Master of Science in Electrical Engineering, Cleveland State University, 2021, Washkewicz College of Engineering

In this thesis, we draw attention to the problem of cross-service attacks, that is, attacks that exploit information collected about users from one service to launch an attack on the same users on another service. With the increased deployment and use of what fundamentally are integrated-services networks, such as 4G/LTE networks and now 5G, we expect that cross-service attacks will become easier to stage and therefore more prevalent. As running example to illustrate the effectiveness and the potential impact of cross-service attacks we will use the problem of account association in 4G/LTE networks. Account association attacks aim at determining whether a target mobile phone number is associated with a particular online account. In the case of 4G/LTE, the adversary launches the account association attacks by sending SMS messages to the target phone number and analyzing patterns in traffic related to the online account. We evaluate the proposed attacks in both a local 4G/LTE testbed and a major commercial 4G/LTE network. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed attacks can successfully identify account association with close-to-zero false negative and false positive rates. Our experiments also illustrate that the proposed attacks can be launched in a way that the victim receives no indication of being under attack.

Committee: Ye Zhu (Committee Chair); Yongjain Fu (Committee Member); Sui-Tung Yau (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Engineering; Computer Science; Electrical Engineering; Information Technology; Technology

, Ohio University, 2007, Communication Theory and Process (Communication)

Universal telephone service was originally funded though a complex process of implicit cross-subsidization of local residential telephone rates from more profitable long distance and business customer service. Presently the funding is through explicit contributions from all telecommunications companies. This pool of funds is then redistributed to local telephone service providers to ensure that the goals of universal service are met. Since 2000 total telecommunications revenues have declined as have the eligible revenues for contributions to the Universal Service Fund. The taxation rate has increased on the remaining contribution base to insure adequate funding but new funding options should be considered. This research examines three funding mechanisms for universal service (i.e., taxes on telephone numbers, taxes on line carrying capacity, and reverse auctions) regarding their ability to generate revenue and their possible impacts on customers, technology, and the telecommunications network.

Committee: Phyllis Bernt (Advisor) Subjects:

MS, Kent State University, 2007, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Computer Science

Audio perception is highly susceptible to disturbance in temporal quality. In the event of congestion, audio datagrams suffer packet loss, delay and jitter. Compressed audio appears as one of the most delicate traffic-type to handle on the Internet. The recent advances in auditory perception promise opportunities where a perceptually clever adaptive audio system can respond to impending breakdown and support near flawless sound. However, the major problem is receiving fast feedback from the current Internet. Recently proposed TCP Interactive (iTCP) seems to offer some interesting opportunity to perceptual audio. This is an operational state equivalent to the conventional TCP except that applications can optionally subscribe and receive selected local end-point protocol events in real-time. In this thesis, we implemented a novel symbiotic perceptual audio streaming mechanism, that receives fast feedback from iTCP about congestion and then responds appropriately. This mechanism combines the quantization technique to accurately represent the audio signals without distortion. The adaptive system reduces the encoding target bit rate when congestion is detected which invariably reduces the delay and jitter faced by audio traffic in the network during congestion. We have tested it over the Internet. In this thesis, we highlight the performance of this system and report on the dramatic improvements in time-bounded streaming audio we observed.

Committee: Javed Khan (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering, Cleveland State University, 2009, Fenn College of Engineering

The increasing popularity of VoIP telephony has brought a lot of attention and concern over security and privacy issues of VoIP communication. This thesis proposesa new class of traffic analysis attacks to encrypted VoIP calls. The goal of these attacks is to detect speaker or speech of encrypted VoIP calls. The proposed traffic analysis attacks exploit silent suppression, an essential feature of VoIP telephony. These attacks are based on application-level features so that the attacks can detect the same speech or the same speaker of different VoIP calls made with different VoIP codecs. We evaluate the proposed attacks by extensive experiments over different type of networks including commercialized anonymity networks and campus networks. The experiments show that the proposed traffic analysis attacks can detect speaker and speech of encrypted VoIP calls with a high detection rate which is a great improvement comparing with random guess. With the help of intersection attacks, the detection rate for speaker detection can be increased. In order to shield the detrimental effect of this proposed attacks, a countermeasure is proposed to mitigate the proposed traffic analysis attacks.

Committee: Ye Zhu Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Vijaya Konangi Ph.D. (Committee Member); Pong Chu Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: