Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Rapid Android Parser For Investigating Dex Files (Rapid), Xiaolu Zhang, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Android malware is a well-known challenging problem and many researchers/vendors/practitioners have tried to address this issue through application analysis techniques. In order to analyze Android applications, tools decompress APK files and extract relevant data from the Dalvik EXecutable (DEX) files. To acquire the data, investigators either use decompiled intermediate code generated by existing tools, e.g., Baksmali or Dex2jar or write their own parsers/dissemblers. Thus, they either need additional time because of decompiling the application into an intermediate representation and then parsing text files, or they reinvent the wheel by implementing their own parsers. In this article, we present Rapid Android …

The Evolution Dynamics And Trends Of The Content Of Chinese Exports From 1995-2011, Megan Kerbs

Honors Theses

There is no question that China’s role in the international economy has grown over time, as it seems to be claiming more and more of center stage in the global arena. Back in the early 1990’s, the phenomenon of globalization enabled China to expand its reach, inserting itself into intricate production hierarchies that began to define the global marketplace. China experienced a massive export boom in 2000, and since, has evolved to become a highly sophisticated, high-tech country that now plays an integral role within not only the East Asian region, but also the rest of the world. This thesis …

Figure-Ground Organization Using 3d Symmetry, Aaron Michaux, Vijai Jayadevan, Edward Delp, Zygmunt Pizlo

MODVIS Workshop

We present a novel approach to object localization using mirror symmetry as a general purpose and biologically motivated prior. 3D symmetry leads to good segmentation because (i) almost all objects exhibit symmetry, and (ii) configurations of objects are not likely to be symmetric unless they share some additional relationship. Furthermore, psychophysical evidence suggests that the human vision system makes use symmetry in constructing 3D percepts, indicating that symmetry may be important in object localization. No general purpose approach is known for solving 3D symmetry correspondence in 2D camera images, because few invariants exist. Therefore, to test symmetry as a clustering …

An Image-Based Model For Early Visual Processing, Heiko H. Schütt, Felix A. Wichmann

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

Advances In Repurposing And Recycling Of Post-Vehicle-Application Lithium-Ion Batteries, Charles R. Standridge, Lindsay Corneal, Nicholas Baine

Mineta Transportation Institute

Increased electrification of vehicles has increased the use of lithium-ion batteries for energy storage, and raised the issue of what to do with post-vehicle-application batteries. Three possibilities have been identified: 1) remanufacturing for intended reuse in vehicles; 2) repurposing for non-vehicle, stationary storage applications; and 3) recycling, extracting the precious metals, chemicals and other byproducts. Advances in repurposing and recycling are presented, along with a mathematical model that forecasts the manufacturing capacity needed for remanufacturing, repurposing, and recycling. Results obtained by simulating the model show that up to a 25% reduction in the need for new batteries can be achieved …

Implementation Of Software Community Radio Using Low Cost Resources, Amean Shareaf Ghazi Al-Safi

Research and Creative Activities Poster Day

Community radio is the third third model model of radio broadcasting besides besides the commercial and public systems systems. It aims to provide individuals with local news and information that are important to a small community. This poster presented a new method of implementing community community radio using low cost hardware and free software.The transmitter system consists of PC, USRP, and antenna while the receiver side consists of Raspberry Pi, RTL –SDR, and antenna .The main goal is to define and demonstrate a low, cost, flexible transmitter consisting of the USRP N210 and and commodity PC and a receiver consisting …

Sparse Coding Based Feature Representation Method For Remote Sensing Images, Ender Oguslu

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

In this dissertation, we study sparse coding based feature representation method for the classification of multispectral and hyperspectral images (HSI). The existing feature representation systems based on the sparse signal model are computationally expensive, requiring to solve a convex optimization problem to learn a dictionary. A sparse coding feature representation framework for the classification of HSI is presented that alleviates the complexity of sparse coding through sub-band construction, dictionary learning, and encoding steps. In the framework, we construct the dictionary based upon the extracted sub-bands from the spectral representation of a pixel. In the encoding step, we utilize a soft …

A Cyber Forensics Needs Analysis Survey: Revisiting The Domain's Needs A Decade Later, Vikram S. Harichandran, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili, Andrew Marrington

