OS and Networks Commons^™

Understanding Deleted File Decay On Removable Media Using Differential Analysis, James H. Jones Jr, Anurag Srivastava, Josh Mosier, Connor Anderson, Seth Buenafe

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Digital content created by picture recording devices is often stored internally on the source device, on either embedded or removable media. Such storage media is typically limited in capacity and meant primarily for interim storage of the most recent image files, and these devices are frequently configured to delete older files as necessary to make room for new files. When investigations involve such devices and media, it is sometimes these older deleted files that would be of interest. It is an established fact that deleted file content may persist in part or in its entirety after deletion, and identifying the …

Harnessing Predictive Models For Assisting Network Forensic Investigations Of Dns Tunnels, Irvin Homem, Panagiotis Papapetrou

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In recent times, DNS tunneling techniques have been used for malicious purposes, however network security mechanisms struggle to detect them. Network forensic analysis has been proven effective, but is slow and effort intensive as Network Forensics Analysis Tools struggle to deal with undocumented or new network tunneling techniques. In this paper, we present a machine learning approach, based on feature subsets of network traffic evidence, to aid forensic analysis through automating the inference of protocols carried within DNS tunneling techniques. We explore four network protocols, namely, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and POP3. Three features are extracted from the DNS tunneled traffic: …

An Accidental Discovery Of Iot Botnets And A Method For Investigating Them With A Custom Lua Dissector, Max Gannon, Gary Warner, Arsh Arora

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper presents a case study that occurred while observing peer-to-peer network communications on a botnet monitoring station and shares how tools were developed to discover what ultimately was identified as Mirai and many related IoT DDOS Botnets. The paper explains how researchers developed a customized protocol dissector in Wireshark using the Lua coding language, and how this enabled them to quickly identify new DDOS variants over a five month period of study.

Kelihos Botnet: A Never-Ending Saga, Arsh Arora, Max Gannon, Gary Warner

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper investigates the recent behavior of the Kelihos botnet, a spam-sending botnet that accounts for many millions of emails sent each day. The paper demonstrates how a team of students are able to perform a longitudinal malware study, making significant observations and contributions to the understanding of a major botnet using tools and techniques taught in the classroom. From this perspective the paper has two objectives: encouragement and observation. First, by providing insight into the methodology and tools used by student researchers to document and understand a botnet, the paper strives to embolden other academic programs to follow a …

Lightweight Data Aggregation Scheme Against Internal Attackers In Smart Grid Using Elliptic Curve Cryptography, Debiao He, Sherali Zeadally, Huaqun Wang, Qin Liu

Information Science Faculty Publications

Recent advances of Internet and microelectronics technologies have led to the concept of smart grid which has been a widespread concern for industry, governments, and academia. The openness of communications in the smart grid environment makes the system vulnerable to different types of attacks. The implementation of secure communication and the protection of consumers’ privacy have become challenging issues. The data aggregation scheme is an important technique for preserving consumers’ privacy because it can stop the leakage of a specific consumer’s data. To satisfy the security requirements of practical applications, a lot of data aggregation schemes were presented over the …

Proactive And Reactive Strategies To Handle Surges In Urban Crowds, Jiali Du

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Most urban infrastructures are built to cater a planned capacity, yet surges in usage do happen in times (can be either expected or unexpected), and this has long been a major challenge for urban planner. In this thesis, I propose to study approaches handle surges in urban crowd movement. In particular, the surges in demand studied are limited to situations where a large crowd of commuters/visitors gather in a small vicinity, and I am concerned with their movements both within the vicinity and out of the vicinity (the egress from the vicinity). Significant crowd build-ups and congestions can be observed …

Characterizing And Improving Power And Performance In Hpc Networks, Taylor L. Groves

Computer Science ETDs

Networks are the backbone of modern HPC systems. They serve as a critical piece of infrastructure, tying together applications, analytics, storage and visualization. Despite this importance, we have not fully explored how evolving communication paradigms and network design will impact scientific workloads. As networks expand in the race towards Exascale (1×10^18 floating point operations a second), we need to reexamine this relationship so that the HPC community better understands (1) characteristics and trends in HPC communication; (2) how to best design HPC networks to save power or enhance the performance; (3) how to facilitate scalable, informed, and dynamic decisions within …

