MS Thesis Defense

Stateless Detection of Malicious Traffic:
Emphasis on User Privacy

Paul Halvorsen

1:00pm Monday, 3 December 2012, ITE 346, UMBC

In order to allow flexibility in deployment location and to preserve user privacy we have performed research into stateless classification of network traffic. Stateless detection allows for flexibility in deployment location because traffic on a network does not necessarily follow the same path to and from the end points. By only requiring a single direction of traffic, we have the ability to deploy this classifier anywhere on a network. We also do not require the data from a packet which preserves user privacy and allows for the classification of encrypted traffic.

Our research shows that it is possible to determine if traffic is malicious by using packets traveling in a single direction and without the data contained in the packet. Our research shows that with the use of the timing of the packets, time to live value, and source and destination IP addresses and ports, it is possible to determine if the traffic is malicious. In this way we are able to deploy the classifier anywhere on a network, preserve user privacy, and classify encrypted traffic.

Committee members:

• Dr. Anupam Joshi (chair)
• Dr. Charles Nicholas
• Dr. Tim Finin

Originally from Montclair, New Jersey, Celia is a Computer Science and Math double-major and CWIT Scholar.

About Celia

When did you become interested in Computer Science? I’ve always been interested in math and solving puzzles since I was a little girl.  In my senior year of high school, I had the opportunity to take two programming classes at a local college.  At the time, I was thinking I might want to create games for women and children.

What area of Computer Science interests you the most? Now I’m thinking about being a data scientist, somebody who makes sense of the large amounts of data that are growing rapidly in so many fields.  I’ll want to take classes in machine learning algorithms, computer graphics, and data visualization. 

What Computer Science courses did you take in high school?I took seven math classes, including AP Calculus BC and statistics.  I realize now that the programming classes I took at the local college weren’t great, but they helped pique my interest in computer science.

What is your dream job? Google and Facebook created the idea of data science and now there are a lot of start-up companies in Silicon Valley that specialize in mining complex data.  Everyone from the NSA to General Electric are now looking for people who can do this, too, and it would be fun to be part of the exciting breakthroughs in this information technology.

About being a CS major

Who is your favorite professor or course? My favorite class is Discrete Structures with Dr. LaBerge. He’s wonderful.  He’s got so many office hours, and he encourages us to come see him.  He never thinks any question is dumb.

Are you part of any on-campus clubs, organizations, teams, or labs?  I’m a member of the Society of Women Engineers, and I’m joining the A-Team, a group who helps the admissions office when prospective students visit. Every Tuesday I have lunch with a group of intellectually challenged students attending UMBC under the new SUCCESS program. I’m also working on my 3^rd degree black belt in Taekwondo. I was on a demonstration team that won a national championship in 2010.

What is the best part about being a CWIT Scholar? I love living in the Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) LLC in Erickson Hall.  We all got to be good friends before school started at a retreat in August.  It’s so much fun, and it’s really helpful, to have friends right there who are studying the same subjects.

About life at UMBC

What is the best part of college so far? Being on my own and away from home.

What is the best part about campus life at UMBC? Hanging out with friends.

What is your favorite spot on campus? The Commons, because it is so full of life.  There is an awesome game room, many dining options, and many SEB events take place there.

Where can you get the best coffee/lunch/ food or beverage of choice? My favorite place to eat is the Admin Café.  I go there with fellow CWIT scholars every weekday morning and get this delicious bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich.  My favorite lunch there is a turkey, lettuce and tomato sandwich on wheat bread with honey mustard and a pickle on the side.  I also love the chicken tenders at the Mesquite BBQ and Grill and the smoothies at Au Bon Pain!

CSEE professor Dr. Alan Sherman and his Ph.D. advisee Josiah Dykstra have been invited to give the keynote address at the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement’s (IDGA) Forensic Enabled Intelligence Summit. Scheduled to be held in Washington D.C. in April 2013, the conference is one of the IDGA’s most anticipated government technology summits of the year.