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

The number of successful cyber attacks continues to increase, threatening financial and personal security worldwide. Cyber/digital forensics is undergoing a paradigm shift in which evidence is frequently massive in size, demands live acquisition, and may be insufficient to convict a criminal residing in another legal jurisdiction. This paper presents the findings of the first broad needs analysis survey in cyber forensics in nearly a decade, aimed at obtaining an updated consensus of professional attitudes in order to optimize resource allocation and to prioritize problems and possible solutions more efficiently. Results from the 99 respondents gave compelling testimony that the following …

A Method And A Case Study For The Selection Of The Best Available Tool For Mobile Device Forensics Using Decision Analysis, Shahzad Saleem, Oliver Popov, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

The omnipresence of mobile devices (or small scale digital devices - SSDD) and more importantly the utility of their associated applications for our daily activities, which range from financial transactions to learning, and from entertainment to distributed social presence, create an abundance of digital evidence for each individual. Some of the evidence may be a result of illegal activities that need to be identified, understood and eventually prevented in the future. There are numerous tools for acquiring and analyzing digital evidence extracted from mobile devices. The diversity of SSDDs, types of evidence generated and the number of tools used to …

In-The-Wild Residual Data Research And Privacy, William B. Glisson, Tim Storer, Andrew Blyth, George Grispos, Matt Campbell

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

As the world becomes increasingly dependent on technology, researchers in both industry and academia endeavor to understand how technology is used, the impact it has on everyday life, the artifact life-cycle and overall integrations of digital information. In doing so, researchers are increasingly gathering 'real-world' or 'in-the-wild' residual data, obtained from a variety of sources, without the explicit consent of the original owners. This data gathering raises significant concerns regarding privacy, ethics and legislation, as well as practical considerations concerning investigator training, data storage, overall security and data disposal. This research surveys recent studies of residual data gathered in-the-wild and …

Bytewise Approximate Matching: The Good, The Bad, And The Unknown, Vikram S. Harichandran, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Hash functions are established and well-known in digital forensics, where they are commonly used for proving integrity and file identification (i.e., hash all files on a seized device and compare the fingerprints against a reference database). However, with respect to the latter operation, an active adversary can easily overcome this approach because traditional hashes are designed to be sensitive to altering an input; output will significantly change if a single bit is flipped. Therefore, researchers developed approximate matching, which is a rather new, less prominent area but was conceived as a more robust counterpart to traditional hashing. Since the conception …

Towards Syntactic Approximate Matching-A Pre-Processing Experiment, Doowon Jeong, Frank Breitinger, Hari Kang, Sangjin Lee

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Over the past few years, the popularity of approximate matching algorithms (a.k.a. fuzzy hashing) has increased. Especially within the area of bytewise approximate matching, several algorithms were published, tested, and improved. It has been shown that these algorithms are powerful, however they are sometimes too precise for real world investigations. That is, even very small commonalities (e.g., in the header of a file) can cause a match. While this is a desired property, it may also lead to unwanted results. In this paper, we show that by using simple pre-processing, we significantly can influence the outcome. Although our test set …

Exploring Deviant Hacker Networks (Dhn) On Social Media Platforms, Samer Al-Kateeb, Kevin Conlan, Nitin Agarwal, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have grown exponentially over the past decade. The initial use of social media for benign purposes (e.g., to socialize with friends, browse pictures and photographs, and communicate with family members overseas) has now transitioned to include malicious activities (e.g., cybercrime, cyberterrorism, and cyberwarfare). These nefarious uses of OSNs poses a signi_cant threat to society, and thus requires research attention. In this exploratory work, we study activities of one deviant groups: hacker groups on social media, which we term Deviant Hacker Networks (DHN). We investigated the connection between different DHNs on Twitter: how they are connected, identified …

Find Me If You Can: Mobile Gps Mapping Applications Forensic Analysis & Snavp The Open Source, Modular, Extensible Parser, Jason Moore, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

The use of smartphones as navigation devices has become more prevalent. The ubiquity of hand-held navigation devices such as Garmins or Toms Toms has been falling whereas the ownership of smartphones and their adoption as GPS devices is growing. This work provides a comprehensive study of the most popular smartphone mapping applications, namely Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, MapQuest, Bing, and Scout, on both Android and iOS. It details what data was found, where it was found, and how it was acquired for each application. Based on the findings, the work allowed for the construction of a tool capable of …

Security Analysis Of Mvhash-B Similarity Hashing, Donghoon Chang, Somitra Sanadhya, Monika Singh

