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The rapid advances in wireless communications and networking have given rise to a number of emerging heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks along with novel networking paradigms, including wireless sensor networks, mobile crowdsourcing, and mobile social networking. While offering promising solutions to a wide range of new applications, their widespread adoption

The rapid advances in wireless communications and networking have given rise to a number of emerging heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks along with novel networking paradigms, including wireless sensor networks, mobile crowdsourcing, and mobile social networking. While offering promising solutions to a wide range of new applications, their widespread adoption and large-scale deployment are often hindered by people's concerns about the security, user privacy, or both. In this dissertation, we aim to address a number of challenging security and privacy issues in heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks in an attempt to foster their widespread adoption. Our contributions are mainly fivefold. First, we introduce a novel secure and loss-resilient code dissemination scheme for wireless sensor networks deployed in hostile and harsh environments. Second, we devise a novel scheme to enable mobile users to detect any inauthentic or unsound location-based top-k query result returned by an untrusted location-based service providers. Third, we develop a novel verifiable privacy-preserving aggregation scheme for people-centric mobile sensing systems. Fourth, we present a suite of privacy-preserving profile matching protocols for proximity-based mobile social networking, which can support a wide range of matching metrics with different privacy levels. Last, we present a secure combination scheme for crowdsourcing-based cooperative spectrum sensing systems that can enable robust primary user detection even when malicious cognitive radio users constitute the majority.
ContributorsZhang, Rui (Author) / Zhang, Yanchao (Thesis advisor) / Duman, Tolga Mete (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
Communication networks, both wired and wireless, are expected to have a certain level of fault-tolerance capability.These networks are also expected to ensure a graceful degradation in performance when some of the network components fail. Traditional studies on fault tolerance in communication networks, for the most part, make no assumptions regarding

Communication networks, both wired and wireless, are expected to have a certain level of fault-tolerance capability.These networks are also expected to ensure a graceful degradation in performance when some of the network components fail. Traditional studies on fault tolerance in communication networks, for the most part, make no assumptions regarding the location of node/link faults, i.e., the faulty nodes and links may be close to each other or far from each other. However, in many real life scenarios, there exists a strong spatial correlation among the faulty nodes and links. Such failures are often encountered in disaster situations, e.g., natural calamities or enemy attacks. In presence of such region-based faults, many of traditional network analysis and fault-tolerant metrics, that are valid under non-spatially correlated faults, are no longer applicable. To this effect, the main thrust of this research is design and analysis of robust networks in presence of such region-based faults. One important finding of this research is that if some prior knowledge is available on the maximum size of the region that might be affected due to a region-based fault, this piece of knowledge can be effectively utilized for resource efficient design of networks. It has been shown in this dissertation that in some scenarios, effective utilization of this knowledge may result in substantial saving is transmission power in wireless networks. In this dissertation, the impact of region-based faults on the connectivity of wireless networks has been studied and a new metric, region-based connectivity, is proposed to measure the fault-tolerance capability of a network. In addition, novel metrics, such as the region-based component decomposition number(RBCDN) and region-based largest component size(RBLCS) have been proposed to capture the network state, when a region-based fault disconnects the network. Finally, this dissertation presents efficient resource allocation techniques that ensure tolerance against region-based faults, in distributed file storage networks and data center networks.
ContributorsBanerjee, Sujogya (Author) / Sen, Arunabha (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Richa, Andrea (Committee member) / Hurlbert, Glenn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
As networks are playing an increasingly prominent role in different aspects of our lives, there is a growing awareness that improving their performance is of significant importance. In order to enhance performance of networks, it is essential that scarce networking resources be allocated smartly to match the continuously changing network

