OS and Networks Commons^™

Proteus: Computing Disjunctive Loop Summary Via Path Dependency Analysis, Xiaofei Xie, Bihuan Chen, Yang Liu, Wei Le, Xiaohong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Loops are challenging structures for program analysis, especially when loops contain multiple paths with complex interleaving executions among these paths. In this paper, we first propose a classification of multi-path loops to understand the complexity of the loop execution, which is based on the variable updates on the loop conditions and the execution order of the loop paths. Secondly, we propose a loop analysis framework, named Proteus, which takes a loop program and a set of variables of interest as inputs and summarizes path-sensitive loop effects on the variables. The key contribution is to use a path dependency automaton (PDA) …

Static Loop Analysis And Its Applications, Xiaofei Xie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Loops are challenging structures in program analysis, and an effective loop analysis is crucial in the applications, such as symbolic execution and program verification. In the research, we will first perform a deep analysis and propose a classification according to the complexity of the loops. Then try to propose techniques for analyzing and summarizing different loops. At last, we apply the techniques in multiple applications.

Techniques For Identifying Mobile Platform Vulnerabilities And Detecting Policy-Violating Applications, Mon Kywe Su

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Mobile systems are generally composed of three layers of software: application layer where third-party applications are installed, framework layer where Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are exposed, and kernel layer where low-level system operations are executed. In this dissertation, we focus on security and vulnerability analysis of framework and application layers. Security mechanisms, such as Android’s sandbox and permission systems, exist in framework layer, while malware scanners protects application layer. However, there are rooms for improvement in both mechanisms. For instance, Android’s permission system is known to be implemented in ad-hoc manner and not well-tested for vulnerabilities. Application layer also focuses …

Hifocap: An Android App For Wearable Health Devices, Yoonsik Cheon, Rodrigo A. Romero

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Android is becoming a platform for mobile health-care devices and apps. However, there are many challenges in developing soft real-time, health-care apps for non-dedicated mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. In this paper we share our experiences in developing the HifoCap app, a mobile app for receiving electroencephalogram (EEG) wave samples from a wearable device, visualizing the received EEG samples, and transmitting them to a cloud storage server. The app is network and data-intensive. We describe the challenges we faced while developing the HifoCap app---e.g., ensuring the soft real-time requirement in the presence of uncertainty on the Android platform---along …

Ra2: Predicting Simulation Execution Time For Cloud-Based Design Space Explorations, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Wentong Cai, Zengxiang Li, Suiping Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Design space exploration refers to the evaluation of implementation alternatives for many engineering and design problems. A popular exploration approach is to run a large number of simulations of the actual system with varying sets of configuration parameters to search for the optimal ones. Due to the potentially huge resource requirements, cloud-based simulation execution strategies should be considered in many cases. In this paper, we look at the issue of running largescale simulation-based design space exploration problems on commercial Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds, namely Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine. To efficiently manage cloud resources used for execution, the key …

Towards Autonomous Behavior Learning Of Non-Player Characters In Games, Shu Feng, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Non-Player-Characters (NPCs), as found in computer games, can be modelled as intelligent systems, which serve to improve the interactivity and playability of the games. Although reinforcement learning (RL) has been a promising approach to creating the behavior models of non-player characters (NPC), an initial stage of exploration and low performance is typically required. On the other hand, imitative learning (IL) is an effective approach to pre-building a NPC’s behavior model by observing the opponent’s actions, but learning by imitation limits the agent’s performance to that of its opponents. In view of their complementary strengths, this paper proposes a computational model …

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 …

Analyzing Clinical Depressive Symptoms In Twitter, Amir Hossein Yazdavar, Hussein S. Al-Olimat, Tanvi Banerjee, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

350 million people are suffering from clinical depression worldwide.

Decision Modeling And Empirical Analysis Of Mobile Financial Services, Jun Liu

Dissertations and Theses Collection

The past twenty years have been a time of many new technological developments, changing business practices, and interesting innovations in the financial information system (IS) and technology landscape. As the financial services industry has been undergoing the digital transformation, the emergence of mobile financial services has been changing the way that customers pay for goods and services purchases and interact with financial institutions. This dissertation seeks to understand the evolution of the mobile payments technology ecosystem and how firms make mobile payments investment decisions under uncertainty, as well as examines the influence of mobile banking on customer behavior and financial …

Dynamic Machine Level Resource Allocation To Improve Tasking Performance Across Multiple Processes, Richard Walter Thatcher

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Across the landscape of computing, parallelism within applications is increasingly important in order to track advances in hardware capability and meet critical performance metrics. However, writing parallel applications is difficult to do in a scalable way, which has led to the creation of tasking libraries and language extensions like OpenMP, Intel Threading Building Blocks, Qthreads, and more. These tools abstract parallel execution by expressing it in terms of work units (tasks) rather than specific hardware details. This abstraction enables scaling and allows programmers to write software solutions that can leverage whatever level of parallelism is available.However, the typical task scheduler …

What Motivates High School Students To Take Precautions Against The Spread Of Influenza? A Data Science Approach To Latent Modeling Of Compliance With Preventative Practice, William L. Romine, Tanvi Banerjee, William R. Folk, Lloyd H. Barrow

Kno.e.sis Publications

– This study focuses on a central question: What key behavioral factors influence high school students’ compliance with preventative measures against the transmission of influenza? We use multilevel logistic regression to equate logit measures for eight precautions to students’ latent compliance levels on a common scale. Using linear regression, we explore the efficacy of knowledge of influenza, affective perceptions about influenza and its prevention, prior illness, and gender in predicting compliance. Hand washing and respiratory etiquette are the easiest precautions for students, and hand sanitizer use and keeping the hands away from the face are the most difficult. Perceptions of …

