WIE Undergraduates: CS Scholars Projects
2010 Summer Research Projects
Please note that "Daily Activities" are provided as estimates of time commitment and do not include additional program activities.
- Security and Surveillance using Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Sarah Bergbreiter, Mechanical Engineering - Privacy Leakage in Facebook
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Michel Cukier, Mechanical Engineering and Dr. Jennifer Golbeck, Information Studies - Benchmarking to Enable the Next Generation of Software Test Automation Tools
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Atif Memon, Computer Science - Securing Wireless Communications in the Physical Layer
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Sennur Ulukus, Electrical and Computer Engineering - Content Fingerprinting: Helping Your Favorite Online Community Legally
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Min Wu, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Security and Surveillance using Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks
Project Description
Wireless sensor networks can enable a host of new security and surveillance applications. However, to provide sensor coverage of a given space, these networks must be deployed in an appropriate manner. For hundreds to thousands of nodes, this deployment could take a great deal of time and resources. As the sensor size shrinks, it is expected that the number of sensors will grow even further.
One solution to this problem is to add mobility to the wireless sensors, creating networked robots from previously static sensors. Using their mobility, a dispersal algorithm can move the sensors from a single deployment spot to cover a much wider area. In addition, if some of these sensors fail or if somebody physically removes them from the network, the remaining mobile sensors should be able to cover the required space.
This summer project will allow the student to investigate new ideas for deploying networks to enable this kind of security. The student will research previous deployment algorithms and use computer simulation tools (Matlab or other) to investigate new dispersal ideas with simple sensor and mobility models. One challenge is to implement new algorithms without any robot location information -- one of the more difficult sensors to implement on a small robot. If time allows, the student will investigate implementing this algorithm on real robots.
CS Scholar Responsibilities and Daily Activities
All CS Scholars will be expected to perform background reading (15%) on previous work in mobile wireless sensor networks. The scholar will be trained on experimental methods and the software required to program and test the chosen hardware platform (25%) and each scholar will develop and test new distance/bearing methods with real hardware (55%). The scholars will meet at least once a week to compare experiences and identify specific activities for ongoing study (5%). All scholars will compile their results for a presentation and report publication.
Project Description:
Most research in computer security focuses on developing methods and tools for preventing, detecting, or tolerating attacks or intrusions. Little research is conducted to quantify the security of a computer system. The Experimental Information Assurance Lab (EIAL) at the University of Maryland specializes in conducting experiments for quantifying various security aspects of a computer system. Recent research focused on: a) how to separate attacks among malicious traffic, b) how to analyze malicious activity over time, c) how to assess the threat of attacks due to IRC channels, d) how to understand behavior and diagnosing and finding solutions to issues encountered in organizational computer security systems using a systemic approach, namely system archetypes, e) How to build a profile of attacker behavior following a remote compromise, and f) how to analyze a large set of incident data using well-known tools developed by the software reliability community.
The goal of this research is to show the discrepancy between the type and level of private information users agree to share and what they do share. This experiment focuses on one on-line social network, Facebook, and a population of students attending a large US university. A small sample of the population will be surveyed on what type and amount of private information they agree to share with friends, friends of friends, networks’ members, or everyone. We then will develop a tool to monitor these students. The research will show the difference between the shared information and the intended shared information.
CS Scholar Responsibilities and Daily Activities
All CS Scholars will be expected to perform background reading (10%) on on-line social networks (OSNs) and privacy associated with OSNs. All Scholars will be developing a survey regarding privacy issues on OSNs and will analyzing the survey results (40%). All Scholars will collect data related to Facebook and identify privacy leakages in these data (45%). The Scholars will meet at least once a week to compare experiences and identify specific activities for ongoing study (5%). All Scholars will compile their results for a presentation and report publication.
Benchmarking to Enable the Next Generation of Software Test Automation Tools
Project Description
Event-driven software (EDS) spans multiple domains, from industrial embedded devices and robotic controllers to web interfaces. Researchers experimenting with new software testing techniques for EDS do not have benchmarks that they can use to compare their techniques. This project will investigate the requirements for a community infrastructure of event-based testing researchers to provide uniformity in experimentation. It will use the results of the requirements analysis to enhance a shared resource called COMET: COMmunity-Event-based Testing.
