Measuring the quality and identifying influencing factors of sustainability reporting: Evidence from the resources industry in Australia

The lack of a standardised reporting framework in sustainability reporting has resulted in companies producing unaudited generic sustainability information that are not reflective of companies’ actual sustainability performance. The disclosures also differ in quality and hinder comparison. This study addresses these problems with the development of a new scoring index that integrates the hard and soft principles in Clarkson, Li, Richardson and Vasvari’s (2008) environmental index with performance indicators of the Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI) framework. The newly developed index comprises all three aspects of sustainability (economic, environmental and social) and adopts a standardised scoring scale that is reflective of companies’ sustainability performance. The new index was applied to evaluate annual reports and stand-alone sustainability reports of listed companies in the resources industry of Australia. This study investigates whether significant correlations existed between the extent of sustainability disclosures (economic, environmental and social) and company characteristics (company size, financial performance, board composition and type of resources extracted). This study found that companies generally produced minimal sustainability information with vast diversity in their disclosure items. Significant positive correlations were found between sustainability disclosures and company size, company financial performance, proportion of independent directors, multiple directorships and women directors on the board. Companies without CEO duality and those with a sustainability committee disclosed more sustainability information. However, no significant differences in sustainability disclosures were identified between companies operating in the metals and mining sector and the energy and utilities sector. Companies disclosed more soft than hard disclosure items and significantly more information on the economic aspect than the environmental and social aspects. This industry-specific study suggests that improvements identified by the new index is essential to enhance the current sustainability reporting practices and performance and to promote a benchmark for quality sustainability reporting

Particle Measurement Programme. Volatile Particle Remover Calibration Round Robin

A dual ejector system with an intermediate Evaporating Tube was circulated at 11 laboratories to measure the Particle Concentration Reduction Factors (PCRF) at 30, 50 and 100 nm (as required by the legislation). In addition to this “Golden” Volatile Particle Remover (GVPR), a PALAS DNP 3000 graphite spark generator (Golden Aerosol Generator - GAG) and a TSI 3790 Condensation Particle Counter (Golden CPC – GCPC), were also circulated to compare the performance of the different aerosol generators (including CAST, sodium chloride and palladium) and CPCs employed at each laboratory. The study highlighted the importance of controlling and accounting for the pressures in the calibration setup. It also highlighted the difficulties associated with the measurement of the size distribution of the polydisperse aerosols produced by the generators that due to the high number concentrations are prone to significant coagulation. The study also provided evidence that the pre-treatment of sodium-chloride and CAST particles employed in most laboratories is not sufficient, and can lead to inaccuracies in the PCRF measurements at 30 nm if a CPC with a 50% counting efficiency at 23 nm is employed. No significant linearity issues were identified in the 15 in total CPCs that were cross-checked against the GCPC. However, a change of the operating temperature of TSI 3790 CPCs to reduce the cut-off size can lead to significant linearity issues for some units, and therefore such modifications must be accompanied by linearity checks.JRC.F.8-Sustainable Transpor

Investigation of Nutritional Biomarkers Associated with Metabolism of Inorganic Arsenic and Infant Birthweight

Exposure to inorganic arsenic (As) in utero represents a critical window of susceptibility for iAs associated adverse birth outcomes. Ingested iAs undergoes hepatic methylation generating mono- and di-methyl arsenicals (MMA and DMA, respectively), a process that facilitates urinary As elimination. Differences in pregnant women’s metabolism of As (e.g. increases in %MMAs and decreases in %DMAs) are a risk factor for adverse birth outcomes. One carbon metabolism (OCM), the nutritionally-regulated pathway essential for supplying methyl groups, plays a role in As metabolism and is understudied during the prenatal period. In this cross-sectional study from the Biomarkers of Exposure to ARsenic (BEAR) pregnancy cohort in Gómez Palacio, Mexico, we assessed the relationships among OCM indicators (e.g. maternal biomarkers of serum B12, folate, and homocysteine (Hcys)), and levels of iAs and its metabolites in maternal urine and in neonatal serum. We also estimated the relationship between OCM indicators, iAs metabolism, and infant birthweight using a causal mediation approach, where we measured the total effect (TE) and the natural direct effects (NDE) of OCM indicators on infant birthweight, and controlled direct effects (CDE) of both OCM indicators and maternal metabolism of iAs on infant birthweight. Interestingly, the prevalence of folate sufficiency (serum folate levels > 9 nmol/L) in the cohort was high 99%, and hyperhomocysteinemia (Hcys levels >10.4 μmol/L) was low (8%). However, 74% of the women displayed a deficiency in B12 (serum levels < 148 pmol/L). Differences in lower B12 levels and higher Hcys were associated with increases in total arsenic levels in urine (U-tAs). In unadjusted comparisons, infants born to mothers in the lowest tertile of serum folate had significantly higher mean levels of C-%MMA relative to folate replete women. Furthermore, beta regression results demonstrated that maternal Hcys was positively associated with both C-tAs and %C-MMAs. Interestingly, levels of folate modify the effects of B12 deficiency on infant birthweight. The causal mediation results demonstrated that there is evidence of interaction between OCM indicators and iAs metabolism. The results from this study indicate that maternal OCM status may influence neonatal As metabolites, and interactions of OCM with iAs metabolism may influence infant birthweight.Doctor of Philosoph

