ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 76
Description
Access control is necessary for information assurance in many of today's applications such as banking and electronic health record. Access control breaches are critical security problems that can result from unintended and improper implementation of security policies. Security testing can help identify security vulnerabilities early and avoid unexpected expensive cost in handling breaches for security architects and security engineers. The process of security testing which involves creating tests that effectively examine vulnerabilities is a challenging task. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) has been widely adopted to support fine-grained access control. However, in practice, due to its complexity including role management, role hierarchy with hundreds of roles, and their associated privileges and users, systematically testing RBAC systems is crucial to ensure the security in various domains ranging from cyber-infrastructure to mission-critical applications. In this thesis, we introduce i) a security testing technique for RBAC systems considering the principle of maximum privileges, the structure of the role hierarchy, and a new security test coverage criterion; ii) a MTBDD (Multi-Terminal Binary Decision Diagram) based representation of RBAC security policy including RHMTBDD (Role Hierarchy MTBDD) to efficiently generate effective positive and negative security test cases; and iii) a security testing framework which takes an XACML-based RBAC security policy as an input, parses it into a RHMTBDD representation and then generates positive and negative test cases. We also demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through case studies.
ContributorsGupta, Poonam (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Collofello, James (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The energy consumption of data centers is increasing steadily along with the associ- ated power-density. Approximately half of such energy consumption is attributed to the cooling energy, as a result of which reducing cooling energy along with reducing servers energy consumption in data centers is becoming imperative so as to achieve greening of the data centers. This thesis deals with cooling energy management in data centers running data-processing frameworks. In particular, we propose ther- mal aware scheduling for MapReduce framework and its Hadoop implementation to reduce cooling energy in data centers. Data-processing frameworks run many low- priority batch processing jobs, such as background log analysis, that do not have strict completion time requirements; they can be delayed by a bounded amount of time. Cooling energy savings are possible by being able to temporally spread the workload, and assign it to the computing equipments which reduce the heat recirculation in data center room and therefore the load on the cooling systems. We implement our scheme in Hadoop and performs some experiments using both CPU-intensive and I/O-intensive workload benchmarks in order to evaluate the efficiency of our scheme. The evaluation results highlight that our thermal aware scheduling reduces hot-spots and makes uniform temperature distribution within the data center possible. Sum- marizing the contribution, we incorporated thermal awareness in Hadoop MapReduce framework by enhancing the native scheduler to make it thermally aware, compare the Thermal Aware Scheduler(TAS) with the Hadoop scheduler (FCFS) by running PageRank and TeraSort benchmarks in the BlueTool data center of Impact lab and show that there is reduction in peak temperature and decrease in cooling power using TAS over FCFS scheduler.
ContributorsKole, Sayan (Author) / Gupta, Sandeep (Thesis advisor) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Varsamopoulos, Georgios (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
With the increasing user demand for low latency, elastic provisioning of computing resources coupled with ubiquitous and on-demand access to real-time data, cloud computing has emerged as a popular computing paradigm to meet growing user demands. However, with the introduction and rising use of wear- able technology and evolving uses of smart-phones, the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) has become a prevailing notion in the currently growing technology industry. Cisco Inc. has projected a data creation of approximately 403 Zetabytes (ZB) by 2018. The combination of bringing benign devices and connecting them to the web has resulted in exploding service and data aggregation requirements, thus requiring a new and innovative computing platform. This platform should have the capability to provide robust real-time data analytics and resource provisioning to clients, such as IoT users, on-demand. Such a computation model would need to function at the edge-of-the-network, forming a bridge between the large cloud data centers and the distributed connected devices.
This research expands on the notion of bringing computational power to the edge- of-the-network, and then integrating it with the cloud computing paradigm whilst providing services to diverse IoT-based applications. This expansion is achieved through the establishment of a new computing model that serves as a platform for IoT-based devices to communicate with services in real-time. We name this paradigm as Gateway-Oriented Reconfigurable Ecosystem (GORE) computing. Finally, this thesis proposes and discusses the development of a policy management framework for accommodating our proposed computational paradigm. The policy framework is designed to serve both the hosted applications and the GORE paradigm by enabling them to function more efficiently. The goal of the framework is to ensure uninterrupted communication and service delivery between users and their applications.
This research expands on the notion of bringing computational power to the edge- of-the-network, and then integrating it with the cloud computing paradigm whilst providing services to diverse IoT-based applications. This expansion is achieved through the establishment of a new computing model that serves as a platform for IoT-based devices to communicate with services in real-time. We name this paradigm as Gateway-Oriented Reconfigurable Ecosystem (GORE) computing. Finally, this thesis proposes and discusses the development of a policy management framework for accommodating our proposed computational paradigm. The policy framework is designed to serve both the hosted applications and the GORE paradigm by enabling them to function more efficiently. The goal of the framework is to ensure uninterrupted communication and service delivery between users and their applications.
