Teresa Nicole Brooks

Teresa Nicole Brooks

This paper explores using a Long short-term memory (LSTM) based sequence autoencoder to learn interesting features for detecting surveillance aircraft using ADS-B flight data. An aircraft periodically broadcasts ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast) data to ground receivers. The ability of LSTM networks to model varying length time series data and remember dependencies that span across events makes it an ideal candidate for implementing a sequence autoencoder for ADS-B data because of its possible variable length time series, irregular sampling and dependencies that span across events.

Teresa Nicole Brooks

Automated text detection is a difficult computer vision task. In order to accurately detect and identity text in an image or video, two major problems must be addressed. The primary problem is implementing a robust and reliable method for distinguishing text vs non-text regions in images and videos. Part of the difficulty stems from the almost unlimited combinations of fonts, lighting conditions, distortions, and other variations that can be found in images and videos. This paper explores key properties of two popular and proven methods for implementing text detection; maximum stable external regions (MSER) and stroke width variation.

Teresa Nicole Brooks

Software is everywhere, from mission critical systems such as industrial power stations, pacemakers and even household appliances. This growing dependence on technology and the increasing complexity software has serious security implications as it means we are potentially surrounded by software that contain exploitable vulnerabilities. These challenges have made binary analysis an important area of research in computer science and has emphasized the need for building automated analysis systems that can operate at scale, speed and efficacy; all while performing with the skill of a human expert. Though great progress has been made in this area of research, there remains limitations and open challenges to be addressed. Recognizing this need, DARPA sponsored the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC), a competition to showcase the current state of the art in systems that perform; automated vulnerability detection, exploit generation and software patching. This paper is a survey of the vulnerability detection and exploit generation techniques, underlying technologies and related works of two of the winning systems Mayhem and Mechanical Phish.