6,888 research outputs found

    The Viability and Potential Consequences of IoT-Based Ransomware

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    With the increased threat of ransomware and the substantial growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) market, there is significant motivation for attackers to carry out IoT-based ransomware campaigns. In this thesis, the viability of such malware is tested. As part of this work, various techniques that could be used by ransomware developers to attack commercial IoT devices were explored. First, methods that attackers could use to communicate with the victim were examined, such that a ransom note was able to be reliably sent to a victim. Next, the viability of using "bricking" as a method of ransom was evaluated, such that devices could be remotely disabled unless the victim makes a payment to the attacker. Research was then performed to ascertain whether it was possible to remotely gain persistence on IoT devices, which would improve the efficacy of existing ransomware methods, and provide opportunities for more advanced ransomware to be created. Finally, after successfully identifying a number of persistence techniques, the viability of privacy-invasion based ransomware was analysed. For each assessed technique, proofs of concept were developed. A range of devices -- with various intended purposes, such as routers, cameras and phones -- were used to test the viability of these proofs of concept. To test communication hijacking, devices' "channels of communication" -- such as web services and embedded screens -- were identified, then hijacked to display custom ransom notes. During the analysis of bricking-based ransomware, a working proof of concept was created, which was then able to remotely brick five IoT devices. After analysing the storage design of an assortment of IoT devices, six different persistence techniques were identified, which were then successfully tested on four devices, such that malicious filesystem modifications would be retained after the device was rebooted. When researching privacy-invasion based ransomware, several methods were created to extract information from data sources that can be commonly found on IoT devices, such as nearby WiFi signals, images from cameras, or audio from microphones. These were successfully implemented in a test environment such that ransomable data could be extracted, processed, and stored for later use to blackmail the victim. Overall, IoT-based ransomware has not only been shown to be viable but also highly damaging to both IoT devices and their users. While the use of IoT-ransomware is still very uncommon "in the wild", the techniques demonstrated within this work highlight an urgent need to improve the security of IoT devices to avoid the risk of IoT-based ransomware causing havoc in our society. Finally, during the development of these proofs of concept, a number of potential countermeasures were identified, which can be used to limit the effectiveness of the attacking techniques discovered in this PhD research

    Identifying and responding to people with mild learning disabilities in the probation service

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    It has long been recognised that, like many other individuals, people with learningdisabilities find their way into the criminal justice system. This fact is not disputed. Whathas been disputed, however, is the extent to which those with learning disabilities arerepresented within the various agencies of the criminal justice system and the ways inwhich the criminal justice system (and society) should address this. Recently, social andlegislative confusion over the best way to deal with offenders with learning disabilities andmental health problems has meant that the waters have become even more muddied.Despite current government uncertainty concerning the best way to support offenders withlearning disabilities, the probation service is likely to continue to play a key role in thesupervision of such offenders. The three studies contained herein aim to clarify the extentto which those with learning disabilities are represented in the probation service, toexamine the effectiveness of probation for them and to explore some of the ways in whichprobation could be adapted to fit their needs.Study 1 and study 2 showed that around 10% of offenders on probation in Kent appearedto have an IQ below 75, putting them in the bottom 5% of the general population. Study 3was designed to assess some of the support needs of those with learning disabilities in theprobation service, finding that many of the materials used by the probation service arelikely to be too complex for those with learning disabilities to use effectively. To addressthis, a model for service provision is tentatively suggested. This is based on the findings ofthe three studies and a pragmatic assessment of what the probation service is likely to becapable of achieving in the near future

    On the Mechanism of Building Core Competencies: a Study of Chinese Multinational Port Enterprises

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    This study aims to explore how Chinese multinational port enterprises (MNPEs) build their core competencies. Core competencies are firms’special capabilities and sources to gain sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) in marketplace, and the concept led to extensive research and debates. However, few studies include inquiries about the mechanisms of building core competencies in the context of Chinese MNPEs. Accordingly, answers were sought to three research questions: 1. What are the core competencies of the Chinese MNPEs? 2. What are the mechanisms that the Chinese MNPEs use to build their core competencies? 3. What are the paths that the Chinese MNPEs pursue to build their resources bases? The study adopted a multiple-case study design, focusing on building mechanism of core competencies with RBV. It selected purposively five Chinese leading MNPEs and three industry associations as Case Companies. The study revealed three main findings. First, it identified three generic core competencies possessed by Case Companies, i.e., innovation in business models and operations, utilisation of technologies, and acquisition of strategic resources. Second, it developed the conceptual framework of the Mechanism of Building Core Competencies (MBCC), which is a process of change of collective learning in effective and efficient utilization of resources of a firm in response to critical events. Third, it proposed three paths to build core competencies, i.e., enhancing collective learning, selecting sustainable processes, and building resource base. The study contributes to the knowledge of core competencies and RBV in three ways: (1) presenting three generic core competencies of the Chinese MNPEs, (2) proposing a new conceptual framework to explain how Chinese MNPEs build their core competencies, (3) suggesting a solid anchor point (MBCC) to explain the links among resources, core competencies, and SCA. The findings set benchmarks for Chinese logistics industry and provide guidelines to build core competencies

