data centers. Data storage system is one of the essential components of database and has been under many research efforts aiming at reducing its energy consumption. In previous work, dynamic power management (DPM) techniques that make real-time decisions to transition the disks to low-power modes are normally used to save energy in storage systems. In this research, we tackle …

Poster: Towards Safe Refactoring For Intelligent Parallelization Of Java 8 Streams, Yiming Tang, Raffi Khatchadourian, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Syed Ahmed

Publications and Research

The Java 8 Stream API sets forth a promising new programming model that incorporates functional-like, MapReduce-style features into a mainstream programming language. However, using streams correctly and efficiently may involve subtle considerations. In this poster, we present our ongoing work and preliminary results to- wards an automated refactoring approach that assists developers in writing optimal stream code. The approach, based on ordering and typestate analysis, determines when it is safe and advantageous to convert streams to parallel and optimize a parallel streams.

A Bayesian Network Based Adaptability Design Of Product Structures For Function Evolution, Shaobo Li, Yongming Wu, Yan-Xia Xu, Jie Hu, Jianjun Hu

Faculty Publications

Structure adaptability design is critical for function evolution in product families, in which many structural and functional design factors are intertwined together with manufacturing cost, customer satisfaction, and final market sales. How to achieve a delicate balance among all of these factors to maximize the market performance of the product is too complicated to address based on traditional domain experts’ knowledge or some ad hoc heuristics. Here, we propose a quantitative product evolution design model that is based on Bayesian networks to model the dynamic relationship between customer needs and product structure design. In our model, all of the structural …

Usability Assessment For Caregiver Behavior Analysis Using Gaming Technology, Alexandrea C. Oliver, Tanvi Banerjee, Jennifer Hughes, Noah L. Schroeder

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

The proposed research focuses on developing a mobile application for Android systems that will detect changes in behavior and activity patterns of those who are primary caregivers for dementia patients. This application will be used to detect fluctuation in the behavior and the task performance of the caregivers as a measure of caregiver stress. By detecting these changes in behavior, the goal is to analyze the effects of caregiving to evaluate caregiver burnout. A usability study was conducted for this application to find the optimal design factors and features that benefit the target user: the caregiver.

The purpose of this …

Mitigating The Effects Of Cyber Attacks And Human Control In An Autonomous Intersection, Karl C. Bentjen

Theses and Dissertations

Widespread use of fully autonomous vehicles is near. However, the desire for a human to maintain control, even if limited, of a vehicle will likely never fully subside. Protocols to safely and efficiently manage reservation-based intersections with a mixture of fully autonomous, semi-autonomous, and non-autonomous vehicles exist such as AIM, SemiAIM, and H-AIM. Missing from these protocols is persistent human control of semi-autonomous vehicles in approaching and navigating autonomous intersections without the use of traditional signals. This thesis offers a proof-of-concept of a reservation-based protocol with necessary extensions required for human control in semi-autonomous vehicles. Desired is a protocol that …

Pattern-Of-Life Modeling Using Data Leakage In Smart Homes, Steven M. Beyer

Theses and Dissertations

This work investigates data leakage in smart homes by providing a Smart Home Automation Architecture (SHAA) and a device classifier and pattern-of-life analysis tool, CITIoT (Classify, Identify, and Track Internet of things). CITIoT was able to capture traffic from SHAA and classify 17 of 18 devices, identify 95% of the events that occurred, and track when users were home or away with near 100% accuracy. Additionally, a mitigation tool, MIoTL (Mitigation of IoT Leakage) is provided to defend against smart home data leakage. With mitigation, CITIoT was unable to identify motion and camera devices and was inundated with an average …

Behavior Flexibility For Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Systems, Taylor B. Bodin

Theses and Dissertations

Autonomous unmanned aerial systems (UAS) could supplement and eventually subsume a substantial portion of the mission set currently executed by remote pilots, making UAS more robust, responsive, and numerous than permitted by teleoperation alone. Unfortunately, the development of robust autonomous systems is difficult, costly, and time-consuming. Furthermore, the resulting systems often make little reuse of proven software components and offer limited adaptability for new tasks. This work presents a development platform for UAS which promotes behavioral flexibility. The platform incorporates the Unified Behavior Framework (a modular, extensible autonomy framework), the Robotic Operating System (a RSF), and PX4 (an open- source …