The keynote will discuss Sherman and Dykstra’s research in cloud forensics. Their work explores ways to conduct forensic exams of crimes  committed in the cloud.

ACM Distinguished Speaker

Cloud based Active Archiving Solution for Databases

Dr. Mukesh Mohania
IBM Research – India

2:30pm Friday, 30 November 2012
Room 102 (LH8), ITE Building, UMBC

In the second talk of the UMBC ACM Student Chapter's Tech Talk Series, ACM Distinguished Speaker Dr. Mukesh Mohania will visit UMBC and talk about "Cloud based Active Archiving Solution for Databases".

Cloud computing offers an exciting opportunity to bring on-demand applications to customers and is being used for delivering hosted services over the Internet and/or processing massive amount of data for business intelligence. In this talk, we will discuss the architecture of cloud computing, MapReduce, and Hadoop. We will then discuss how the cloud infrastructure can be used for data management services, how the massive amount of data can be processed over cloud for various business intelligence applications, and how the cloud can be used for 'Active' Data Archival for near real-time data access. We discuss various issues concerning the active archive system including schema modification, query federation, query optimization, access control and data provenance. Using TPC-DS benchmark data, we present evaluation results that shows the ability of our system to seamlessly query archive data along with data stored in the warehouse in order of minutes compared to hours required to move the data into the warehouse from traditional archival systems.

Mukesh Mohania received his Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India in 1995. Currently, he is a Senior Technical Staff Member and IBM Master Inventor in IBM Research – India. He has worked extensively in the areas of distributed databases, data warehousing, data integration, and autonomic computing. He has published more than 120 papers and also filed more than 50 patents in these or related areas, and more than 14 have already been granted. He received the best paper awards in CIKM 2004 and CIKM 2005. His work on Data Quality, Information Integration, and Autonomic Computing has led to the development of new products and also influenced several existing IBM products. He has received several awards within IBM, such as "Excellence in People Management", “Outstanding Innovation Award”, "Technical Accomplishment Award", “Leadership By Doing”, and many more. He also received IEEE Meritorious Service Award. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, and a member of IBM Academy of Technology.

Light refreshments will be served after the talk outside ITE-325

RSVP via Facebook https://facebook.com/events/378277722253548/

More information and directions: http://bit.ly/UMBCtalks

Dr. Oates is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at UMBC. He is the Principal Investigator of UMBC’s Cognition, Robotics, and Learning (CoRaL) Lab, where he pursues research in the broad areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, and natural language processing.

Congratulations to Dr. Tim Oates, named an Oros Family Professor in Computer Science and Technology. The five-year endowed professorship will fund Dr. Oates’ newly proposed research project in the area of mobile healthcare.

"I was delighted to recommend Dr. James T. Oates' appointment as Oros Family Professor in Computer Science and Technology, an endowed professorship established to honor and support the work of faculty pursuing scholarly activity in computer science,” says Dr. Warren Devries, Dean of UMBC’s College of Engineering and Information Technology. “Tim Oates is a first rate teacher and scholar, and I had a chance to work with him as a key part of the College and CSEE department's accreditation activity. Taken together this is precisely the type of faculty member this professorship is intended to recognize. The CSEE department's faculty, staff and students are fortunate to have Tim Oates as a mentor and colleague."

The funds will support graduate students to work with Dr. Oates on a project to improve healthcare in developing countries. “The issue is that in developing countries, almost everything is still done on paper,” explains Dr. Oates. That means that every record—things like immunization records and medical histories–are taken by hand. It’s an inefficient process that makes it hard to keep track of medical data.

His proposed solution is to develop an algorithm that can extract data from a cell-phone photo of the paper record. Once digitized, the medical data can be more easily shared and analyzed.

Dr. Oates chose to develop this technology for cell phones because they are a common and reliable tool in these areas, he explains. In many cases, cell phones can be found where basic needs are absent. “There are people living in villages that don’t have access to clean water, but they have cell phones,” he says.