ContributorsDsouza, Clinton (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Android is currently the most widely used mobile operating system. The permission model in Android governs the resource access privileges of applications. The permission model however is amenable to various attacks, including re-delegation attacks, background snooping attacks and disclosure of private information. This thesis is aimed at understanding, analyzing and performing forensics on application behavior. This research sheds light on several security aspects, including the use of inter-process communications (IPC) to perform permission re-delegation attacks.
Android permission system is more of app-driven rather than user controlled, which means it is the applications that specify their permission requirement and the only thing which the user can do is choose not to install a particular application based on the requirements. Given the all or nothing choice, users succumb to pressures and needs to accept permissions requested. This thesis proposes a couple of ways for providing the users finer grained control of application privileges. The same methods can be used to evade the Permission Re-delegation attack.
This thesis also proposes and implements a novel methodology in Android that can be used to control the access privileges of an Android application, taking into consideration the context of the running application. This application-context based permission usage is further used to analyze a set of sample applications. We found the evidence of applications spoofing or divulging user sensitive information such as location information, contact information, phone id and numbers, in the background. Such activities can be used to track users for a variety of privacy-intrusive purposes. We have developed implementations that minimize several forms of privacy leaks that are routinely done by stock applications.
Android permission system is more of app-driven rather than user controlled, which means it is the applications that specify their permission requirement and the only thing which the user can do is choose not to install a particular application based on the requirements. Given the all or nothing choice, users succumb to pressures and needs to accept permissions requested. This thesis proposes a couple of ways for providing the users finer grained control of application privileges. The same methods can be used to evade the Permission Re-delegation attack.
This thesis also proposes and implements a novel methodology in Android that can be used to control the access privileges of an Android application, taking into consideration the context of the running application. This application-context based permission usage is further used to analyze a set of sample applications. We found the evidence of applications spoofing or divulging user sensitive information such as location information, contact information, phone id and numbers, in the background. Such activities can be used to track users for a variety of privacy-intrusive purposes. We have developed implementations that minimize several forms of privacy leaks that are routinely done by stock applications.
ContributorsGollapudi, Narasimha Aditya (Author) / Dasgupta, Partha (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The increasing number of continually connected mobile persons has created an environment conducive to real time user data gathering for many uses both public and private in nature. Publicly, one can envision no longer requiring a census to determine the demographic composition of the country and its sub regions. The information provided is vastly more up to date than that of a census and allows civil authorities to be more agile and preemptive with planning. Privately, advertisers take advantage of a persons stated opinions, demographics, and contextual (where and when) information in order to formulate and present pertinent offers.
Regardless of its use this information can be sensitive in nature and should therefore be under the control of the user. Currently, a user has little say in the manner that their information is processed once it has been released. An ad-hoc approach is currently in use, where the location based service providers each maintain their own policy over personal information usage.
In order to allow more user control over their personal information while still providing for targeted advertising, a systematic approach to the release of the information is needed. It is for that reason we propose a User-Centric Context Aware Spatiotemporal Anonymization framework. At its core the framework will unify the current spatiotemporal anonymization with that of traditional anonymization so that user specified anonymization requirement is met or exceeded while allowing for more demographic information to be released.
Regardless of its use this information can be sensitive in nature and should therefore be under the control of the user. Currently, a user has little say in the manner that their information is processed once it has been released. An ad-hoc approach is currently in use, where the location based service providers each maintain their own policy over personal information usage.
In order to allow more user control over their personal information while still providing for targeted advertising, a systematic approach to the release of the information is needed. It is for that reason we propose a User-Centric Context Aware Spatiotemporal Anonymization framework. At its core the framework will unify the current spatiotemporal anonymization with that of traditional anonymization so that user specified anonymization requirement is met or exceeded while allowing for more demographic information to be released.
ContributorsSanchez, Michael Andrew (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The rate at which new malicious software (Malware) is created is consistently increasing each year. These new malwares are designed to bypass the current anti-virus countermeasures employed to protect computer systems. Security Analysts must understand the nature and intent of the malware sample in order to protect computer systems from these attacks. The large number of new malware samples received daily by computer security companies require Security Analysts to quickly determine the type, threat, and countermeasure for newly identied samples. Our approach provides for a visualization tool to assist the Security Analyst in these tasks that allows the Analyst to visually identify relationships between malware samples.
This approach consists of three steps. First, the received samples are processed by a sandbox environment to perform a dynamic behavior analysis. Second, the reports of the dynamic behavior analysis are parsed to extract identifying features which are matched against other known and analyzed samples. Lastly, those matches that are determined to express a relationship are visualized as an edge connected pair of nodes in an undirected graph.
This approach consists of three steps. First, the received samples are processed by a sandbox environment to perform a dynamic behavior analysis. Second, the reports of the dynamic behavior analysis are parsed to extract identifying features which are matched against other known and analyzed samples. Lastly, those matches that are determined to express a relationship are visualized as an edge connected pair of nodes in an undirected graph.
