Theory and Algorithms Commons^™

Post-Quantum Cryptography Encryption Implementation For Messaging App, Callum S. Ward

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

This paper and complementary capstone project aim to explore the state of post-quantum cryptography today by defining the algorithms with which quantum computers can decipher modern asymmetric cryptographic algorithms in exponentially accelerated time, exploring national standards body NIST’s recommendations to circumvent these weaknesses with post-quantum solutions, and implementing recommended algorithms in my group’s project for the UNO Computer Science Capstone course, LockTalk. After having decided on ML-KEM for quantum-resistant asymmetric key transfer and AES-256 for symmetric message encryption and decryption, I was able to cryptographically encode messages to obscure their plaintext values from communication interceptions without any discernible increase in …

Making Unsafe Sequences Unexecutable: Formal Protocol Enforcement For Cyber-Physical Systems, Arthur Amorim

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

Cyber-physical systems execute physical actions in response to software commands, making their communication protocols a primary attack surface. A stealthy attack is a sequence of individually valid messages that violates a required ordering, driving the system into an unsafe state without malware or protocol violation. Existing defenses examine messages or physical state in isolation, not protocol level sequences, and cannot prevent them. Preventing them requires enforcement that makes unsafe sequences unexecutable at the communication boundary.

Formal methods offer a principled path to enforcement, but no tool spans specification to safe deployed hardware. Model checking automates proofs but has no certified …

A Systematic Review And Characterization Of Privacy Noncompliance In Real-World Applications, Alexander E. Charkiewicz

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

Software applications increasingly rely on user data to provide their functionality, but improper handling of such data can lead to serious privacy noncompliance with applicable regulations and policies. A prominent example is the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a third-party application collected the personal data of approximately 87 million Facebook users without users' consent. Despite growing attention to privacy compliance, two key challenges hinder the systematic understanding and analysis of privacy noncompliance. First, unlike security vulnerabilities, which have been systematically categorized through taxonomies such as the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE), privacy noncompliance lacks a technical taxonomy describing how it manifests …

Ai-Driven Penetration Testing For Arm Systems: A Comprehensive Framework With Experimental Validation, Matthew Ragsdale

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The convergence of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity presents new opportunities for automated penetration testing capable of discovering, prioritizing, and remediating vulnerabilities at machine speed. However, deployment on resource-constrained ARM platforms remains unexplored despite ARM’s dominance in mobile, IoT, and edge computing with over 280 billion chips deployed globally. This thesis presents systematic experimental evaluation of AI-driven penetration testing across four paradigms—traditional machine learning, deep learning, large language models, and reinforcement learning—on three ARM platform tiers: Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB, Cortex-A76), Radxa ROCK 5B Plus (16GB LPDDR5 with NPU), and NVIDIA Jetson Nano (4GB with Maxwell GPU). The experimental framework generates …

Syntax-Enhanced Boundary-Aware Named Entity Recognition Model, Chuanming Yu, Bin Deng, Zhengang Zhang

Journal of Scientific Information Research

[Purpose/significance] This study addresses the issue of inadequate perception of entity boundaries in traditional character-level modeling-based named entity recognition models by integrating syntax information containing entity boundary features into the task using a multi-head graph attention network with dense connections. This integration enhances the effectiveness of named entity recognition.

[Method/process] This study proposes a Syntax-enhanced Boundary-aware Named Entity Recognition Model (SynBNER), which utilizes BERT for text semantic representation and integrates syntax information using a dense-connected graph attention network. This integration incorporates implicit entity boundary information from syntax information into word representations, thereby enhancing the model's entity boundary perception capability.

