Software Engineering Commons^™

Near Real-Time Rf-Dna Fingerprinting For Zigbee Devices Using Software Defined Radios, Frankie A. Cruz

Theses and Dissertations

Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network(s) (LR-WPAN) usage has increased as more consumers embrace Internet of Things (IoT) devices. ZigBee Physical Layer (PHY) is based on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.15.4 specification designed to provide a low-cost, low-power, and low-complexity solution for Wireless Sensor Network(s) (WSN). The standard’s extended battery life and reliability makes ZigBee WSN a popular choice for home automation, transportation, traffic management, Industrial Control Systems (ICS), and cyber-physical systems. As robust and versatile as the standard is, ZigBee remains vulnerable to a myriad of common network attacks. Previous research involving Radio Frequency-Distinct Native Attribute …

Instantaneous Bandwidth Expansion Using Software Defined Radios, Nicholas D. Everett

Theses and Dissertations

The Stimulated Unintended Radiated Emissions (SURE) process has been proven capable of classifying a device (e.g. a loaded antenna) as either operational or defective. Currently, the SURE process utilizes a specialized noise radar which is bulky, expensive and not easily supported. With current technology advancements, Software Defined Radios (SDRs) have become more compact, more readily available and significantly cheaper. The research here examines whether multiple SDRs can be integrated to replace the current specialized ultra-wideband noise radar used with the SURE process. The research specifically targets whether or not multiple SDR sub-band collections can be combined to form a wider …

Modeling Crowd Feedback In The Mobile App Market, Grant S. Williams

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Mobile application (app) stores, such as Google Play and the Apple App Store, have recently emerged as a new model of online distribution platform. These stores have expanded in size in the past five years to host millions of apps, offering end-users of mobile software virtually unlimited options to choose from. In such a competitive market, no app is too big to fail. In fact, recent evidence has shown that most apps lose their users within the first 90 days after initial release. Therefore, app developers have to remain up-to-date with their end-users’ needs in order to survive. Staying close …

Wiwear: Wearable Sensing Via Directional Wifi Energy Harvesting, Huy Vu Tran, Archan Misra, Jie Xiong, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Energy harvesting, from a diverse set of modes such as light or motion, has been viewed as the key to developing batteryless sensing devices. In this paper, we develop the nascent idea of harvesting RF energy from WiFi transmissions, applying it to power a prototype wearable device that captures and transmits accelerometer sensor data. Our solution, WiWear, has two key innovations: 1) beamforming WiFi transmissions to significantly boost the energy that a receiver can harvest ~23 meters away, and 2) smart zero-energy, triggering of inertial sensing, that allows intelligent duty-cycled operation of devices whose transient power consumption far exceeds what …

Quantum Computing Is Here To Stay, Manoj Thulasidas

MITB Thought Leadership Series

QUANTUM COMPUTING is emerging from university laboratories and entering the industry arena at a painfully slow pace. The measured and deliberate progress is understandable given its complexity and promise. The stakes are high, because quantum computing presents the tantalising prospect of solving problems previously considered completely insoluble

Functionality & Privacy In Mobile Applications - Who's Going To Win The Game, Debin Gao

MITB Thought Leadership Series

MOBILE APPS have brought so much convenience and fun into our lives. From route planning to grocery shopping, reserving flights and hiring bicycles, to the action games we play to pass the time on public transport.

Flashlight In A Dark Room: A Grounded Theory Study On Information Security Management At Small Healthcare Provider Organizations, Gerald Auger

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Healthcare providers have a responsibility to protect patient’s privacy and a business motivation to properly secure their assets. These providers encounter barriers to achieving these objectives and limited academic research has been conducted to examine the causes and strategies to overcome them. A subset of this demographic, businesses with less than 10 providers, compose a majority 57% of provider organizations in the United States. This grounded theory study provides exploratory findings, discovering these small healthcare provider organizations (SHPO) have limited knowledge on information technology (IT) and information security that results in assumptions and misappropriations of information security implementation, who is …

Evaluating The Impacts Of Detecting X.509 Covert Channels, Cody Welu

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

This quasi-experimental before-and-after study examined the performance impacts of detecting X.509 covert channels in the Suricata intrusion detection system. Relevant literature and previous studies surrounding covert channels and covert channel detection, X.509 certificates, and intrusion detection system performance were evaluated. This study used Jason Reaves’ X.509 covert channel proof of concept code to generate malicious network traffic for detection (2018). Various detection rules for intrusion detection systems were created to aid in the detection of the X.509 covert channel. The central processing unit (CPU) and memory utilization impacts that each rule had on the intrusion detection system was studied and …

Characterizing And Identifying Reverted Commits, Meng Yan, Xin Xia, David Lo, Ahmed E. Hassan, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In practice, a popular and coarse-grained approach for recovering from a problematic commit is to revert it (i.e., undoing the change). However, reverted commits could induce some issues for software development, such as impeding the development progress and increasing the difficulty for maintenance. In order to mitigate these issues, we set out to explore the following central question: can we characterize and identify which commits will be reverted? In this paper, we characterize commits using 27 commit features and build an identification model to identify commits that will be reverted. We first identify reverted commits by analyzing commit messages and …

Design And Assessment Of Myoelectric Games For Prosthesis Training Of Upper Limb Amputees, Meeralakshmi Radhakrishnan, Asim Smailagic, Brian French, Daniel P. Siewiorek, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of our system, which provides an engaging game-based pre-prosthesis training environment for upper limb transradial amputees. We believe that patients who train using such a training tool will demonstrate significantly higher improvement in functional performance tests using a myoelectric prosthesis than when conventional pre-prosthesis training protocols are used. We re-designed two simple games to be playable using three muscle contractions which are appropriate to pre-prosthesis exercises and are detected by an EMG-based arm sleeve. Through user studies conducted with 16 non-amputee subjects, we show that the proposed games are enjoyable, fun …