Dr. Oates joins last year’s Oros Family Professor appointee, Dr. Anupam Joshi, who is similarly using the funds for his research in mobile healthcare.

Join a webcast of the Federal government's cybersecurity research and development strategies from 1:00pm to 3:00pm EST on Tuesday 27 November 2012. Senior Federal representatives will review Government activities in implementing the Federal cybersecurity R&D strategic plan and discuss emerging areas in cybersecurity research that may warrant further focus. The webcast session is part of the National Science Foundation's Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace PI Meeting. Addional information about the Federal Cybersecurity R&D program is available online.

In last week’s PBS NOVA scienceNOW program, What Will the Future Be Like?, David Pogue imagined what the Tech page of The New York Times might look like 10, 20, or 30 years from today and offered his predictions about the technologies that will transform your life and the lives of your grandchildren.

Mobile phones that read your mind? Video games that can cure cancer? Wearable robots that give you the strength of Ironman? David Pogue predicts which technologies will transform daily life for you — and your grandkids. These advancements are already taking shape in laboratories around the world — and gadgets that once were purely science fiction are on the verge of becoming as common as the iPhones and Androids Pogue reviews every day.

In last week’s PBS NOVA scienceNOW program, What Will the Future Be Like?, David Pogue imagined what the Tech page of The New York Times might look like 10, 20, or 30 years from today and offered his predictions about the technologies that will transform your life and the lives of your grandchildren.

Mobile phones that read your mind? Video games that can cure cancer? Wearable robots that give you the strength of Ironman? David Pogue predicts which technologies will transform daily life for you — and your grandkids. These advancements are already taking shape in laboratories around the world — and gadgets that once were purely science fiction are on the verge of becoming as common as the iPhones and Androids Pogue reviews every day.

A free screening of the new film Codebreaker will be shown on Thursday, November 29 at 5:30pm in Hodson Auditorium at johns Hopkins University. The screening will be followed by a reception and question and answer session with the film's executive producer, Patrick Sammon.

Codebreaker tells the remarkable and tragic story of one of the 20th century's most important people. Alan Turing set in motion the digital revolution and his World War II codebreaking helped turn the tide of war. This maverick British genius is one of the most important scientists ever, yet few people have heard his name, know his story, or understand his legacy. Historians say by breaking the Nazis' Naval Enigma code, Turing helped shorten the Second World War by two years, saving millions of lives. As the founding father of computer science and artificial intelligence, Alan Turing envisioned our digital world long before anyone else. Built on a solid historical foundation of true events, Turing is our storyteller as he defiantly searches for answers. Documentary elements seamlessly interconnect with drama scenes to offer a three dimensional picture of Turing, his accomplishments, his tragic end, and his lasting legacy. (Running time 81 minutes). Learn more about Codebreaker and view a two-minute trailer at www.turingfilm.com.

MS Thesis Defense

Smartphone Application and Data Privacy Control Using Semantically Rich Reasoning and Context Modeling

Dibyajyoti Ghosh

9:00am Tuesday, 20 November 2012, ITE 325B, UMBC

We present our ongoing work on user data and contextual privacy preservation in mobile devices through semantic reasoning. Recent advances in context modeling, tracking and collaborative localization has led to the emergence of a new class of smartphone applications that can access and share embedded sensor data. Unfortunately, this also means significant amount of user context information is now accessible to applications and potentially others, creating serious privacy and security concerns. Mobile OS frameworks like Android lack mechanisms for dynamic privacy control. We show how data flow among applications can be successfully filtered at a much more granular level using semantic web driven technologies that model device location, surroundings, application roles as well as context-dependent information sharing policies.

Committee members:

• Prof. Anupam Joshi (Chair)
• Prof. Tim Finin
• Prof. Yelena Yesha
• Prof. Shujia Zhou