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- All Subjects: Computer Science
- Creators: Maciejewski, Ross
- Creators: Shrivastava, Aviral
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
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been widely used to measure the retinotopic organization of early visual cortex in the human brain. Previous studies have identified multiple visual field maps (VFMs) based on statistical analysis of fMRI signals, but the resulting geometry has not been fully characterized with mathematical models. This thesis explores using concepts from computational conformal geometry to create a custom software framework for examining and generating quantitative mathematical models for characterizing the geometry of early visual areas in the human brain. The software framework includes a graphical user interface built on top of a selected core conformal flattening algorithm and various software tools compiled specifically for processing and examining retinotopic data. Three conformal flattening algorithms were implemented and evaluated for speed and how well they preserve the conformal metric. All three algorithms performed well in preserving the conformal metric but the speed and stability of the algorithms varied. The software framework performed correctly on actual retinotopic data collected using the standard travelling-wave experiment. Preliminary analysis of the Beltrami coefficient for the early data set shows that selected regions of V1 that contain reasonably smooth eccentricity and polar angle gradients do show significant local conformality, warranting further investigation of this approach for analysis of early and higher visual cortex.
ContributorsTa, Duyan (Author) / Wang, Yalin (Thesis advisor) / Maciejewski, Ross (Committee member) / Wonka, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In blindness research, the corpus callosum (CC) is the most frequently studied sub-cortical structure, due to its important involvement in visual processing. While most callosal analyses from brain structural magnetic resonance images (MRI) are limited to the 2D mid-sagittal slice, we propose a novel framework to capture a complete set of 3D morphological differences in the corpus callosum between two groups of subjects. The CCs are segmented from whole brain T1-weighted MRI and modeled as 3D tetrahedral meshes. The callosal surface is divided into superior and inferior patches on which we compute a volumetric harmonic field by solving the Laplace's equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions. We adopt a refined tetrahedral mesh to compute the Laplacian operator, so our computation can achieve sub-voxel accuracy. Thickness is estimated by tracing the streamlines in the harmonic field. We combine areal changes found using surface tensor-based morphometry and thickness information into a vector at each vertex to be used as a metric for the statistical analysis. Group differences are assessed on this combined measure through Hotelling's T2 test. The method is applied to statistically compare three groups consisting of: congenitally blind (CB), late blind (LB; onset > 8 years old) and sighted (SC) subjects. Our results reveal significant differences in several regions of the CC between both blind groups and the sighted groups; and to a lesser extent between the LB and CB groups. These results demonstrate the crucial role of visual deprivation during the developmental period in reshaping the structural architecture of the CC.
ContributorsXu, Liang (Author) / Wang, Yalin (Thesis advisor) / Maciejewski, Ross (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Detection of extruded features like rooftops and trees in aerial images automatically is a very active area of research. Elevated features identified from aerial imagery have potential applications in urban planning, identifying cover in military training or flight training. Detection of such features using commonly available geospatial data like orthographic aerial imagery is very challenging because rooftop and tree textures are often camouflaged by similar looking features like roads, ground and grass. So, additonal data such as LIDAR, multispectral imagery and multiple viewpoints are exploited for more accurate detection. However, such data is often not available, or may be improperly registered or inacurate. In this thesis, we discuss a novel framework that only uses orthographic images for detection and modeling of rooftops. A segmentation scheme that initializes by assigning either foreground (rooftop) or background labels to certain pixels in the image based on shadows is proposed. Then it employs grabcut to assign one of those two labels to the rest of the pixels based on initial labeling. Parametric model fitting is performed on the segmented results in order to create a 3D scene and to facilitate roof-shape and height estimation. The framework can also benefit from additional geospatial data such as streetmaps and LIDAR, if available.
ContributorsKhanna, Kunal (Author) / Femiani, John (Thesis advisor) / Wonka, Peter (Thesis advisor) / Razdan, Anshuman (Committee member) / Maciejewski, Ross (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In this thesis we deal with the problem of temporal logic robustness estimation. We present a dynamic programming algorithm for the robust estimation problem of Metric Temporal Logic (MTL) formulas regarding a finite trace of time stated sequence. This algorithm not only tests if the MTL specification is satisfied by the given input which is a finite system trajectory, but also quantifies to what extend does the sequence satisfies or violates the MTL specification. The implementation of the algorithm is the DP-TALIRO toolbox for MATLAB. Currently it is used as the temporal logic robust computing engine of S-TALIRO which is a tool for MATLAB searching for trajectories of minimal robustness in Simulink/ Stateflow. DP-TALIRO is expected to have near linear running time and constant memory requirement depending on the structure of the MTL formula. DP-TALIRO toolbox also integrates new features not supported in its ancestor FW-TALIRO such as parameter replacement, most related iteration and most related predicate. A derivative of DP-TALIRO which is DP-T-TALIRO is also addressed in this thesis which applies dynamic programming algorithm for time robustness computation. We test the running time of DP-TALIRO and compare it with FW-TALIRO. Finally, we present an application where DP-TALIRO is used as the robustness computation core of S-TALIRO for a parameter estimation problem.
