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Description
There currently exist various challenges in learning cybersecuirty knowledge, along with a shortage of experts in the related areas, while the demand for such talents keeps growing. Unlike other topics related to the computer system such as computer architecture and computer network, cybersecurity is a multidisciplinary topic involving scattered technologies,

There currently exist various challenges in learning cybersecuirty knowledge, along with a shortage of experts in the related areas, while the demand for such talents keeps growing. Unlike other topics related to the computer system such as computer architecture and computer network, cybersecurity is a multidisciplinary topic involving scattered technologies, which yet remains blurry for its future direction. Constructing a knowledge graph (KG) in cybersecurity education is a first step to address the challenges and improve the academic learning efficiency.

With the advancement of big data and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, constructing large KGs and mining concepts, from unstructured text by using learning methodologies, become possible. The NLP-based KG with the semantic similarity between concepts has brought inspiration to different industrial applications, yet far from completeness in the domain expertise, including education in computer science related fields.

In this research work, a KG in cybersecurity area has been constructed using machine-learning-based word embedding (i.e., mapping a word or phrase onto a vector of low dimensions) and hyperlink-based concept mining from the full dataset of words available using the latest Wikipedia dump. The different approaches in corpus training are compared and the performance based on different similarity tasks is evaluated. As a result, the best performance of trained word vectors has been applied, which is obtained by using Skip-Gram model of Word2Vec, to construct the needed KG. In order to improve the efficiency of knowledge learning, a web-based front-end is constructed to visualize the KG, which provides the convenience in browsing related materials and searching for cybersecurity-related concepts and independence relations.
ContributorsLin, Fanjie (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Hsiao, I-Han (Committee member) / Chen, Yinong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Cyber-systems and networks are the target of different types of cyber-threats and attacks, which are becoming more common, sophisticated, and damaging. Those attacks can vary in the way they are performed. However, there are similar strategies

and tactics often used because they are time-proven to be effective. The motivations behind cyber-attacks

Cyber-systems and networks are the target of different types of cyber-threats and attacks, which are becoming more common, sophisticated, and damaging. Those attacks can vary in the way they are performed. However, there are similar strategies

and tactics often used because they are time-proven to be effective. The motivations behind cyber-attacks play an important role in designating how attackers plan and proceed to achieve their goals. Generally, there are three categories of motivation

are: political, economical, and socio-cultural motivations. These indicate that to defend against possible attacks in an enterprise environment, it is necessary to consider what makes such an enterprise environment a target. That said, we can understand

what threats to consider and how to deploy the right defense system. In other words, detecting an attack depends on the defenders having a clear understanding of why they become targets and what possible attacks they should expect. For instance,

attackers may preform Denial of Service (DoS), or even worse Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), with intention to cause damage to targeted organizations and prevent legitimate users from accessing their services. However, in some cases, attackers are very skilled and try to hide in a system undetected for a long period of time with the incentive to steal and collect data rather than causing damages.

Nowadays, not only the variety of attack types and the way they are launched are important. However, advancement in technology is another factor to consider. Over the last decades, we have experienced various new technologies. Obviously, in the beginning, new technologies will have their own limitations before they stand out. There are a number of related technical areas whose understanding is still less than satisfactory, and in which long-term research is needed. On the other hand, these new technologies can boost the advancement of deploying security solutions and countermeasures when they are carefully adapted. That said, Software Defined Networking i(SDN), its related security threats and solutions, and its adaption in enterprise environments bring us new chances to enhance our security solutions. To reach the optimal level of deploying SDN technology in enterprise environments, it is important to consider re-evaluating current deployed security solutions in traditional networks before deploying them to SDN-based infrastructures. Although DDoS attacks are a bit sinister, there are other types of cyber-threats that are very harmful, sophisticated, and intelligent. Thus, current security defense solutions to detect DDoS cannot detect them. These kinds of attacks are complex, persistent, and stealthy, also referred to Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) which often leverage the bot control and remotely access valuable information. APT uses multiple stages to break into a network. APT is a sort of unseen, continuous and long-term penetrative network and attackers can bypass the existing security detection systems. It can modify and steal the sensitive data as well as specifically cause physical damage the target system. In this dissertation, two cyber-attack motivations are considered: sabotage, where the motive is the destruction; and information theft, where attackers aim to acquire invaluable information (customer info, business information, etc). I deal with two types of attacks (DDoS attacks and APT attacks) where DDoS attacks are classified under sabotage motivation category, and the APT attacks are classified under information theft motivation category. To detect and mitigate each of these attacks, I utilize the ease of programmability in SDN and its great platform for implementation, dynamic topology changes, decentralized network management, and ease of deploying security countermeasures.
ContributorsAlshamrani, Adel (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its increasing appearances in

Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) networks pose a unique issue to the availability

and health of the Internet at large. Many of these devices are shipped insecurely, with

poor default user and password credentials and oftentimes the general consumer does

not have

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its increasing appearances in

Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) networks pose a unique issue to the availability

and health of the Internet at large. Many of these devices are shipped insecurely, with

poor default user and password credentials and oftentimes the general consumer does

not have the technical knowledge of how they may secure their devices and networks.

