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With the growth of IT products and sophisticated software in various operating systems, I observe that security risks in systems are skyrocketing constantly. Consequently, Security Assessment is now considered as one of primary security mechanisms to measure assurance of systems since systems that are not compliant with security requirements may

With the growth of IT products and sophisticated software in various operating systems, I observe that security risks in systems are skyrocketing constantly. Consequently, Security Assessment is now considered as one of primary security mechanisms to measure assurance of systems since systems that are not compliant with security requirements may lead adversaries to access critical information by circumventing security practices. In order to ensure security, considerable efforts have been spent to develop security regulations by facilitating security best-practices. Applying shared security standards to the system is critical to understand vulnerabilities and prevent well-known threats from exploiting vulnerabilities. However, many end users tend to change configurations of their systems without paying attention to the security. Hence, it is not straightforward to protect systems from being changed by unconscious users in a timely manner. Detecting the installation of harmful applications is not sufficient since attackers may exploit risky software as well as commonly used software. In addition, checking the assurance of security configurations periodically is disadvantageous in terms of time and cost due to zero-day attacks and the timing attacks that can leverage the window between each security checks. Therefore, event-driven monitoring approach is critical to continuously assess security of a target system without ignoring a particular window between security checks and lessen the burden of exhausted task to inspect the entire configurations in the system. Furthermore, the system should be able to generate a vulnerability report for any change initiated by a user if such changes refer to the requirements in the standards and turn out to be vulnerable. Assessing various systems in distributed environments also requires to consistently applying standards to each environment. Such a uniformed consistent assessment is important because the way of assessment approach for detecting security vulnerabilities may vary across applications and operating systems. In this thesis, I introduce an automated event-driven security assessment framework to overcome and accommodate the aforementioned issues. I also discuss the implementation details that are based on the commercial-off-the-self technologies and testbed being established to evaluate approach. Besides, I describe evaluation results that demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of the approaches.
ContributorsSeo, Jeong-Jin (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Yau, Stephen S. (Committee member) / Lee, Joohyung (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) mechanisms have been attracting a lot of interest from the research community in recent times. This is especially because of the flexibility and extensibility it provides by using attributes assigned to subjects as the basis for access control. ABAC enables an administrator of a server

Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) mechanisms have been attracting a lot of interest from the research community in recent times. This is especially because of the flexibility and extensibility it provides by using attributes assigned to subjects as the basis for access control. ABAC enables an administrator of a server to enforce access policies on the data, services and other such resources fairly easily. It also accommodates new policies and changes to existing policies gracefully, thereby making it a potentially good mechanism for implementing access control in large systems, particularly in today's age of Cloud Computing. However management of the attributes in ABAC environment is an area that has been little touched upon. Having a mechanism to allow multiple ABAC based systems to share data and resources can go a long way in making ABAC scalable. At the same time each system should be able to specify their own attribute sets independently. In the research presented in this document a new mechanism is proposed that would enable users to share resources and data in a cloud environment using ABAC techniques in a distributed manner. The focus is mainly on decentralizing the access policy specifications for the shared data so that each data owner can specify the access policy independent of others. The concept of ontologies and semantic web is introduced in the ABAC paradigm that would help in giving a scalable structure to the attributes and also allow systems having different sets of attributes to communicate and share resources.
ContributorsPrabhu Verleker, Ashwin Narayan (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
The comparative study of the poetics of landscape of the Argentinian poet Diana Bellessi in Sur (1998) and the U.S. poet Mary Oliver in What Do We Know (2002) reveal how each writer acknowledges discourse and perception as means to bridge the nature/culture dichotomy and to unsettle the American landscape