An Investigation Into The Performance Evaluation Of Connected Vehicle Applications: From Real-World Experiment To Parallel Simulation Paradigm, Md Salman Ahmed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A novel system was developed that provides drivers lane merge advisories, using vehicle trajectories obtained through Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC). It was successfully tested on a freeway using three vehicles, then targeted for further testing, via simulation. The failure of contemporary simulators to effectively model large, complex urban transportation networks then motivated further research into distributed and parallel traffic simulation. An architecture for a closed-loop, parallel simulator was devised, using a new algorithm that accounts for boundary nodes, traffic signals, intersections, road lengths, traffic density, and counts of lanes; it partitions a sample, Tennessee road network more efficiently than …

Monitoring The Dark Web And Securing Onion Services, John Schriner

Publications and Research

This paper focuses on how researchers monitor the Dark Web. After defining what onion services and Tor are, we discuss tools for monitoring and securing onion services. As Tor Project itself is research-driven, we find that the development and use of these tools help us to project where use of the Dark Web is headed.

What Are People Tweeting About Zika? An Exploratory Study Concerning Its Symptoms, Treatment, Transmission, And Prevention, Michele Miller, Tanvi Banerjee, Roopteja Muppalla, William L. Romine, Amit Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Background: In order to harness what people are tweeting about Zika, there needs to be a computational framework that leverages machine learning techniques to recognize relevant Zika tweets and, further, categorize these into disease-specific categories to address specific societal concerns related to the prevention, transmission, symptoms, and treatment of Zika virus.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine the relevancy of the tweets and what people were tweeting about the 4 disease characteristics of Zika: symptoms, transmission, prevention, and treatment.

Methods: A combination of natural language processing and machine learning techniques was used to determine what people were …

Eassistant: Cognitive Assistance For Identification And Auto-Triage Of Actionable Conversations, Hamid R. Motahari Nezhad, Kalpa Gunaratna, Juan Cappi

Kno.e.sis Publications

The browser and screen have been the main user interfaces of the Web and mobile apps. The notification mechanism is an evolution in the user interaction paradigm by keeping users updated without checking applications. Conversational agents are posed to be the next revolution in user interaction paradigms. However, without intelligence on the triage of content served by the interaction and content differentiation in applications, interaction paradigms may still place the burden of information overload on users. In this paper, we focus on the problem of intelligent identification of actionable information in the content served by applications, and in particular in …

A Dynamic Programming Approach For Quickly Estimating Large Network-Based Mev Models, Tien Mai, Emma Frejinger, Mogens Fosgereau, Fabian Bastin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a way to estimate a family of static Multivariate Extreme Value (MEV) models with large choice sets in short computational time. The resulting model is also straightforward and fast to use for prediction. Following Daly and Bierlaire (2006), the correlation structure is defined by a rooted, directed graph where each node without successor is an alternative. We formulate a family of MEV models as dynamic discrete choice models on graphs of correlation structures and show that the dynamic models are consistent with MEV theory and generalize the network MEV model (Daly and Bierlaire, 2006). Moreover, we show that …

Network-On-Chip Based H.264 Video Decoder On A Field Programmable Gate Array, Ian Barge

Master's Theses (2009 -)

This thesis develops the first fully network-on-chip (NoC) based h.264 video decoder implemented in real hardware on a field programmable gate array (FPGA). This thesis starts with an overview of the h.264 video coding standard and an introduction to the NoC communication paradigm. Following this, a series of processing elements (PEs) are developed which implement the component algorithms making up the h.264 video decoder. These PEs, described primarily in VHDL with some Verilog and C, are then mapped to an NoC which is generated using the CONNECT NoC generation tool. To demonstrate the scalability of the proposed NoC based design, …

Java Server Reliability In The Presence Of Failures, Rich Coe

Master's Theses (2009 -)