The many vulnerabilities of the IoT coupled with the immense number of existing

devices provide opportunities for malicious actors to compromise such devices and

use them in large scale distributed denial of service attacks, preventing legitimate

users from using services and degrading the health of the Internet in general.

This thesis presents an approach that leverages the benefits of an Internet Engineering

Task Force (IETF) proposed standard named Manufacturer Usage Descriptions,

that is used in conjunction with the concept of Software Defined Networks

(SDN) in order to detect malicious traffic generated from IoT devices suspected of

being utilized in coordinated flooding attacks. The approach then works towards

the ability to detect these attacks at their sources through periodic monitoring of

preemptively permitted flow rules and determining which of the flows within the permitted

set are misbehaving by using an acceptable traffic range using Exponentially

Weighted Moving Averages (EWMA).
ContributorsChang, Laurence Hao (Author) / Yau, Stephen (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Emerging from years of research and development, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has finally paved its way into our daily lives. From smart home to Industry 4.0, IoT has been fundamentally transforming numerous domains with its unique superpower of interconnecting world-wide devices. However, the capability of IoT is largely constrained by the

Emerging from years of research and development, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has finally paved its way into our daily lives. From smart home to Industry 4.0, IoT has been fundamentally transforming numerous domains with its unique superpower of interconnecting world-wide devices. However, the capability of IoT is largely constrained by the limited resources it can employ in various application scenarios, including computing power, network resource, dedicated hardware, etc. The situation is further exacerbated by the stringent quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of many IoT applications, such as delay, bandwidth, security, reliability, and more. This mismatch in resources and demands has greatly hindered the deployment and utilization of IoT services in many resource-intense and QoS-sensitive scenarios like autonomous driving and virtual reality.

I believe that the resource issue in IoT will persist in the near future due to technological, economic and environmental factors. In this dissertation, I seek to address this issue by means of smart resource allocation. I propose mathematical models to formally describe various resource constraints and application scenarios in IoT. Based on these, I design smart resource allocation algorithms and protocols to maximize the system performance in face of resource restrictions. Different aspects are tackled, including networking, security, and economics of the entire IoT ecosystem. For different problems, different algorithmic solutions are devised, including optimal algorithms, provable approximation algorithms, and distributed protocols. The solutions are validated with rigorous theoretical analysis and/or extensive simulation experiments.
ContributorsYu, Ruozhou, Ph.D (Author) / Xue, Guoliang (Thesis advisor) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
In traditional networks the control and data plane are highly coupled, hindering development. With Software Defined Networking (SDN), the two planes are separated, allowing innovations on either one independently of the other. Here, the control plane is formed by the applications that specify an organization's policy and the data plane

In traditional networks the control and data plane are highly coupled, hindering development. With Software Defined Networking (SDN), the two planes are separated, allowing innovations on either one independently of the other. Here, the control plane is formed by the applications that specify an organization's policy and the data plane contains the forwarding logic. The application sends all commands to an SDN controller which then performs the requested action on behalf of the application. Generally, the requested action is a modification to the flow tables, present in the switches, to reflect a change in the organization's policy. There are a number of ways to control the network using the SDN principles, but the most widely used approach is OpenFlow.

With the applications now having direct access to the flow table entries, it is easy to have inconsistencies arise in the flow table rules. Since the flow rules are structured similar to firewall rules, the research done in analyzing and identifying firewall rule conflicts can be adapted to work with OpenFlow rules.

The main work of this thesis is to implement flow conflict detection logic in OpenDaylight and inspect the applicability of techniques in visualizing the conflicts. A hierarchical edge-bundling technique coupled with a Reingold-Tilford tree is employed to present the relationship between the conflicting rules. Additionally, a table-driven approach is also implemented to display the details of each flow.

