In recent years, the technological space experienced the proliferation of Generative AI models. A prominent type of this model is a language model-based chatbot. The primary function of these models is to generate answers to a question from an extensive database and create a stream of conversation at various levels of complexity. The database of these models encompasses diverse data type of text (e.g., ChatGPT), audio (e.g., PlayHT), or images (e.g., DALLE-2). The intricate process involves neural networks, which undergoes pre-training from the database, building result from architecture neural networks, refined tuning to creating coherent result, probability estimation to produce the correct context result, and generating and refinement as improvement to generated answers. This proposal aims to delve deep into the probability estimation process of the generative AI model. A specific focus is to predict an airborne object's trajectory to create an understanding of how to adapt and adjust robotic limbs and enable them to intercept and capture the thing with some degree of precision.

Today, all modern computing systems are undoubtedly vulnerable to numerous types of attacks that could be targeted toward any layer of the system from dedicated hardware to highly abstracted software. Unfortunately, many devices and systems naturally contain inadequately protected components or software modules that un- dermine their security as a whole. Additionally, security is heavily variable system to system, and has a huge dependence on adequate implementation and ongoing support from device and software manufacturers. To address these various security issues in a very general way, TrustGuard, a containment security system utilizing an external device called the Sentry that would verify the activity of the host machine and control all incoming/outgoing communication accordingly, was created. To do this, Trust- Guard uses cryptographic memory protection schemes, a small trusted hardware and software base, and recomputation and checking of application behavior running on the host machine at an instruction-by-instruction granularity before allowing exter- nal communication to occur. Currently, however, the TrustGuard system only allows for one 8-byte chunk to be sent or received externally at one time, limiting overall throughput, and heavily polluting the main system caches in the case of large data transfers. To combat this limitation, This thesis proposes a system to allow for ef- ficient communication of large batches of data at once. In particular, it does so by using a small dedicated cache and efficient tree traversal techniques to asynchronously verify large chunks of program memory in stream-like fashion. This thesis primarily serves to provide a design, proof-of-concept, and collection of important information that will help future students implement such a system.

With rapid developments in communication technologies and awareness of security and privacy risks online, Security and Privacy Enhancing Networks (SPENs) have become increasingly popular. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, workplaces encouraged employees to take additional security measures, such as VPNs. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study on website fingerprinting attacks. A comprehensive system model and threat model based on two types of SPENs (Virtual Private Networks and Tor Networks) are presented. Moreover, we demonstrate a website fingerprinting attack by ethically collecting website fetch data and analyzing the collected data using five different machine learning classification models including k nearest neighbors, decision tree, ada boost, and random forest. We find that SPENs are still vulnerable to website fingerprinting attacks which enable attackers to violate users’ behavioral privacy. However, it is not easy to get accurate results, especially over a large number of websites. Furthermore, we discuss a series of recommendations for SPENs to increase behavioral privacy for their customers. Finally, we cover a variety of directions that future work could take.

Previous work introduced TrustGuard, a design for a containment architecture that allows only the result of the correct execution of approved software to be outputted. A containment architecture prevents results from malicious hardware or software from being communicated externally. At the core of TrustGuard is a trusted, pluggable device that sits on the path between an untrusted processor and the outside world. This device, called the Sentry, is responsible for validating the correctness of all communication before it leaves the system. This thesis seeks to leverage the correctness guarantees that the Sentry provides to enable efficient secure communication between two systems each protected by their own Sentry. This thesis reviews the literature for methods of enabling secure communication between two computer-Sentry pairs. It categorizes the pieces of the solution into three sections: attestation, establishing a tunnel, and communicating securely. Attestation in this context provides evidence of identity. It proposes a new configurable design for a secure network architecture, which includes a new version of the Sentry with a hardware accelerator for secure symmetric encryption, ring oscillator-based physically unclonable functions, and random number generators for attestation and key generation. These design elements are then evaluated based on how they might affect the overall system in terms of resource constraints, performance impacts, and scalability.

Attacks against mobile systems have escalated over the past decade. There have been increases of fraud, platform attacks, and malware. The Internet of Things (IoT) offers a new attack vector for Cybercriminals. M2M contributes to the growing number of devices that use wireless systems for Internet connection. As new applications and platforms are created, old vulnerabilities are transferred to next-generation systems. There is a research gap that exists between the current approaches for security framework development and the understanding of how these new technologies are different and how they are similar. This gap exists because system designers, security architects, and users are not fully aware of security risks and how next-generation devices can jeopardize safety and personal privacy. Current techniques, for developing security requirements, do not adequately consider the use of new technologies, and this weakens countermeasure implementations. These techniques rely on security frameworks for requirements development. These frameworks lack a method for identifying next generation security concerns and processes for comparing, contrasting and evaluating non-human device security protections. This research presents a solution for this problem by offering a novel security framework that is focused on the study of the “functions and capabilities” of M2M devices and improves the systems development life cycle for the overall IoT ecosystem.