[Result/conclusion] …

Leveraging Benford’S Law And Machine Learning For Financial Fraud Detection, Benjamin R. Fu

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Financial fraud, particularly credit card fraud, continues to pose substantial challenges to financial institutions due to its increasing frequency and impact on consumer trust. While traditional rule-based methods have provided foundational defenses, their limitations in scalability and adaptability have accelerated the adoption of machine learning (ML) techniques. Concurrently, Benford’s Law—a statistical principle often used in forensic accounting—has demonstrated efficacy in detecting anomalies within naturally occurring numerical datasets. This study explores a hybrid fraud detection approach that integrates Benford’s Law with supervised machine learning algorithms, including Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and k-Nearest Neighbors. Using the publicly available European credit card fraud …

Detecting Sensor Data Manipulation, Ricky Green, Michael Black

Shelby Hall Graduate Research Forum Posters

The integration of Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) have made OT devices vulnerable to threats that have been successfully exploited with devastating results. Many modern techniques for hardening and securing enterprise IT systems are either incompatible with OT components in an Industrial Control System (ICS), reduce the efficiency of processes, or are prohibitively expensive to implement. Research in the area of ICS security focuses on a top-down approach, such as intrusion prevention by securing the perimeter of the network and hardening computer systems. This approach is useful in business IT systems, but full compatibility with OT components in …

Computing In The Commonwealth: Specialized Education In Computer Science And Information Technology For High School Students In Virginia – An Environmental Scan, Amy Corning, Jonathan D. Becker, Jon Graham, James Carrigan, Keisha Tennessee

ICRE Publications

Over the past two decades, Virginia has invested substantially in STEM education, in part through specialized programs focused on computer science and information technology (CS/IT). This study represents the first effort to identify Virginia’s specialized secondary CS/IT programs and examine them collectively. Findings from the statewide environmental scan indicate that the programs are delivered through a wide variety of institutional structures, including Governor’s STEM Academies, Governor’s Schools, specialty centers, and academies, but most often through Career and Technical Education (CTE) centers. Programs tend to be concentrated in metropolitan areas, and some rural divisions may not be served. The programs provide …

Towards Smart Farming: Image-Based Crop Health Assessment And Disease Diagnosis Using Deep Learning Techniques, Kristina Botova

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

Accurate crop monitoring is essential for optimizing agricultural productivity and ensuring food security. This study presents a comprehensive deep learning framework for image crop type recognition, health status prediction, and disease detection using multiple Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. The proposed approach uses open-source datasets consisting of five crop types (apple, corn, grape, potato, tomato), varying health conditions, and common diseases. By deploying specialized CNN architecture focused on each task, the system achieves a high accuracy of 99.25% in classifying crop types, identifying health status, and detecting specific diseases. Compared to a single CNN model, the use of the proposed …

Ohss: Optimizing Homomorphic Secret Sharing To Support Fast Matrix Multiplication, Shuguang Zhang, Jianli Bai, Kun Tu, Ziyue Yin, Chan Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Homomorphic Secret Sharing (HSS) has evolved as a state-of-the-art methodology for achieving secure two-party computation, synthesizing the advantages of secret sharing and homomorphic encryption. This amalgamation ensures minimal computational and communicational overhead, making it particularly adept at arithmetic operations. However, HSS faces challenges in scalability and efficiency when confronted with extensive matrix operations, including both matrix-vector and matrix-matrix multiplications, which are fundamental in numerous privacy-preserving computations, notably within the realm of privacy-preserving machine learning. In this research, we introduce Optimized Homomorphic Secret Sharing (OHSS), a refined version of HSS, crafted to address these limitations. Our contributions include enhancements to the …

Lr-Auth: Towards Practical Implementation Of Implicit User Authentication On Earbuds, Changshuo Hu, Xiao Ma, Xinger Huang, Yiran Shen, Dong Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The increasing use of earbuds in applications like immersive entertainment and health monitoring necessitates effective implicit user authentication systems to preserve the privacy of sensitive data and provide personalized experiences. Existing approaches, which leverage physiological cues (e.g., jawbone structure) and behavioral cues (e.g., gait), face challenges such as limited usability, high delay and energy overhead, and significant computational demands, rendering them impractical for resource-constrained earbuds. To address these issues, we present LR-Auth, a lightweight, user-friendly implicit authentication system designed for various earbud usage scenarios. LR-Auth utilizes the modulation of sound frequencies by the user's unique occluded ear canal, generating user-specific …