Both types of visualization are then tested for correctness by providing them with flows which are known to have conflicts. The conflicts were identified properly and displayed by the views.
ContributorsNatarajan, Janakarajan (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Syrotiuk, Violet R. (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Lighting systems and air-conditioning systems are two of the largest energy consuming end-uses in buildings. Lighting control in smart buildings and homes can be automated by having computer controlled lights and window blinds along with illumination sensors that are distributed in the building, while temperature control can be automated by

Lighting systems and air-conditioning systems are two of the largest energy consuming end-uses in buildings. Lighting control in smart buildings and homes can be automated by having computer controlled lights and window blinds along with illumination sensors that are distributed in the building, while temperature control can be automated by having computer controlled air-conditioning systems. However, programming actuators in a large-scale environment for buildings and homes can be time consuming and expensive. This dissertation presents an approach that algorithmically sets up the control system that can automate any building without requiring custom programming. This is achieved by imbibing the system self calibrating and self learning abilities.

For lighting control, the dissertation describes how the problem is non-deterministic polynomial-time hard(NP-Hard) but can be resolved by heuristics. The resulting system controls blinds to ensure uniform lighting and also adds artificial illumination to ensure light coverage remains adequate at all times of the day, while adjusting for weather and seasons. In the absence of daylight, the system resorts to artificial lighting.

For temperature control, the dissertation describes how the temperature control problem is modeled using convex quadratic programming. The impact of every air conditioner on each sensor at a particular time is learnt using a linear regression model. The resulting system controls air-conditioning equipments to ensure the maintenance of user comfort and low cost of energy consumptions. The system can be deployed in large scale environments. It can accept multiple target setpoints at a time, which improves the flexibility and efficiency of cooling systems requiring temperature control.

The methods proposed work as generic control algorithms and are not preprogrammed for a particular place or building. The feasibility, adaptivity and scalability features of the system have been validated through various actual and simulated experiments.
ContributorsWang, Yuan (Author) / Dasgupta, Partha (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Reddy, T. Agami (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Detecting cyber-attacks in cyber systems is essential for protecting cyber infrastructures from cyber-attacks. It is very difficult to detect cyber-attacks in cyber systems due to their high complexity. The accuracy of the attack detection in the cyber systems

Detecting cyber-attacks in cyber systems is essential for protecting cyber infrastructures from cyber-attacks. It is very difficult to detect cyber-attacks in cyber systems due to their high complexity. The accuracy of the attack detection in the cyber systems depends heavily on the completeness of the collected sensor information. In this thesis, two approaches are presented: one to detecting attacks in completely observable cyber systems, and the other to estimating types of states in partially observable cyber systems for attack detection in cyber systems. These two approaches are illustrated using three large data sets of network traffic because the packet-level information of the network traffic data provides details about the cyber systems.

The approach to attack detection in cyber systems is based on a multimodal artificial neural network (MANN) using the collected network traffic data from completely observable cyber systems for training and testing. Since the training of MANN is computationally intensive, to reduce the computational overhead, an efficient feature selection algorithm using the genetic algorithm is developed and incorporated in this approach.

In order to detect attacks in cyber systems in partially observable environments, an approach to estimating the types of states in partially observable cyber systems, which is the first phase of attack detection in cyber systems in partially observable environments, is presented. The types of states of such cyber systems are useful to detecting cyber-attacks in such cyber systems. This approach involves the use of a convolutional neural network (CNN), and unsupervised learning with elbow method and k-means clustering algorithm.
ContributorsGuha, Sayantan (Author) / Yau, Stephen S. (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
The recent years have witnessed a rapid development of mobile devices and smart devices. As more and more people are getting involved in the online environment, privacy issues are becoming increasingly important. People’s privacy in the digital world is much easier to leak than in the real world, because every

The recent years have witnessed a rapid development of mobile devices and smart devices. As more and more people are getting involved in the online environment, privacy issues are becoming increasingly important. People’s privacy in the digital world is much easier to leak than in the real world, because every action people take online would leave a trail of information which could be recorded, collected and used by malicious attackers. Besides, service providers might collect users’ information and analyze them, which also leads to a privacy breach. Therefore, preserving people’s privacy is very important in the online environment.