A próxima geração da Internet aponta para um cenário onde trilhões de pessoas e objetos estarão interconectados e acessíveis a qualquer momento e em qualquer lugar. Um dos pilares desta nova geração é o paradigma conhecido como Internet das Coisas, que tem atraído pesquisas em diferentes domínios, entre eles, saúde, indústria, logística, cidades inteligentes, casas inteligentes e agronegócio. No contexto do agronegócio, a Internet das Coisas tem avançado em aplicações de rastreabilidade das cadeias de suprimentos com produtos de alto valor agregado, por exemplo, a cadeia do vinho. Entretanto, o desenvolvimento de aplicações para rastreabilidade dessa cadeia não está suportado por uma arquitetura baseada em Internet das Coisas. Além disso, os sistemas de rastreabilidade das cadeias de suprimentos atuais não contemplam amplamente o paradigma da Internet das Coisas em sua premissa de interconexão entre os agentes da cadeia. Dessa forma, esta tese propõe uma arquitetura em camadas baseada no paradigma de Internet das Coisas para rastreabilidade da cadeia de suprimentos do vinho. Para isso foi realizado o levantamento de requisitos, a identificação dos interessados no sistema (stakeholders) suas preocupações, identificação dos atributos de qualidade e a relevância de cada um deles. De posse de uma arquitetura candidata foi implementado um sistema em um caso real para refinamento dos componentes da arquitetura. A avaliação da arquitetura proposta em diferentes parâmetros mostra sua adequação tanto ao paradigma de Internet das Coisas quanto às necessidades dos stakeholders da cadeia de suprimentos do vinho. Dessa forma é possível afirmar que os sistemas implementados a partir da arquitetura proposta tendem a ser escaláveis, seguros, adaptativos, disponíveis e que suportam a interconexão entre os agentes da cadeia de suprimentos, desde a produção do vinho até o seu descarte. / The next-generation Internet points to a scenario where trillions of objects and people are interconnected and accessible anytime and anywhere. One of the pillars of this new generation is the paradigm known as Internet of Things. This paradigm has attracted research in different domains, including, health, industry, logistics, smart cities, smart homes and agribusiness. In the context of agribusiness, the Internet of Things has advanced in applications of traceability of supply chains with products of high added value, for example, the wine chain. However, the development of applications for traceability in the wine supply chain is not supported by an architecture Internet of Things-based. In addition, current supply chain traceability systems do not broadly address the Internet of Things paradigm in its premise of interconnection among chain agents. Thus, this thesis proposes a layered architecture based on the Internet of Things paradigm for traceability of the wine supply chain. To do this, requirements were surveyed, the identification of the stakeholders in the system their concerns, identification of quality attributes and the relevance of each one of them. A candidate system was implemented in a real case for the refinement of architectural components. The evaluation of the architecture proposed in different parameters shows its adequacy both to the Internet paradigm of Things and to the needs of the stakeholders of the wine supply chain. In this way it is possible to affirm that the systems implemented from the proposed architecture are scalable, secure, adaptive, available and that support the interconnection between the agents of the supply chain, from its wine production to its disposal.

