Computer Sciences Commons^™

How Many Mutex Bugs Can A Simple Analysis Find In Go Programs?, Fumi Takeuchi, Hidehiko Masuhara, Raffi Khatchadourian, Youyou Cong, Keisuke Ishibashi

Publications and Research

In open-source software, it is known that there are many concurrency bugs. A previous study in Go revealed that a considerable number of such bugs are simple (for example, 9% of the bugs are the ones that forget to unlock a mutex,) through a manual program investigation. This paper tries to detect such bugs by applying a simple analysis to see how far such a tool can match the manual analysis. We built a simple intraprocedural control flow analysis in Go, and evaluated its performance concerning the open source programs with concurrency bugs reported in the previous study. Consequently, as …

Grammar Competition Explored In Two Case Studies: The Null Subject Stage In English-Speaking Children And The Variation Observed In Old English, Soumik Dey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Grammar competition theory postulates that variation in a speaker is the result of different grammars competing against each other. This study performs an analysis of two case studies of empirical observations attributed to possible grammar competition — subject drop in English-speaking children and variation observed in Old English.

Children in an English-speaking environment drop subjects early on during acquisition. Orfitelli and Hyams (2012) find that young English-speaking children mistakenly interpret imperative null subject utterances as declaratives. They suggest that this misinterpretation can be attributed to performance factors, which leads to grammar competition and subsequently subject drop in English children. We …

An Analysis Of The Friendship Paradox And Derived Sampling Methods, Yitzchak Novick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The friendship paradox (FP) is the famous sampling-bias phenomenon that leads to the seemingly paradoxical truth that, on average, people’s friends have more friends than they do. Among the many far-reaching research findings the FP inspired is a sampling method that samples neighbors of vertices in a graph in order to acquire random vertices that are of higher expected degree than average.

Our research examines the friendship paradox on a local level. We seek to quantify the impact of the FP on an individual vertex by defining the vertex’s “friendship index”, a measure of the extent to which the phenomenon …

Influence Level Prediction On Social Media Through Multi-Task And Sociolinguistic User Characteristics Modeling, Denys Katerenchuk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prediction of a user’s influence level on social networks has attracted a lot of attention as human interactions move online. Influential users have the ability to influence others’ behavior to achieve their own agenda. As a result, predicting users’ level of influence online can help to understand social networks, forecast trends, prevent misinformation, etc. The research on user influence in social networks has attracted much attention across multiple disciplines, from social sciences to mathematics, yet it is still not well understood. One of the difficulties is that the definition of influence is specific to a particular problem or a domain, …

Data-Centric Machine Learning For Speech And Audio, Ali Raza Syed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is growing recognition of the importance of data-centric methods for building machine learning systems. Data-centric methods assume a fixed model and iterate over the data to improve system performance. This is in contrast to traditional model-centric approaches, which assume a fixed dataset and iterate over models for the same ends. Data-centric machine learning is driven by the observation that, beyond the size of the training data, model performance depends on factors such as the quality of the annotations, and whether the data are representative of conditions in which models will be deployed. This is particularly of interest in the …

Towards Explaining Variation In Entrainment, Andreas Weise

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Entrainment refers to the tendency of human speakers to adapt to their interlocutors to become more similar to them. This affects various dimensions and occurs in many contexts, allowing for rich applications in human-computer interaction. However, it is not exhibited by every speaker in every conversation but varies widely across features, speakers, and contexts, hindering broad application. This variation, whose guiding principles are poorly understood even after decades of entrainment research, is the subject of this thesis. We begin with a comprehensive literature review that serves as the foundation of our own work and provides a reference to guide future …

Witness-Authenticated Key Exchange, Kelsey G. Melissaris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation we investigate Witness-Authenticated Key Exchange (WAKE), a key agreement protocol in which each party is authenticated through knowledge of a witness to an arbitrary NP statement. We provide both game-based and universally composable definitions. Thereby, this thesis presents solutions for the most flexible and general method of authentication for group key exchange, providing simple constructions from (succinct) signatures of knowledge (SOK) and a two round UC-secure protocol.