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In the era of big data, the volume of digital data is increasing rapidly, causing new challenges for investigators to examine the same in a reasonable amount of time. A major requirement of modern forensic investigation is the ability to perform automatic filtering of correlated data, and thereby reducing and focusing the manual effort of the investigator. Approximate matching is a technique to find “closeness” between two digital artifacts. mvHash-B is a well-known approximate matching scheme used for finding similarity between two digital objects and produces a ‘score of similarity’ on a scale of 0 to 100. However, no security …

Reliable And Secure Scada Framework For Residential Microgrid Communications, Goutham Krishna Chalamasetty

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Cyber security is one of the major needs for electric power industry like many other industries and organizations. The advancements in technology provide numerous benefits to power industry as well as benefits cyber attackers to perform different cyber-attacks on the industry. Power system is a complex physical entity that deals with power generation, distribution, and transmission. In general, no individual or company or an organization can bear a one hour power cut, which shows the need for reliability in electric power industry.

In order to develop a reliable and secure Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) communication network, this Thesis …

A Wavelet Transform Module For A Speech Recognition Virtual Machine, Euisung Kim

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This work explores the trade-offs between time and frequency information during the feature extraction process of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system using wavelet transform (WT) features instead of Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and the benefits of combining the WTs and the MFCCs as inputs to an ASR system. A virtual machine from the Speech Recognition Virtual Kitchen resource (www.speechkitchen.org) is used as the context for implementing a wavelet signal processing module in a speech recognition system. Contributions include a comparison of MFCCs and WT features on small and large vocabulary tasks, application of combined MFCC and WT features on …

Managing Risks Of Market Price Uncertainty For A Microgrid Operation, Sriram Raghavan

Masters Theses

"After deregulation of electricity in the United States, the day-ahead and real-time markets allow load serving entities and generation companies to bid and purchase/sell energy under the supervision of the independent system operator (ISO). The electricity market prices are inherently uncertain, and can be highly volatile. The main objective of this thesis is to hedge against the risk from the uncertainty of the market prices when purchasing/selling energy from/to the market. The energy manager can also schedule distributed generators (DGs) and storage of the microgrid to meet the demand, in addition to energy transactions from the market. The risk measure …

A Clean Electricity Future: Assessing The Role Of Wide-Area Power System Operations In Supporting Weather-Driven Renewable Energy In The U.S., Paul D. Picciano

Pomona Senior Theses

Over the coming decades, renewable energy sources, namely wind and solar, will need to play a larger role in our nation’s energy mix as we seek to lower greenhouse emissions and respond to renewable energy policies and the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. This thesis assesses the role of wider-area power system operations in the U.S. as a powerful solution in supporting the integration of these weather-driven, variable energy resources that pose substantial challenges to grid reliability. The expansion and integration of organized electricity markets and transmission networks over wider geographic areas can (1) help reduce net-variability in wind and solar …

Wireless Network Neutrality: Technological Challenges And Policy Implications, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

One key aspect of the debate over network neutrality has been whether and how network neutrality should apply to wireless networks. The existing commentary has focused on the economics of wireless network neutrality, but to date a detailed analysis of how the technical aspects of wireless networks affect the implementation of network neutrality has yet to appear in the literature. As an initial matter, bad handoffs, local congestion, and the physics of wave propagation make wireless broadband networks significantly less reliable than fixed broadband networks. These technical differences require the network to manage dropped packets and congestion in a way …

Evidential Reasoning For Forensic Readiness, Yi-Ching Liao, Hanno Langweg

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

To learn from the past, we analyse 1,088 "computer as a target" judgements for evidential reasoning by extracting four case elements: decision, intent, fact, and evidence. Analysing the decision element is essential for studying the scale of sentence severity for cross-jurisdictional comparisons. Examining the intent element can facilitate future risk assessment. Analysing the fact element can enhance an organization's capability of analysing criminal activities for future offender profiling. Examining the evidence used against a defendant from previous judgements can facilitate the preparation of evidence for upcoming legal disclosure. Follow the concepts of argumentation diagrams, we develop an automatic judgement summarizing …

Low Budget Forensic Drive Imaging Using Arm Based Single Board Computers, Eric Olson, Narasimha Shashidhar

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Traditional forensic analysis of hard disks and external media typically involves a powered down machine and “dead analysis” of these devices. Forensic acquisition of hard drives and external media has traditionally been by one of several means: standalone forensic duplicator; using a hardware write-blocker or dock attached to a laptop, computer, workstation, etc., forensic operating systems that live boot from a USB, CD/DVD or virtual machines with preinstalled operating systems. Standalone forensics acquisition and imaging devices generally cost thousands of dollars. In this paper, we propose the use of single board computers as forensic imaging devices. Single board computers can …