    Discovering the hidden structure of financial markets through bayesian modelling

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    Understanding what is driving the price of a financial asset is a question that is currently mostly unanswered. In this work we go beyond the classic one step ahead prediction and instead construct models that create new information on the behaviour of these time series. Our aim is to get a better understanding of the hidden structures that drive the moves of each financial time series and thus the market as a whole. We propose a tool to decompose multiple time series into economically-meaningful variables to explain the endogenous and exogenous factors driving their underlying variability. The methodology we introduce goes beyond the direct model forecast. Indeed, since our model continuously adapts its variables and coefficients, we can study the time series of coefficients and selected variables. We also present a model to construct the causal graph of relations between these time series and include them in the exogenous factors. Hence, we obtain a model able to explain what is driving the move of both each specific time series and the market as a whole. In addition, the obtained graph of the time series provides new information on the underlying risk structure of this environment. With this deeper understanding of the hidden structure we propose novel ways to detect and forecast risks in the market. We investigate our results with inferences up to one month into the future using stocks, FX futures and ETF futures, demonstrating its superior performance according to accuracy of large moves, longer-term prediction and consistency over time. We also go in more details on the economic interpretation of the new variables and discuss the created graph structure of the market.Open Acces

    From wallet to mobile: exploring how mobile payments create customer value in the service experience

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    This study explores how mobile proximity payments (MPP) (e.g., Apple Pay) create customer value in the service experience compared to traditional payment methods (e.g. cash and card). The main objectives were firstly to understand how customer value manifests as an outcome in the MPP service experience, and secondly to understand how the customer activities in the process of using MPP create customer value. To achieve these objectives a conceptual framework is built upon the Grönroos-Voima Value Model (Grönroos and Voima, 2013), and uses the Theory of Consumption Value (Sheth et al., 1991) to determine the customer value constructs for MPP, which is complimented with Script theory (Abelson, 1981) to determine the value creating activities the consumer does in the process of paying with MPP. The study uses a sequential exploratory mixed methods design, wherein the first qualitative stage uses two methods, self-observations (n=200) and semi-structured interviews (n=18). The subsequent second quantitative stage uses an online survey (n=441) and Structural Equation Modelling analysis to further examine the relationships and effect between the value creating activities and customer value constructs identified in stage one. The academic contributions include the development of a model of mobile payment services value creation in the service experience, introducing the concept of in-use barriers which occur after adoption and constrains the consumers existing use of MPP, and revealing the importance of the mobile in-hand momentary condition as an antecedent state. Additionally, the customer value perspective of this thesis demonstrates an alternative to the dominant Information Technology approaches to researching mobile payments and broadens the view of technology from purely an object a user interacts with to an object that is immersed in consumers’ daily life

    The Impact of a Play Intervention on the Social-Emotional Development of Preschool Children in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

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    Practitioners working with children have emphasized that play is vital to children’s development, Links between children’s social-emotional development and play have been widely documented. However, rigorous research evidence of these links remains limited. This study’s objectives were to measure the impact of play on children’s social-emotional development in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia; identify teachers’ viewpoints around the use of play intervention; and understand the children’s experience of play intervention. Fifty-nine children aged between five and six years, with mean age of 5.5 (SD 3.376) and eight teachers participated in the study. The study used a mixed-method strategy including questionnaires, interviews, and focus group discussions. Children’s social-emotional development was measured by using the Strengths and Difficulties Questioner (SDQ). A pre-/post-test counterbalanced design was used to measure the impact of the play intervention on children’s development. Teachers’ perspectives on play were obtained by interviewing eight teachers. Children’s views were gathered through focus group discussions. Repeated measures ANOVA was conducted to determine the differences in the SDQ score over three time points. Results showed that using unstructured loose parts play had positively impacted children’s social-emotional development. After participation in the play intervention, scores from the SDQ indicated that children demonstrated significantly less problematic emotional, conduct and peer relationship issues. They also scored significantly higher in their positive prosocial behaviour. These positive effects were sustained after six weeks of stopping the intervention. The play intervention did not however impact children’s hyperactivity level. The interviews analysis illustrates four main themes: concept and characteristics of play, play functions, developmental benefits of play, and play and practice. Regarding children’s discussion, affordance emerged as a main theme; this includes emotional, social, and functional affordances. Unstructured loose parts play intervention was demonstrated to have positive impacts on children’s social-emotional development. The study’s findings support the view that play is a way to increase children’s development

