Due to their high fault-tolerance, ease of installation and scalability to large networks, distributed algorithms have recently gained immense popularity in the sensor networks community, especially in computer vision. Multi-target tracking in a camera network is one of the fundamental problems in this domain. Distributed estimation algorithms…

Trust can be an important component of wireless sensor networks for believability of the produced data and historical value is a crucial asset in deciding trust of the data. A node's trust can change over time after its initial deployment due to various reasons such as energy loss, environmental conditions or exhausting sources. Provenance can…

Current cybersecurity measures have become a major concern for commercial organizations in the United States. As the cyber-attack landscape expands and the skills and knowledge of the cyber-attacker become broader, the current measures that are taken and the laws structured around them are making it increasingly difficult for commercial…

The need for detecting malicious behavior on a computer networks continued to be important to maintaining a safe and secure environment. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship of multilayer feed forward neural network architecture to the ability of detecting abnormal behavior in networks. This involved building, training, and…

In this thesis, delay and security issues in network coding are considered. First, we study the delay incurred in the transmission of a fixed number of packets through acyclic networks comprised of erasure links. The two transmission schemes studied are routing with hop-by-hop retransmissions, where every node in the network simply stores and…

The rapid advancement of wireless technology has instigated the broad deployment of wireless networks. Different types of networks have been developed, including wireless sensor networks, mobile ad hoc networks, wireless local area networks, and cellular networks. These networks have different structures and applications, and require different…

In the past two decades, we have seen an unprecedented rise in unlicensed wireless devices and applications of wireless technology. To meet various application constraints, we continually customize the radios and their protocols to the application domain which has led to significant diversity in spectrum use. Unfortunately, this diversity (coupled…

The research problem that inspired this effort is the challenge of managing the security of systems in large-scale heterogeneous networked environments. Human intervention is slow and limited: humans operate at much slower speeds than networked computer communications and there are few humans associated with each network. Enabling each node in the…

The insider security threat causes new and dangerous dimensions in cloud computing. Those internal threats are originated from contractors or the business partners' input that have access to the systems. A study of trustworthiness and transparency might assist the organizations to monitor employees' activity more cautiously on cloud technologies…

Increased internal and external training approaches are elements senior leaders need to know before creating a training plan for security professionals to protect sensitive information. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore training strategies telecommunication industry leaders use to ensure security professionals can protect…

This thesis identifies three essays which contribute to the foundational understanding of the vulnerabilities and risk towards potentially implementing wireless grid Edgeware technology in a virtualized cloud environment. Since communication networks and devices are subject to becoming the target of exploitation by hackers (e.g. individuals who…

Resource-rich computing devices, decreasing communication costs, and Web 2.0 technologies are fundamentally changing the way distributed applications communicate and collaborate. With these changes, we envision Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems that will allow for the integration and collaboration of peers with diverse capabilities to a virtual community…

Use of the Patch Vulnerability Management (PVM) process should be seriously considered for any networked computing system. The PVM process prevents the operating system (OS) and software applications from being attacked due to security vulnerabilities, which lead to system failures and critical data leakage. The purpose of this research is to…

In this dissertation, we discuss the problem of enabling cooperative query execution in a multi-cloud environment where the data is owned and managed by multiple enterprises. Each enterprise maintains its own relational database using a private cloud. In order to implement desired business services, parties need to share selected portion of their…

Despite the recent advances in systems and network security, attacks on large enterprise networks consistently impose serious challenges to maintaining data privacy and software service integrity. We identify two main problems that contribute to increasing the security risk in a networked environment: (i) vulnerable servers, workstations, and…