Matching Items (349)
Description
Internet browsers are today capable of warning internet users of a potential phishing attack. Browsers identify these websites by referring to blacklists of reported phishing websites maintained by trusted organizations like Google, Phishtank etc. On identifying a Unified Resource Locator (URL) requested by a user as a reported phishing URL, browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome display an 'active' warning message in an attempt to stop the user from making a potentially dangerous decision of visiting the website and sharing confidential information like username-password, credit card information, social security number etc.
However, these warnings are not always successful at safeguarding the user from a phishing attack. On several occasions, users ignore these warnings and 'click through' them, eventually landing at the potentially dangerous website and giving away confidential information. Failure to understand the warning, failure to differentiate different types of browser warnings, diminishing trust on browser warnings due to repeated encounter are some of the reasons that make users ignore these warnings. It is important to address these factors in order to eventually improve a user’s reaction to these warnings.
In this thesis, I propose a novel design to improve the effectiveness and reliability of phishing warning messages. This design utilizes the name of the target website that a fake website is mimicking, to display a simple, easy to understand and interactive warning message with the primary objective of keeping the user away from a potentially spoof website.
However, these warnings are not always successful at safeguarding the user from a phishing attack. On several occasions, users ignore these warnings and 'click through' them, eventually landing at the potentially dangerous website and giving away confidential information. Failure to understand the warning, failure to differentiate different types of browser warnings, diminishing trust on browser warnings due to repeated encounter are some of the reasons that make users ignore these warnings. It is important to address these factors in order to eventually improve a user’s reaction to these warnings.
In this thesis, I propose a novel design to improve the effectiveness and reliability of phishing warning messages. This design utilizes the name of the target website that a fake website is mimicking, to display a simple, easy to understand and interactive warning message with the primary objective of keeping the user away from a potentially spoof website.
ContributorsSharma, Satyabrata (Author) / Bazzi, Rida (Thesis advisor) / Walker, Erin (Committee member) / Gaffar, Ashraf (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This thesis addresses the problem of online schema updates where the goal is to be able to update relational database schemas without reducing the database system's availability. Unlike some other work in this area, this thesis presents an approach which is completely client-driven and does not require specialized database management systems (DBMS). Also, unlike other client-driven work, this approach provides support for a richer set of schema updates including vertical split (normalization), horizontal split, vertical and horizontal merge (union), difference and intersection. The update process automatically generates a runtime update client from a mapping between the old the new schemas. The solution has been validated by testing it on a relatively small database of around 300,000 records per table and less than 1 Gb, but with limited memory buffer size of 24 Mb. This thesis presents the study of the overhead of the update process as a function of the transaction rates and the batch size used to copy data from the old to the new schema. It shows that the overhead introduced is minimal for medium size applications and that the update can be achieved with no more than one minute of downtime.
ContributorsTyagi, Preetika (Author) / Bazzi, Rida (Thesis advisor) / Candan, Kasim S (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Broadcast Encryption is the task of cryptographically securing communication in a broadcast environment so that only a dynamically specified subset of subscribers, called the privileged subset, may decrypt the communication. In practical applications, it is desirable for a Broadcast Encryption Scheme (BES) to demonstrate resilience against attacks by colluding, unprivileged subscribers. Minimal Perfect Hash Families (PHFs) have been shown to provide a basis for the construction of memory-efficient t-resilient Key Pre-distribution Schemes (KPSs) from multiple instances of 1-resilient KPSs. Using this technique, the task of constructing a large t-resilient BES is reduced to finding a near-minimal PHF of appropriate parameters. While combinatorial and probabilistic constructions exist for minimal PHFs with certain parameters, the complexity of constructing them in general is currently unknown. This thesis introduces a new type of hash family, called a Scattering Hash Family (ScHF), which is designed to allow for the scalable and ingredient-independent design of memory-efficient BESs for large parameters, specifically resilience and total number of subscribers. A general BES construction using ScHFs is shown, which constructs t-resilient KPSs from other KPSs of any resilience ≤w≤t. In addition to demonstrating how ScHFs can be used to produce BESs , this thesis explores several ScHF construction techniques. The initial technique demonstrates a probabilistic, non-constructive proof of existence for ScHFs . This construction is then derandomized into a direct, polynomial time construction of near-minimal ScHFs using the method of conditional expectations. As an alternative approach to direct construction, representing ScHFs as a k-restriction problem allows for the indirect construction of ScHFs via randomized post-optimization. Using the methods defined, ScHFs are constructed and the parameters' effects on solution size are analyzed. For large strengths, constructive techniques lose significant performance, and as such, asymptotic analysis is performed using the non-constructive existential results. This work concludes with an analysis of the benefits and disadvantages of BESs based on the constructed ScHFs. Due to the novel nature of ScHFs, the results of this analysis are used as the foundation for an empirical comparison between ScHF-based and PHF-based BESs . The primary bases of comparison are construction efficiency, key material requirements, and message transmission overhead.