Double Issuer-Hiding Attribute-Based Credentials From Tag-Based Aggregatable Mercurial Signatures, Rui Shi, Yang Yang, Yingjiu Li, Huamin Feng, Guozhen Shi, Hwee Hwa Pang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Attribute-based anonymous credentials offer users fine-grained access control in a privacy-preserving manner. However, in such schemes obtaining a user's credentials requires knowledge of the issuer's public key, which obviously reveals the issuer's identity that must be hidden from users in certain scenarios. Moreover, verifying a user's credentials also requires the knowledge of issuer's public key, which may infer the user's private information from their choice of issuer. In this article, we introduce the notion of double issuer-hiding attribute-based credentials ( DIHAC ) to tackle these two problems. In our model, a central authority can issue public-key credentials for a group …

Side Channel Detection Of Pc Rootkits Using Nonlinear Phase Space, Rebecca Clark

Poster Presentations

Cyberattacks are increasing in size and scope yearly, and the most effective and common means of attack is through malicious software executed on target devices of interest. Malware threats vary widely in terms of behavior and impact and, thus, effective methods of detection are constantly being sought from the academic research community to offset both volume and complexity. Rootkits are malware that represent a highly feared threat because they can change operating system integrity and alter otherwise normally functioning software. Although normal methods of detection that are based on signatures of known malware code are the standard line of defense, …

Formalization Of A Security Framework Design For A Health Prescription Assistant In An Internet Of Things System, Thomas Rolando Mellema

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Security system design flaws will create greater risks and repercussions as the systems being secured further integrate into our daily life. One such application example is incorporating the powerful potential of the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) into software services engineered for improving the practices of monitoring and prescribing effective healthcare to patients. A study was performed in this application area in order to specify a security system design for a Health Prescription Assistant (HPA) that operated with medical IoT (mIoT) devices in a healthcare environment. Although the efficiency of this system was measured, little was presented to …

Techniques To Detect Fake Profiles On Social Media Using The New Age Algorithms – A Survey, A K M Rubaiyat Reza Habib, Edidiong Elijah Akpan

ATU Scholars Symposium

This research explores the growing issue of fake accounts in Online Social Networks [OSNs]. While platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook foster connections, their lax authentication measures have attracted many scammers and cybercriminals. Fake profiles conduct malicious activities, such as phishing, spreading misinformation, and inciting social discord. The consequences range from cyberbullying to deceptive commercial practices. Detecting fake profiles manually is often challenging and causes considerable stress and trust issues for the users. Typically, a social media user scrutinizes various elements like the profile picture, bio, and shared posts to identify fake profiles. These evaluations sometimes lead users to conclude …

Gradual Memory Safety, Jack Phillips

All NMU Master's Theses

This paper extends the theory of Gradual Types to include memory safe Region-Types and Region-Based Memory Management. It also makes advancements in the capabilities of Region-Based systems. Lastly, it presents the Svejk language and Hasek Type System.

Improving Educational Delivery And Content In Juvenile Detention Centers, Yomna Elmousalami

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Students in juvenile detention centers have the greatest need to receive improvements in educational delivery and content; however, they are one of the “truly disadvantaged” populations in terms of receiving those improvements. This work presents a qualitative data analysis based on a focus group meeting with stakeholders at a local Juvenile Detention Center. The current educational system in juvenile detention centers is based on paper worksheets, single-room style teaching methods, outdated technology, and a shortage of textbooks and teachers. In addition, detained students typically have behavioral challenges that are deemed "undesired" in society. As a result, many students miss classes …

Intelligent Algorithm Safety: Concepts, Scientific Problems And Prospects, Xueqi Cheng, Wei Chen, Huawei Shen, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen, Guojie Li

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

Intelligent algorithms refer to the methods embodied in the computational processes that realize intelligence. These methods are often characterized by being data-driven, involving uncertain computations, and with unexplainable model inferences. These characteristics simultaneously introduce potential safety risks to the application of intelligent algorithms and AI. This study firstly explores the concepts of intelligent algorithm safety. Specifically, intelligent algorithm safety, based on the degree of human-machine integration, extends from the univariate safety of the algorithm itself to the bivariate applicational safety when the algorithm serves humans, and finally evolves into the multivariate systemic safety arises within complex socio-technical systems of human-machine …

Data Science In Finance: Challenges And Opportunities, Xianrong Zheng, Elizabeth Gildea, Sheng Chai, Tongxiao Zhang, Shuxi Wang