Digital Forensics In Law Enforcement: A Needs Based Analysis Of Indiana Agencies, Teri A. Cummins Flory

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Cyber crime is a growing problem, with the impact to society increasing exponentially, but the ability of local law enforcement agencies to investigate and successfully prosecute criminals for these crimes is unclear. Many national needs assessments have previously been conducted, and all indicated that state and local law enforcement did not have the training, tools, or staff to effectively conduct digital investigations, but very few have been completed recently. This study provided a current and localized assessment of the ability of Indiana law enforcement agencies to effectively investigate crimes involving digital evidence, the availability of training for both law enforcement …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Exploring Deviant Hacker Networks (Dhm) On Social Media Platforms, Samer Al-Khateeb, Kevin J. Conlan, Nitin Agarwal, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have grown exponentially over the past decade. The initial use of social media for benign purposes (e.g., to socialize with friends, browse pictures and photographs, and communicate with family members overseas) has now transitioned to include malicious activities (e.g., cybercrime, cyberterrorism, and cyberwarfare). These nefarious uses of OSNs poses a significant threat to society, and thus requires research attention. In this exploratory work, we study activities of one deviant groups: hacker groups on social media, which we term Deviant Hacker Networks (DHN). We investigated the connection between different DHNs on Twitter: how they are connected, identified …

Log Analysis Using Temporal Logic And Reconstruction Approach: Web Server Case, Murat Gunestas, Zeki Bilgin

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

We present a post-mortem log analysis method based on Temporal Logic (TL), Event Processing Language (EPL), and reconstruction approach. After showing that the proposed method could be adapted to any misuse event or attack, we specifically investigate the case of web server misuses. To this end, we examine 5 different misuses on Wordpress web servers, and generate corresponding log files of these attacks for forensic analysis. Then we establish attack patterns and formalize them by means of a special case of temporal logic, i.e. many sorted first order metric temporal logic (MSFOMTL). Later on, we implement these attack patterns in …

Bytewise Approximate Matching: The Good, The Bad, And The Unknown, Vikram S. Harichandran, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Hash functions are established and well-known in digital forensics, where they are commonly used for proving integrity and file identification (i.e., hash all files on a seized device and compare the fingerprints against a reference database). However, with respect to the latter operation, an active adversary can easily overcome this approach because traditional hashes are designed to be sensitive to altering an input; output will significantly change if a single bit is flipped. Therefore, researchers developed approximate matching, which is a rather new, less prominent area but was conceived as a more robust counterpart to traditional hashing. Since the conception …

On Efficiency Of Distributed Password Recovery, Radek Hranický, Martin Holkovič, Petr Matoušek

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

One of the major challenges in digital forensics today is data encryption. Due to the leaked information about unlawful sniffing, many users decided to protect their data by encryption. In case of criminal activities, forensic experts are challenged how to decipher suspect's data that are subject to investigation. A common method how to overcome password-based protection is a brute force password recovery using GPU-accelerated hardware. This approach seems to be expensive. This paper presents an alternative approach using task distribution based on BOINC platform. The cost, time and energy efficiency of this approach is discussed and compared to the GPU-based …

Towards Syntactic Approximate Matching - A Pre-Processing Experiment, Doowon Jeong, Frank Breitinger, Hari Kang, Sangjin Lee

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Over the past few years the popularity of approximate matching algorithms (a.k.a. fuzzy hashing) has increased. Especially within the area of bytewise approximate matching, several algorithms were published, tested and improved. It has been shown that these algorithms are powerful, however they are sometimes too precise for real world investigations. That is, even very small commonalities (e.g., in the header of a le) can cause a match. While this is a desired property, it may also lead to unwanted results. In this paper we show that by using simple pre-processing, we signicantly can in uence the outcome. Although our test …

Electronic Voting Service Using Block-Chain, Kibin Lee, Joshua I. James, Tekachew G. Ejeta, Hyoung J. Kim

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Cryptocurrency, and its underlying technologies, has been gaining popularity for transaction management beyond financial transactions. Transaction information is maintained in the block-chain, which can be used to audit the integrity of the transaction. The focus on this paper is the potential availability of block-chain technology of other transactional uses. Block-chain is one of the most stable open ledgers that preserves transaction information, and is difficult to forge. Since the information stored in block-chain is not related to personally identify information, it has the characteristics of anonymity. Also, the block-chain allows for transparent transaction verification since all information in the block-chain …