Defense in Depth of Resource-Constrained Devices

The emergent next generation of computing, the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), presents significant challenges to security, privacy, and trust. The devices commonly used in IoT scenarios are often resource-constrained with reduced computational strength, limited power consumption, and stringent availability requirements. Additionally, at least in the consumer arena, time-to-market is often prioritized at the expense of quality assurance and security. An initial lack of standards has compounded the problems arising from this rapid development. However, the explosive growth in the number and types of IoT devices has now created a multitude of competing standards and technology silos resulting in a highly fragmented threat model. Tens of billions of these devices have been deployed in consumers\u27 homes and industrial settings. From smart toasters and personal health monitors to industrial controls in energy delivery networks, these devices wield significant influence on our daily lives. They are privy to highly sensitive, often personal data and responsible for real-world, security-critical, physical processes. As such, these internet-connected things are highly valuable and vulnerable targets for exploitation. Current security measures, such as reactionary policies and ad hoc patching, are not adequate at this scale. This thesis presents a multi-layered, defense in depth, approach to preventing and mitigating a myriad of vulnerabilities associated with the above challenges. To secure the pre-boot environment, we demonstrate a hardware-based secure boot process for devices lacking secure memory. We introduce a novel implementation of remote attestation backed by blockchain technologies to address hardware and software integrity concerns for the long-running, unsupervised, and rarely patched systems found in industrial IoT settings. Moving into the software layer, we present a unique method of intraprocess memory isolation as a barrier to several prevalent classes of software vulnerabilities. Finally, we exhibit work on network analysis and intrusion detection for the low-power, low-latency, and low-bandwidth wireless networks common to IoT applications. By targeting these areas of the hardware-software stack, we seek to establish a trustworthy system that extends from power-on through application runtime

The 45th Australasian Universities Building Education Association Conference: Global Challenges in a Disrupted World: Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Approaches in the Built Environment, Conference Proceedings, 23 - 25 November 2022, Western Sydney University, Kingswood Campus, Sydney, Australia

This is the proceedings of the 45th Australasian Universities Building Education Association (AUBEA) conference which will be hosted by Western Sydney University in November 2022. The conference is organised by the School of Engineering, Design, and Built Environment in collaboration with the Centre for Smart Modern Construction, Western Sydney University. This year’s conference theme is “Global Challenges in a Disrupted World: Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Approaches in the Built Environment”, and expects to publish over a hundred double-blind peer review papers under the proceedings

Measuring knowledge sharing processes through social network analysis within construction organisations

The construction industry is a knowledge intensive and information dependent industry. Organisations risk losing valuable knowledge, when the employees leave them. Therefore, construction organisations need to nurture opportunities to disseminate knowledge through strengthening knowledge-sharing networks. This study aimed at evaluating the formal and informal knowledge sharing methods in social networks within Australian construction organisations and identifying how knowledge sharing could be improved. Data were collected from two estimating teams in two case studies. The collected data through semi-structured interviews were analysed using UCINET, a Social Network Analysis (SNA) tool, and SNA measures. The findings revealed that one case study consisted of influencers, while the other demonstrated an optimal knowledge sharing structure in both formal and informal knowledge sharing methods. Social networks could vary based on the organisation as well as the individuals’ behaviour. Identifying networks with specific issues and taking steps to strengthen networks will enable to achieve optimum knowledge sharing processes. This research offers knowledge sharing good practices for construction organisations to optimise their knowledge sharing processes

(In)authentic Participation: Contemporary Participatory Performance Practice, Social Media & Neoliberalism

There has been a (re)emergence of participatory modes of audience engagement in contemporary western European theatre and performance since the mid-2000s. The concern at the root of contemporary participatory performance practice is the authenticity or inauthenticity with which one constitutes and presents one’s self in contemporary digitised society. Social media technology is not inauthentic in of itself, however the wider political economy in which social media operates encourages users to participate in a way that promotes the constitution, maintenance and presentation of a consistent, static and commodifiable self. Participation in social media in the context of neoliberalism makes users vulnerable to external influence and manipulates them into disengaging with their fundamental agency while promoting an ideology of choice and self-creation. Contemporary participatory performance practice problematises this inauthentic orientation by appropriating, reflecting and critically amplifying both social media technologies and modes of participation inherent in neoliberally induced social media. Contemporary practice also provides participatory alternatives that help audiences approach selfhood from an authentic orientation, embracing individual agency, responsibility and a liminal position between internal intention and external influence. This thesis draws upon the phenomenological ontology of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre to investigate the question of why this has come to pass by exploring the recent changes to the way that one presents oneself and interacts with other people through online social media