After a discussion of flaws in previous definitions for WAKE we supply a new and improved game-based definition along with the first definition for witness-authenticated key exchange between groups of …

On The Cryptographic Deniability Of The Signal Protocol, Nihal Vatandas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Offline deniability is the ability to a posteriori deny having participated in a particular communication session. This property has been widely assumed for the Signal messaging application, yet no formal proof has appeared in the literature. In this work, we present the first formal study of the offline deniability of the Signal protocol. Our analysis shows that building a deniability proof for Signal is non-trivial and requires strong assumptions on the underlying mathematical groups where the protocol is run.

To do so, we study various implicitly authenticated key exchange protocols, including MQV, HMQV, and 3DH/X3DH, the latter being the core …

The Interaction Of Different Primary Producers And Physical And Chemical Dynamics Of An Urban Shallow Lake, Majid Sahin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An artificial urban shallow lake, Prospect Park Lake (PPL), is situated on a terminal moraine in Brooklyn New York, and supplied with municipal water treated with ortho-phosphates. The constant input of the phosphate nutrient is the primary source of eutrophication in the lake. The numerous pools along the water course houses various aquatic phototrophs, which influence the water quality and the state of the system, driving conditions into favoring the survival of their species. In the first half of the dissertation, the focus of the project is on analyzing how the different primary producers in different regions of PPL affect …

Finite Gaussian Neurons: Defending Against Adversarial Attacks By Making Neural Networks Say "I Don’T Know", Felix Grezes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this work, I introduce the Finite Gaussian Neuron (FGN), a novel neuron architecture for artificial neural networks aimed at protecting against adversarial attacks.
Since 2014, artificial neural networks have been known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which can fool the network into producing wrong or nonsensical outputs by making humanly imperceptible alterations to inputs. While defenses against adversarial attacks have been proposed, they usually involve retraining a new neural network from scratch, a costly task.

My works aims to:
- easily convert existing models to Finite Gaussian Neuron architecture,
- while preserving the existing model's behavior on real …

Val: Volume And Access Pattern Leakage-Abuse Attack With Leaked Documents, Steven Lambregts, Huanhuan Chen, Jianting Ning, Kaitai Liang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searchable Encryption schemes provide secure search over encrypted databases while allowing admitted information leakages. Generally, the leakages can be categorized into access and volume pattern. In most existing SE schemes, these leakages are caused by practical designs but are considered an acceptable price to achieve high search efficiency. Recent attacks have shown that such leakages could be easily exploited to retrieve the underlying keywords for search queries. Under the umbrella of attacking SE, we design a new Volume and Access Pattern Leakage-Abuse Attack (VAL-Attack) that improves the matching technique of LEAP (CCS ’21) and exploits both the access and volume …

Robustness And Cross-Lingual Transfer: An Exploration Of Out-Of-Distribution Scenario In Natural Language Processing, Yu, Sicheng

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Most traditional machine learning or deep learning methods are based on the premise that training data and test data are independent and identical distributed, i.e., IID. However, it is just an ideal situation. In real-world applications, test set and training data often follow different distributions, which we refer to as the out of distribution, i.e., OOD, setting. As a result, models trained with traditional methods always suffer from an undesirable performance drop on the OOD test set. It's necessary to develop techniques to solve this problem for real applications. In this dissertation, we present four pieces of work in the …

Analytic Case Study Using Unsupervised Event Detection In Multivariate Time Series Data, Jeremy M. Wightman

Theses and Dissertations

Analysis of cyber-physical systems (CPS) has emerged as a critical domain for providing US Air Force and Space Force leadership decision advantage in air, space, and cyberspace. Legacy methods have been outpaced by evolving battlespaces and global peer-level challengers. Automation provides one way to decrease the time that analysis currently takes. This thesis presents an event detection automation system (EDAS) which utilizes deep learning models, distance metrics, and static thresholding to detect events. The EDAS automation is evaluated with case study of CPS domain experts in two parts. Part 1 uses the current methods for CPS analysis with a qualitative …

