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
The rapid advancement of wireless technology has instigated the broad deployment of wireless networks. Different types of networks have been developed, including wireless sensor networks, mobile ad hoc networks, wireless local area networks, and cellular networks. These networks have different structures and applications, and require different control algorithms. The focus

The rapid advancement of wireless technology has instigated the broad deployment of wireless networks. Different types of networks have been developed, including wireless sensor networks, mobile ad hoc networks, wireless local area networks, and cellular networks. These networks have different structures and applications, and require different control algorithms. The focus of this thesis is to design scheduling and power control algorithms in wireless networks, and analyze their performances. In this thesis, we first study the multicast capacity of wireless ad hoc networks. Gupta and Kumar studied the scaling law of the unicast capacity of wireless ad hoc networks. They derived the order of the unicast throughput, as the number of nodes in the network goes to infinity. In our work, we characterize the scaling of the multicast capacity of large-scale MANETs under a delay constraint D. We first derive an upper bound on the multicast throughput, and then propose a lower bound on the multicast capacity by proposing a joint coding-scheduling algorithm that achieves a throughput within logarithmic factor of the upper bound. We then study the power control problem in ad-hoc wireless networks. We propose a distributed power control algorithm based on the Gibbs sampler, and prove that the algorithm is throughput optimal. Finally, we consider the scheduling algorithm in collocated wireless networks with flow-level dynamics. Specifically, we study the delay performance of workload-based scheduling algorithm with SRPT as a tie-breaking rule. We demonstrate the superior flow-level delay performance of the proposed algorithm using simulations.
ContributorsZhou, Shan (Author) / Ying, Lei (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
The rapid advances in wireless communications and networking have given rise to a number of emerging heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks along with novel networking paradigms, including wireless sensor networks, mobile crowdsourcing, and mobile social networking. While offering promising solutions to a wide range of new applications, their widespread adoption

The rapid advances in wireless communications and networking have given rise to a number of emerging heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks along with novel networking paradigms, including wireless sensor networks, mobile crowdsourcing, and mobile social networking. While offering promising solutions to a wide range of new applications, their widespread adoption and large-scale deployment are often hindered by people's concerns about the security, user privacy, or both. In this dissertation, we aim to address a number of challenging security and privacy issues in heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks in an attempt to foster their widespread adoption. Our contributions are mainly fivefold. First, we introduce a novel secure and loss-resilient code dissemination scheme for wireless sensor networks deployed in hostile and harsh environments. Second, we devise a novel scheme to enable mobile users to detect any inauthentic or unsound location-based top-k query result returned by an untrusted location-based service providers. Third, we develop a novel verifiable privacy-preserving aggregation scheme for people-centric mobile sensing systems. Fourth, we present a suite of privacy-preserving profile matching protocols for proximity-based mobile social networking, which can support a wide range of matching metrics with different privacy levels. Last, we present a secure combination scheme for crowdsourcing-based cooperative spectrum sensing systems that can enable robust primary user detection even when malicious cognitive radio users constitute the majority.
ContributorsZhang, Rui (Author) / Zhang, Yanchao (Thesis advisor) / Duman, Tolga Mete (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
Mobile devices have penetrated into every aspect of modern world. For one thing, they are becoming ubiquitous in daily life. For the other thing, they are storing more and more data, including sensitive data. Therefore, security and privacy of mobile devices are indispensable. This dissertation consists of five parts: two

Mobile devices have penetrated into every aspect of modern world. For one thing, they are becoming ubiquitous in daily life. For the other thing, they are storing more and more data, including sensitive data. Therefore, security and privacy of mobile devices are indispensable. This dissertation consists of five parts: two authentication schemes, two attacks, and one countermeasure related to security and privacy of mobile devices.

Specifically, in Chapter 1, I give an overview the challenges and existing solutions in these areas. In Chapter 2, a novel authentication scheme is presented, which is based on a user’s tapping or sliding on the touchscreen of a mobile device. In Chapter 3, I focus on mobile app fingerprinting and propose a method based on analyzing the power profiles of targeted mobile devices. In Chapter 4, I mainly explore a novel liveness detection method for face authentication on mobile devices. In Chapter 5, I investigate a novel keystroke inference attack on mobile devices based on user eye movements. In Chapter 6, a novel authentication scheme is proposed, based on detecting a user’s finger gesture through acoustic sensing. In Chapter 7, I discuss the future work.
ContributorsChen, Yimin (Author) / Zhang, Yanchao (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Reisslein, Martin (Committee member) / Ying, Lei (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Microblogging services such as Twitter, Sina Weibo, and Tumblr have been emerging and deeply embedded into people's daily lives. Used by hundreds of millions of users to connect the people worldwide and share and access information in real-time, the microblogging service has also became the target of malicious attackers due