ContributorsYang, Hengyi (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Sarjoughian, Hessam S. (Committee member) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Over 2 billion people are using online social network services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Users update their status, post their photos, share their information, and chat with others in these social network sites every day; however, not everyone shares the same amount of information. This thesis explores methods of linking publicly available data sources as a means of extrapolating missing information of Facebook. An application named "Visual Friends Income Map" has been created on Facebook to collect social network data and explore geodemographic properties to link publicly available data, such as the US census data. Multiple predictors are implemented to link data sets and extrapolate missing information from Facebook with accurate predictions. The location based predictor matches Facebook users' locations with census data at the city level for income and demographic predictions. Age and relationship based predictors are created to improve the accuracy of the proposed location based predictor utilizing social network link information. In the case where a user does not share any location information on their Facebook profile, a kernel density estimation location predictor is created. This predictor utilizes publicly available telephone record information of all people with the same surname of this user in the US to create a likelihood distribution of the user's location. This is combined with the user's IP level information in order to narrow the probability estimation down to a local regional constraint.
ContributorsMao, Jingxian (Author) / Maciejewski, Ross (Thesis advisor) / Farin, Gerald (Committee member) / Wang, Yalin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
With the rapid development of mobile sensing technologies like GPS, RFID, sensors in smartphones, etc., capturing position data in the form of trajectories has become easy. Moving object trajectory analysis is a growing area of interest these days owing to its applications in various domains such as marketing, security, traffic monitoring and management, etc. To better understand movement behaviors from the raw mobility data, this doctoral work provides analytic models for analyzing trajectory data. As a first contribution, a model is developed to detect changes in trajectories with time. If the taxis moving in a city are viewed as sensors that provide real time information of the traffic in the city, a change in these trajectories with time can reveal that the road network has changed. To detect changes, trajectories are modeled with a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). A modified training algorithm, for parameter estimation in HMM, called m-BaumWelch, is used to develop likelihood estimates under assumed changes and used to detect changes in trajectory data with time. Data from vehicles are used to test the method for change detection. Secondly, sequential pattern mining is used to develop a model to detect changes in frequent patterns occurring in trajectory data. The aim is to answer two questions: Are the frequent patterns still frequent in the new data? If they are frequent, has the time interval distribution in the pattern changed? Two different approaches are considered for change detection, frequency-based approach and distribution-based approach. The methods are illustrated with vehicle trajectory data. Finally, a model is developed for clustering and outlier detection in semantic trajectories. A challenge with clustering semantic trajectories is that both numeric and categorical attributes are present. Another problem to be addressed while clustering is that trajectories can be of different lengths and also have missing values. A tree-based ensemble is used to address these problems. The approach is extended to outlier detection in semantic trajectories.
ContributorsKondaveeti, Anirudh (Author) / Runger, George C. (Thesis advisor) / Mirchandani, Pitu (Committee member) / Pan, Rong (Committee member) / Maciejewski, Ross (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Rapid technology scaling, the main driver of the power and performance improvements of computing solutions, has also rendered our computing systems extremely susceptible to transient errors called soft errors. Among the arsenal of techniques to protect computation from soft errors, Control Flow Checking (CFC) based techniques have gained a reputation of effective, yet low-cost protection mechanism. The basic idea is that, there is a high probability that a soft-fault in program execution will eventually alter the control flow of the program. Therefore just by making sure that the control flow of the program is correct, significant protection can be achieved. More than a dozen techniques for CFC have been developed over the last several decades, ranging from hardware techniques, software techniques, and hardware-software hybrid techniques as well. Our analysis shows that existing CFC techniques are not only ineffective in protecting from soft errors, but cause additional power and performance overheads. For this analysis, we develop and validate a simulation based experimental setup to accurately and quantitatively estimate the architectural vulnerability of a program execution on a processor micro-architecture. We model the protection achieved by various state-of-the-art CFC techniques in this quantitative vulnerability estimation setup, and find out that software only CFC protection schemes (CFCSS, CFCSS+NA, CEDA) increase system vulnerability by 18% to 21% with 17% to 38% performance overhead. Hybrid CFC protection (CFEDC) increases vulnerability by 5%, while the vulnerability remains almost the same for hardware only CFC protection (CFCET); notwithstanding the hardware overheads of design cost, area, and power incurred in the hardware modifications required for their implementations.