Emerging Technologies, Evolving Threats: Next-Generation Security Challenges, Tamara Bonaci, Katina Michael, Pablo Rivas, Lindsay J. Roberston, Michael Zimmer

Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Security is a fundamental human requirement. We desire the security of our person against injury, security of our capability to provide for our families, security of income linked to needs (food, water, clothing, and shelter), and much more. Most also hope for security of a way of life that is fulfilling and pleasant and peaceful [1] . In 2003, Alkire [2] defined “human security” as: “[t]he objective … to safeguard the vital core of all human lives from critical pervasive threats, in a way that is consistent with long-term human fulfillment.” Today most of the world’s population is highly dependent, …

Development Of A Security-Focused Multi-Channel Communication Protocol And Associated Quality Of Secure Service (Qoss) Metrics, Paul M. Simon

Theses and Dissertations

The threat of eavesdropping, and the challenge of recognizing and correcting for corrupted or suppressed information in communication systems is a consistent challenge. Effectively managing protection mechanisms requires an ability to accurately gauge the likelihood or severity of a threat, and adapt the security features available in a system to mitigate the threat. This research focuses on the design and development of a security-focused communication protocol at the session-layer based on a re-prioritized communication architecture model and associated metrics. From a probabilistic model that considers data leakage and data corruption as surrogates for breaches of confidentiality and integrity, a set …

Analysis Of Graph Layout Algorithms For Use In Command And Control Network Graphs, Matthew R. Stone

Theses and Dissertations

This research is intended to determine which styles of layout algorithm are well suited to Command and Control (C2) network graphs to replace current manual layout methods. Manual methods are time intensive and an automated layout algorithm should decrease the time spent creating network graphs. Simulations on realistic synthetically generated graphs provide information to help infer which algorithms perform better than others on this problem. Data is generated using statistics drawn from multiple real world C2 network graphs. The three algorithms tested against this data are the Spectral algorithm, the Dot algorithm, and the Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm. The results include a …

Generative Methods, Meta-Learning, And Meta-Heuristics For Robust Cyber Defense, Marc W. Chalé

Theses and Dissertations

Cyberspace is the digital communications network that supports the internet of battlefield things (IoBT), the model by which defense-centric sensors, computers, actuators and humans are digitally connected. A secure IoBT infrastructure facilitates real time implementation of the observe, orient, decide, act (OODA) loop across distributed subsystems. Successful hacking efforts by cyber criminals and strategic adversaries suggest that cyber systems such as the IoBT are not secure. Three lines of effort demonstrate a path towards a more robust IoBT. First, a baseline data set of enterprise cyber network traffic was collected and modelled with generative methods allowing the generation of realistic, …

A Gpu-Based Machine Learning Approach For Detection Of Botnet Attacks, Michal Motylinski, Áine Macdermott, Farkhund Iqbal, Babar Shah

All Works

Rapid development and adaptation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has created new problems for securing these interconnected devices and networks. There are hundreds of thousands of IoT devices with underlying security vulnerabilities, such as insufficient device authentication/authorisation making them vulnerable to malware infection. IoT botnets are designed to grow and compete with one another over unsecure devices and networks. Once infected, the device will monitor a Command-and-Control (C&C) server indicating the target of an attack via Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. These security issues, coupled with the continued growth of IoT, presents a much larger attack surface for …

Learning Improvement Heuristics For Solving Routing Problems, Yaoxin Wu, Wen Song, Zhiguang Cao, Jie Zhang, Andrew Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent studies in using deep learning to solve routing problems focus on construction heuristics, the solutions of which are still far from optimality. Improvement heuristics have great potential to narrow this gap by iteratively refining a solution. However, classic improvement heuristics are all guided by hand-crafted rules which may limit their performance. In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning framework to learn the improvement heuristics for routing problems. We design a self-attention based deep architecture as the policy network to guide the selection of next solution. We apply our method to two important routing problems, i.e. travelling salesman …