Microblogging services such as Twitter, Sina Weibo, and Tumblr have been emerging and deeply embedded into people's daily lives. Used by hundreds of millions of users to connect the people worldwide and share and access information in real-time, the microblogging service has also became the target of malicious attackers due to its massive user engagement and structural openness. Although existed, little is still known in the community about new types of vulnerabilities in current microblogging services which could be leveraged by the intelligence-evolving attackers, and more importantly, the corresponding defenses that could prevent both the users and the microblogging service providers from being attacked. This dissertation aims to uncover a number of challenging security and privacy issues in microblogging services and also propose corresponding defenses.

This dissertation makes fivefold contributions. The first part presents the social botnet, a group of collaborative social bots under the control of a single botmaster, demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of exploiting a social botnet for spam distribution and digital-influence manipulation, and propose the corresponding countermeasures and evaluate their effectiveness. Inspired by Pagerank, the second part describes TrueTop, the first sybil-resilient system to find the top-K influential users in microblogging services with very accurate results and strong resilience to sybil attacks. TrueTop has been implemented to handle millions of nodes and 100 times more edges on commodity computers. The third and fourth part demonstrate that microblogging systems' structural openness and users' carelessness could disclose the later's sensitive information such as home city and age. LocInfer, a novel and lightweight system, is presented to uncover the majority of the users in any metropolitan area; the dissertation also proposes MAIF, a novel machine learning framework that leverages public content and interaction information in microblogging services to infer users' hidden ages. Finally, the dissertation proposes the first privacy-preserving social media publishing framework to let the microblogging service providers publish their data to any third-party without disclosing users' privacy and meanwhile meeting the data's commercial utilities. This dissertation sheds the light on the state-of-the-art security and privacy issues in the microblogging services.
ContributorsZhang, Jinxue (Author) / Zhang, Yanchao (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Ying, Lei (Committee member) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Mobile devices are penetrating everyday life. According to a recent Cisco report [10], the number of mobile connected devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, eReaders, and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) modules will hit 11.6 billion by 2021, exceeding the world's projected population at that time (7.8 billion). The rapid development of mobile

Mobile devices are penetrating everyday life. According to a recent Cisco report [10], the number of mobile connected devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, eReaders, and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) modules will hit 11.6 billion by 2021, exceeding the world's projected population at that time (7.8 billion). The rapid development of mobile devices has brought a number of emerging security and privacy issues in mobile computing. This dissertation aims to address a number of challenging security and privacy issues in mobile computing.

This dissertation makes fivefold contributions. The first and second parts study the security and privacy issues in Device-to-Device communications. Specifically, the first part develops a novel scheme to enable a new way of trust relationship called spatiotemporal matching in a privacy-preserving and efficient fashion. To enhance the secure communication among mobile users, the second part proposes a game-theoretical framework to stimulate the cooperative shared secret key generation among mobile users. The third and fourth parts investigate the security and privacy issues in mobile crowdsourcing. In particular, the third part presents a secure and privacy-preserving mobile crowdsourcing system which strikes a good balance among object security, user privacy, and system efficiency. The fourth part demonstrates a differentially private distributed stream monitoring system via mobile crowdsourcing. Finally, the fifth part proposes VISIBLE, a novel video-assisted keystroke inference framework that allows an attacker to infer a tablet user's typed inputs on the touchscreen by recording and analyzing the video of the tablet backside during the user's input process. Besides, some potential countermeasures to this attack are also discussed. This dissertation sheds the light on the state-of-the-art security and privacy issues in mobile computing.
ContributorsSun, Jingchao (Author) / Zhang, Yanchao (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Ying, Lei (Committee member) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) has great potential to address worldwide spectrum shortage by enhancing spectrum efficiency. It allows unlicensed secondary users to access the under-utilized spectrum when the primary users are not transmitting. On the other hand, the open wireless medium subjects DSA systems to various security and privacy issues,

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) has great potential to address worldwide spectrum shortage by enhancing spectrum efficiency. It allows unlicensed secondary users to access the under-utilized spectrum when the primary users are not transmitting. On the other hand, the open wireless medium subjects DSA systems to various security and privacy issues, which might hinder the practical deployment. This dissertation consists of two parts to discuss the potential challenges and solutions.