    A Cornish palimpsest : Peter Lanyon and the construction of a new landscape, 1938-1964

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    The thesis examines the emergence of Peter Lanyon as one of the few truly innovative British landscape painters this century. In the Introduction I discuss the problematic nature of landscape art and consider the significance of Lanyon's discovery that direct description and linear perspective can be replaced with allusive representational elements by fusing the emotional and imaginative life of the artist with the physical activity of painting. Chapter One concentrates on the period 1936-8 when Lanyon was taught by Borlase Smart, a key figure in the St Ives art colony between the wars. Chapter Two examines the influence of Adrian Stokes and the links between Lanyon's painting and the theories developed in books such as Colour and Form and The Quattro Cento. Chapter Three analyses the period 1940-45 when Lanyon was directly influenced by the constructivism of Nicholson, Hepworth and Gabo. I look closely at their approaches to abstraction and assess Lanyon's relative position to them. The importance of Neo-Romanticism and the status of St Ives as a perceived avant-garde community is also addressed. In Chapter Four I discuss how Lanyon resolved to achieve a new orientation in his art on his return from wartime service with the RAF by synthesising constructivism, and traditional landscape. The Generation and Surfacing Series demonstrate his preoccupation with a sense of place, a fascination with the relationships between the human body and landscape and his struggle to find a technique and style that was entirely his own. His sense of existential insideness is discussed in Chapter Five through an examination of the work derived from Portreath, St. Just and Porthleven - key places in Lanyon's psychological attachment to the landscape of West Penwith. In Chapter Six I examine Lanyon's attachment to myths and archetypal forms, tracing the influence of Bergson's vitalist philosophy as well as his use of Celtic and classical motifs. Chapter Seven is a discussion of the malaise evident in Lanyon's work by 1955 and the impact of American Abstract Expressionism at the Tate Gallery a year later. In the summer of 1959 Lanyon joined the Cornish Gliding Club and Chapter Eight looks at how this necessitated a dynamic, expanded conception of the landscape and a re-thinking of relations within the picture field. The ability to dissolve boundaries encouraged him to break down distinctions between painting and construction so that abstract sculptural elements were now assembled into independent works of art. Finally, Chapter Nine assesses Lanyon's overall position in relation to his early influences and to St Ives art as a whole, his response to new directions in art coming out of London and NewYork in the early 1960s and the importance of travel as a stimulus for further realignment in his artistic and topographical horizons. His pictorial inventiveness and vitality remained unabated at the time of his death and would undoubtedly have continued to be enriched by travel abroad and contact with new movements in modem art on both sides of the Atlanti

    Moving Right Along: Examining The Venture Gestation Process For Black Women Entrepreneurs

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    Entrepreneurship is becoming one of the most sault after professions due to factors such as locus of control, flexibility, need for achievement, autonomy, and escaping corporate America. Many have come to realize that some of the most common reasons for pursuing entrepreneurship are not as convenient as expected. In fact, some of the inequalities experienced in corporate America are also experienced during venture creation. This is more so apparent for marginalized groups such as people of color, people with disabilities, and women. This study explores the barriers faced by African American women during the venture creation process and some of the contributing factors that play a role in successful creation of new ventures. This study will explore two of the more popular avenues to gaining access to experience social capital and human capital, what the experience of Black women entrepreneurs have been in terms of gain access to those forms of capital, as well as how this particular group of entrepreneurs are creating ventures inspire of the challenges. The results revealed that there was a statistically significant negative relationship between gendered racial microaggressions and individual factors among black women xii entrepreneurs. The results expand the findings of Lewis and Neville (2015), A. M. Jones (2020), Sue (2010), Capodilupo et al. (2010), and other researchers in the literature who concluded with the negative impact microaggressions have on Black women to include the also negative impact on Black women entrepreneurs during the venture creation process. The results also reveal that although the moderating effect of superwoman schema on the relationship between individual factors and venture gestation activity was not significant, the findings show a pattern of moderation. However, a recent study concluded that the superwoman schema can negatively impact both the mental and physical health of Black women (Woods-Giscombé et al., 2019). The findings from this research is two-fold, entrepreneurs can utilize the study to create a playbook for eliminating risk associated with their encounters with microaggressions while presenting researchers with preliminary data around microaggressions in the field of entrepreneurship. Future research should explore other control variables to determine whether moderating effects exist between the individual factors and the levels of superwoman schema