User Guided Abductive Proof Generation For Answer Set Programming Queries, Avishkar Mahajan, Martin Strecker, Meng Weng (Huang Mingrong) Wong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

We present a method for generating possible proofs of a query with respect to a given Answer Set Programming (ASP) rule set using an abductive process where the space of abducibles is automatically constructed just from the input rules alone. Given a (possibly empty) set of user provided facts, our method infers any additional facts that may be needed for the entailment of a query and then outputs these extra facts, without the user needing to explicitly specify the space of all abducibles. We also present a method to generate a set of directed edges corresponding to the justification graph …

Hierarchical Semantic-Aware Neural Code Representation, Yuan Jiang, Xiaohong Su, Christoph Treude, Tiantian Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code representation is a fundamental problem in many software engineering tasks. Despite the effort made by many researchers, it is still hard for existing methods to fully extract syntactic, structural and sequential features of source code, which form the hierarchical semantics of the program and are necessary to achieve a deeper code understanding. To alleviate this difficulty, we propose a new supervised approach based on the novel use of Tree-LSTM to incorporate the sequential and the global semantic features of programs explicitly into the representation model. Unlike previous techniques, our proposed model can not only learn low-level syntactic information within …

Largeea: Aligning Entities For Large-Scale Knowledge Graphs, Congcong Ge, Xiaoze Liu, Lu Chen, Yunjun Gao, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Entity alignment (EA) aims to find equivalent entities in different knowledge graphs (KGs). Current EA approaches suffer from scalability issues, limiting their usage in real-world EA scenarios. To tackle this challenge, we propose LargeEA to align entities between large-scale KGs. LargeEA consists of two channels, i.e., structure channel and name channel. For the structure channel, we present METIS-CPS, a memory-saving mini-batch generation strategy, to partition large KGs into smaller mini-batches. LargeEA, designed as a general tool, can adopt any existing EA approach to learn entities’ structural features within each mini-batch independently. For the name channel, we first introduce NFF, a …

An Attribute-Aware Attentive Gcn Model For Attribute Missing In Recommendation, Fan Liu, Zhiyong Cheng, Lei Zhu, Chenghao Liu, Liqiang Nie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As important side information, attributes have been widely exploited in the existing recommender system for better performance. However, in the real-world scenarios, it is common that some attributes of items/users are missing (e.g., some movies miss the genre data). Prior studies usually use a default value (i.e., "other") to represent the missing attribute, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To address this problem, in this paper, we present an attribute-aware attentive graph convolution network (A(2)-GCN). In particular, we first construct a graph, where users, items, and attributes are three types of nodes and their associations are edges. Thereafter, we leverage the graph …

On The Effectiveness Of Using Graphics Interrupt As A Side Channel For User Behavior Snooping, Haoyu Ma, Jianwen Tian, Debin Gao, Chunfu Jia

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are now a key component of many devices and systems, including those in the cloud and data centers, thus are also subject to side-channel attacks. Existing side-channel attacks on GPUs typically leak information from graphics libraries like OpenGL and CUDA, which require creating contentions within the GPU resource space and are being mitigated with software patches. This paper evaluates potential side channels exposed at a lower-level interface between GPUs and CPUs, namely the graphics interrupts. These signals could indicate unique signatures of GPU workload, allowing a spy process to infer the behavior of other processes. We …

Perceptual Analysis Of Distance Sampling And Transmittance Estimation Techniques In Biomedical Volume Visualization, Raazia Sosan, Muhammad Mobeen Movania, Shama Siddiqui

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

In volumetric path tracer, distance sampling and transmittance estimation techniques play a vital role in producing high-quality final rendered images. Previously, these techniques were implemented for production volume rendering, and were analyzed for faster convergence. In this article, we have augmented additional transmittance estimators including ratio tracking, residual ratio tracking and unbiased ray marcher in a GPU-based volumetric path tracer (Exposure Render) for biomedical datasets. We have also analyzed distance sampling methods and transmittance estimators perceptually using CIEDE2000 and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). It was found that ratio and residual ratio tracking estimators performed close to each other and were …