The first part consists of three chapters, with a focus on secondary-user authentication. Chapter One gives an overview of the challenges and existing solutions in spectrum-misuse detection. Chapter Two presents SpecGuard, the first crowdsourced spectrum-misuse detection framework for DSA systems. In SpecGuard, three novel schemes are proposed for embedding and detecting a spectrum permit at the physical layer. Chapter Three proposes SafeDSA, a novel PHY-based scheme utilizing temporal features for authenticating secondary users. In SafeDSA, the secondary user embeds his spectrum authorization into the cyclic prefix of each physical-layer symbol, which can be detected and authenticated by a verifier.

The second part also consists of three chapters, with a focus on crowdsourced spectrum sensing (CSS) with privacy consideration. CSS allows a spectrum sensing provider (SSP) to outsource the spectrum sensing to distributed mobile users. Without strong incentives and location-privacy protection in place, however, mobile users are reluctant to act as crowdsourcing workers for spectrum-sensing tasks. Chapter Four gives an overview of the challenges and existing solutions. Chapter Five presents PriCSS, where the SSP selects participants based on the exponential mechanism such that the participants' sensing cost, associated with their locations, are privacy-preserved. Chapter Six further proposes DPSense, a framework that allows the honest-but-curious SSP to select mobile users for executing spatiotemporal spectrum-sensing tasks without violating the location privacy of mobile users. By collecting perturbed location traces with differential privacy guarantee from participants, the SSP assigns spectrum-sensing tasks to participants with the consideration of both spatial and temporal factors.

Through theoretical analysis and simulations, the efficacy and effectiveness of the proposed schemes are validated.
ContributorsJin, Xiaocong (Author) / Zhang, Yanchao (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Ying, Lei (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
The first half of this dissertation introduces a minimum cost incentive mechanism for collecting discrete distributed private data for big-data analysis. The goal of an incentive mechanism is to incentivize informative reports and make sure randomization in the reported data does not exceed a target level. It answers two fundamental

The first half of this dissertation introduces a minimum cost incentive mechanism for collecting discrete distributed private data for big-data analysis. The goal of an incentive mechanism is to incentivize informative reports and make sure randomization in the reported data does not exceed a target level. It answers two fundamental questions: what is the minimum payment required to incentivize an individual to submit data with quality level $\epsilon$? and what incentive mechanisms can achieve the minimum payment? A lower bound on the minimum amount of payment required for guaranteeing quality level $\epsilon$ is derived. Inspired by the lower bound, our incentive mechanism (WINTALL) first decides a winning answer based on reported data, then pays to individuals whose reported data match the winning answer. The expected payment of WINTALL matches lower bound asymptotically. Real-world experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk are presented to further illustrate novelty of the principle behind WINTALL.

The second half studies problem of iterative training in Federated Learning. A system with a single parameter server and $M$ client devices is considered for training a predictive learning model with distributed data. The clients communicate with the parameter server using a common wireless channel so each time, only one device can transmit. The training is an iterative process consisting of multiple rounds. Adaptive training is considered where the parameter server decides when to stop/restart a new round, so the problem is formulated as an optimal stopping problem. While this optimal stopping problem is difficult to solve, a modified optimal stopping problem is proposed. Then a low complexity algorithm is introduced to solve the modified problem, which also works for the original problem. Experiments on a real data set shows significant improvements compared with policies collecting a fixed number of updates in each iteration.
ContributorsJiang, Pengfei (Author) / Ying, Lei (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Wang, Weina (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Description
This dissertation presents a novel algorithm for recovering missing values of co-evolving time series with partial embedded network information. The idea is to connect two sources of data through a shared low dimensional latent space. The proposed algorithm, named NetDyna, is an Expectation-Maximization algorithm, and uses the Kalman filter and

This dissertation presents a novel algorithm for recovering missing values of co-evolving time series with partial embedded network information. The idea is to connect two sources of data through a shared low dimensional latent space. The proposed algorithm, named NetDyna, is an Expectation-Maximization algorithm, and uses the Kalman filter and matrix factorization approaches to infer the missing values both in the time series and embedded network. The experimental results on real datasets, including a Motes dataset and a Motion Capture dataset, show that (1) NetDyna outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms, especially with partially observed network information; (2) its computational complexity scales linearly with the time duration of time series; and (3) the algorithm recovers the embedded network in addition to missing time series values.