Making Wearable Sensing Less Obtrusive, Huy Vu Tran, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sensing is a crucial part of any cyber-physical system. Wearable device has its huge potential for sensing applications because it is worn on the user body. However, wearable sensing can cause obtrusiveness to the user. Obtrusiveness can be seen as a perception of a lack of usefulness [1] such as a lag in user interaction channel. In addition, being worn by a user, it is not connected to a power supply, and thus needs to be removed to be charged regularly. This can cause a nuisance to elderly or disabled people. However, there are also opportunities for wearable devices to …

Ict: In-Field Calibration Transfer For Air Quality Sensor Deployments, Yun Cheng, Xiaoxi He, Zimu Zhou, Lothar Thiele

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in urban air pollution monitoring, where hundreds of low-cost air quality sensors are deployed city-wide. To guarantee data accuracy and consistency, these sensors need periodic calibration after deployment. Since access to ground truth references is often limited in large-scale deployments, it is difficult to conduct city-wide post-deployment sensor calibration. In this work we propose In-field Calibration Transfer (ICT), a calibration scheme that transfers the calibration parameters of source sensors (with access to references) to target sensors (without access to references). On observing that (i) the distributions of ground truth in both source and …

A Study Of Face Embedding In Face Recognition, Khanh Duc Le

Master's Theses

Face Recognition has been a long-standing topic in computer vision and pattern recognition field because of its wide and important applications in our daily lives such as surveillance system, access control, and so on. The current modern face recognition model, which keeps only a couple of images per person in the database, can now recognize a face with high accuracy. Moreover, the model does not need to be retrained every time a new person is added to the database.

By using the face dataset from Digital Democracy, the thesis will explore the capability of this model by comparing it with …

Api Recommendation For Event-Driven Android Application Development, Weizhao Yuan, Huu Hoang Nguyen, Lingxiao Jiang, Yuting Chen, Jianjun Zhao, Haibo Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: Software development is increasingly dependent on existing libraries. Developers need help to find suitable library APIs. Although many studies have been proposed to recommend relevant functional APIs that can be invoked for implementing a functionality, few studies have paid attention to an orthogonal need associated with event-driven programming frameworks, such as the Android framework. In addition to invoking functional APIs, Android developers need to know where to place functional code according to various events that may be triggered within the framework.Objective: This paper aims to develop an API recommendation engine for Android application development that can recommend both (1) …

Careful-Packing: A Practical And Scalable Anti-Tampering Software Protection Enforced By Trusted Computing, Flavio Toffalini, Martín Ochoa, Jun Sun, Jianying Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ensuring the correct behaviour of an application is a critical security issue. One of the most popular ways to modify the intended behaviour of a program is to tamper its binary. Several solutions have been proposed to solve this problem, including trusted computing and anti-tampering techniques. Both can substantially increase security, and yet both have limitations. In this work, we propose an approach which combines trusted computing technologies and anti-tampering techniques, and that synergistically overcomes some of their inherent limitations. In our approach critical software regions are protected by leveraging on trusted computing technologies and cryptographic packing, without introducing additional …

Automatic, Highly Accurate App Permission Recommendation, Zhongxin Liu, Xin Xia, David Lo, John Grundy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To ensure security and privacy, Android employs a permission mechanism which requires developers to explicitly declare the permissions needed by their applications (apps). Users must grant those permissions before they install apps or during runtime. This mechanism protects users’ private data, but also imposes additional requirements on developers. For permission declaration, developers need knowledge about what permissions are necessary to implement various features of their apps, which is difficult to acquire due to the incompleteness of Android documentation. To address this problem, we present a novel permission recommendation system named PerRec for Android apps. PerRec leverages mining-based techniques and data …

Microbtc: Efficient, Flexible And Fair Micropayment For Bitcoin Using Hash Chains, Zhiguo Wan, Robert H. Deng, David Kuo Chuen Lee, Ying Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While Bitcoin gains increasing popularity in different payment scenarios, the transaction fees make it difficult to be applied to micropayment. Given the wide applicability of micropayment, it is crucial for all cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin to provide effective support therein. In light of this, a number of low-cost micropayment schemes for Bitcoin have been proposed recently to reduce micropayment costs. Existing schemes, however, suffer from drawbacks such as high computation cost, inflexible payment value, and possibly unfair exchanges. The paper proposes two new micropayment schemes, namely the basic MicroBTC and the advanced MicroBTC, for Bitcoin by integrating the hash chain technique …

Welcome Message From The General Chairs, Nabil I. Alshurafa, Archan Misra, Abhishek Mukherji

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Neural Network Based Detection Of Self-Admitted Technical Debt: From Performance To Explainability, Xiaoxue Ren, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo, Xinyu Wang, John Grundy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Technical debt is a metaphor to reflect the tradeoff software engineers make between short term benefitsand long term stability. Self-admitted technical debt (SATD), a variant of technical debt, has been proposed to identify debt that is intentionally introduced during software development, e.g., temporary fixes and workarounds. Previous studies have leveraged human-summarized patterns (which represent n-gram phrases that can be used to identify SATD) or text mining techniques to detect SATD in source code comments. However, several characteristics of SATD features in code comments, such as vocabulary diversity, project uniqueness, length and semantic variations, pose a big challenge to the accuracy …

Requirements Practices In Software Startups, John D. Hoff

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

In a dynamic environment full of uncertainties in software startups, software development practices must be carefully approached. It is vital that startups determine the right time to make advancements and evolve their company to the next level. We will discuss the importance of requirements practices in startups and their impact on company culture, work environments, and product quality.