This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.

In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.

Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.

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Description
Widespread adoption of smartphone based Mobile Medical Apps (MMAs) is opening new avenues for innovation, bringing MMAs to the forefront of low cost healthcare delivery. These apps often control human physiology and work on sensitive data. Thus it is necessary to have evidences of their trustworthiness i.e. maintaining privacy of

Widespread adoption of smartphone based Mobile Medical Apps (MMAs) is opening new avenues for innovation, bringing MMAs to the forefront of low cost healthcare delivery. These apps often control human physiology and work on sensitive data. Thus it is necessary to have evidences of their trustworthiness i.e. maintaining privacy of health data, long term operation of wearable sensors and ensuring no harm to the user before actual marketing. Traditionally, clinical studies are used to validate the trustworthiness of medical systems. However, they can take long time and could potentially harm the user. Such evidences can be generated using simulations and mathematical analysis. These methods involve estimating the MMA interactions with human physiology. However, the nonlinear nature of human physiology makes the estimation challenging.

This research analyzes and develops MMA software while considering its interactions with human physiology to assure trustworthiness. A novel app development methodology is used to objectively evaluate trustworthiness of a MMA by generating evidences using automatic techniques. It involves developing the Health-Dev β tool to generate a) evidences of trustworthiness of MMAs and b) requirements assured code generation for vulnerable components of the MMA without hindering the app development process. In this method, all requests from MMAs pass through a trustworthy entity, Trustworthy Data Manager which checks if the app request satisfies the MMA requirements. This method is intended to expedite the design to marketing process of MMAs. The objectives of this research is to develop models, tools and theory for evidence generation and can be divided into the following themes:

• Sustainable design configuration estimation of MMAs: Developing an optimization framework which can generate sustainable and safe sensor configuration while considering interactions of the MMA with the environment.

• Evidence generation using simulation and formal methods: Developing models and tools to verify safety properties of the MMA design to ensure no harm to the human physiology.

• Automatic code generation for MMAs: Investigating methods for automatically

• Performance analysis of trustworthy data manager: Evaluating response time generating trustworthy software for vulnerable components of a MMA and evidences.performance of trustworthy data manager under interactions from non-MMA smartphone apps.
ContributorsBagade, Priyanka (Author) / Gupta, Sandeep K. S. (Thesis advisor) / Wu, Carole-Jean (Committee member) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Zhang, Yi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
One of the main goals of computer architecture design is to improve performance without much increase in the power consumption. It cannot be achieved by adding increasingly complex intelligent schemes in the hardware, since they will become increasingly less power-efficient. Therefore, parallelism comes up as the solution. In fact, the

One of the main goals of computer architecture design is to improve performance without much increase in the power consumption. It cannot be achieved by adding increasingly complex intelligent schemes in the hardware, since they will become increasingly less power-efficient. Therefore, parallelism comes up as the solution. In fact, the irrevocable trend of computer design in near future is still to keep increasing the number of cores while reducing the operating frequency. However, it is not easy to scale number of cores. One important challenge is that existing cores consume too much power. Another challenge is that cache-based memory hierarchy poses a serious limitation due to the rapidly increasing demand of area and power for coherence maintenance.

In this dissertation, opportunities to resolve the aforementioned issues were explored in two aspects.

Firstly, the possibility of removing hardware cache altogether, and replacing it with scratchpad memory with software management was explored. Scratchpad memory consumes much less power than caches. However, as data management logic is completely shifted to Software, how to reduce software overhead is challenging. This thesis presents techniques to manage scratchpad memory judiciously by exploiting application semantics and knowledge of data access patterns, thereby enabling optimization of data movement across the memory hierarchy. Experimental results show that the optimization was able to reduce stack data management overhead by 13X, produce better code mapping in more than 80% of the case, and improve performance by 83% in heap management.

