OS and Networks Commons^™

Linux Malware Obfuscation, Brian Roden

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Many forms of malicious software use techniques and tools that make it harder for their functionality to be parsed, both by antivirus software and reverse-engineering methods. Historically, the vast majority of malware has been written for the Windows operating system due to its large user base. As such, most efforts made for malware detection and analysis have been performed on that platform. However, in recent years, we have seen an increase in malware targeting servers running Linux and other Unix-like operating systems resulting in more emphasis of malware research on these platforms. In this work, several obfuscation techniques for Linux …

Canary: An Automated Approach To Security Scanning And Remediation, David Wiles

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Modern software has a smaller attack surface today than in the past. Memory-safe languages, container runtimes, virtual machines, and a mature web stack all contribute to the relative safety of the web and software in general compared to years ago. Despite this, we still see high-profile bugs, hacks, and outages which affect major companies and widely-used technologies. The extensive work that has gone into hardening virtualization, containerization, and commonly used applications such as Nginx still depends on the end-user to configure correctly to prevent a compromised machine.

In this paper, I introduce a tool, which I call Canary, which can …

Cis 440 Unix, George A. Nossa

Open Educational Resources

This document is a topical outline of the CIS 440 UNIX Course. This course is mostly based on lab assignments that are performed by students using their home computers (desktops or laptops). The home computers are configured as virtual machines by installing the Oracle Virtual Box Version 6.12 The Ubuntu Desktop Operating System (version 20.04) is then installed on these virtual machines, which are then used to run the course labs. The first Unit of the syllabus covers the virtual machine configuration for the lab environment and subsequent Units are a topical outline of the course. The detailed content is …

Unit 2 - Customizing The Ubuntu Desktop And Updating App Software, George A. Nossa

Open Educational Resources

This document demonstrates the steps to customize the Linux-Ubuntu 20.04 desktop and the steps to add a Media Player and a Video Editor to the desktop.

This is a course lab in the CIS 440 UNIX course.

Unit 4 - Installing Packages And Shared Libraries On Ubuntu 20.04, George A. Nossa, Ahmet Kok

Open Educational Resources

This document details the steps necessary for Installing Packages and Shared Libraries on the Ubuntu 20.04 Operating System. This is a course lab of the CIS 440 UNIX course and this lab runs on a virtual machine installed on the student's home computer. The creation and configuration of this virtual machine is described in the Unit 1 document previously posted.

Unit 3 - Displaying Hardware And Data Files, George A. Nossa, Ahmet Kok

Open Educational Resources

This document is a lab assignment of the CIS 440 UNIX Course. This course is mostly based on lab assignments that are performed by students using their home computers (desktops or laptops). The home computers are configured as virtual machines by installing the Oracle Virtual Box Version 6.12 The Ubuntu Desktop Operating System (version 20.04) is then installed on these virtual machines, which are then used to run the course labs.

This lab assignment titled “Unit 3 - Displaying Hardware and Data Files” was originally developed by the National Information Security and Geospatial Technologies Consortium (NISGTC)and is licensed under …

Unit 1 - Virtual Machine Creation And Configuration, George A. Nossa

Open Educational Resources

The COVID pandemic has challenged us in continuing our instructional mission and provide high quality learning activities remotely. A key requirement for advanced technology courses is to duplicate the BMCC Computer Lab environment on the student's home computers.

This document provides detailed instructions for creating a "virtual machine" on the student's home computer. This document assumes the home computer is a PC desktop or laptop but this document will also work on computers running MacOS with an Intel X86 compatible chip,

Once the virtual machine is created, this document details the steps to install and configure an Ubuntu 20.04 Operating …

Lecture - Csci 275: Linux Systems Administration And Security, Moe Hassan, Nyc Tech-In-Residence Corps

Open Educational Resources

Lecture for CSCI 275: Linux Systems Administration and Security

Understanding Firewalld In Multi-Zone Configurations, Nathan R. Vance, William F. Polik

Faculty Publications

Stories of compromised servers and data theft fill today's news. It isn't difficult for someone who has read an informative blog post to access a system via a misconfigured service, take advantage of a recently exposed vulnerability, or gain control using a stolen password. Any of the many internet services found on a typical Linux server could harbor a vulnerability that grants unauthorized access to the system.