As networks are playing an increasingly prominent role in different aspects of our lives, there is a growing awareness that improving their performance is of significant importance. In order to enhance performance of networks, it is essential that scarce networking resources be allocated smartly to match the continuously changing network environment. This dissertation focuses on two different kinds of networks - communication and social, and studies resource allocation problems in these networks. The study on communication networks is further divided into different networking technologies - wired and wireless, optical and mobile, airborne and terrestrial. Since nodes in an airborne network (AN) are heterogeneous and mobile, the design of a reliable and robust AN is highly complex. The dissertation studies connectivity and fault-tolerance issues in ANs and proposes algorithms to compute the critical transmission range in fault free, faulty and delay tolerant scenarios. Just as in the case of ANs, power optimization and fault tolerance are important issues in wireless sensor networks (WSN). In a WSN, a tree structure is often used to deliver sensor data to a sink node. In a tree, failure of a node may disconnect the tree. The dissertation investigates the problem of enhancing the fault tolerance capability of data gathering trees in WSN. The advent of OFDM technology provides an opportunity for efficient resource utilization in optical networks and also introduces a set of novel problems, such as routing and spectrum allocation (RSA) problem. This dissertation proves that RSA problem is NP-complete even when the network topology is a chain, and proposes approximation algorithms. In the domain of social networks, the focus of this dissertation is study of influence propagation in presence of active adversaries. In a social network multiple vendors may attempt to influence the nodes in a competitive fashion. This dissertation investigates the scenario where the first vendor has already chosen a set of nodes and the second vendor, with the knowledge of the choice of the first, attempts to identify a smallest set of nodes so that after the influence propagation, the second vendor's market share is larger than the first.
ContributorsShirazipourazad, Shahrzad (Author) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Richa, Andrea (Committee member) / Saripalli, Srikanth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Resource allocation is one of the most challenging issues policy decision makers must address. The objective of this thesis is to explore the resource allocation from an economical perspective, i.e., how to purchase resources in order to satisfy customers' requests. In this thesis, we attend to answer the question: when

Resource allocation is one of the most challenging issues policy decision makers must address. The objective of this thesis is to explore the resource allocation from an economical perspective, i.e., how to purchase resources in order to satisfy customers' requests. In this thesis, we attend to answer the question: when and how to buy resources to fulfill customers' demands with minimum costs?

The first topic studied in this thesis is resource allocation in cloud networks. Cloud computing heralded an era where resources (such as computation and storage) can be scaled up and down elastically and on demand. This flexibility is attractive for its cost effectiveness: the cloud resource price depends on the actual utilization over time. This thesis studies two critical problems in cloud networks, focusing on the economical aspects of the resource allocation in the cloud/virtual networks, and proposes six algorithms to address the resource allocation problems for different discount models. The first problem attends a scenario where the virtual network provider offers different contracts to the service provider. Four algorithms for resource contract migration are proposed under two pricing models: Pay-as-You-Come and Pay-as-You-Go. The second problem explores a scenario where a cloud provider offers k contracts each with a duration and a rate respectively and a customer buys these contracts in order to satisfy its resource demand. This work shows that this problem can be seen as a 2-dimensional generalization of the classic online parking permit problem, and present a k-competitive online algorithm and an optimal online algorithm.

The second topic studied in this thesis is to explore how resource allocation and purchasing strategies work in our daily life. For example, is it worth buying a Yoga pass which costs USD 100 for ten entries, although it will expire at the end of this year? Decisions like these are part of our daily life, yet, not much is known today about good online strategies to buy discount vouchers with expiration dates. This work hence introduces a Discount Voucher Purchase Problem (DVPP). It aims to optimize the strategies for buying discount vouchers, i.e., coupons, vouchers, groupons which are valid only during a certain time period. The DVPP comes in three flavors: (1) Once Expire Lose Everything (OELE): Vouchers lose their entire value after expiration. (2) Once Expire Lose Discount (OELD): Vouchers lose their discount value after expiration. (3) Limited Purchasing Window (LPW): Vouchers have the property of OELE and can only be bought during a certain time window.