ContributorsO'Brien, Devon James (Author) / Colbourn, Charles J (Thesis advisor) / Bazzi, Rida (Committee member) / Richa, Andrea (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
A load balancer is an essential part of many network systems. A load balancer is capable of dividing and redistributing incoming network traffic to different back end servers, thus improving reliability and performance. Existing load balancing solutions can be classified into two categories: hardware-based or software-based. Hardware-based load balancing systems are hard to manage and force network administrators to scale up (replacing with more powerful but expensive hardware) when their system can not handle the growing traffic. Software-based solutions have a limitation when dealing with a single large TCP flow. In recent years, with the fast developments of virtualization technology, a new trend of network function virtualization (NFV) is being adopted. Instead of using proprietary hardware, an NFV network infrastructure uses virtual machines running to implement network functions such as load balancers, firewalls, etc. In this thesis, a new load balancing system is designed and evaluated. This system is high performance and flexible. It can fully utilize the bandwidth between a load balancer and back end servers compared to traditional load balancers such as HAProxy. The experimental results show that using this NFV load balancer could have $n$ ($n$ is the number of back end servers) times better performance than HAProxy. Also, an extract, transform and load (ETL) application was implemented to demonstrate that this load balancer can shorten data load time. The experiment shows that when loading a large data set (18.3GB), our load balancer needs only 28\% less time than traditional load balancer.
ContributorsWu, Jinxuan (Author) / Syrotiuk, Violet R. (Thesis advisor) / Bazzi, Rida (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Due to large data resources generated by online educational applications, Educational Data Mining (EDM) has improved learning effects in different ways: Students Visualization, Recommendations for students, Students Modeling, Grouping Students, etc. A lot of programming assignments have the features like automating submissions, examining the test cases to verify the correctness, but limited studies compared different statistical techniques with latest frameworks, and interpreted models in a unified approach.
In this thesis, several data mining algorithms have been applied to analyze students’ code assignment submission data from a real classroom study. The goal of this work is to explore
and predict students’ performances. Multiple machine learning models and the model accuracy were evaluated based on the Shapley Additive Explanation.
The Cross-Validation shows the Gradient Boosting Decision Tree has the best precision 85.93% with average 82.90%. Features like Component grade, Due Date, Submission Times have higher impact than others. Baseline model received lower precision due to lack of non-linear fitting.
In this thesis, several data mining algorithms have been applied to analyze students’ code assignment submission data from a real classroom study. The goal of this work is to explore
and predict students’ performances. Multiple machine learning models and the model accuracy were evaluated based on the Shapley Additive Explanation.
The Cross-Validation shows the Gradient Boosting Decision Tree has the best precision 85.93% with average 82.90%. Features like Component grade, Due Date, Submission Times have higher impact than others. Baseline model received lower precision due to lack of non-linear fitting.
