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- Genre: Masters Thesis
Description
Continuous Delivery, as one of the youngest and most popular member of agile model family, has become a popular concept and method in software development industry recently. Instead of the traditional software development method, which requirements and solutions must be fixed before starting software developing, it promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. However, several problems prevent Continuous Delivery to be introduced into education world. Taking into the consideration of the barriers, we propose a new Cloud based Continuous Delivery Software Developing System. This system is designed to fully utilize the whole life circle of software developing according to Continuous Delivery concepts in a virtualized environment in Vlab platform.
ContributorsDeng, Yuli (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Chen, Yinong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Access control is necessary for information assurance in many of today's applications such as banking and electronic health record. Access control breaches are critical security problems that can result from unintended and improper implementation of security policies. Security testing can help identify security vulnerabilities early and avoid unexpected expensive cost in handling breaches for security architects and security engineers. The process of security testing which involves creating tests that effectively examine vulnerabilities is a challenging task. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) has been widely adopted to support fine-grained access control. However, in practice, due to its complexity including role management, role hierarchy with hundreds of roles, and their associated privileges and users, systematically testing RBAC systems is crucial to ensure the security in various domains ranging from cyber-infrastructure to mission-critical applications. In this thesis, we introduce i) a security testing technique for RBAC systems considering the principle of maximum privileges, the structure of the role hierarchy, and a new security test coverage criterion; ii) a MTBDD (Multi-Terminal Binary Decision Diagram) based representation of RBAC security policy including RHMTBDD (Role Hierarchy MTBDD) to efficiently generate effective positive and negative security test cases; and iii) a security testing framework which takes an XACML-based RBAC security policy as an input, parses it into a RHMTBDD representation and then generates positive and negative test cases. We also demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through case studies.
ContributorsGupta, Poonam (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Collofello, James (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The energy consumption of data centers is increasing steadily along with the associ- ated power-density. Approximately half of such energy consumption is attributed to the cooling energy, as a result of which reducing cooling energy along with reducing servers energy consumption in data centers is becoming imperative so as to achieve greening of the data centers. This thesis deals with cooling energy management in data centers running data-processing frameworks. In particular, we propose ther- mal aware scheduling for MapReduce framework and its Hadoop implementation to reduce cooling energy in data centers. Data-processing frameworks run many low- priority batch processing jobs, such as background log analysis, that do not have strict completion time requirements; they can be delayed by a bounded amount of time. Cooling energy savings are possible by being able to temporally spread the workload, and assign it to the computing equipments which reduce the heat recirculation in data center room and therefore the load on the cooling systems. We implement our scheme in Hadoop and performs some experiments using both CPU-intensive and I/O-intensive workload benchmarks in order to evaluate the efficiency of our scheme. The evaluation results highlight that our thermal aware scheduling reduces hot-spots and makes uniform temperature distribution within the data center possible. Sum- marizing the contribution, we incorporated thermal awareness in Hadoop MapReduce framework by enhancing the native scheduler to make it thermally aware, compare the Thermal Aware Scheduler(TAS) with the Hadoop scheduler (FCFS) by running PageRank and TeraSort benchmarks in the BlueTool data center of Impact lab and show that there is reduction in peak temperature and decrease in cooling power using TAS over FCFS scheduler.
ContributorsKole, Sayan (Author) / Gupta, Sandeep (Thesis advisor) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Varsamopoulos, Georgios (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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 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
Description
Security has been one of the top concerns in cloud community while cloud resource abuse and malicious insiders are considered as top threats. Traditionally, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) have been widely deployed to manipulate cloud security, with the latter one providing additional prevention capability. However, as one of the most creative networking technologies, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is rarely used to implement IDPS in the cloud computing environment because the lack of comprehensive development framework and processing flow. Simply migration from traditional IDS/IPS systems to SDN environment are not effective enough for detecting and defending malicious attacks. Hence, in this thesis, we present an IPS development framework to help user easily design and implement their defensive systems in cloud system by SDN technology. This framework enables SDN approaches to enhance the system security and performance. A Traffic Information Platform (TIP) is proposed as the cornerstone with several upper layer security modules such as Detection, Analysis and Prevention components. Benefiting from the flexible, compatible and programmable features of SDN, Customized Detection Engine, Network Topology Finder, Source Tracer and further user-developed security appliances are plugged in our framework to construct a SDN-based defensive system. Two main categories Python-based APIs are designed to support developers for further development. This system is designed and implemented based on the POX controller and Open vSwitch in the cloud computing environment. The efficiency of this framework is demonstrated by a sample IPS implementation and the performance of our framework is also evaluated.
ContributorsXiong, Zhengyang (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Dalvucu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Interactive remote e-learning is one of the youngest and most popular methods that is used in today's teaching method. WebRTC, on the other hand, has become the popular concept and method in real time communication. Unlike the old fashioned Adobe Flash, user will communicate directly to each other rather than calling server as the middle man. The world is changing from plug-in to web-browser. However, the WebRTC have not been widely used for school education.
By taking into consideration of the WebRTC solution for data transferring, we propose a new Cloud based interactive multimedia which enables virtual lab learning environment. Three modules were proposed along with an efficient solution for achieving optimized network bandwidth. The One-to-Many communication was introduced in the video conferencing and scalability was tested for the application. The key technical contribution is to establish a sufficient system that designed to utilize the WebRTC in its best way in educational world in the Vlab platform and reduces the tool cost and improves online learning experience.
