Modern Information Technology (IT) infrastructure and open-source software (OSS) have revolutionized our ability to access and process data, enabling us to tackle increasingly complex problems and challenges. While these technologies provide substantial benefits, they often expose users to vulnerabilities that can severely damage individuals and…

A problem in computer security is identification of attack signatures in network packets. An attack signature is a pattern of bits that characterizes a particular attack. Because there are many kinds of attacks, there are potentially many attack signatures. Furthermore, attackers may seek to avoid detection by altering the attack mechanism so that…

Anomaly detection is a challenging problem that has been researched within a variety of application domains. In network intrusion detection, anomaly based techniques are particularly attractive because of their ability to identify previously unknown attacks without the need to be programmed with the specific signatures of every possible attack.…

The recent White House (2011) policy paper for the Smart Grid that was released on June 13, 2011, "A Policy Framework for the 21st Century Grid: Enabling Our Secure Energy Future," defines four major problems to be solved and the one that is addressed in this dissertation is Securing the Grid. Securing the Grid is referred to as one of…

With today's high demand for online applications and services running on the Internet, software has become a vital component in our lives. With every revolutionary technology comes challenges unique to its characteristics; for online applications, security is one huge concern and challenge. Currently, there are several schemes that address…