This dissertation also studies a load balancing algorithm, the so called power-of-two-choices(Po2), for many-server systems (with N servers) and focuses on the convergence of stationary distribution of Po2 in the both light and heavy traffic regimes to the solution of mean-field system. The framework of Stein’s method and state space collapse (SSC) are used to analyze both regimes.

In both regimes, the thesis first uses the argument of state space collapse to show that the probability of the state being far from the mean-field solution is small enough. By a simple Markov inequality, it is able to show that the probability is indeed very small with a proper choice of parameters.

Then, for the state space close to the solution of mean-field model, the thesis uses Stein’s method to show that the stochastic system is close to a linear mean-field model. By characterizing the generator difference, it is able to characterize the dominant terms in both regimes. Note that for heavy traffic case, the lower and upper bound analysis of a tridiagonal matrix, which arises from the linear mean-field model, is needed. From the dominant term, it allows to calculate the coefficient of the convergence rate.

In the end, comparisons between the theoretical predictions and numerical simulations are presented.
ContributorsHairi, FNU (Author) / Ying, Lei (Thesis advisor) / Wang, Weina (Committee member) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Description
Mobile and Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems have been widely used in many aspects

of human’s life. These systems are storing and operating on more and more sensitive

data of users. Attackers may want to obtain the data to peek at users’ privacy or

pollute the data to cause system malfunction. In addition, these systems

Mobile and Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems have been widely used in many aspects

of human’s life. These systems are storing and operating on more and more sensitive

data of users. Attackers may want to obtain the data to peek at users’ privacy or

pollute the data to cause system malfunction. In addition, these systems are not

user-friendly for some people such as children, senior citizens, and visually impaired

users. Therefore, it is of cardinal significance to improve both security and usability

of mobile and IoT systems. This report consists of four parts: one automatic locking

system for mobile devices, one systematic study of security issues in crowdsourced

indoor positioning systems, one usable indoor navigation system, and practical attacks

on home alarm IoT systems.

Chapter 1 overviews the challenges and existing solutions in these areas. Chapater

2 introduces a novel system ilock which can automatically and immediately lock the

mobile devices to prevent data theft. Chapter 3 proposes attacks and countermeasures

for crowdsourced indoor positioning systems. Chapter 4 presents a context-aware indoor

navigation system which is more user-friendly for visual impaired people. Chapter

5 investigates some novel attacks on commercial home alarm systems. Chapter 6

concludes the report and discuss the future work.
ContributorsLi, Tao (Author) / Zhang, Yanchao (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Fan, Deliang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Description
This dissertation studies the scheduling in two stochastic networks, a co-located wireless network and an outpatient healthcare network, both of which have a cyclic planning horizon and a deadline-related performance metric.

For the co-located wireless network, a time-slotted system is considered. A cycle of planning horizon is called a frame,

This dissertation studies the scheduling in two stochastic networks, a co-located wireless network and an outpatient healthcare network, both of which have a cyclic planning horizon and a deadline-related performance metric.

For the co-located wireless network, a time-slotted system is considered. A cycle of planning horizon is called a frame, which consists of a fixed number of time slots. The size of the frame is determined by the upper-layer applications. Packets with deadlines arrive at the beginning of each frame and will be discarded if missing their deadlines, which are in the same frame. Each link of the network is associated with a quality of service constraint and an average transmit power constraint. For this system, a MaxWeight-type problem for which the solutions achieve the throughput optimality is formulated. Since the computational complexity of solving the MaxWeight-type problem with exhaustive search is exponential even for a single-link system, a greedy algorithm with complexity O(nlog(n)) is proposed, which is also throughput optimal.

The outpatient healthcare network is modeled as a discrete-time queueing network, in which patients receive diagnosis and treatment planning that involves collaboration between multiple service stations. For each patient, only the root (first) appointment can be scheduled as the following appointments evolve stochastically. The cyclic planing horizon is a week. The root appointment is optimized to maximize the proportion of patients that can complete their care by a class-dependent deadline. In the optimization algorithm, the sojourn time of patients in the healthcare network is approximated with a doubly-stochastic phase-type distribution. To address the computational intractability, a mean-field model with convergence guarantees is proposed. A linear programming-based policy improvement framework is developed, which can approximately solve the original large-scale stochastic optimization in queueing networks of realistic sizes.
ContributorsLiu, Yiqiu (Author) / Ying, Lei (Thesis advisor) / Shi, Pengyi (Committee member) / Wang, Weina (Committee member) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020