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This thesis proposed a novel approach to establish the trust model in a social network scenario based on users' emails. Email is one of the most important social connections nowadays. By analyzing email exchange activities among users, a social network trust model can be established to judge the trust rate

This thesis proposed a novel approach to establish the trust model in a social network scenario based on users' emails. Email is one of the most important social connections nowadays. By analyzing email exchange activities among users, a social network trust model can be established to judge the trust rate between each two users. The whole trust checking process is divided into two steps: local checking and remote checking. Local checking directly contacts the email server to calculate the trust rate based on user's own email communication history. Remote checking is a distributed computing process to get help from user's social network friends and built the trust rate together. The email-based trust model is built upon a cloud computing framework called MobiCloud. Inside MobiCloud, each user occupies a virtual machine which can directly communicate with others. Based on this feature, the distributed trust model is implemented as a combination of local analysis and remote analysis in the cloud. Experiment results show that the trust evaluation model can give accurate trust rate even in a small scale social network which does not have lots of social connections. With this trust model, the security in both social network services and email communication could be improved.
ContributorsZhong, Yunji (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Syrotiuk, Violet (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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This dissertation is focused on building scalable Attribute Based Security Systems (ABSS), including efficient and privacy-preserving attribute based encryption schemes and applications to group communications and cloud computing. First of all, a Constant Ciphertext Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CCP-ABE) is proposed. Existing Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) schemes usually incur large,

This dissertation is focused on building scalable Attribute Based Security Systems (ABSS), including efficient and privacy-preserving attribute based encryption schemes and applications to group communications and cloud computing. First of all, a Constant Ciphertext Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CCP-ABE) is proposed. Existing Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) schemes usually incur large, linearly increasing ciphertext. The proposed CCP-ABE dramatically reduces the ciphertext to small, constant size. This is the first existing ABE scheme that achieves constant ciphertext size. Also, the proposed CCP-ABE scheme is fully collusion-resistant such that users can not combine their attributes to elevate their decryption capacity. Next step, efficient ABE schemes are applied to construct optimal group communication schemes and broadcast encryption schemes. An attribute based Optimal Group Key (OGK) management scheme that attains communication-storage optimality without collusion vulnerability is presented. Then, a novel broadcast encryption model: Attribute Based Broadcast Encryption (ABBE) is introduced, which exploits the many-to-many nature of attributes to dramatically reduce the storage complexity from linear to logarithm and enable expressive attribute based access policies. The privacy issues are also considered and addressed in ABSS. Firstly, a hidden policy based ABE schemes is proposed to protect receivers' privacy by hiding the access policy. Secondly,a new concept: Gradual Identity Exposure (GIE) is introduced to address the restrictions of hidden policy based ABE schemes. GIE's approach is to reveal the receivers' information gradually by allowing ciphertext recipients to decrypt the message using their possessed attributes one-by-one. If the receiver does not possess one attribute in this procedure, the rest of attributes are still hidden. Compared to hidden-policy based solutions, GIE provides significant performance improvement in terms of reducing both computation and communication overhead. Last but not least, ABSS are incorporated into the mobile cloud computing scenarios. In the proposed secure mobile cloud data management framework, the light weight mobile devices can securely outsource expensive ABE operations and data storage to untrusted cloud service providers. The reported scheme includes two components: (1) a Cloud-Assisted Attribute-Based Encryption/Decryption (CA-ABE) scheme and (2) An Attribute-Based Data Storage (ABDS) scheme that achieves information theoretical optimality.
ContributorsZhou, Zhibin (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Yau, Sik-Sang (Committee member) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Reisslein, Martin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
Continuous Delivery, as one of the youngest and most popular member of agile model family, has become a popular concept and method in software development industry recently. Instead of the traditional software development method, which requirements and solutions must be fixed before starting software developing, it promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary

Continuous Delivery, as one of the youngest and most popular member of agile model family, has become a popular concept and method in software development industry recently. Instead of the traditional software development method, which requirements and solutions must be fixed before starting software developing, it promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. However, several problems prevent Continuous Delivery to be introduced into education world. Taking into the consideration of the barriers, we propose a new Cloud based Continuous Delivery Software Developing System. This system is designed to fully utilize the whole life circle of software developing according to Continuous Delivery concepts in a virtualized environment in Vlab platform.
ContributorsDeng, Yuli (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Chen, Yinong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
The Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi) framework is a standard of module system and service platform that implements a complete and dynamic component model. Currently most of OSGi implementations are implemented by Java, which has similarities of Android language. With the emergence of Android operating system, due to the similarities

The Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi) framework is a standard of module system and service platform that implements a complete and dynamic component model. Currently most of OSGi implementations are implemented by Java, which has similarities of Android language. With the emergence of Android operating system, due to the similarities between Java and Android, the integration of module system and service platform from OSGi to Android system attracts more and more attention. How to make OSGi run in Android is a hot topic, further, how to find a mechanism to enable communication between OSGi and Android system is a more advanced area than simply making OSGi running in Android. This paper, which aimed to fulfill SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and CBA (Component Based Architecture), proposed a solution on integrating Felix OSGi platform with Android system in order to build up Distributed OSGi framework between mobile phones upon XMPP protocol. And in this paper, it not only successfully makes OSGi run on Android, but also invents a mechanism that makes a seamless collaboration between these two platforms.
ContributorsDong, Xinyi (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Chen, Yinong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
In modern healthcare environments, there is a strong need to create an infrastructure that reduces time-consuming efforts and costly operations to obtain a patient's complete medical record and uniformly integrates this heterogeneous collection of medical data to deliver it to the healthcare professionals. As a result, healthcare providers are more

In modern healthcare environments, there is a strong need to create an infrastructure that reduces time-consuming efforts and costly operations to obtain a patient's complete medical record and uniformly integrates this heterogeneous collection of medical data to deliver it to the healthcare professionals. As a result, healthcare providers are more willing to shift their electronic medical record (EMR) systems to clouds that can remove the geographical distance barriers among providers and patient. Even though cloud-based EMRs have received considerable attention since it would help achieve lower operational cost and better interoperability with other healthcare providers, the adoption of security-aware cloud systems has become an extremely important prerequisite for bringing interoperability and efficient management to the healthcare industry. Since a shared electronic health record (EHR) essentially represents a virtualized aggregation of distributed clinical records from multiple healthcare providers, sharing of such integrated EHRs may comply with various authorization policies from these data providers. In this work, we focus on the authorized and selective sharing of EHRs among several parties with different duties and objectives that satisfies access control and compliance issues in healthcare cloud computing environments. We present a secure medical data sharing framework to support selective sharing of composite EHRs aggregated from various healthcare providers and compliance of HIPAA regulations. Our approach also ensures that privacy concerns need to be accommodated for processing access requests to patients' healthcare information. To realize our proposed approach, we design and implement a cloud-based EHRs sharing system. In addition, we describe case studies and evaluation results to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.
ContributorsWu, Ruoyu (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Yau, Stephen S. (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Access control is one of the most fundamental security mechanisms used in the design and management of modern information systems. However, there still exists an open question on how formal access control models can be automatically analyzed and fully realized in secure system development. Furthermore, specifying and managing access control