Secondly, the possibility of using software branch hinting to replace hardware branch prediction to completely eliminate power consumption on corresponding hardware components was explored. As branch predictor is removed from hardware, software logic is responsible for reducing branch penalty. Techniques to minimize the branch penalty by optimizing branch hint placement were proposed, which can reduce branch penalty by 35.4% over the state-of-the-art.
ContributorsLu, Jing (Author) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Thesis advisor) / Sarjoughian, Hessam S. (Committee member) / Wu, Carole-Jean (Committee member) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Cyberspace has become a field where the competitive arms race between defenders and adversaries play out. Adaptive, intelligent adversaries are crafting new responses to the advanced defenses even though the arms race has resulted in a gradual improvement of the security posture. This dissertation aims to assess the evolving threat

Cyberspace has become a field where the competitive arms race between defenders and adversaries play out. Adaptive, intelligent adversaries are crafting new responses to the advanced defenses even though the arms race has resulted in a gradual improvement of the security posture. This dissertation aims to assess the evolving threat landscape and enhance state-of-the-art defenses by exploiting and mitigating two different types of emerging security vulnerabilities. I first design a new cache attack method named Prime+Count which features low noise and no shared memory needed.I use the method to construct fast data covert channels. Then, I propose a novel software-based approach, SmokeBomb, to prevent cache side-channel attacks for inclusive and non-inclusive caches based on the creation of a private space in the L1 cache. I demonstrate the effectiveness of SmokeBomb by applying it to two different ARM processors with different instruction set versions and cache models and carry out an in-depth evaluation. Next, I introduce an automated approach that exploits a stack-based information leak vulnerability in operating system kernels to obtain sensitive data. Also, I propose a lightweight and widely applicable runtime defense, ViK, for preventing temporal memory safety violations which can lead attackers to have arbitrary code execution or privilege escalation together with information leak vulnerabilities. The security impact of temporal memory safety vulnerabilities is critical, but,they are difficult to identify because of the complexity of real-world software and the spatial separation of allocation and deallocation code. Therefore, I focus on preventing not the vulnerabilities themselves, but their exploitation. ViK can effectively protect operating system kernels and user-space programs from temporal memory safety violations, imposing low runtime and memory overhead.
ContributorsCho, Haehyun (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Thesis advisor) / Shoshitaishvili, Yan (Committee member) / Wang, Ruoyu (Committee member) / Wu, Carole-Jean (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
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Description
With the rapid development of both hardware and software, mobile devices with their advantages in mobility, interactivity, and privacy have enabled various applications, including social networking, mixed reality, entertainment, authentication, and etc.In diverse forms such as smartphones, glasses, and watches, the number of mobile devices is expected to increase by

With the rapid development of both hardware and software, mobile devices with their advantages in mobility, interactivity, and privacy have enabled various applications, including social networking, mixed reality, entertainment, authentication, and etc.In diverse forms such as smartphones, glasses, and watches, the number of mobile devices is expected to increase by 1 billion per year in the future. These devices not only generate and exchange small data such as GPS data, but also large data including videos and point clouds. Such massive visual data presents many challenges for processing on mobile devices. First, continuously capturing and processing high resolution visual data is energy-intensive, which can drain the battery of a mobile device very quickly. Second, data offloading for edge or cloud computing is helpful, but users are afraid that their privacy can be exposed to malicious developers. Third, interactivity and user experience is degraded if mobile devices cannot process large scale visual data in real-time such as off-device high precision point clouds. To deal with these challenges, this work presents three solutions towards fine-grained control of visual data in mobile systems, revolving around two core ideas, enabling resolution-based tradeoffs and adopting split-process to protect visual data.In particular, this work introduces: (1) Banner media framework to remove resolution reconfiguration latency in the operating system for enabling seamless dynamic resolution-based tradeoffs; (2) LesnCap split-process application development framework to protect user's visual privacy against malicious data collection in cloud-based Augmented Reality (AR) applications by isolating the visual processing in a distinct process; (3) A novel voxel grid schema to enable adaptive sampling at the edge device that can sample point clouds flexibly for interactive 3D vision use cases across mobile devices and mobile networks. The evaluation in several mobile environments demonstrates that, by controlling visual data at a fine granularity, energy efficiency can be improved by 49% switching between resolutions, visual privacy can be protected through split-process with negligible overhead, and point clouds can be delivered at a high throughput meeting various requirements.Thus, this work can enable more continuous mobile vision applications for the future of a new reality.
ContributorsHu, Jinhan (Author) / LiKamWa, Robert (Thesis advisor) / Wu, Carole-Jean (Committee member) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022