Passively Testing Routing Protocols In Wireless Sensor Networks, Xiaoping Che, Stephane Maag, Hwee-Xian Tan, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart systems are today increasingly developed with the number of wireless sensor devices that drastically increases. They are implemented within several contexts through our environment. Thus, sensed data transported in ubiquitous systems are important and the way to carry them must be efficient and reliable. For that purpose, several routing protocols have been proposed to wireless sensor networks (WSN). However, one stage that is often neglected before their deployment, is the conformance testing process, a crucial and challenging step. Active testing techniques commonly used in wired networks are not suitable to WSN and passive approaches are needed. While some works …

Edit Distance Based Encryption And Its Application, Tran Viet Xuan Phuong, Guomin Yang, Willy Susilo, Kaitai Liang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Edit distance, also known as Levenshtein distance, is a very useful tool to measure the similarity between two strings. It has been widely used in many applications such as natural language processing and bioinformatics. In this paper, we introduce a new type of fuzzy public key encryption called Edit Distance-based Encryption (EDE). In EDE, the encryptor can specify an alphabet string and a threshold when encrypting a message, and a decryptor can obtain a decryption key generated from another alphabet string, and the decryption will be successful if and only if the edit distance between the two strings is within …

Self-Regulated Incremental Clustering With Focused Preferences, Di Wang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to their online learning nature, incremental clustering techniques can handle a continuous stream of data. In particular, various incremental clustering techniques based on Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) have been shown to have low computational complexity in adaptive learning and are less sensitive to noisy information. However, parameter regularization in existing ART clustering techniques is applied either on different features or on different clusters exclusively. In this paper, we introduce Interest-Focused Clustering based on Adaptive Resonance Theory (IFC-ART), which self-regulates the vigilance parameter associated with each feature and each cluster. As such, we can incorporate the domain knowledge of the …

Raspberry Pi Vpn Travel Router, Daniel S. Pierson

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Consumers are increasingly relying on public wireless hotspots to access the internet from a growing number of devices. Usage of these hotspots has expanded from just laptops to everything from iPhones to tablets, which are expected to be internet-connected for full functionality. It has become common for one to check if there’s an open wireless hotspot connection available at places like coffee shops, hotels, restaurants, or even a doctor’s waiting room. The issue that arises is that these public connections present an inherent security risk, as anyone can connect and gain access to the network. For increased security, the use …

Packet Filter Approach To Detect Denial Of Service Attacks, Essa Yahya M Muharish

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Denial of service attacks (DoS) are a common threat to many online services. These attacks aim to overcome the availability of an online service with massive traffic from multiple sources. By spoofing legitimate users, an attacker floods a target system with a high quantity of packets or connections to crash its network resources, bandwidth, equipment, or servers. Packet filtering methods are the most known way to prevent these attacks via identifying and blocking the spoofed attack from reaching its target. In this project, the extent of the DoS attacks problem and attempts to prevent it are explored. The attacks categories …

Sim Card Forensics: Digital Evidence, Nada Ibrahim, Nuha Al Naqbi, Farkhund Iqbal, Omar Alfandi

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

With the rapid evolution of the smartphone industry, mobile device forensics has become essential in cybercrime investigation. Currently, evidence forensically-retrieved from a mobile device is in the form of call logs, contacts, and SMSs; a mobile forensic investigator should also be aware of the vast amount of user data and network information that are stored in the mobile SIM card such as ICCID, IMSI, and ADN. The aim of this study is to test various forensic tools to effectively gather critical evidence stored on the SIM card. In the first set of experiments, we compare the selected forensic tools in …

Assessing The Gap: Measure The Impact Of Phishing On An Organization, Brad Wardman

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Phishing has become one of the most recognized words associated with cybercrime. As more organizations are being targeted by phishing campaigns, there are more options within the industry to deter such attacks. However, there is little research into how much damage these campaigns are causing organizations. This paper will show how financial organizations can be impacted by phishing and present a method for accurately quantifying resultant monetary losses. The methodology presented in this paper can be adapted to other organizations in order to quantify phishing losses across industries.

Keywords: phishing, cybercrime, economics

Wban Security Management In Healthcare Enterprise Environments, Karina Bahena, Manghui Tu

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

As healthcare data are pushed online, consumers have raised big concerns on the breach of their personal information. Law and regulations have placed businesses and public organizations under obligations to take actions to prevent such data breaches. Various vulnerabilities have been identified in healthcare enterprise environments, in which the Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) remains to be a major vulnerability, which can be easily taken advantage of by determined adversaries. Thus, vulnerabilities of WBAN systems and the effective countermeasure mechanisms to secure WBAN are urgently needed. In this research, first, the architecture of WBAN system has been explored, and the …

Forensics Analysis Of Privacy Of Portable Web Browsers, Ahmad Ghafarian

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Web browser vendors offer a portable web browser option which is considered as one of the features that provides user privacy. Portable web browser is a browser that can be launched from a USB flash drive without the need for its installation on the host machine. Most popular web browsers have portable versions of their browsers as well. Portable web browsing poses a great challenge to computer forensic investigators who try to reconstruct the past browsing history, in case of any computer incidence. This research examines various sources in the host machine such as physical memory, temporary, recent, event files, …