The comparative study of the poetics of landscape of the Argentinian poet Diana Bellessi in Sur (1998) and the U.S. poet Mary Oliver in What Do We Know (2002) reveal how each writer acknowledges discourse and perception as means to bridge the nature/culture dichotomy and to unsettle the American landscape from cultural and epistemological assumptions that perpetuate the disconnection with matter. While Bellessi re–signifies the historical and cultural landscape drawn by European colonization in order to establish a dialogue with the voices of the past related to a present–day quest to reconnect with nature, Oliver articulates an ontological and phenomenological expression to reformulate prevailing notions of cognizing materiality aiming to overcome the culture
ature divide. I therefore examine the interrelationship between perception, language and nature in Bellessi’s and Oliver’s poetic works by deploying Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological theory of perception into material feminist theoretical works by Karen Barad and Susan Hekman. In so doing, I demonstrate how both poets act on language to forge a non–dualistic expression that, in allowing matter as an agentic force that relates with humans in dynamics of mutual impact and intra–activity, entails a phenomenological and onto–epistemological approach to ground language in materiality and produce ethical discursive practices to relate with nature. I argue that Bellessi’s and Oliver’s approach toward nature proves as necessary in the articulation of efforts leading to overcome the nature/culture dichotomy and thus, to address ecological and environmental concerns.
ContributorsSan Martín Vásquez, Angela (Author) / Horan, Elizabeth (Thesis advisor) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Committee member) / Hernández-G, Manuel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
Cisco estimates that by 2020, 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet. But 99% of the things today remain isolated and unconnected. Different connectivity protocols, proprietary access, varied device characteristics, security concerns are the main reasons for that isolated state. This project aims at designing and building a

Cisco estimates that by 2020, 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet. But 99% of the things today remain isolated and unconnected. Different connectivity protocols, proprietary access, varied device characteristics, security concerns are the main reasons for that isolated state. This project aims at designing and building a prototype gateway that exposes a simple and intuitive HTTP Restful interface to access and manipulate devices and the data that they produce while addressing most of the issues listed above. Along with manipulating devices, the framework exposes sensor data in such a way that it can be used to create applications like rules or events that make the home smarter. It also allows the user to represent high-level knowledge by aggregating the low-level sensor data. This high-level representation can be considered as a property of the environment or object rather than the sensor itself which makes interpreting the values more intuitive and accessible.
ContributorsNair, Shankar (Author) / Lee, Yann-Hang (Thesis advisor) / Lee, Joohyung (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Design problem formulation is believed to influence creativity, yet it has received only modest attention in the research community. Past studies of problem formulation are scarce and often have small sample sizes. The main objective of this research is to understand how problem formulation affects creative outcome. Three research areas

Design problem formulation is believed to influence creativity, yet it has received only modest attention in the research community. Past studies of problem formulation are scarce and often have small sample sizes. The main objective of this research is to understand how problem formulation affects creative outcome. Three research areas are investigated: development of a model which facilitates capturing the differences among designers' problem formulation; representation and implication of those differences; the relation between problem formulation and creativity.

This dissertation proposes the Problem Map (P-maps) ontological framework. P-maps represent designers' problem formulation in terms of six groups of entities (requirement, use scenario, function, artifact, behavior, and issue). Entities have hierarchies within each group and links among groups. Variables extracted from P-maps characterize problem formulation.

Three experiments were conducted. The first experiment was to study the similarities and differences between novice and expert designers. Results show that experts use more abstraction than novices do and novices are more likely to add entities in a specific order. Experts also discover more issues.

The second experiment was to see how problem formulation relates to creativity. Ideation metrics were used to characterize creative outcome. Results include but are not limited to a positive correlation between adding more issues in an unorganized way with quantity and variety, more use scenarios and functions with novelty, more behaviors and conflicts identified with quality, and depth-first exploration with all ideation metrics. Fewer hierarchies in use scenarios lower novelty and fewer links to requirements and issues lower quality of ideas.

The third experiment was to see if problem formulation can predict creative outcome. Models based on one problem were used to predict the creativity of another. Predicted scores were compared to assessments of independent judges. Quality and novelty are predicted more accurately than variety, and quantity. Backward elimination improves model fit, though reduces prediction accuracy.