Access control is one of the most fundamental security mechanisms used in the design and management of modern information systems. However, there still exists an open question on how formal access control models can be automatically analyzed and fully realized in secure system development. Furthermore, specifying and managing access control policies are often error-prone due to the lack of effective analysis mechanisms and tools. In this dissertation, I present an Assurance Management Framework (AMF) that is designed to cope with various assurance management requirements from both access control system development and policy-based computing. On one hand, the AMF framework facilitates comprehensive analysis and thorough realization of formal access control models in secure system development. I demonstrate how this method can be applied to build role-based access control systems by adopting the NIST/ANSI RBAC standard as an underlying security model. On the other hand, the AMF framework ensures the correctness of access control policies in policy-based computing through automated reasoning techniques and anomaly management mechanisms. A systematic method is presented to formulate XACML in Answer Set Programming (ASP) that allows users to leverage off-the-shelf ASP solvers for a variety of analysis services. In addition, I introduce a novel anomaly management mechanism, along with a grid-based visualization approach, which enables systematic and effective detection and resolution of policy anomalies. I further evaluate the AMF framework through modeling and analyzing multiparty access control in Online Social Networks (OSNs). A MultiParty Access Control (MPAC) model is formulated to capture the essence of multiparty authorization requirements in OSNs. In particular, I show how AMF can be applied to OSNs for identifying and resolving privacy conflicts, and representing and reasoning about MPAC model and policy. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methodology, a suite of proof-of-concept prototype systems is implemented as well.
ContributorsHu, Hongxin (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Yau, Stephen S. (Committee member) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Ye, Nong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Cloud computing systems fundamentally provide access to large pools of data and computational resources through a variety of interfaces similar in spirit to existing grid and HPC resource management and programming systems. These types of systems offer a new programming target for scalable application developers and have gained popularity over

Cloud computing systems fundamentally provide access to large pools of data and computational resources through a variety of interfaces similar in spirit to existing grid and HPC resource management and programming systems. These types of systems offer a new programming target for scalable application developers and have gained popularity over the past few years. However, most cloud computing systems in operation today are proprietary and rely upon infrastructure that is invisible to the research community, or are not explicitly designed to be instrumented and modified by systems researchers. In this research, Xen Server Management API is employed to build a framework for cloud computing that implements what is commonly referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); systems that give users the ability to run and control entire virtual machine instances deployed across a variety physical resources. The goal of this research is to develop a cloud based resource and service sharing platform for Computer network security education a.k.a Virtual Lab.
ContributorsKadne, Aniruddha (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Tsai, Wei-Tek (Committee member) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
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Description
Personalized learning is gaining popularity in online computer science education due to its characteristics of pacing the learning progress and adapting the instructional approach to each individual learner from a diverse background. Among various instructional methods in computer science education, hands-on labs have unique requirements of understanding learners' behavior and

Personalized learning is gaining popularity in online computer science education due to its characteristics of pacing the learning progress and adapting the instructional approach to each individual learner from a diverse background. Among various instructional methods in computer science education, hands-on labs have unique requirements of understanding learners' behavior and assessing learners' performance for personalization. Hands-on labs are a critical learning approach for cybersecurity education. It provides real-world complex problem scenarios and helps learners develop a deeper understanding of knowledge and concepts while solving real-world problems. But there are unique challenges when using hands-on labs for cybersecurity education. Existing hands-on lab exercises materials are usually managed in a problem-centric fashion, while it lacks a coherent way to manage existing labs and provide productive lab exercising plans for cybersecurity learners. To solve these challenges, a personalized learning platform called ThoTh Lab specifically designed for computer science hands-on labs in a cloud environment is established. ThoTh Lab can identify the learning style from student activities and adapt learning material accordingly. With the awareness of student learning styles, instructors are able to use techniques more suitable for the specific student, and hence, improve the speed and quality of the learning process. ThoTh Lab also provides student performance prediction, which allows the instructors to change the learning progress and take other measurements to help the students timely. A knowledge graph in the cybersecurity domain is also constructed using Natural language processing (NLP) technologies including word embedding and hyperlink-based concept mining. This knowledge graph is then utilized during the regular learning process to build a personalized lab recommendation system by suggesting relevant labs based on students' past learning history to maximize their learning outcomes. To evaluate ThoTh Lab, several in-class experiments were carried out in cybersecurity classes for both graduate and undergraduate students at Arizona State University and data was collected over several semesters. The case studies show that, by leveraging the personalized lab platform, students tend to be more absorbed in a lab project, show more interest in the cybersecurity area, spend more effort on the project and gain enhanced learning outcomes.
ContributorsDeng, Yuli (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Zhao, Ming (Committee member) / Hsiao, Sharon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
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Description
The popularity of social media has generated abundant large-scale social networks, which advances research on network analytics. Good representations of nodes in a network can facilitate many network mining tasks. The goal of network representation learning (network embedding) is to learn low-dimensional vector representations of social network nodes that capture