    Internationalisation dynamics in contemporary South American life sciences: the case of zebrafish

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    We tend to assume that science is inherently international. Geographical boundaries are not a matter of concern in science, and when they do – e.g. due to the rise of nationalist or populist movements – they are thought to constitute a threat to the essence of the scientific enterprise; namely, the global mobility of ideas, knowledge and researchers. Quite recently, we also started to consider that research could become ‘more international’ under the assumption that in doing so it becomes better, i.e. more collaborative, innovative, dynamic, and of greater quality. Such a positive conceptualisation of internationalisation, however, rests on interpretations coming almost exclusively from the Global North that systematically ignore power dynamics in scientific practice and that regard scientific internationalisation as an unproblematic transformative process and as a desired outcome. In Science and Technology Studies (STS), social research on model organisms is perhaps the clearest example of the influence of the dominant vision of internationalisation. This body of literature tends to describe model organism science and their research communities as uniform and harmonious international ecosystems governed by a strong collaborative ethos of sharing specimens, knowledge and resources. But beyond these unproblematic descriptions, how does internationalisation actually transform research on life? To what extent do the power dynamics of internationalisation intervene in contemporary practices of knowledge production and diffusion in this field of research? This thesis revisits the dynamics and practices of scientific internationalisation in contemporary science from the perspective of South American life sciences. It takes the zebrafish (Danio rerio), a small tropic freshwater fish, originally from the Ganges region in India and quite popular in pet shops, as a case study of how complex dynamics of internationalisation intervene in science. While zebrafish research has experienced a remarkable growth in recent years at the global scale, in South America its growth has been unprecedented, allowing average laboratories, which often operate with small budgets and with less well-developed science infrastructures, to conduct world-class research. My approach is based on a consideration of internationalisation as a conceptual model of change. I consider internationalisation to be a process essentially marked by tensions in the spatial, cognitive and evaluative dimensions of scientific practice. These tensions, I claim, are not just a key feature of internationalisation, but also aspects of a conceptual opposition that is geared towards explaining how change comes about in science. By studying the dynamics of internationalisation, I seek to understand various transformations of zebrafish research: from its construction as a research artefact to its diffusion across geographical boundaries. My focus on South America, on the other hand, helps me to understand the complexity of such dynamics beyond the lenses of the dominant discourse of internationalisation that prevails in the STS literature on model organisms. I use mixed-methods (i.e. semi-structured interviews, document analysis, bibliometrics and social network analysis) to observe and interpret transformations of internationalisation at different scales and levels. My analysis suggests first, that internationalisation played an important role in the construction of the zebrafish as a model organism and that, in the infrastructures and practices of resource exchange that sustain the scientific value of the organism internationally, dynamics of asymmetry and empowerment problematise the collaborative ethos of this community. Second, I found that collaborative networks – measured through co-authorships – also played an important role in the diffusion of zebrafish as a model organism in South America. However, I did not find a clear indication of international dependency in the diffusion of zebrafish, explained by a geographical concentration of scientific expertise in the zebrafish collaboration network. Rather than exposing peripheral researchers to novel ideas, networks of international collaboration seem to be more related to access to privileged material infrastructures resulting from the social organisation of scientific labour worldwide. Lastly, by examining practices of biological data curation and researchers’ international mobility trajectories, I describe how dynamics of internationalisation shape the notion of research excellence in model organism science. In this case, I found mobility trajectories to play a key role in boosting researchers’ contributions to the community’s database, especially among researchers from peripheral communities like South America. Overall, while these findings show the value of considering internationalisation as a conceptual model of change in science, more research is needed on the intervention of complex dynamics of internationalisation in other cases and fields of research
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