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

Data science has become increasingly popular due to emerging technologies, including generative AI, big data, deep learning, etc. It can provide insights from data that are hard to determine from a human perspective. Data science in finance helps to provide more personal and safer experiences for customers and develop cutting-edge solutions for a company. This paper surveys the challenges and opportunities in applying data science to finance. It provides a state-of-the-art review of financial technologies, algorithmic trading, and fraud detection. Also, the paper identifies two research topics. One is how to use generative AI in algorithmic trading. The other is …

A Secure And Robust Knowledge Transfer Framework Via Stratified-Causality Distribution Adjustment In Intelligent Collaborative Services, Ju Jia, Siqi Ma, Lina Wang, Yang Liu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rapid development of device-edge-cloud collaborative computing techniques has actively contributed to the popularization and application of intelligent service models. The intensity of knowledge transfer plays a vital role in enhancing the performance of intelligent services. However, the existing knowledge transfer methods are mainly implemented through data fine-tuning and model distillation, which may cause the leakage of data privacy or model copyright in intelligent collaborative systems. To address this issue, we propose a secure and robust knowledge transfer framework through stratified-causality distribution adjustment (SCDA) for device-edge-cloud collaborative services. Specifically, a simple yet effective density-based estimation is first employed to obtain …

Using Feature Selection Enhancement To Evaluate Attack Detection In The Internet Of Things Environment, Khawlah Harahsheh, Rami Al-Naimat, Chung-Hao Chen

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The rapid evolution of technology has given rise to a connected world where billions of devices interact seamlessly, forming what is known as the Internet of Things (IoT). While the IoT offers incredible convenience and efficiency, it presents a significant challenge to cybersecurity and is characterized by various power, capacity, and computational process limitations. Machine learning techniques, particularly those encompassing supervised classification techniques, offer a systematic approach to training models using labeled datasets. These techniques enable intrusion detection systems (IDSs) to discern patterns indicative of potential attacks amidst the vast amounts of IoT data. Our investigation delves into various aspects …

A Defensive Strategy Against Android Adversarial Malware Attacks, Fabrice Setephin Atedjio, Jean-Pierre Lienou, Frederica F. Nelson, Sachin S. Shetty, Charles A. Kamhoua

VMASC Publications

Due to the popularity of Android mobile devices over the past ten years, malicious Android applications have significantly increased. Systems utilizing machine learning techniques have been successfully applied for Android malware detection to counter the constantly changing Android malware threats. However, attackers have developed new strategies to circumvent these systems by using adversarial attacks. An attacker can carefully craft a malicious sample to deceive a classifier. Among the evasion attacks, there is the more potent one, which is based on solid optimization constraints: the Carlini-Wagner attack. Carlini-Wagner is an attack that uses margin loss, which is more efficient than cross-entropy …

Efficient Privacy-Preserving Spatial Data Query In Cloud Computing, Yinbin Miao, Yutao Yang, Xinghua Li, Linfeng Wei, Zhiquan Liu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid development of geographic location technology and the explosive growth of data, a large amount of spatial data is outsourced to the cloud server for reducing the local high storage and computing burdens, but at the same time causes security issues. Thus, extensive privacy-preserving spatial data query schemes have been proposed. Most of the existing schemes use Asymmetric Scalar-Product-Preserving Encryption (ASPE) to encrypt data, but ASPE has proven to be insecure against known plaintext attack. And the existing schemes require users to provide more information about query range and thus generate a large amount of ciphertexts, which causes …

Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, S.A. Claudell, Emilio Mejia

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Urban farming can enhance the lives of communities and help reduce food scarcity. This paper presents a conceptual prototype of an efficient urban farming community that can be scaled for a single apartment building or an entire community across all global geoeconomics regions, including densely populated cities and rural, developing towns and communities. When deployed in coordination with smart crop choices, local farm support, and efficient transportation then the result isn’t just sustainability, but also increasing fresh produce accessibility, optimizing nutritional value, eliminating the use of ‘forever chemicals’, reducing transportation costs, and fostering global environmental benefits.