In this dissertation, I study the problems of preserving people’s identity privacy and loca- tion privacy in the online environment. Specifically, I study four topics: identity privacy in online social networks (OSNs), identity privacy in anonymous message submission, lo- cation privacy in location based social networks (LBSNs), and location privacy in location based reminders. In the first topic, I propose a system which can hide users’ identity and data from untrusted storage site where the OSN provider puts users’ data. I also design a fine grained access control mechanism which prevents unauthorized users from accessing the data. Based on the secret sharing scheme, I construct a shuffle protocol that disconnects the relationship between members’ identities and their submitted messages in the topic of identity privacy in anonymous message submission. The message is encrypted on the mem- ber side and decrypted on the message collector side. The collector eventually gets all of the messages but does not know who submitted which message. In the third topic, I pro- pose a framework that hides users’ check-in information from the LBSN. Considering the limited computation resources on smart devices, I propose a delegatable pseudo random function to outsource computations to the much more powerful server while preserving privacy. I also implement efficient revocations. In the topic of location privacy in location based reminders, I propose a system to hide users’ reminder locations from an untrusted cloud server. I propose a cross based approach and an improved bar based approach, re- spectively, to represent a reminder area. The reminder location and reminder message are encrypted before uploading to the cloud server, which then can determine whether the dis- tance between the user’s current location and the reminder location is within the reminder distance without knowing anything about the user’s location information and the content of the reminder message.
ContributorsZhao, Xinxin (Author) / Xue, Guoliang (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Cloud computing is known as a new and powerful computing paradigm. This new generation of network computing model delivers both software and hardware as on-demand resources and various services over the Internet. However, the security concerns prevent users from adopting the cloud-based solutions to fulfill the IT requirement for many

Cloud computing is known as a new and powerful computing paradigm. This new generation of network computing model delivers both software and hardware as on-demand resources and various services over the Internet. However, the security concerns prevent users from adopting the cloud-based solutions to fulfill the IT requirement for many business critical computing. Due to the resource-sharing and multi-tenant nature of cloud-based solutions, cloud security is especially the most concern in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). It has been attracting a lot of research and development effort in the past few years.

Virtualization is the main technology of cloud computing to enable multi-tenancy.

Computing power, storage, and network are all virtualizable to be shared in an IaaS system. This important technology makes abstract infrastructure and resources available to users as isolated virtual machines (VMs) and virtual networks (VNs). However, it also increases vulnerabilities and possible attack surfaces in the system, since all users in a cloud share these resources with others or even the attackers. The promising protection mechanism is required to ensure strong isolation, mediated sharing, and secure communications between VMs. Technologies for detecting anomalous traffic and protecting normal traffic in VNs are also needed. Therefore, how to secure and protect the private traffic in VNs and how to prevent the malicious traffic from shared resources are major security research challenges in a cloud system.

This dissertation proposes four novel frameworks to address challenges mentioned above. The first work is a new multi-phase distributed vulnerability, measurement, and countermeasure selection mechanism based on the attack graph analytical model. The second work is a hybrid intrusion detection and prevention system to protect VN and VM using virtual machines introspection (VMI) and software defined networking (SDN) technologies. The third work further improves the previous works by introducing a VM profiler and VM Security Index (VSI) to keep track the security status of each VM and suggest the optimal countermeasure to mitigate potential threats. The final work is a SDN-based proactive defense mechanism for a cloud system using a reconfiguration model and moving target defense approaches to actively and dynamically change the virtual network configuration of a cloud system.
ContributorsChung, Chun-Jen (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
The increasing usage of smart-phones and mobile devices in work environment and IT

industry has brought about unique set of challenges and opportunities. ARM architecture

in particular has evolved to a point where it supports implementations across wide spectrum

of performance points and ARM based tablets and smart-phones are in demand. The

enhancements to

The increasing usage of smart-phones and mobile devices in work environment and IT

industry has brought about unique set of challenges and opportunities. ARM architecture

in particular has evolved to a point where it supports implementations across wide spectrum

of performance points and ARM based tablets and smart-phones are in demand. The

enhancements to basic ARM RISC architecture allow ARM to have high performance,

small code size, low power consumption and small silicon area. Users want their devices to

perform many tasks such as read email, play games, and run other online applications and

organizations no longer desire to provision and maintain individual’s IT equipment. The

term BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has come into being from demand of such a work

setup and is one of the motivation of this research work. It brings many opportunities such

as increased productivity and reduced costs and challenges such as secured data access,

data leakage and amount of control by the organization.

To provision such a framework we need to bridge the gap from both organizations side

and individuals point of view. Mobile device users face issue of application delivery on

multiple platforms. For instance having purchased many applications from one proprietary

application store, individuals may want to move them to a different platform/device but

currently this is not possible. Organizations face security issues in providing such a solution

as there are many potential threats from allowing BYOD work-style such as unauthorized

access to data, attacks from the devices within and outside the network.

ARM based Secure Mobile SDN framework will resolve these issues and enable employees

to consolidate both personal and business calls and mobile data access on a single device.

To address application delivery issue we are introducing KVM based virtualization that

will allow host OS to run multiple guest OS. To address the security problem we introduce

SDN environment where host would be running bridged network of guest OS using Open

vSwitch . This would allow a remote controller to monitor the state of guest OS for making

important control and traffic flow decisions based on the situation.
ContributorsChowdhary, Ankur (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015