A próxima geração da Internet aponta para um cenário onde trilhões de pessoas e objetos estarão interconectados e acessíveis a qualquer momento e em qualquer lugar. Um dos pilares desta nova geração é o paradigma conhecido como Internet das Coisas, que tem atraído pesquisas em diferentes domínios, entre eles, saúde, indústria, logística, cidades inteligentes, casas inteligentes e agronegócio. No contexto do agronegócio, a Internet das Coisas tem avançado em aplicações de rastreabilidade das cadeias de suprimentos com produtos de alto valor agregado, por exemplo, a cadeia do vinho. Entretanto, o desenvolvimento de aplicações para rastreabilidade dessa cadeia não está suportado por uma arquitetura baseada em Internet das Coisas. Além disso, os sistemas de rastreabilidade das cadeias de suprimentos atuais não contemplam amplamente o paradigma da Internet das Coisas em sua premissa de interconexão entre os agentes da cadeia. Dessa forma, esta tese propõe uma arquitetura em camadas baseada no paradigma de Internet das Coisas para rastreabilidade da cadeia de suprimentos do vinho. Para isso foi realizado o levantamento de requisitos, a identificação dos interessados no sistema (stakeholders) suas preocupações, identificação dos atributos de qualidade e a relevância de cada um deles. De posse de uma arquitetura candidata foi implementado um sistema em um caso real para refinamento dos componentes da arquitetura. A avaliação da arquitetura proposta em diferentes parâmetros mostra sua adequação tanto ao paradigma de Internet das Coisas quanto às necessidades dos stakeholders da cadeia de suprimentos do vinho. Dessa forma é possível afirmar que os sistemas implementados a partir da arquitetura proposta tendem a ser escaláveis, seguros, adaptativos, disponíveis e que suportam a interconexão entre os agentes da cadeia de suprimentos, desde a produção do vinho até o seu descarte. / The next-generation Internet points to a scenario where trillions of objects and people are interconnected and accessible anytime and anywhere. One of the pillars of this new generation is the paradigm known as Internet of Things. This paradigm has attracted research in different domains, including, health, industry, logistics, smart cities, smart homes and agribusiness. In the context of agribusiness, the Internet of Things has advanced in applications of traceability of supply chains with products of high added value, for example, the wine chain. However, the development of applications for traceability in the wine supply chain is not supported by an architecture Internet of Things-based. In addition, current supply chain traceability systems do not broadly address the Internet of Things paradigm in its premise of interconnection among chain agents. Thus, this thesis proposes a layered architecture based on the Internet of Things paradigm for traceability of the wine supply chain. To do this, requirements were surveyed, the identification of the stakeholders in the system their concerns, identification of quality attributes and the relevance of each one of them. A candidate system was implemented in a real case for the refinement of architectural components. The evaluation of the architecture proposed in different parameters shows its adequacy both to the Internet paradigm of Things and to the needs of the stakeholders of the wine supply chain. In this way it is possible to affirm that the systems implemented from the proposed architecture are scalable, secure, adaptive, available and that support the interconnection between the agents of the supply chain, from its wine production to its disposal.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine multi-core technology. Multi-core architecture provides benefits such as less power consumption, scalability, and improved application performance enabled by thread-level parallelism.

Future computing will require significant development in new computing device paradigms. This is motivated by CMOS devices reaching their technological limits, the need for non-Von Neumann architectures as well as the energy constraints of wearable technologies and embedded processors. The first device proposal, an energy-efficient voltage-controlled domain wall device for implementing an artificial neuron and synapse is analyzed using micromagnetic modeling. By controlling the domain wall motion utilizing spin transfer or spin orbit torques in association with voltage generated strain control of perpendicular magnetic anisotropy in the presence of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI), different positions of the domain wall are realized in the free layer of a magnetic tunnel junction to program different synaptic weights. Additionally, an artificial neuron can be realized by combining this DW device with a CMOS buffer. The second neuromorphic device proposal is inspired by the brain. Membrane potential of many neurons oscillate in a subthreshold damped fashion and fire when excited by an input frequency that nearly equals their Eigen frequency. We investigate theoretical implementation of such “resonate-and-fire” neurons by utilizing the magnetization dynamics of a fixed magnetic skyrmion based free layer of a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ). Voltage control of magnetic anisotropy or voltage generated strain results in expansion and shrinking of a skyrmion core that mimics the subthreshold oscillation. Finally, we show that such resonate and fire neurons have potential application in coupled nanomagnetic oscillator based associative memory arrays.

As a major component of a computing system, memory has been a key performance and power consumption bottleneck in computer system design. While processor speeds have been kept rising dramatically, the overall computing performance improvement of the entire system is limited by how fast the memory can feed instructions/data to processing units (i.e. so-called memory wall problem). The increasing transistor density and surging access demands from a rapidly growing number of processing cores also significantly elevated the power consumption of the memory system. In addition, the interference of memory access from different applications and processing cores significantly degrade the computation predictability, which is essential to ensure timing specifications in real-time system design. The recent IC technologies (such as 3D-IC technology) and emerging data-intensive real-time applications (such as Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things) further amplify these challenges. We believe that it is not simply desirable but necessary to adopt a joint CPU/Memory resource management framework to deal with these grave challenges. In this dissertation, we focus on studying how to schedule fixed-priority hard real-time tasks with memory impacts taken into considerations. We target on the fixed-priority real-time scheduling scheme since this is one of the most commonly used strategies for practical real-time applications. Specifically, we first develop an approach that takes into consideration not only the execution time variations with cache allocations but also the task period relationship, showing a significant improvement in the feasibility of the system. We further study the problem of how to guarantee timing constraints for hard real-time systems under CPU and memory thermal constraints. We first study the problem under an architecture model with a single core and its main memory individually packaged. We develop a thermal model that can capture the thermal interaction between the processor and memory, and incorporate the periodic resource sever model into our scheduling framework to guarantee both the timing and thermal constraints. We further extend our research to the multi-core architectures with processing cores and memory devices integrated into a single 3D platform. To our best knowledge, this is the first research that can guarantee hard deadline constraints for real-time tasks under temperature constraints for both processing cores and memory devices. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheduling can improve significantly the feasibility of hard real-time systems under thermal constraints.