Mike Borowczak

Verified

Mike verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Mike verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• Ph.D. Computer Science and Engineering
• Professor (Associate) at University of Central Florida

Side-channel attacks target system implementation statistics, such as the electricity required to run a cryptographic function. Deriving cryptographic keys, such as AES keys, has become such a simplified process that extracting sensitive information from an otherwise secure algorithm requires only a $35USD microcontroller. While cryptographic algor...

Determination of an adequate level of security and providing subsequent mechanisms to achieve it, is one of the most pressing problems regarding embedded computing devices. While there are some solutions available for resource-rich computer systems, direct application of these solutions to resource-constrained environments are often unfeasible. The...

With the rising concerns over privacy and fairness in machine learning, privacy-preserving fair machine learning has received tremendous attention in recent years. However, most existing fair models still need to collect sensitive demographic data, which may be impossible given privacy regulations. To address the dilemma between model fairness and...

The measure of diffusion, the property of dissipating patterns and statistical structures in cryptographic transformations, serves as a valuable heuristic for assessing the obscurity of patterns that could lead to collisions. As with many cryptographic hash functions, SHA-256 is thought to exhibit the property of diffusion. While SHA-256’s diffuse...

A computer science camp for pre-collegiate students was operated during the summers of 2022 and 2023. The effect the camp had on attitudes was quantitatively assessed using a survey instrument. However, enrollment at the summer camp was small, which meant the well-known Pearson's Chi-Squared to measure the significance of results was not applied. T...

The von-Neumann architecture has a bottleneck which limits the speed at which data can be made available for computation. To combat this problem, novel paradigms for computing are being developed. One such paradigm, known as in-memory computing, interleaves computation with the storage of data within the same circuits. MAGIC, or Memristor Aided Log...

Power-based Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) began with visual-based examinations and has progressed to utilize data-driven statistical analysis. Two distinct classifications of these methods have emerged over the years; those focused on leakage exploitation and those dedicated to leakage detection. This work primarily focuses on a leakage detection-bas...

The control flow of a program represents valuable and sensitive information; in embedded systems, this information can take on even greater value as the resources, control flow, and execution of the system have more constraints and functional implications than modern desktop environments. Early works have demonstrated the possibility of recovering...

In recent years, Wyoming has developed Computer Science (CS) standards for adoption and use within K-12 classrooms. These standards, adopted in January of 2022, go into effect for the 2022-2023 school year. The University of Wyoming has offered two different computer science week-long professional developments for teachers. Many K-12 teachers do no...

For 2 weeks in the summer of 2018, K-12 STEM teachers ( n = 40) attended a professional development (PD) that included four sessions focused on computer science modeling with follow-up academic year sessions; however, overall, the teachers did not meet expectations about what modeling means or how to utilize it. To examine why, the authors looked a...

Finite state machines represent a fundamental component of all electronic circuit design yet their development, implementation, and refinement have often been constrained toward power and area optimization requirements of circuits. Given the present-day technological advances, many lightweight and low-power circuits are no longer constrained by phy...

Kevin Costner: America's Teacher examines the role of Costner in educational settings domestically and abroad. Costner’s career over the past 35 years has seen ups and downs: his movies grossed 2 billion dollars in ticket sales worldwide and he has he won/been nominated for several Academy Awards but he also experienced critical and box office fail...

Computer science, cybersecurity education, and microcredentials are becoming more pervasive in all levels of the educational system. The purpose of this study was partnering with precollegiate teachers: (1) to investigate the self-efficacy of 30 precollegiate teacher participants towards computer science before, during, and after three iterations o...

Many smart city applications rely on machine learning; however, adversarial perturbations can be injected into training data to cause models to return skewed results. Jangseung is a preprocessor limits the effects of poisoning attacks without impeding on accuracy. Jangseung was created to guard support vector machines from poisoned data by utilizin...