P-maps provide a theoretical framework for formalizing, tracing, and quantifying conceptual design strategies. Other potential applications are developing a test of problem formulation skill, tracking students' learning of formulation skills in a course, and reproducing other researchers’ observations about designer thinking.
ContributorsDinar, Mahmoud (Author) / Shah, Jami J. (Thesis advisor) / Langley, Pat (Committee member) / Davidson, Joseph K. (Committee member) / Lande, Micah (Committee member) / Ren, Yi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
The concept of Linked Data is gaining widespread popularity and importance. The method of publishing and linking structured data on the web is called Linked Data. Emergence of Linked Data has made it possible to make sense of huge data, which is scattered all over the web, and link multiple

The concept of Linked Data is gaining widespread popularity and importance. The method of publishing and linking structured data on the web is called Linked Data. Emergence of Linked Data has made it possible to make sense of huge data, which is scattered all over the web, and link multiple heterogeneous sources. This leads to the challenge of maintaining the quality of Linked Data, i.e., ensuring outdated data is removed and new data is included. The focus of this thesis is devising strategies to effectively integrate data from multiple sources, publish it as Linked Data, and maintain the quality of Linked Data. The domain used in the study is online education. With so many online courses offered by Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), it is becoming increasingly difficult for an end user to gauge which course best fits his/her needs.

Users are spoilt for choices. It would be very helpful for them to make a choice if there is a single place where they can visually compare the offerings of various MOOC providers for the course they are interested in. Previous work has been done in this area through the MOOCLink project that involved integrating data from Coursera, EdX, and Udacity and generation of linked data, i.e. Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples.

The research objective of this thesis is to determine a methodology by which the quality

of data available through the MOOCLink application is maintained, as there are lots of new courses being constantly added and old courses being removed by data providers. This thesis presents the integration of data from various MOOC providers and algorithms for incrementally updating linked data to maintain their quality and compare it against a naïve approach in order to constantly keep the users engaged with up-to-date data. A master threshold value was determined through experiments and analysis that quantifies one algorithm being better than the other in terms of time efficiency. An evaluation of the tool shows the effectiveness of the algorithms presented in this thesis.
ContributorsDhekne, Chinmay (Author) / Bansal, Srividya (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Ajay (Committee member) / Sohoni, Sohum (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
One activity for which philosophers are perhaps best known is having disputes with one another. Some non-philosophers, and increasingly many philosophers, believe that a number of these disputes are silly or misguided in some way. Call such silly or misguided disputes defective disputes. When is a dispute defective? What kinds

One activity for which philosophers are perhaps best known is having disputes with one another. Some non-philosophers, and increasingly many philosophers, believe that a number of these disputes are silly or misguided in some way. Call such silly or misguided disputes defective disputes. When is a dispute defective? What kinds of defective disputes are there? How are these different kinds of defective disputes different from one another? What does it mean to call a dispute 'merely verbal'? These questions come up for consideration in Part One of this manuscript. In Part Two I examine whether certain disputes in ontology and over the nature of possible worlds are defective in any of the ways described in Part One. I focus mainly on the question of whether these disputes are merely verbal disputes, though I examine whether they are defective in any other ways. I conclude that neither dispute is defective in any of the senses that I make clear in Part One. Moreover, I conclude that even some defective philosophical disputes can be worth consideration under certain circumstances.
ContributorsMarsh, Gerald (Author) / French, Peter (Thesis advisor) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / Blackson, Thomas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
Much of the anthropological and Islamic studies focus in recent years has addressed the shifting forms of Islamic piety across Muslim majority societies. The analysis of this shift in Islamic practice and belief has enveloped the changing sensibilities around technologies, social strata, democracy, law, and everyday life. In light of

Much of the anthropological and Islamic studies focus in recent years has addressed the shifting forms of Islamic piety across Muslim majority societies. The analysis of this shift in Islamic practice and belief has enveloped the changing sensibilities around technologies, social strata, democracy, law, and everyday life. In light of these transformations, after the fall of the Indonesian New Order in 1998, the performances of Islamic devotional songs (salawat) by Habib Syech bin Abdul Qadir Assegaf (Habib Syech) began bringing millions of people together across Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Although salawat has typically been performed in remembrance of the birth of Prophet Muhammad (mawlid) in localized celebrations. The performances of salawat by Habib Syech, on the other hand, occur fifteen or more times a month with crowds swelling to tens of thousands across multiple nation-states. Habib Syech’s salawat performances furthermore appeal to and bring together diverse Muslim populations that have historically been more divided. Habib Syech’s gatherings reveal how popular forms of piety are shifting in conjunction with profound societal changes in Indonesia and other Muslim communities. In untangling the popularity of Habib Syech’s gatherings, it was not until I became entangled in the rhythm of salawat that baraka, often translated as blessings, emerged as a slippery, elusive, and living helping propel the popularity of this phenomena. The guttural cries of my interlocutors (baraka, baraka, baraka) resonate and summon a methodology that takes the visible and invisible together in understanding the concept and life of baraka. I, like my interlocutors, began hunting baraka as an alternative, living concept that challenges understandings of Islam in Indonesia driven by Islamic civil organizations, prescriptive vs everyday Islamic piety, and Western interpretations of the world as disenchanted. This dissertation is an exploration of new opportunities for understanding religion in the modern world that emerge from the ethnographic field through the life of baraka.
ContributorsEdmonds, James Michael (Author) / Talebi, Shahla (Thesis advisor) / Bennett, Gaymon (Committee member) / Haines, Charles (Committee member) / Rush, James (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This dissertation deals with the confluence of neoliberal and dominant Western social pressures in tension with researchers and educators striving toward a more sustainable world in light of the Anthropocene. Although scientists see the Anthropocene as a problem of human activity and environmental degradation, many social scientists and humanities researchers

