Botnets are networks of computers which have been compromised by malicious software which enables a remotely located adversary to control them and focus their collective power on specific tasks. Botnets pose a significant global threat, with tangible political, economic and military ramifications and have resultingly become a field of significant interest within the cyber-security research community. While a number of effective defence techniques have been devised for botnets utilizing centralized command and control infrastructures, few of these techniques are suitable for defending against larger-scale peer-to-peer (P2P) botnets. In contrast, the sybil attack, combined with index poisoning is an established defence technique for P2P botnets. During a sybil attack, fake bots (\ie sybils) are inserted into the botnet. These sybils distribute fake commands to bots, causing them not to carry out illicit activities. Bots also then unwittingly redistribute the fake commands to other bots in the botnet. This work uses packet-level simulation of a Kademlia-based P2P botnet to evaluate 1) the impact that the location of sybils within the underlying network topology can have on the effectiveness of sybil attacks and 2) several potential optimizations to the placement of sybils within the underlying network topology. / Graduate / 0537 / 0544 / 0984

Shared ride systems match the travel demand of transport a client with the supply of vehicles, or hosts, so that the client find rides to their destinations. A peer-to-peer shared ride system allows a client to find rides in an ad-hoc manner, by negotiating directly with nearby hosts via radio-based communication. Such a peer-to-peer shared ride system has to deal with various types of hosts, such as private cars, taxicabs and mass transit vehicles. Agents, i.e. a client and hosts, have diverse behaviors in such systems. Their different behaviors affect the negotiation process, and consequently the travel choices. Preliminary research (Winter et al. 2005) has investigated peer-to-peer shared ride systems with homogeneous hosts and immobile client. This thesis extends their work to multiple types of agents. It focuses on what are typical agent behaviors in peer-to-peer shared ride systems, and how these behaviors affect negotiation processes in a dynamic transport environment. (For complete abstract open document)

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on August 19, 2009) Includes bibliographical references.

Mannheim, Univ., Diss., 2002.

Stuttgart, Univ., Studienarbeit, 2007.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Supervisor: Simon S. Lam. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 64-67). Also available in electronic version.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 214-227) and index. Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Techn. University, Diss., 2005--Darmstadt.

KOŠÍČEK, M. Support for automated cross-platform sharing and files synchronization. Brno, 2013. This thesis examines the issue of sharing and synchronizing files between different types of devices. It deals with the possible tools and technologies for the realization of automated sharing. It performs analysis of applications to share data and on the basis of this knowledge determines the appropriate procedures and techniques for the implementation application for data sharing.