Climate change and global warming are the significant challenges of the new century. A viable solution to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions is via a globally incentivized market mechanism proposed in the Kyoto protocol. In this view, the carbon dioxide (or other greenhouse gases) emission is considered a commodity, forming a carbon trading system....

The SHARKS protocol enables agents to circle a two-dimensional target or ensphere a three-dimensional target through two simple distributed algorithms that ensure that the drones are equally dispersed from each other and maintain a specified distance from a target. An attack vector was identified in previous work that corrals agents and inhibits th...

This study compares three pre-collegiate teacher professional learning and development (PLD) integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) experiences framed in astronomy. The study is set in the western United States (USA) and involves 60 pre-collegiate teachers (in the USA these are K-12 teachers) over the course of three ye...

Research on innovative, integrated outreach programs guided three separate week-long outreach camps held across two summers (2018 and 2019). These camps introduced computer science through real-world applications and hands-on activities, each dealing with cybersecurity principles. The camps utilized low-cost hardware and free software to provide a...

Distributed systems disseminate emergent behaviors across an interconnected group of lightweight agents. The SHARKS protocol (Secure, Heterogeneous, Autonomous, and Rotational Knowledge for Swarms) allows for a robotic swarm to encircle/ensphere a target. Motivated by security and resiliency, the SHARKS protocol addresses traditional vulnerabilitie...

The decreased size and cost of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) has enabled the use of swarms of unmanned autonomous vehicles to accomplish a variety of tasks. By utilizing swarming behaviors, it is possible to efficiently accomplish coordinated tasks while minimizing per-drone computational requirements. Some dro...

Most current authentication mechanisms rely on static initial verification of the user; however, such authentication mechanisms do not verify user identities on already unlocked systems. Spy Hunter, a continuous authentication mechanism, constantly examines user's keystroke timing dynamics to assess the user's identity. Also, Spy Hunter preserves t...

The decreased size and cost of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) has enabled the use of swarms of unmanned autonomous vehicles to accomplish a variety of tasks. By utilizing swarming behaviors, it is possible to efficiently accomplish coordinated tasks while minimizing per-drone computational requirements. Some dro...

Power side-channel attacks have been shown to be effective against recovering protected information from integrated circuits. Existing defense methods are expensive in area, power or both. Small-scale ICs used in embedded systems and IoT devices are expected to be safe and secure, and yet cannot afford the area and power overheads of the sophistica...

Automation and mechanization require students to master the utilization and creation of new technology. Vital for potential careers, tomorrow's professionals require technological understanding to remain competitive in a job market driven by engineering advances. Regardless, most K-12 schools in the US and other countries do not currently other Com...

Many institutions across the country suffer from a high attrition rate in their engineering programs, especially between the freshman and sophomore levels. A summer-long research and development experience can aid undergraduate mechanical engineering students in gaining and reinforcing skills critical to success in their programs. The research oppo...

There is a clear call for pre-collegiate students in the United States to become literate in computer science (CS) concepts and practices through integrated, authentic experiences and instruction. Yet, a majority of in-service and pre-service pre-collegiate teachers (instructing children aged five to 18) lack the fundamental skills and self-efficac...

Security‐centric components and systems, such as System‐on‐Chip early‐boot communication protocols and ultra‐specific lightweight devices, require a departure from minimalist design constructs. The need for built‐in protection mechanisms, at all levels of design, is paramount to providing cost‐effective, efficient, secure systems. In this work, Sec...

Emerging technology demands reliable authentication mechanisms, particularly in interconnected systems. Current systems rely on a single moment of authentication, however continuous authentication systems assess a users identity utilizing a constant biometric analysis. Spy Hunter, a continuous authentication mechanism uses keystroke dynamics to val...

This article explores one group’s use of action research (AR) and lesson study in three US university-level computer science courses affecting 85 undergraduate computer science and engineering students. It offers an overview of three areas including AR, lesson study, and engineering soft skills. The research group identified a problem: undergraduat...