The popularity of social media has generated abundant large-scale social networks, which advances research on network analytics. Good representations of nodes in a network can facilitate many network mining tasks. The goal of network representation learning (network embedding) is to learn low-dimensional vector representations of social network nodes that capture certain properties of the networks. With the learned node representations, machine learning and data mining algorithms can be applied for network mining tasks such as link prediction and node classification. Because of its ability to learn good node representations, network representation learning is attracting increasing attention and various network embedding algorithms are proposed.

Despite the success of these network embedding methods, the majority of them are dedicated to static plain networks, i.e., networks with fixed nodes and links only; while in social media, networks can present in various formats, such as attributed networks, signed networks, dynamic networks and heterogeneous networks. These social networks contain abundant rich information to alleviate the network sparsity problem and can help learn a better network representation; while plain network embedding approaches cannot tackle such networks. For example, signed social networks can have both positive and negative links. Recent study on signed networks shows that negative links have added value in addition to positive links for many tasks such as link prediction and node classification. However, the existence of negative links challenges the principles used for plain network embedding. Thus, it is important to study signed network embedding. Furthermore, social networks can be dynamic, where new nodes and links can be introduced anytime. Dynamic networks can reveal the concept drift of a user and require efficiently updating the representation when new links or users are introduced. However, static network embedding algorithms cannot deal with dynamic networks. Therefore, it is important and challenging to propose novel algorithms for tackling different types of social networks.

In this dissertation, we investigate network representation learning in social media. In particular, we study representative social networks, which includes attributed network, signed networks, dynamic networks and document networks. We propose novel frameworks to tackle the challenges of these networks and learn representations that not only capture the network structure but also the unique properties of these social networks.
ContributorsWang, Suhang (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Aggarwal, Charu (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
The pervasive use of social media gives it a crucial role in helping the public perceive reliable information. Meanwhile, the openness and timeliness of social networking sites also allow for the rapid creation and dissemination of misinformation. It becomes increasingly difficult for online users to find accurate and trustworthy information.

The pervasive use of social media gives it a crucial role in helping the public perceive reliable information. Meanwhile, the openness and timeliness of social networking sites also allow for the rapid creation and dissemination of misinformation. It becomes increasingly difficult for online users to find accurate and trustworthy information. As witnessed in recent incidents of misinformation, it escalates quickly and can impact social media users with undesirable consequences and wreak havoc instantaneously. Different from some existing research in psychology and social sciences about misinformation, social media platforms pose unprecedented challenges for misinformation detection. First, intentional spreaders of misinformation will actively disguise themselves. Second, content of misinformation may be manipulated to avoid being detected, while abundant contextual information may play a vital role in detecting it. Third, not only accuracy, earliness of a detection method is also important in containing misinformation from being viral. Fourth, social media platforms have been used as a fundamental data source for various disciplines, and these research may have been conducted in the presence of misinformation. To tackle the challenges, we focus on developing machine learning algorithms that are robust to adversarial manipulation and data scarcity.

The main objective of this dissertation is to provide a systematic study of misinformation detection in social media. To tackle the challenges of adversarial attacks, I propose adaptive detection algorithms to deal with the active manipulations of misinformation spreaders via content and networks. To facilitate content-based approaches, I analyze the contextual data of misinformation and propose to incorporate the specific contextual patterns of misinformation into a principled detection framework. Considering its rapidly growing nature, I study how misinformation can be detected at an early stage. In particular, I focus on the challenge of data scarcity and propose a novel framework to enable historical data to be utilized for emerging incidents that are seemingly irrelevant. With misinformation being viral, applications that rely on social media data face the challenge of corrupted data. To this end, I present robust statistical relational learning and personalization algorithms to minimize the negative effect of misinformation.
ContributorsWu, Liang (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Davison, Brian D. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019