Research

– UNDER CONSTRUCTION –

The projects listed below are no longer being worked on, but are included here for archival purposes + highlighting my background across various subject areas.

Undergraduate Research

Optimizing Mutation Testing Through Targeted Mutation Operator Selection Using Conditional Coverage (Fall 2022 - Spring 2023)

Steven Ngo, Ayaan Kazerouni

This was a project where we studied what types of mutation operators within mutation testing survive under varying kinds of test case suite coverage. We aimed to identify a smaller subset of operators depending on the method being analyzed, which can then be focused on and provided to developers testing their code through a tool or development plug-in.

Modeling Human-Cyber Interactions in Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical/Industrial Control Systems (Summer 2022)

Steven Ngo, Dave DeAngelis, Luis Garcia

Abstract: Safety-critical cyber-physical and industrial control systems (CPS/ICS) such as electrical power grids and water treatment plants are prone to external attacks and internal mistakes or threats. Still, research in this area does not involve high-fidelity human models in their CPS state estimation models. We provide a starting point to modeling the expansiveness of human behavior in CPS by proposing Cyber-Human Interaction Modeling for Cyber-Physical Systems (CHIMPS), a novel decision-making-based process to explicitly integrate human models in the design and implementation of CPS. We present a use case of our process focusing on safety-critical ICS that simulates a human ICS operator maintaining a water treatment plant.

This project was started during summer 2022 as a part of USC Information Sciences Institute’s Research Experience for Undergraduates (NSF-funded). A 6-page version was submitted to the REU Workshop on Networking and Systems 2022, co-located with the IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Smart Systems 2022, and our work was revised and accepted for a 2-page poster paper version.

XSOC CORP Cryptographic Benchmarking (Winter 2021 - Spring 2022)

Steven Ngo, Zachary Peterson

I assisted Dr. Peterson with cryptographic benchmarking of one of XSOC CORP’s products - limited information available to the public, contact me if any further info is desired.

Software Security Analysis on Internet-of-Things Applications (Summer 2020)

Steven Ngo, Phoenix (Dongfeng) Fang

Abstract: In this paper, we present a software security analysis on Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. We first present a system model of an IoT system from a software perspective. Based on the proposed system model, we discuss the software attack models and security objectives. Software security analysis is presented. Based on the software security analysis, we propose a software complexity and information score framework. A smart-home case study is presented to show our proposed framework can be used to analyze the security of the system.

This project was started during summer 2020 as a part of Cal Poly SLO College of Engineering’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program, and it served to be more of an exploratory project into the areas of IoT and its software security aspects with it being my first research experience and exposure to forming my own research interests and directions. The linked paper was submitted to IEEE International Conference on Communications 2021, and we received feedback on improving our methodology and framing of our novel contributions. My work on it was put on hold when I took on teaching assistant responsibilities.