ContributorsHolmes, James Edward (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Most existing security decisions for both defending and attacking are made based on some deterministic approaches that only give binary answers. Even though these approaches can achieve low false positive rate for decision making, they have high false negative rates due to the lack of accommodations to new attack methods and defense techniques. In this dissertation, I study how to discover and use patterns with uncertainty and randomness to counter security challenges. By extracting and modeling patterns in security events, I am able to handle previously unknown security events with quantified confidence, rather than simply making binary decisions. In particular, I cope with the following four real-world security challenges by modeling and analyzing with pattern-based approaches: 1) How to detect and attribute previously unknown shellcode? I propose instruction sequence abstraction that extracts coarse-grained patterns from an instruction sequence and use Markov chain-based model and support vector machines to detect and attribute shellcode; 2) How to safely mitigate routing attacks in mobile ad hoc networks? I identify routing table change patterns caused by attacks, propose an extended Dempster-Shafer theory to measure the risk of such changes, and use a risk-aware response mechanism to mitigate routing attacks; 3) How to model, understand, and guess human-chosen picture passwords? I analyze collected human-chosen picture passwords, propose selection function that models patterns in password selection, and design two algorithms to optimize password guessing paths; and 4) How to identify influential figures and events in underground social networks? I analyze collected underground social network data, identify user interaction patterns, and propose a suite of measures for systematically discovering and mining adversarial evidence. By solving these four problems, I demonstrate that discovering and using patterns could help deal with challenges in computer security, network security, human-computer interaction security, and social network security.
ContributorsZhao, Ziming (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Yau, Stephen S. (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Santanam, Raghu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This research describes software based remote attestation schemes for obtaining the integrity of an executing user application and the Operating System (OS) text section of an untrusted client platform. A trusted external entity issues a challenge to the client platform. The challenge is executable code which the client must execute, and the code generates results which are sent to the external entity. These results provide the external entity an assurance as to whether the client application and the OS are in pristine condition. This work also presents a technique where it can be verified that the application which was attested, did not get replaced by a different application after completion of the attestation. The implementation of these three techniques was achieved entirely in software and is backward compatible with legacy machines on the Intel x86 architecture. This research also presents two approaches to incorporating software based "root of trust" using Virtual Machine Monitors (VMMs). The first approach determines the integrity of an executing Guest OS from the Host OS using Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and qemu emulation software. The second approach implements a small VMM called MIvmm that can be utilized as a trusted codebase to build security applications such as those implemented in this research. MIvmm was conceptualized and implemented without using any existing codebase; its minimal size allows it to be trustworthy. Both the VMM approaches leverage processor support for virtualization in the Intel x86 architecture.
ContributorsSrinivasan, Raghunathan (Author) / Dasgupta, Partha (Thesis advisor) / Colbourn, Charles (Committee member) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Dewan, Prashant (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
With the advent of technologies such as web services, service oriented architecture and cloud computing, modern organizations have to deal with policies such as Firewall policies to secure the networks, XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) policies for controlling the access to critical information as well as resources. Management of these policies is an extremely important task in order to avoid unintended security leakages via illegal accesses, while maintaining proper access to services for legitimate users. Managing and maintaining access control policies manually over long period of time is an error prone task due to their inherent complex nature. Existing tools and mechanisms for policy management use different approaches for different types of policies. This research thesis represents a generic framework to provide an unified approach for policy analysis and management of different types of policies. Generic approach captures the common semantics and structure of different access control policies with the notion of policy ontology. Policy ontology representation is then utilized for effectively analyzing and managing the policies. This thesis also discusses a proof-of-concept implementation of the proposed generic framework and demonstrates how efficiently this unified approach can be used for analysis and management of different types of access control policies.
ContributorsKulkarni, Ketan (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Yau, Stephen S. (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
In this dissertation, two interrelated problems of service-based systems (SBS) are addressed: protecting users' data confidentiality from service providers, and managing performance of multiple workflows in SBS. Current SBSs pose serious limitations to protecting users' data confidentiality. Since users' sensitive data is sent in unencrypted forms to remote machines owned and operated by third-party service providers, there are risks of unauthorized use of the users' sensitive data by service providers. Although there are many techniques for protecting users' data from outside attackers, currently there is no effective way to protect users' sensitive data from service providers. In this dissertation, an approach is presented to protecting the confidentiality of users' data from service providers, and ensuring that service providers cannot collect users' confidential data while the data is processed or stored in cloud computing systems. The approach has four major features: (1) separation of software service providers and infrastructure service providers, (2) hiding the information of the owners of data, (3) data obfuscation, and (4) software module decomposition and distributed execution. Since the approach to protecting users' data confidentiality includes software module decomposition and distributed execution, it is very important to effectively allocate the resource of servers in SBS to each of the software module to manage the overall performance of workflows in SBS. An approach is presented to resource allocation for SBS to adaptively allocating the system resources of servers to their software modules in runtime in order to satisfy the performance requirements of multiple workflows in SBS. Experimental results show that the dynamic resource allocation approach can substantially increase the throughput of a SBS and the optimal resource allocation can be found in polynomial time
ContributorsAn, Ho Geun (Author) / Yau, Sik-Sang (Thesis advisor) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Santanam, Raghu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012