This dissertation deals with the confluence of neoliberal and dominant Western social pressures in tension with researchers and educators striving toward a more sustainable world in light of the Anthropocene. Although scientists see the Anthropocene as a problem of human activity and environmental degradation, many social scientists and humanities researchers also see it as a problem with entrenched ways of thought. Current ways of thought complicit in the making of the Anthropocene include centering all thought, control, and agency in the radically individual human, centering science as the only legitimate access to knowledge, and presenting that knowledge as apolitical absolute truth. I engage in research creation activated by the minor gestures of human/nature entanglement in the Anthropocene and the promise of place in environmental and sustainability education. As such, I embark on the invention of a new ecology of practices that takes the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead as their guiding foundation. As part of this invention circumventing normative neoliberal and Western logics, I take Ajo, Arizona and the surrounding Sonoran Desert as a partner in more-than-human process inquiry. I live in Ajo and explore the Sonoran Desert for four months of data generation employing basic techniques of ethnography divorced from their neopositivist founding theories. Bodies generated from my entanglement with Ajo and the desert participate in inventing Remixing Data Experiences (RDE), a novel data engagement technique. Through RDE, my more-than-human partners and I create ideas by engaging in arts-based techniques that form multimedia art-workings. The ideas generated include Oasis, Decline, Celebrate, Precarity, and Directions. I respond to each idea through anarchival written texts in a variety of genres including ethnographic memoir, short fiction, essay, ballad, and talk poem. I put these ideas into conversation with current methodological and education literature to illustrate that aesthetic-based inquiry contributes new ways forward in the Anthropocene. These new ways include rhythms of certainty and uncertainty in knowledge creation, participating in reciprocal affective capabilities of bodies in joyful knowing, developing modest abstractions that frequently engage concrete experience, and inclusion of aesthetic experiences in learning and inquiry.
ContributorsBowers, Nicole (Author) / Carlson, David L (Thesis advisor) / Koro, Mirka (Committee member) / Jordan, Michelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
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Description
Ontologies play an important role in storing and exchanging digitized data. As the need for semantic web information grows, organizations from around the globe has defined ontologies in different domains to better represent the data. But different organizations define ontologies of the same entity in their own way. Finding ontologies

Ontologies play an important role in storing and exchanging digitized data. As the need for semantic web information grows, organizations from around the globe has defined ontologies in different domains to better represent the data. But different organizations define ontologies of the same entity in their own way. Finding ontologies of the same entity in different fields and domains has become very important for unifying and improving interoperability of data between these multiple domains. Many different techniques have been used over the year, including human assisted, automated and hybrid. In recent years with the availability of many machine learning techniques, researchers are trying to apply these techniques to solve the ontology alignment problem across different domains. In this study I have looked into the use of different machine learning techniques such as Support Vector Machine, Stochastic Gradient Descent, Random Forest etc. for solving ontology alignment problem with some of the most commonly used datasets found from the famous Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI). I have proposed a method OntoAlign which demonstrates the importance of using different types of similarity measures for feature extraction from ontology data in order to achieve better results for ontology alignment.
ContributorsNasim, Tariq M (Author) / Bansal, Srividya (Thesis advisor) / Mehlhase, Alexandra (Committee member) / Banerjee, Ayan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022