Imagine Doris, who is …

The Vulnerabilities To The Rsa Algorithm And Future Alternative Algorithms To Improve Security, James Johnson

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The RSA encryption algorithm has secured many large systems, including bank systems, data encryption in emails, several online transactions, etc. Benefiting from the use of asymmetric cryptography and properties of number theory, RSA was widely regarded as one of most difficult algorithms to decrypt without a key, especially since by brute force, breaking the algorithm would take thousands of years. However, in recent times, research has shown that RSA is getting closer to being efficiently decrypted classically, using algebraic methods, (fully cracked through limited bits) in which elliptic-curve cryptography has been thought of as the alternative that is stronger than …

Learning Program Semantics For Vulnerability Detection Via Vulnerability-Specific Inter-Procedural Slicing, Bozhi Wu, Shangqing Liu, Xiao Yang, Zhiming Li, Jun Sun, Shang-Wei Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning-based approaches that learn code representations for software vulnerability detection have been proven to produce inspiring results. However, they still fail to capture complete and precise vulnerability semantics for code representations. To address the limitations, in this work, we propose a learning-based approach namely SnapVuln, which first utilizes multiple vulnerability-specific inter-procedural slicing algorithms to capture vulnerability semantics of various types and then employs a Gated Graph Neural Network (GGNN) with an attention mechanism to learn vulnerability semantics. We compare SnapVuln with state-of-the-art learning-based approaches on two public datasets, and confirm that SnapVuln outperforms them. We further perform an ablation study …

Closing The Gap: Leveraging Aes-Ni To Balance Adversarial Advantage And Honest User Performance In Argon2i, Nicholas Harrell, Nathaniel Krakauer

CERIAS Technical Reports

The challenge of providing data privacy and integrity while maintaining efficient performance for honest users is a persistent concern in cryptography. Attackers exploit advances in parallel hardware and custom circuit hardware to gain an advantage over regular users. One such method is the use of Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) to optimize key derivation function (KDF) algorithms, giving adversaries a significant advantage in password guessing and recovery attacks. Other examples include using graphical processing units (GPUs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). We propose a focused approach to close the gap between adversarial advantage and honest user performance by leveraging the …

Toward Intention Discovery For Early Malice Detection In Cryptocurrency, Ling Cheng, Feida Zhu, Yong Wang, Ruicheng Liang, Huiwen Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cryptocurrency’s pseudo-anonymous nature makes it vulnerable to malicious activities. However, existing deep learning solutions lack interpretability and only support retrospective analysis of specific malice types. To address these challenges, we propose Intention-Monitor for early malice detection in Bitcoin. Our model, utilizing Decision-Tree based feature Selection and Complement (DT-SC), builds different feature sets for different malice types. The Status Proposal Module (SPM) and hierarchical self-attention predictor provide real-time global status and address label predictions. A survival module determines the stopping point and proposes the status sequence (intention). Our model detects various malicious activities with strong interpretability, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in extensive …

Configuring Timing Parameters To Ensure Execution-Time Opacity In Timed Automata, Étienne André, Engel Lefaucheux, Didier Lime, Dylan Marinho, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Timing information leakage occurs whenever an attacker successfully deduces confidential internal information by observing some timed information such as events with timestamps. Timed automata are an extension of finite-state automata with a set of clocks evolving linearly and that can be tested or reset, making this formalism able to reason on systems involving concurrency and timing constraints. In this paper, we summarize a recent line of works using timed automata as the input formalism, in which we assume that the attacker has access (only) to the system execution time. First, we address the following execution-time opacity problem: given a timed …

Threshold Attribute-Based Credentials With Redactable Signature, Rui Shi, Huamin Feng, Yang Yang, Feng Yuan, Yingjiu Li, Hwee Hwa Pang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Threshold attribute-based credentials are suitable for decentralized systems such as blockchains as such systems generally assume that authenticity, confidentiality, and availability can still be guaranteed in the presence of a threshold number of dishonest or faulty nodes. Coconut (NDSS'19) was the first selective disclosure attribute-based credentials scheme supporting threshold issuance. However, it does not support threshold tracing of user identities and threshold revocation of user credentials, which is desired for internal governance such as identity management, data auditing, and accountability. The communication and computation complexities of Coconut for verifying credentials are linear in the number of each user's attributes and …