This study bridges discipline silos between science courses and computer science by indicating how they fit into and complement each other. A study of eight K12 teachers and 26 K12 secondary students participated in a GenCyber (cybersecurity) camp for a week during July 2018. External evaluations of the camp show its success and how cybersecurity f...

Although you may think of our technological world as a giant web of elegantly interconnected devices, the reality is a collection of messy overlapping networks, all communicating simultaneously on disparate infrastructural backbones. To communicate within the chaos today, specific components may be forced to share space on dedicated local networks,...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), referenced as drones, have advanced to consumer adoption for hobby and business use. Drone applications, such as infrastructure technology, security mechanisms, and resource delivery, are just the starting point. More complex tasks are possible through the use of UAV swarms. These tasks increase the potential impact...

Employee theft and dishonesty is a major contributor to loss in the retail industry. Retailers have reported the need for more automated analytic tools to assess the liability of their employees. In this work, we train and optimize several machine learning models for regression prediction and analysis on this data, which will help retailers identif...

Employee theft and dishonesty is a major contributor to loss in the retail industry. Retailers have reported the need for more automated analytic tools to assess the liability of their employees. In this work, we train and optimize several machine learning models for regression prediction and analysis on this data, which will help retailers identif...

This article showcases STEM as an interdisciplinary field in which the disciplines strengthen and support each other (not as separate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines). The authors focus on an open-ended, complex problem—water quality—as the primary teaching and learning task. The participants, middle school female stud...

On-line privacy is of major public concern. Unfortunately, for the average consumer, there is no simple mechanism to browse the Internet privately on multiple devices. Most available Internet privacy mechanisms are either expensive, not readily available, untrusted, or simply provide trivial information masking. We propose that the simplest, most e...

This work introduces CHIRP - an algorithm for communication between ultra-portable heterogeneous IoT devices with a type of round-robin protection mechanism. This algorithm is presented both in its basic form as well as in a secured form in order to secure and maintain trust boundaries and communication within specific groups of heterogeneous devic...

The adoption of " new" and "untested " pedagogical approaches within collegiate classrooms discounts that these approaches are anything but new, and that a trove of data and lessons learned is already available. The work in K12 classrooms and professional development is often ignored rather than leveraged as a force multiplier as a starting point i...

This paper, based on pre/post test scores of engineering student responses to ABET soft skill knowledge, explores the possibilities for freshman engineering students to engage meaningfully in six of the 11 outcomes for engineering graduates. With a focus on multi-disciplinary teamwork, professional ethical responsibility, effective communication, e...

The retail industry is a data-rich environment, especially in the case of risk management. However, much of this risk management data is not used to its full potential and there exists a need for more automated analytic tools. Supervised learning solutions are not enticing due to the difficulty of providing meaningful labels for these types of data...

Cloud-based implementations of interactive code notebooks and multi-agent simulators enable K12 and collegiate level instructors to incorporate computer science (CS) into their existing science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses and professional developments (PDs). Three different K16+instructor-learner interactions are highlig...

This paper provides a view of 22 K12 teachers' expectations versus the actuality of immersion into an engineering education computer science (CS) project during a Math/Science Partnership (MSP) grant called RAMPED, which was a 16-day, yearlong MSP grant. The CS session using NetLogo was selected for focused examination. NetLogo is a multi-agent sim...

A presentation to a mixed audience of business leaders from across Wyoming.

Currently, computer science (CS) is emphasized in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) standards and curricula in K-12 settings. The authors of this paper argue that K-12 teachers can learn basic CS fundamentals through exploration with a free, online programming technology tool called NetLogo and without structured, lecture-ori...

Computer science (CS) and engineering concepts are often absent from education-led initiatives. This study examined the views of 23 pre-service teachers (PST) regarding CS/engineering concepts. Findings show pre-service teachers (PSTs) have below average content knowledge in part recognition and skill sets, as well in use of crosscutting construct...

