6,757 research outputs found

    Undergraduate Catalog of Studies, 2023-2024

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    Graduate Catalog of Studies, 2023-2024

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    Configuration Management of Distributed Systems over Unreliable and Hostile Networks

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    Economic incentives of large criminal profits and the threat of legal consequences have pushed criminals to continuously improve their malware, especially command and control channels. This thesis applied concepts from successful malware command and control to explore the survivability and resilience of benign configuration management systems. This work expands on existing stage models of malware life cycle to contribute a new model for identifying malware concepts applicable to benign configuration management. The Hidden Master architecture is a contribution to master-agent network communication. In the Hidden Master architecture, communication between master and agent is asynchronous and can operate trough intermediate nodes. This protects the master secret key, which gives full control of all computers participating in configuration management. Multiple improvements to idempotent configuration were proposed, including the definition of the minimal base resource dependency model, simplified resource revalidation and the use of imperative general purpose language for defining idempotent configuration. Following the constructive research approach, the improvements to configuration management were designed into two prototypes. This allowed validation in laboratory testing, in two case studies and in expert interviews. In laboratory testing, the Hidden Master prototype was more resilient than leading configuration management tools in high load and low memory conditions, and against packet loss and corruption. Only the research prototype was adaptable to a network without stable topology due to the asynchronous nature of the Hidden Master architecture. The main case study used the research prototype in a complex environment to deploy a multi-room, authenticated audiovisual system for a client of an organization deploying the configuration. The case studies indicated that imperative general purpose language can be used for idempotent configuration in real life, for defining new configurations in unexpected situations using the base resources, and abstracting those using standard language features; and that such a system seems easy to learn. Potential business benefits were identified and evaluated using individual semistructured expert interviews. Respondents agreed that the models and the Hidden Master architecture could reduce costs and risks, improve developer productivity and allow faster time-to-market. Protection of master secret keys and the reduced need for incident response were seen as key drivers for improved security. Low-cost geographic scaling and leveraging file serving capabilities of commodity servers were seen to improve scaling and resiliency. Respondents identified jurisdictional legal limitations to encryption and requirements for cloud operator auditing as factors potentially limiting the full use of some concepts

    UMSL Bulletin 2023-2024

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    The 2023-2024 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1088/thumbnail.jp

    Graduate Catalog of Studies, 2023-2024

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    UMSL Bulletin 2022-2023

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    The 2022-2023 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1087/thumbnail.jp

    Developing IncidentUI -- A Ride Comfort and Disengagement Evaluation Application for Autonomous Vehicles

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    This report details the design, development, and implementation of IncidentUI, an Android tablet application designed to measure user-experienced ride comfort and record disengagement data for autonomous vehicles (AV) during test drives. The goal of our project was to develop an Android application to run on a peripheral tablet and communicate with the Drive Pegasus AGX, the AI Computing Platform for Nvidia's AV Level 2 Autonomy Solution Architecture [1], to detect AV disengagements and report ride comfort. We designed and developed an Android XML-based intuitive user interface for IncidentUI. The development of IncidentUI required a redesign of the system architecture by redeveloping the system communications protocol in Java and implementing the Protocol Buffers (Protobufs) in Java using the existing system Protobuf definitions. The final iteration of IncidentUI yielded the desired functionality while testing on an AV test drive. We also received positive feedback from Nvidia's AV Platform Team during our final IncidentUI demonstration.Comment: Previously embargoed by Nvidia. Nvidia owns the right