COMET http://comet.unl.edu/ consists of a core set of requirements for EDS testing that provides a repository of both logical and concrete test artifacts. This includes processes and models to standardize the way experiments are conducted as well as on- line web services for common computational components. Techniques developed in this project will have a broad impact: COMET has the potential to bring EDS testing techniques to a broader community and will promote greater transferability of ideas. Artifacts for EDS testing will be available to other disciplines such as computer human interaction researchers who are interested in EDS usability.
The Summer 2010 project focuses on creating new benchmarks for EDS. More precisely, the focus will be on (1) identifying new subject applications for COMET and (2) using tools to populate the benchmarks for each application.
CS Scholar Responsibilities and Daily Activities
All CS Scholars will be expected to perform background reading (10%) on testing, code instrumentation, fault seeding, and test coverage. All Scholars will be trained to use a tool called GUITAR and code instrumenters (10%). Each scholar will then use SourceForge.net to identify at least four applications (20%), and develop artifacts for benchmark creation of the four subject applications (55%). The Scholars will meet at least once a week to compare experiences and identify specific activities for ongoing study (5%). All Scholars will compile their results for a presentation and report publication.
Securing Wireless Communications in the Physical Layer
Project Description:
The last couple of decades have witnessed an amazing growth in
wireless communications and networking applications. More and more subscribers are relying solely on their wireless communication
and computing devices for communicating sensitive information.
Preserving the security of wirelessly transmitted information is
becoming ever more challenging, yet essential. This important issue
is currently dealt with at the higher layers of the protocol hierarchies
using cryptographic algorithms, yet the need to deal with it in the
physical layer is imminent.
This research explores possibilities of providing security in the physical layer using techniques from information theory, communication theory and signal processing. In particular, we use unique characteristics of the wireless medium, such as random fluctuations in the channel gains, i.e., fading (that enables opportunistic transmissions), overhead information (that enables cooperation), and use of multiple antennas (that provides spatial diversity and multiplexing gains). As part of the project, students will be introduced to these techniques, and will be involved in implementing, testing and simulating some of these techniques under realistic system and security threat assumptions.
CS Scholar Responsibilities:
All CS Scholars will be expected to perform background reading (20%)
on previous work in physical layer security. All scholars will
be trained on using programming and software tools to simulate algorithms
(10%).
All scholars will be trained to create a simulation program to
implement, test and evaluate various physical layer security
algorithms (65%). The scholars will meet at least once a week to compare
experiences and identify specific activities for ongoing study (5%).
All scholars will compile their results for a presentation and
report publication.
Content Fingerprinting: Helping Your Favorite Online Community – Legally
Project Description
YouTube and other web services alike have revolutionized content sharing and online social networking by providing an easy-to-use platform for users to post and share video. At the same time, content owners have raised serious concerns on unauthorized uploads of copyrighted movies and TV shows to these websites, as witnessed by high-profile lawsuits filed against YouTube and Google. In order to deter copyright violation and more importantly, to help keep online communities alive legally, “content fingerprinting” technologies are deployed to compute a short string of bits to capture unique characteristics of each video and use it determine whether an uploaded video belongs to a set of copyrighted content or not. Content fingerprints are also used by such applications as Shazam on iPhone to use recordings of short audio clips to identify the song and provide information about the artist, the album, and where to buy.
Video and other multimedia data are typically stored in various formats and may exhibit minor differences among versions. Is it possible to identify that these different versions correspond to the same movie? The Summer 2009 project focuses on designing a benchmark suite to evaluate the performance of video fingerprinting schemes. As part of the project, students will be introduced to various fingerprinting algorithms and typical analog/digital processing that a video may undergo. Students will help create a database of reference videos with representatives from different genres such as animation, newscasts, movie scenes, sport telecasts, etc., subject to different processing. This benchmark suite will then be used to evaluate and compare the performance of different video identification schemes. If time permits, the students may also propose improvements, examine strategies to defeat content fingerprinting algorithms and devise countermeasures to resist such attacks.
CS Scholar Responsibilities and Daily Activities
All CS Scholars will be expected to perform background reading (10%) on previous work in video fingerprinting. All scholars will be trained on using programming and software tools to manipulate videos (20%). Scholars will be trained to create a test suite for evaluating and comparing different video fingerprinting schemes (65%). The scholars will meet at least once a week to compare experiences and identify specific activities for ongoing study (5%). All scholars will compile their results for a presentation and report publication.