ContributorsTian, Wenbo (Author) / Hsiao, Ihan (Thesis advisor) / Bazzi, Rida (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
The purpose of this paper is to understand how companies are finding high potential employees and if they are leaving top talent behind in their approach. Eugene Burke stated in 2014 that 55% of employees that are labeled as a High Potential Employee will turn over and move companies. Burke (2014) also states that the average high potential employee tenure is five years. The Corporate Leadership Council says that on average, 27% of a company's development budget is spent on its high potential program (CEB 2017). For a midsize company, the high potential development budget is almost a million dollars for only a handful of employees, only to see half of the investment walking out the door to another company . Furthermore, the Corporate Leadership Council said that a study done in 2005 revealed that 50% of high potential employees had significant problems within their job (Kotlyar and Karkowsky 2014). Are time and resources are being given to the wrong employees and the right employees are being overlooked? This paper exams how companies traditionally select high potential employees and where companies are potentially omitting employees who would be better suited for the program. This paper proposes that how a company discovers their top talent will correlate to the number of turnovers or struggles that a high potential employee has on their job. Future research direction and practical considerations are also presented in this paper.
ContributorsHarrison, Carrie (Author) / Mizzi, Philip (Thesis director) / Ruediger, Stefan (Committee member) / Department of Management and Entrepreneurship (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
The goal of our project was to determine how to create the most marketable hockey team. To do this, consumer needs, team psychology, and financing were all researched and evaluated. With this information, a business plan was designed around the next NHL expansion team. Two surveys, one for marketing distributed to the general public, and one for team psychology distributed to current and former hockey players were created and sent out, while data for the financing aspect was collected by comparing data from other NHL teams and franchises from different sports. In terms of financials, this comes in lower than average ticket prices, a nice and expensive stadium, the ideal city to generate capital, and sufficient money spent on advertising. Our ticket prices of $140 is based on having a low enough price to generate lots of demand while high enough to make a profit. The $600 million stadium (which will be fully funded) will surely draw a significant crowd. Choosing Seattle as a city is the most ideal to meet these goals and lastly, in meeting with an NHL GM, we determined $4 million in yearly advertising costs as sufficient in creating the most marketable team. Throughout this whole process, we remained data focus. We focused on data from a customized marketing survey, organizational structures, salary cap, and attendance. What our marketing survey results showed us is that our potential fans wanted three characteristics in a hockey team: speed, intensity, and scoring. In looking at organizational structures teams that exemplified these characteristics had a heavy emphasis on development and scouting. So we built our organizational tree around those two ideals. We hired GM Mike Futa, a current director of player personnel for the L.A. Kings, and Head Coach Adam Oates, a current skills development coach for top players to bring those ideals to fruition. In constructing our team we replicated the rules set forth for the Vegas Knights' expansion draft and hypothesized a likely protected list based off of last years lists. As a result we were able to construct a team that statistically out performed the Vegas Knights draft numbers by double, in goals, assists, and points, while also beating them in PIM. Based off of these numbers and an analysis of how goals translate into game attendance we are confident that we have constructed a team that has the highest potential for marketability. For the team psychology area, when creating a roster and scouting players, some of our main findings were that it is important to pursue players who get along well with their teammates and coaching staff, are aggressive, are leaders on the team, and are vocal players who communicate effectively. We also recommended avoiding players who significantly portrayed any "pet-peeve" traits, with the most emphasis placed on "disrespectful toward teammates," and the least emphasis placed on "over-aggression." By following all of these recommendations, we believe the most marketable hockey team possible can be created.
ContributorsQuinn, Colin Christopher (Co-author) / Spigel, Carlos (Co-author) / Meyer, Matt (Co-author) / Eaton, John (Thesis director) / McIntosh, Daniel (Committee member) / Department of Marketing (Contributor) / Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law (Contributor) / Department of Management and Entrepreneurship (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Innovation Space is a program within Arizona State University in which two different sponsors fund three teams up to two thousand dollars so they may attempt to solve a prompt given by the sponsor. The teams consist of one student from each of the different schools Arizona State University contains. This includes one student from the W.P.Carey School of Business, Fulton School of Engineering, the School of Design, and School of Sustainability. This year, we had the opportunity to work with Johnson & Johnson and Adidas. Over the course of the year, we worked with Johnson & Johnson to deliver a more organic solution to typical mosquito repellent. The entire year consisted of seven phases. The first four phases dealt with customer research; much of this work involved secondary research online, surveys, interviews, and observations to discover our customer and validate that they would buy our product. Once we discovered who our customer was, then we had to brainstorm a solution to their customer pains. At the end of phase four, we had narrowed our brainstorming down to the top three ideas. Phases five through seven consisted of picking our top idea based off of our presentation to the stakeholders at Johnson & Johnson. Phases five through seven focused on how we would launch our product. At the end of the year, we had multiple business reports that continued to build on each other over the course of the year, as well as many other reports such as SWOT analysis, external forces conditions, and market fit plan.