A New Approach For Congestive Heart Failure And Arrhythmia Classification Using Downsampling Local Binary Patterns With Lstm, Süleyman Akdağ, Fatma Kuncan, Yilmaz Kaya

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a vital diagnosis approach for the rapid explication and detection of various heart diseases, especially cardiac arrest, sinus rhythms, and heart failure. For this purpose, in this study, a different perspective based on downsampling one-dimensional-local binary pattern (1D-DS-LBP) and long short-term memory (LSTM) is presented for the categorization of Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. A transformation method named 1DDS-LBP has been presented for Electrocardiogram signals. The 1D-DS-LBP method processes the bigness smallness relationship between neighbors. According to the proposed method, by downsampling the signal, the histograms of 1D local binary patterns (1D-LBP) calculated from the obtained signal groups are …

Two-Layered Blockchain-Based Admission Control For Secure Uav Networks, Müge Özçevi̇k

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

The frequent replacement requirement of UAVs for recharging outputs an extreme number of messaging for admission control of end-users. There are many studies that try to optimize the network capacity in an energy-efficient manner. However, they do not consider the security of data and control channels, which is the urgent requirement of 5G. Blockchain handles secure systems. However, the high numbered transactions in blockchain may cause bottlenecks while considering computational delay and throughput of end-user. In UAVs, a high percentage of battery is consumed for computational tasks instead of communication tasks. Therefore, to handle security by considering the computational needs, …

Analysis Of Patch And Sample Size Effects For 2d-3d Cnn Models Using Multiplatform Dataset: Hyperspectral Image Classification Of Rosis And Jilin-1 Gp01 Imagery, Taşkin Kavzoğlu, Eli̇f Özlem Yilmaz

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Modern hyperspectral sensors provide a huge volume of data at spectral and spatial domains with high redundancy, which requires robust methods for analysis. In this study, 2D and 3D CNN models were applied to hyperspectral image datasets (ROSIS and Jilin-1 GP01) using varying patch and sample sizes to determine their combined impacts on the performance of deep learning models. Differences in classification performances in relation to particle and sample sizes were statistically analysed using McNemar?s test. According to the findings, raising the patch and sample size enhances the performance of the 2D/3D CNN model and produces more accurate results in …

Enhancement Of Stability Delay Margins By Virtual Inertia Control For Microgrids With Time Delay, Suud Ademnur Hasen, Şahi̇n Sönmez, Saffet Ayasun

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Large-scale deployment of renewable energy sources (RESs) contributes to fluctuations in the system frequency due to their inherent reduced inertia feature. Time delays have emerged as a major source of concern in microgrids (MGs) as a result of the broad adoption of open communication networks since significant delays inevitably reduce the controller?s performance and even cause instabilities. In this article, a frequency-domain direct method is used to evaluate the impact of the virtual inertia (VI) control on the stability delay margins of MG with communication delays. By avoiding approximation, the approach first removes transcendental terms from characteristic equations and turns …

Noncontact Machinery Operation Status Monitoring System With Gated Recurrent Unit Model, Jason Jing Wei Lim, Boon Yaik Ooi, Wai Kong Lee, Teik Boon Tan, Soung Yue Liew

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

In manufacturing industry, assembly line monitoring provides statistical information about overall performance and reliability of the legacy machines, ensuring that the machines give maximum yield output. However, most legacy machines lack internet connectivity and advanced functionality, increasing the difficulty for tracking task. Therefore, this work seeks to introduce a noncontact acoustic method to track machines rather than the mainstream vibrational approach. In order to provide accurate tracking of the daily machine operation for our machine tracking system, we consider scenario of background noises such as environmental sounds from multiple sources as well as neighbouring machine?s sound. Thus, several neural networks …