This work explores online algorithms with a provable competitive ratio against a clairvoyant offline algorithm, even in the worst case. In particular, this work makes the following contributions: we present a 4-competitive algorithm for OELE, an 8-competitive algorithm for OELD, and a lower bound for LPW. We also present an optimal offline algorithm for OELE and LPW, and show it is a 2-approximation solution for OELD.
ContributorsHu, Xinhui (Author) / Richa, Andrea (Thesis advisor) / Schmid, Stefan (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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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

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.
ContributorsGollapudi, Narasimha Aditya (Author) / Dasgupta, Partha (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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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

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
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Description
Mobile Cloud computing has shown its capability to support mobile devices for

provisioning computing, storage and communication resources. A distributed mobile

cloud service system called "POEM" is presented to manage the mobile cloud resource

and compose mobile cloud applications. POEM considers resource management not

only between mobile devices and clouds, but also among mobile

Mobile Cloud computing has shown its capability to support mobile devices for

provisioning computing, storage and communication resources. A distributed mobile

cloud service system called "POEM" is presented to manage the mobile cloud resource

and compose mobile cloud applications. POEM considers resource management not

only between mobile devices and clouds, but also among mobile devices. It implements

both computation offloading and service composition features. The proposed POEM

solution is demonstrated by using OSGi and XMPP techniques.

Offloading is one major type of collaborations between mobile device and cloud

to achieve less execution time and less energy consumption. Offloading decisions for

mobile cloud collaboration involve many decision factors. One of important decision

factors is the network unavailability. This report presents an offloading decision model

that takes network unavailability into consideration. The application execution time

and energy consumption in both ideal network and network with some unavailability

are analyzed. Based on the presented theoretical model, an application partition

algorithm and a decision module are presented to produce an offloading decision that

is resistant to network unavailability.

Existing offloading models mainly focus on the one-to-one offloading relation. To

address the multi-factor and multi-site offloading mobile cloud application scenarios,

a multi-factor multi-site risk-based offloading model is presented, which abstracts the

offloading impact factors as for offloading benefit and offloading risk. The offloading

decision is made based on a comprehensive offloading risk evaluation. This presented

model is generic and expendable. Four offloading impact factors are presented to show

the construction and operation of the presented offloading model, which can be easily

extended to incorporate more factors to make offloading decision more comprehensive.

The overall offloading benefits and risks are aggregated based on the mobile cloud

users' preference.

The offloading topology may change during the whole application life. A set of

algorithms are presented to address the service topology reconfiguration problem in

several mobile cloud representative application scenarios, i.e., they are modeled as

finite horizon scenarios, infinite horizon scenarios, and large state space scenarios to

represent ad hoc, long-term, and large-scale mobile cloud service composition scenarios,

respectively.
ContributorsWu, Huijun (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Mirchandani, Pitu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
We live in a networked world with a multitude of networks, such as communication networks, electric power grid, transportation networks and water distribution networks, all around us. In addition to such physical (infrastructure) networks, recent years have seen tremendous proliferation of social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+

We live in a networked world with a multitude of networks, such as communication networks, electric power grid, transportation networks and water distribution networks, all around us. In addition to such physical (infrastructure) networks, recent years have seen tremendous proliferation of social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+ and others. These powerful social networks are not only used for harnessing revenue from the infrastructure networks, but are also increasingly being used as “non-conventional sensors” for monitoring the infrastructure networks. Accordingly, nowadays, analyses of social and infrastructure networks go hand-in-hand. This dissertation studies resource allocation problems encountered in this set of diverse, heterogeneous, and interdependent networks. Three problems studied in this dissertation are encountered in the physical network domain while the three other problems studied are encountered in the social network domain.

The first problem from the infrastructure network domain relates to distributed files storage scheme with a goal of enhancing robustness of data storage by making it tolerant against large scale geographically-correlated failures. The second problem relates to placement of relay nodes in a deployment area with multiple sensor nodes with a goal of augmenting connectivity of the resulting network, while staying within the budget specifying the maximum number of relay nodes that can be deployed. The third problem studied in this dissertation relates to complex interdependencies that exist between infrastructure networks, such as power grid and communication network. The progressive recovery problem in an interdependent network is studied whose goal is to maximize system utility over the time when recovery process of failed entities takes place in a sequential manner.