ContributorsRhisheekesan, Abhishek (Author) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Thesis advisor) / Colbourn, Charles Joseph (Committee member) / Wu, Carole-Jean (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Critical infrastructures in healthcare, power systems, and web services, incorporate cyber-physical systems (CPSes), where the software controlled computing systems interact with the physical environment through actuation and monitoring. Ensuring software safety in CPSes, to avoid hazards to property and human life as a result of un-controlled interactions, is essential and challenging. The principal hurdle in this regard is the characterization of the context driven interactions between software and the physical environment (cyber-physical interactions), which introduce multi-dimensional dynamics in space and time, complex non-linearities, and non-trivial aggregation of interaction in case of networked operations. Traditionally, CPS software is tested for safety either through experimental trials, which can be expensive, incomprehensive, and hazardous, or through static analysis of code, which ignore the cyber-physical interactions. This thesis considers model based engineering, a paradigm widely used in different disciplines of engineering, for safety verification of CPS software and contributes to three fundamental phases: a) modeling, building abstractions or models that characterize cyberphysical interactions in a mathematical framework, b) analysis, reasoning about safety based on properties of the model, and c) synthesis, implementing models on standard testbeds for performing preliminary experimental trials. In this regard, CPS modeling techniques are proposed that can accurately capture the context driven spatio-temporal aggregate cyber-physical interactions. Different levels of abstractions are considered, which result in high level architectural models, or more detailed formal behavioral models of CPSes. The outcomes include, a well defined architectural specification framework called CPS-DAS and a novel spatio-temporal formal model called Spatio-Temporal Hybrid Automata (STHA) for CPSes. Model analysis techniques are proposed for the CPS models, which can simulate the effects of dynamic context changes on non-linear spatio-temporal cyberphysical interactions, and characterize aggregate effects. The outcomes include tractable algorithms for simulation analysis and for theoretically proving safety properties of CPS software. Lastly a software synthesis technique is proposed that can automatically convert high level architectural models of CPSes in the healthcare domain into implementations in high level programming languages. The outcome is a tool called Health-Dev that can synthesize software implementations of CPS models in healthcare for experimental verification of safety properties.
ContributorsBanerjee, Ayan (Author) / Gupta, Sandeep K.S. (Thesis advisor) / Poovendran, Radha (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Maciejewski, Ross (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
In recent years we have witnessed a shift towards multi-processor system-on-chips (MPSoCs) to address the demands of embedded devices (such as cell phones, GPS devices, luxury car features, etc.). Highly optimized MPSoCs are well-suited to tackle the complex application demands desired by the end user customer. These MPSoCs incorporate a constellation of heterogeneous processing elements (PEs) (general purpose PEs and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICS)). A typical MPSoC will be composed of a application processor, such as an ARM Coretex-A9 with cache coherent memory hierarchy, and several application sub-systems. Each of these sub-systems are composed of highly optimized instruction processors, graphics/DSP processors, and custom hardware accelerators. Typically, these sub-systems utilize scratchpad memories (SPM) rather than support cache coherency. The overall architecture is an integration of the various sub-systems through a high bandwidth system-level interconnect (such as a Network-on-Chip (NoC)). The shift to MPSoCs has been fueled by three major factors: demand for high performance, the use of component libraries, and short design turn around time. As customers continue to desire more and more complex applications on their embedded devices the performance demand for these devices continues to increase. Designers have turned to using MPSoCs to address this demand. By using pre-made IP libraries designers can quickly piece together a MPSoC that will meet the application demands of the end user with minimal time spent designing new hardware. Additionally, the use of MPSoCs allows designers to generate new devices very quickly and thus reducing the time to market. In this work, a complete MPSoC synthesis design flow is presented. We first present a technique \cite{leary1_intro} to address the synthesis of the interconnect architecture (particularly Network-on-Chip (NoC)). We then address the synthesis of the memory architecture of a MPSoC sub-system \cite{leary2_intro}. Lastly, we present a co-synthesis technique to generate the functional and memory architectures simultaneously. The validity and quality of each synthesis technique is demonstrated through extensive experimentation.
ContributorsLeary, Glenn (Author) / Chatha, Karamvir S (Thesis advisor) / Vrudhula, Sarma (Committee member) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Beraha, Rudy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013