    Enabling Deep Neural Network Inferences on Resource-constraint Devices

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    Department of Computer Science and EngineeringWhile deep neural networks (DNN) are widely used on various devices, including resource-constraint devices such as IoT, AR/VR, and mobile devices, running DNN from resource-constrained devices remains challenging. There exist three approaches for DNN inferences on resource-constraint devices: 1) lightweight DNN for on-device computing, 2) offloading DNN inferences to a cloud server, and 3) split computing to utilize computation and network resources efficiently. Designing a lightweight DNN without compromising the accuracy of DNN is challenging due to a trade-off between latency and accuracy, that more computation is required to achieve higher accuracy. One solution to overcome this challenge is pre-processing to extract and transfer helpful information to achieve high accuracy of DNN. We design the pre-processing, which consists of three processes. The first process of pre-processing is finding out the best input source. The second process is the input-processing which extracts and contains important information for DNN inferences among the whole information gained from the input source. The last process is choosing or designing a suitable lightweight DNN for processed input. As an instance of how to apply the pre-processing, in Sec 2, we present a new transportation mode recognition system for smartphones called DeepVehicleSense, which aims at achieving three performance objectives: high accuracy, low latency, and low power consumption at once by exploiting sound characteristics captured from the built-in microphone while being on candidate transportations. To achieve high accuracy and low latency, DeepVehicleSense makes use of non-linear filters that can best extract the transportation sound samples. For the recognition of five different transportation modes, we design a deep learning-based sound classifier using a novel deep neural network architecture with multiple branches. Our staged inference technique can significantly reduce runtime and energy consumption while maintaining high accuracy for the majority of samples. Offloading DNN inferences to a server is a solution for DNN inferences on resource-constraint devices, but there is one concern about latency caused by data transmission. To reduce transmission latency, recent studies have tried to make this offloading process more efficient by compressing data to be offloaded. However, conventional compression techniques are designed for human beings, so they compress data to be possible to restore data, which looks like the original from the perspective of human eyes. As a result, the compressed data through the compression technique contains redundancy beyond the necessary information for DNN inference. In other words, the most fundamental question on extracting and offloading the minimal amount of necessary information that does not degrade the inference accuracy has remained unanswered. To answer the question, in Sec 3, we call such an ideal offloading semantic offloading and propose N-epitomizer, a new offloading framework that enables semantic offloading, thus achieving more reliable and timely inferences in highly-fluctuated or even low-bandwidth wireless networks. To realize N-epitomizer, we design an autoencoder-based scalable encoder trained to extract the most informative data and scale its output size to meet the latency and accuracy requirements of inferences over a network. Even though our proposed lightweight DNN and offloading framework with the essential information extractor achieve low latency while preserving DNN performance, they alone cannot realize latency-guaranteed DNN inferences. To realize latency-guaranteed DNN inferences, the computational complexity of the lightweight DNN and the compression performance of the encoder for offloading should be adaptively selected according to current computation resources and network conditions by utilizing the DNN's trade-off between computational complexity and DNN performance and the encoder's trade-off between compression performance and DNN performance. To this end, we propose a new framework for latency-guaranteed DNN inferences called LG-DI, which predicts DNN performance degradation given a latency budget in advance and utilizes the better method between the lightweight DNN and offloading with compression. As a result, our proposed framework for DNN inferences can guarantee latency regardless of changes in computation and network resources while maintaining DNN performance as much as possible.ope

    Towards a centralized multicore automotive system

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    Today’s automotive systems are inundated with embedded electronics to host chassis, powertrain, infotainment, advanced driver assistance systems, and other modern vehicle functions. As many as 100 embedded microcontrollers execute hundreds of millions of lines of code in a single vehicle. To control the increasing complexity in vehicle electronics and services, automakers are planning to consolidate different on-board automotive functions as software tasks on centralized multicore hardware platforms. However, these vehicle software services have different and contrasting timing, safety, and security requirements. Existing vehicle operating systems are ill-equipped to provide all the required service guarantees on a single machine. A centralized automotive system aims to tackle this by assigning software tasks to multiple criticality domains or levels according to their consequences of failures, or international safety standards like ISO 26262. This research investigates several emerging challenges in time-critical systems for a centralized multicore automotive platform and proposes a novel vehicle operating system framework to address them. This thesis first introduces an integrated vehicle management system (VMS), called DriveOS™, for a PC-class multicore hardware platform. Its separation kernel design enables temporal and spatial isolation among critical and non-critical vehicle services in different domains on the same machine. Time- and safety-critical vehicle functions are implemented in a sandboxed Real-time Operating System (OS) domain, and non-critical software is developed in a sandboxed general-purpose OS (e.g., Linux, Android) domain. To leverage the advantages of model-driven vehicle function development, DriveOS provides a multi-domain application framework in Simulink. This thesis also presents a real-time task pipeline scheduling algorithm in multiprocessors for communication between connected vehicle services with end-to-end guarantees. The benefits and performance of the overall automotive system framework are demonstrated with hardware-in-the-loop testing using real-world applications, car datasets and simulated benchmarks, and with an early-stage deployment in a production-grade luxury electric vehicle
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