The three problems studied from the social network domain relate to influence propagation in adversarial environment and political sentiment assessment in various states in a country with a goal of creation of a “political heat map” of the country. In the first problem of the influence propagation domain, the goal of the second player is to restrict the influence of the first player, while in the second problem the goal of the second player is to have a larger market share with least amount of initial investment.
ContributorsMazumder, Anisha (Author) / Sen, Arunabha (Thesis advisor) / Richa, Andrea (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Reisslein, Martin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
The critical infrastructures of the nation are a large and complex network of human, physical and cyber-physical systems. In recent times, it has become increasingly apparent that individual critical infrastructures, such as the power and communication networks, do not operate in isolation, but instead are part of a complex interdependent

The critical infrastructures of the nation are a large and complex network of human, physical and cyber-physical systems. In recent times, it has become increasingly apparent that individual critical infrastructures, such as the power and communication networks, do not operate in isolation, but instead are part of a complex interdependent ecosystem where a failure involving a small set of network entities can trigger a cascading event resulting in the failure of a much larger set of entities through the failure propagation process.

Recognizing the need for a deeper understanding of the interdependent relationships between such critical infrastructures, several models have been proposed and analyzed in the last few years. However, most of these models are over-simplified and fail to capture the complex interdependencies that may exist between critical infrastructures. To overcome the limitations of existing models, this dissertation presents a new model -- the Implicative Interdependency Model (IIM) that is able to capture such complex interdependency relations. As the potential for a failure cascade in critical interdependent networks poses several risks that can jeopardize the nation, this dissertation explores relevant research problems in the interdependent power and communication networks using the proposed IIM and lays the foundations for further study using this model.

Apart from exploring problems in interdependent critical infrastructures, this dissertation also explores resource allocation techniques for environments enabled with cyber-physical systems. Specifically, the problem of efficient path planning for data collection using mobile cyber-physical systems is explored. Two such environments are considered: a Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) environment with mobile “Tags” and “Readers”, and a sensor data collection environment where both the sensors and the data mules (data collectors) are mobile.

Finally, from an applied research perspective, this dissertation presents Raptor, an advanced network planning and management tool for mitigating the impact of spatially correlated, or region based faults on infrastructure networks. Raptor consolidates a wide range of studies conducted in the last few years on region based faults, and provides an interface for network planners, designers and operators to use the results of these studies for designing robust and resilient networks in the presence of spatially correlated faults.
ContributorsDas, Arun (Author) / Sen, Arunabha (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Qiao, Chunming (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
The presence of a rich set of embedded sensors on mobile devices has been fuelling various sensing applications regarding the activities of individuals and their surrounding environment, and these ubiquitous sensing-capable mobile devices are pushing the new paradigm of Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) from concept to reality. MCS aims to

The presence of a rich set of embedded sensors on mobile devices has been fuelling various sensing applications regarding the activities of individuals and their surrounding environment, and these ubiquitous sensing-capable mobile devices are pushing the new paradigm of Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) from concept to reality. MCS aims to outsource sensing data collection to mobile users and it could revolutionize the traditional ways of sensing data collection and processing. In the meantime, cloud computing provides cloud-backed infrastructures for mobile devices to provision their capabilities with network access. With enormous computational and storage resources along with sufficient bandwidth, it functions as the hub to handle the sensing service requests from sensing service consumers and coordinate sensing task assignment among eligible mobile users to reach a desired quality of sensing service. This paper studies the problem of sensing task assignment to mobile device owners with specific spatio-temporal traits to minimize the cost and maximize the utility in MCS while adhering to QoS constraints. Greedy approaches and hybrid solutions combined with bee algorithms are explored to address the problem.

Moreover, the privacy concerns arise with the widespread deployment of MCS from both the data contributors and the sensing service consumers. The uploaded sensing data, especially those tagged with spatio-temporal information, will disclose the personal information of the data contributors. In addition, the sensing service requests can reveal the personal interests of service consumers. To address the privacy issues, this paper constructs a new framework named Privacy-Preserving Mobile Crowd Sensing (PP-MCS) to leverage the sensing capabilities of ubiquitous mobile devices and cloud infrastructures. PP-MCS has a distributed architecture without relying on trusted third parties for privacy-preservation. In PP-MCS, the sensing service consumers can retrieve data without revealing the real data contributors. Besides, the individual sensing records can be compared against the aggregation result while keeping the values of sensing records unknown, and the k-nearest neighbors could be approximately identified without privacy leaks. As such, the privacy of the data contributors and the sensing service consumers can be protected to the greatest extent possible.
ContributorsWang, Zhijie (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Li, Jing (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016