ContributorsHammes, Christopher James (Author) / Trujillo, Rhett (Thesis director) / Montoya, Tara (Committee member) / Department of Management and Entrepreneurship (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
The City of Phoenix has historically been developed in an unsustainable way based on the way that autocentric cities have come to mature. By learning from a few European cities, Phoenix can focus on improving in a few key areas that will make the valley more walkable, enjoyable, and beautiful. This process of learning from other European cities can help developers, designers, and others in the development community to improve all of the valley’s different communities with a consistent plan of increasing urban density and ending outward sprawl while redefining the connective tissue that makes up Phoenix. This paper is meant to provide a set of example cities in order to pull specific recommendations and create a system of guidelines for all autocentric cities.
ContributorsCava, Daniel (Author) / Coseo, Paul (Thesis director) / Azevedo, Justin (Committee member) / The Design School (Contributor) / Department of Management and Entrepreneurship (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
In recent years, companies have been expanding their business efforts on a global scale. This project explores this expansion of American-based multinational corporations (MNCs) in Ireland, and the comparison of how their culture motivation in the workplace. We did a cultural study using Hofstede and Trompenaars' cultural dimensions of the two countries then used McClelland's Needs Theory, Equity Theory, and Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory in order to create three research questions. (1) How does the manager define success for the firm as a whole and for their employees, (2) How is the definition of success reflected in the company's corporate culture (i.e. values, norms and practices), along with how cultural values, norms and practices affect the company, and (3) How do external forces (i.e. governmental factors, workplace technology, etc.) affect the workplace environment and motivation for employees? With these we hypothesized that for research question 1, we hypothesized that from our study of Hofstede's and Trompenaars' cultural frameworks, Irish employees will show a greater tendency to favor affiliation, nAff, as opposed to a need for achievement, nAch, in American employees, according to McClelland's Needs Theory. For research question 2, we predicted that motivation would be administered through style of feedback to employees and office norms, such as autonomy, flexible hours, and work-life balance. For research question 3, we hypothesized that Ireland would have an impact from external factors such as government and technology, whereas the U.S. employees would face no clear impact. We conducted eight, qualitative interviews using a questionnaire, either in person or via video conference. The interviewees were all managers in some facet and have all had some international experience. Through the analysis of the interviews, we found that the Irish employees focused on how employees are able to help or contribute to a group (nAff), instead of looking at how the contribution of a group can be used to meet individual goals (nAch). The American companies reflected Trompenaars' definition of individualism in which employees focus on collaborating in teams, as long as individual goals are met, and benchmarked collaboration as a performance measure, tying in the need for achievement, for research question one. For the second research question, we found that employees in Ireland had a focus on teamwork in the workplace and much higher respect for work-life balance. American firms, in contrast, had a greater focus on making sure employees were contributing, meeting their goals, and getting their work done. While American firms did acknowledge work-life balance and its importance, there was a priority for coming in early and/or staying late to make sure a job got done. Findings for our third question showed that government factors did impact Ireland more, due to labor laws such as required vacation days in Ireland, and that technology had less of an impact than expected, for both countries. More importantly was our finding that the companies in Ireland were greatly impacted by the decisions made by the business executives in the United States.
ContributorsSong, Jenny Jungwon (Co-author) / Brown, William (Co-author) / Arrfelt, Mathias (Thesis director) / Moore, James (Committee member) / Department of Marketing (Contributor) / Department of Management and Entrepreneurship (Contributor) / W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05