Since it's an impossible task to harden a system at the application level against every possible threat, firewalls provide security by limiting access to a system. Firewalls filter incoming packets based on their …

Enhanced Child’S Play Lan Design, Nicholas B. Bordo

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Child’s Play is a charity event hosted by the student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery at the University of Akron. This event allows people to compete in various video game tournaments while simultaneously raising money for charity. In order to make this possible, a network is crucial. However, in previous years, the performance has been poor. The goal of this project is to implement a new network design which will offer more functionality and reliability than in previous years. This network will be able to operate completely inside of an existing network on a temporary basis. This design …

Introduction To Parallel Computation, Clinton Mckay

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Introduction to Parallel Computing is a course designed to educate students on how to use the parallel libraries and tools provided by modern operating systems and massively parallel computer graphics hardware.

Using a series of lectures and hands-on exercises. Students will learn about parallel algorithms and concepts that will aid them in analyzing a problem and constructing a parallel solution, if possible, using the tools available to their disposal.

The course consists of lectures, projects, quizzes, and homework. The combination of these components will deliver the necessary domain knowledge to students, test them, and in the process train them to …

Operating System Scheduling: Linux Preemptive Scheduling Algorithms, Andrew Brand

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

Linux 101: Ci-Trainseminar, Edward Aractingi

IT Research

An overview of how the Linux operating system.

Development Of A Methodology For Customizing Insider Threat Auditing On A Linux Operating System, William T. Bai

Theses and Dissertations

Insider threats can pose a great risk to organizations and by their very nature are difficult to protect against. Auditing and system logging are capabilities present in most operating systems and can be used for detecting insider activity. However, current auditing methods are typically applied in a haphazard way, if at all, and are not conducive to contributing to an effective insider threat security policy. This research develops a methodology for designing a customized auditing and logging template for a Linux operating system. An intent-based insider threat risk assessment methodology is presented to create use case scenarios tailored to address …

Operational Verification Of A Relativistic Program, Robert T. Bauer

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Engineering eorts to achieve scalable multiprocessor perfor- mance for concurrent reader-writer programs have resulted in a family of algorithms that are non-blocking and that tolerate interprocessor in- terference. Because these algorithms accept a unique frame of reference for each processor's accesses to memory, they typify a concurrent pro- gramming technique for shared memory multicore architectures called relativistic programmming.

Rigorous verification of these algorithms is not possible with existing semantic based approaches because the semantics under approximates multiprocessor behavior and the algorithms rely on abstruse interactions with the operating system that aren't reconciled with language seman- tics.

The Read-Copy Update (RCU) …

What Is Rcu, Fundamentally?, Paul E. Mckenney, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Read-copy update (RCU) is a synchronization mechanism that was added to the Linux kernel in October of 2002. RCU achieves scalability improvements by allowing reads to occur concurrently with updates. In contrast with conventional locking primitives that ensure mutual exclusion among concurrent threads regardless of whether they be readers or updaters, or with reader-writer locks that allow concurrent reads but not in the presence of updates, RCU supports concurrency between a single updater and multiple readers. RCU ensures that reads are coherent by maintaining multiple versions of objects and ensuring that they are not freed up until all pre-existing read-side …

A Feedback-Driven Proportion Allocator For Real-Rate Scheduling, David Steere, Ashvin Goel, Joshua Gruenberg, Dylan Mcnamee, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper we propose changing the decades-old practice of allocating CPU to threads based on priority to a scheme based on proportion and period. Our scheme allocates to each thread a percentage of CPU cycles over a period of time, and uses a feedback-based adaptive scheduler to assign automatically both proportion and period. Applications with known requirements, such as isochronous software devices, can bypass the adaptive scheduler by specifying their desired proportion and/or period. As a result, our scheme provides reservations to applications that need them, and the benefits of proportion and period to those that do not. Adaptive …