More than a Roman Monument: A Place-centred Approach to the Long-term History and Archaeology of the Antonine Wall

This thesis offers a critique of currently dominant approaches to the history and archaeology of the Antonine Wall, and develops an expanded place-centred perspective in which this former Roman frontier is reinvested with wider significances that derive from both its Roman past as well as its post-Roman history and archaeology. Part 1 provides a general introduction to the Antonine Wall following the traditional perspective, and draws on interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological developments to outline how this traditional perspective will be challenged through reframing the Wall as a place rather than an artefact or monument. Part 2 offers a critical genealogy of Antonine Wall discourse from the earliest accounts until the present, tracing the development of current reductionist approaches and demonstrating that the Wall has been the focus of wider concerns in the past. Part 3 focuses on particular aspects of the Antonine Wall’s post-Roman archaeology and the Wall’s role in regional myths and legends to explore alternative themes for future research and wider significances that can be integrated into new understandings of the Antonine Wall’s meaning, significance, and value as a place of memory, meaning, and cultural heritage in the present

Preserving Virtual Worlds Final Report

The Preserving Virtual Worlds project is a collaborative research venture of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Linden Lab, conducted as part of Preserving Creative America, an initiative of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress. The primary goals of our project have been to investigate issues surrounding the preservation of video games and interactive fiction through a series of case studies of games and literature from various periods in computing history, and to develop basic standards for metadata and content representation of these digital artifacts for long-term archival storage

‘The raft, the ladder, the transitional space, the moratorium…’: digital interventions in twenty-first-century private and public lives

This project explores the nebulizing effect of digital technologies on their analogue counterparts, and their cultural and social repercussions as depicted in early twenty-first-century novels. The thesis finds five central concerns of digital culture, areas in which the structures and codes of the culture have had to be recalibrated to such a degree to accommodate virtuality, and examines them through the works of a novelist with a fascination for, or resistance to this change. The thesis identifies an irreversible shift in the mental apparatus caused by digital technologies that work on narrativizing powers such as memory, interpretation, and perception, that finds expression in fiction. Chapter 1 reads Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Keep as responses to the phenomena of geomapping, networking and communications in the age of global reach. Chapter 2 uses Tom McCarthy’s novels C, Remainder, and Satin Island to illustrate the distorting effects of digitality on time. Chapter 3 brings to focus the more recent work of J. M. Coetzee, Summertime, Elizabeth Costello, and Diary of a Bad Year, that engages with digitality and a cultural landscape increasing reliant on distancing technologies. Chapter 4 examines the recording and surveilling technologies at the heart of Ali Smith’s twentyfirst- century novels How to Be Both, Autumn and The Accidental. Chapter 5 reads Dave Eggers’ The Circle as a critique of corporate digital culture, and examines the role of taste in articulating personal freedom. The conclusion analyses a current crisis point in the digital project, and gestures towards the future of technology in the contemporary novel, speculating on what elements discussed in the thesis might endure and shape fictional narrative as the age of digitality progresses

Drylands Facing Change

This edited volume examines the changes that arise from the entanglement of global interests and narratives with the local struggles that have always existed in the drylands of Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia/Inner Asia. Changes in drylands are happening in an overwhelming manner. Climate change, growing political instability, and increasing enclosures of large expanses of often common land are some of the changes with far-reaching consequences for those who make their living in the drylands. At the same time, powerful narratives about the drylands as ‘wastelands’ and their ‘backward’ inhabitants continue to hold sway, legitimizing interventions for development, security, and conservation, informing re-emerging frontiers of investment (for agriculture, extraction, infrastructure), and shaping new dryland identities. The chapters in this volume discuss the politics of change triggered by forces as diverse as the global land and resource rush, the expansion of new Information and Communication Technologies, urbanization, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the spread of violent extremism. While recognizing that changes are co-produced by differently positioned actors from within and outside the drylands, this volume presents the dryland’s point of view. It therefore takes the views, experiences, and agencies of dryland dwellers as the point of departure to not only understand the changes that are transforming their lives, livelihoods, and future aspirations, but also to highlight the unexpected spaces of contestation and innovation that have hitherto remained understudied. This edited volume will be of much interest to students, researchers, and scholars of natural resource management, land and resource grabbing, political ecology, sustainable development, and drylands in general. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license