Can you explain the basics of computing or computer science (CS)? Most computing experts have no problem talking to their peers about CS, but can they teach novices? Teaching and interacting with students without any prior scaffolding or exposure to CS concepts is outside the expertise area of most CS content experts and STEM faculty. This work hig...

A total group of 41 K-12 science, mathematics, and technology (STEM) in-service teachers chose to participate in a Math and Science Partnership grant for professional development (PD), named Launching Astronomy: Standards and STEM Integration or LASSI (resources found at UWpd.org/LASSI) for 25-days during the summer and academic year that involved...

Twenty-three pre-collegiate educators of elementary students (ages 5-10 years) and secondary students (ages 11-18 years) attended a two-week science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) astronomy focused professional development in the summer of 2015 with activities focused on authentic science experiences, inquiry, and partnership buil...

This article details a new, free resource for continuous video assessment named YouDemo. The tool enables real time rating of uploaded YouTube videos for use in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and beyond. The authors discuss trends of preservice science teachers’ assessments of self- and peer-created videos using...

Two individuals, one high school teacher and one engineering graduate student, created a lesson in an attempt to expand traditional lessons and instruct the graduate student on effective pedagogy. This article outlines the integrated high school lesson showcasing all the aspects of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as well as...

The thale cress Arabidopsis thaliana is a powerful model organism for studying a wide variety of biological processes. Recent advances in sequencing technology have resulted in a wealth of information describing numerous aspects of A. thaliana genome function. However, there is a relative paucity of computational systems for efficiently and effecti...

The current push to educate highly qualified and productive Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) professionals typically culminates in collegiate capstone projects. These group projects attempt to prepare STEM professionals for entry into the real world as they exemplify early career group dynamics and expose the reality that com...

As silicon-based technology feature sizes continue to decrease and designs remain susceptible to novel attacks designers face competing goals when creating secure, low power, integrated circuits (ICs). Often, low power designs rely on heavy minimization and optimization procedures while many secure designs use low-level duplication mechanisms to th...

We propose a high level methodology for Finite State Machine (FSM) protection on a set of insecure FSMs. Hardware controllers, from those used in low-power authentication devices to those coordinating UAVs, as well as stream-based encoders rely on classically derived and implemented FSMs. As the proliferation of electronic devices that process sens...

Two activities, one on heat/work and one on dynamic equilibrium, are described for three high school classes (n=55) in the USA. The curriculum addressed showcases strategies to use with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students. The two lessons described follow the context ACS method (Application, Career opportunities, and S...

Is the field of computer science and engineering a strict discipline or an art form? The answer is both. Computer science and engineering concepts are typically found almost exclusively in collegiate engineering and technology programs. Given its importance across the 21st Century workforce, arguably these concepts should be taught at all pre-colle...

The emergence and proliferation of Smart Cards and other security-centric technologies require ongoing advancement in secure-IC design. We propose advanced IC protection from Differential Power Analysis attack though a hybrid-logic style based on Complementary Pass-transistor and Dynamic and Differential Logic (DDL) in conjunction with a synthesis...

Described are a self-protecting storage device and method that can be used to monitor attempts to access protected information. Access is allowed for authorized host systems and devices while unauthorized access is prevented. Authorization use includes inserting a watermark into access commands, such as I/O requests, sent to the storage device. The...

This paper describes a methodology for safety-centric development of distributed embedded avionics realized as sense-actuate-control (SAC) networks. The methodology has consists of two parts. First, formal methods are used in defining and deriving families of SAC node architectures. This methodology eliminates redundant verification and validation...

The modeling and analysis of a USB storage device with a novel protection mechanism is described. The USB storage device contains an active monitoring subsystem that decodes and analyzes an encoded request stream has been developed by Clifton Labs. However, before moving to fabrication, there are several design parameters that need to be explored a...

We show that the ability of a lazy language, like Haskell, to allow procedures to lazily generate a stream of tokens can be added to ANSI C++ merely by writing code in a style which uses classes to implement function closures. Coding in this style provides an easy way to handle infinite streams in C++, results in application layer implementations t...