By taking into consideration of the WebRTC solution for data transferring, we propose a new Cloud based interactive multimedia which enables virtual lab learning environment. Three modules were proposed along with an efficient solution for achieving optimized network bandwidth. The One-to-Many communication was introduced in the video conferencing and scalability was tested for the application. The key technical contribution is to establish a sufficient system that designed to utilize the WebRTC in its best way in educational world in the Vlab platform and reduces the tool cost and improves online learning experience.
ContributorsLi, Qingyun (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
A firewall is a necessary component for network security and just like any regular equipment it requires maintenance. To keep up with changing cyber security trends and threats, firewall rules are modified frequently. Over time such modifications increase the complexity, size and verbosity of firewall rules. As the rule set grows in size, adding and modifying rule becomes a tedious task. This discourages network administrators to review the work done by previous administrators before and after applying any changes. As a result the quality and efficiency of the firewall goes down.
Modification and addition of rules without knowledge of previous rules creates anomalies like shadowing and rule redundancy. Anomalous rule sets not only limit the efficiency of the firewall but in some cases create a hole in the perimeter security. Detection of anomalies has been studied for a long time and some well established procedures have been implemented and tested. But they all have a common problem of visualizing the results. When it comes to visualization of firewall anomalies, the results do not fit in traditional matrix, tree or sunburst representations.
This research targets the anomaly detection and visualization problem. It analyzes and represents firewall rule anomalies in innovative ways such as hive plots and dynamic slices. Such graphical representations of rule anomalies are useful in understanding the state of a firewall. It also helps network administrators in finding and fixing the anomalous rules.
Modification and addition of rules without knowledge of previous rules creates anomalies like shadowing and rule redundancy. Anomalous rule sets not only limit the efficiency of the firewall but in some cases create a hole in the perimeter security. Detection of anomalies has been studied for a long time and some well established procedures have been implemented and tested. But they all have a common problem of visualizing the results. When it comes to visualization of firewall anomalies, the results do not fit in traditional matrix, tree or sunburst representations.
This research targets the anomaly detection and visualization problem. It analyzes and represents firewall rule anomalies in innovative ways such as hive plots and dynamic slices. Such graphical representations of rule anomalies are useful in understanding the state of a firewall. It also helps network administrators in finding and fixing the anomalous rules.
ContributorsKhatkar, Pankaj Kumar (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Syrotiuk, Violet R. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This thesis proposed a novel approach to establish the trust model in a social network scenario based on users' emails. Email is one of the most important social connections nowadays. By analyzing email exchange activities among users, a social network trust model can be established to judge the trust rate between each two users. The whole trust checking process is divided into two steps: local checking and remote checking. Local checking directly contacts the email server to calculate the trust rate based on user's own email communication history. Remote checking is a distributed computing process to get help from user's social network friends and built the trust rate together. The email-based trust model is built upon a cloud computing framework called MobiCloud. Inside MobiCloud, each user occupies a virtual machine which can directly communicate with others. Based on this feature, the distributed trust model is implemented as a combination of local analysis and remote analysis in the cloud. Experiment results show that the trust evaluation model can give accurate trust rate even in a small scale social network which does not have lots of social connections. With this trust model, the security in both social network services and email communication could be improved.
ContributorsZhong, Yunji (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Syrotiuk, Violet (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
With the advent of technologies such as web services, service oriented architecture and cloud computing, modern organizations have to deal with policies such as Firewall policies to secure the networks, XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) policies for controlling the access to critical information as well as resources. Management of these policies is an extremely important task in order to avoid unintended security leakages via illegal accesses, while maintaining proper access to services for legitimate users. Managing and maintaining access control policies manually over long period of time is an error prone task due to their inherent complex nature. Existing tools and mechanisms for policy management use different approaches for different types of policies. This research thesis represents a generic framework to provide an unified approach for policy analysis and management of different types of policies. Generic approach captures the common semantics and structure of different access control policies with the notion of policy ontology. Policy ontology representation is then utilized for effectively analyzing and managing the policies. This thesis also discusses a proof-of-concept implementation of the proposed generic framework and demonstrates how efficiently this unified approach can be used for analysis and management of different types of access control policies.
ContributorsKulkarni, Ketan (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Yau, Stephen S. (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
In modern healthcare environments, there is a strong need to create an infrastructure that reduces time-consuming efforts and costly operations to obtain a patient's complete medical record and uniformly integrates this heterogeneous collection of medical data to deliver it to the healthcare professionals. As a result, healthcare providers are more willing to shift their electronic medical record (EMR) systems to clouds that can remove the geographical distance barriers among providers and patient. Even though cloud-based EMRs have received considerable attention since it would help achieve lower operational cost and better interoperability with other healthcare providers, the adoption of security-aware cloud systems has become an extremely important prerequisite for bringing interoperability and efficient management to the healthcare industry. Since a shared electronic health record (EHR) essentially represents a virtualized aggregation of distributed clinical records from multiple healthcare providers, sharing of such integrated EHRs may comply with various authorization policies from these data providers. In this work, we focus on the authorized and selective sharing of EHRs among several parties with different duties and objectives that satisfies access control and compliance issues in healthcare cloud computing environments. We present a secure medical data sharing framework to support selective sharing of composite EHRs aggregated from various healthcare providers and compliance of HIPAA regulations. Our approach also ensures that privacy concerns need to be accommodated for processing access requests to patients' healthcare information. To realize our proposed approach, we design and implement a cloud-based EHRs sharing system. In addition, we describe case studies and evaluation results to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.
ContributorsWu, Ruoyu (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Yau, Stephen S. (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012