A design for the separation of a server interface and work processing. Numerous sources, Tanenbaum (Tanenbaum Modern Operating Systems, 493), Goscinski (Goscinski Distributed operating systems, 203), and Birman (Birman Reliable distributed systems, 265), all discuss the concept of Two-Phase Commit, where a coordinator directs one or more processes to perform a transaction. If the transaction or any of the processes fail, the coordinator can decide how to proceed by either retrying or aborting the request. The popular web browser Chrome utilizes a separate process for each tab displayed. Should the rendering and display of a web page cause a crash, …

An Indoor Navigation System Using A Sensor Fusion Scheme On Android Platform, Jiayi Xin

Master's Theses (2009 -)

With the development of wireless communication networks, smart phones have become a necessity for people’s daily lives, and they meet not only the needs of basic functions for users such as sending a message or making a phone call, but also the users’ demands for entertainment, surfing the Internet and socializing. Navigation functions have been commonly utilized, however the navigation function is often based on GPS (Global Positioning System) in outdoor environments, whereas a number of applications need to navigate indoors. This paper presents a system to achieve high accurate indoor navigation based on Android platform. To do this, we …

A Comprehensive Context-Aware Interruption Management System, April Chunjiao Song

Master's Theses (2009 -)

The interruption system is an application that prevents the user from noticing phone calls when he/she is busy, by turning off the ringtone. In a previous project, the user can enter his/her class and work schedule on Google Calendar. The intelligent interruption system can detect if the current time matches the range of one of the events in the user's Google Calendar. Other contexts considered were: driving, relationship of the callers, and proximity of Bluetooth devices. This project is a continuation of the interruption system. We consider additional context, social media such as Twitter. Research is done on when is …

Dark Hazard: Large-Scale Discovery Of Unknown Hidden Sensitive Operations In Android Apps, Xiaorui Pan, Xueqiang Wang, Yue Duan, Xiaofeng Wang, Heng Yin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hidden sensitive operations (HSO) such as stealing privacy user data upon receiving an SMS message are increasingly utilized by mobile malware and other potentially-harmful apps (PHAs) to evade detection. Identification of such behaviors is hard, due to the challenge in triggering them during an app’s runtime. Current static approaches rely on the trigger conditions or hidden behaviors known beforehand and therefore cannot capture previously unknown HSO activities. Also these techniques tend to be computationally intensive and therefore less suitable for analyzing a large number of apps. As a result, our understanding of real-world HSO today is still limited, not to …

Robust Optimization For Tree-Structured Stochastic Network Design, Xiaojian Wu, Akshat Kumar, Daniel Sheldon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stochastic network design is a general framework for optimizing network connectivity. It has several applications in computational sustainability including spatial conservation planning, pre-disaster network preparation, and river network optimization. A common assumption in previous work has been made that network parameters (e.g., probability of species colonization) are precisely known, which is unrealistic in real- world settings. We therefore address the robust river network design problem where the goal is to optimize river connectivity for fish movement by removing barriers. We assume that fish passability probabilities are known only imprecisely, but are within some interval bounds. We then develop a planning …

A Riemannian Network For Spd Matrix Learning, Zhiwu Huang, Gool L. Van

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrix learning methods have become popular in many image and video processing tasks, thanks to their ability to learn appropriate statistical representations while respecting Riemannian geometry of underlying SPD manifolds. In this paper we build a Riemannian network architecture to open up a new direction of SPD matrix non-linear learning in a deep model. In particular, we devise bilinear mapping layers to transform input SPD matrices to more desirable SPD matrices, exploit eigenvalue rectification layers to apply a non-linear activation function to the new SPD matrices, and design an eigenvalue logarithm layer to perform Riemannian computing …

Bike Route Choice Modeling Using Gps Data Without Choice Sets Of Paths, Maëlle Zimmermann, Tien Mai, Emma Frejinger

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Concerned by the nuisances of motorized travel on urban life, policy makers are faced with the challenge of making cycling a more attractive alternative for everyday transportation. Route choice models can help achieve this objective by gaining insights into the trade-offs cyclists make when choosing their routes and by allowing the effect of infrastructure improvements to be analyzed. We estimate a link-based bike route choice model from a sample of GPS observations in the city of Eugene on a network comprising over 40,000 links. The so-called recursive logit (RL) model (Fosgerau et al., 2013) does not require to sample any …