Exploitation from Malicious PCI Express Peripherals

The thesis of this dissertation is that, despite widespread belief in the security community, systems are still vulnerable to attacks from malicious peripherals delivered over the PCI Express (PCIe) protocol. Malicious peripherals can be plugged directly into internal PCIe slots, or connected via an external Thunderbolt connection. To prove this thesis, we designed and built a new PCIe attack platform. We discovered that a simple platform was insufficient to carry out complex attacks, so created the first PCIe attack platform that runs a full, conventional OS. To allows us to conduct attacks against higher-level OS functionality built on PCIe, we made the attack platform emulate in detail the behaviour of an Intel 82574L Network Interface Controller (NIC), by using a device model extracted from the QEMU emulator. We discovered a number of vulnerabilities in the PCIe protocol itself, and with the way that the defence mechanisms it provides are used by modern OSs. The principal defence mechanism provided is the Input/Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU). The remaps the address space used by peripherals in 4KiB chunks, and can prevent access to areas of address space that a peripheral should not be able to access. We found that, contrary to belief in the security community, the IOMMUs in modern systems were not designed to protect against attacks from malicious peripherals, but to allow virtual machines direct access to real hardware. We discovered that use of the IOMMU is patchy even in modern operating systems. Windows effectively does not use the IOMMU at all; macOS opens windows that are shared by all devices; Linux and FreeBSD map windows into host memory separately for each device, but only if poorly documented boot flags are used. These OSs make no effort to ensure that only data that should be visible to the devices is in the mapped windows. We created novel attacks that subverted control flow and read private data against systems running macOS, Linux and FreeBSD with the highest level of relevant protection enabled. These represent the first use of the relevant exploits in each case. In the final part of this thesis, we evaluate the suitability of a number of proposed general purpose and specific mitigations against DMA attacks, and make a number of recommendations about future directions in IOMMU software and hardware.EPSRC and ARM iCASE Awar

Advances in Modeling and Management of Urban Water Networks

The Special Issue on Advances in Modeling and Management of Urban Water Networks (UWNs) explores four important topics of research in the context of UWNs: asset management, modeling of demand and hydraulics, energy recovery, and pipe burst identification and leakage reduction. In the first topic, the multi-objective optimization of interventions on the network is presented to find trade-off solutions between costs and efficiency. In the second topic, methodologies are presented to simulate and predict demand and to simulate network behavior in emergency scenarios. In the third topic, a methodology is presented for the multi-objective optimization of pump-as-turbine (PAT) installation sites in transmission mains. In the fourth topic, methodologies for pipe burst identification and leakage reduction are presented. As for the urban drainage systems (UDSs), the two explored topics are asset management, with a system upgrade to reduce flooding, and modeling of flow and water quality, with analyses on the transition from surface to pressurized flow, impact of water use reduction on the operation of UDSs, and sediment transport in pressurized pipes. The Special Issue also includes one paper dealing with the hydraulic modeling of an urban river with a complex cross-section

Thunderclap: Exploring Vulnerabilities in Operating System IOMMU Protection via DMA from Untrustworthy Peripherals

Direct Memory Access (DMA) attacks have been known for many years: DMA-enabled I/O peripherals have complete access to the state of a computer and can fully compromise it including reading and writing all of system memory. With the popularity of Thunderbolt 3 over USB Type-C and smart internal devices, opportunities for these attacks to be performed casually with only seconds of physical access to a computer have greatly broadened. In response, commodity hardware and operating-system (OS) vendors have incorporated support for Input-Output Memory Management Units (IOMMUs), which impose memory protection on DMA, and are widely believed to protect against DMA attacks. We investigate the state-of-the-art in IOMMU protection across OSes using a novel I/O security research platform, and find that current protections fall short when faced with a functional network peripheral that uses its complex interactions with the OS for ill intent, and demonstrate compromises against macOS, FreeBSD, and Linux, which notionally utilize IOMMUs to protect against DMA attackers. Windows only uses the IOMMU in limited cases and remains vulnerable. Using Thunderclap, an open-source FPGA research platform we built, we explore a number of novel exploit techniques to expose new classes of OS vulnerability. The complex vulnerability space for IOMMU-exposed shared memory available to DMA-enabled peripherals allows attackers to extract private data (sniffing cleartext VPN traffic) and hijack kernel control flow (launching a root shell) in seconds using devices such as USB-C projectors or power adapters. We have worked closely with OS vendors to remedy these vulnerability classes, and they have now shipped substantial feature improvements and mitigations as a result of our work.DARPA I2O FA8750-10-C-0237 ("CTSRD") DARPA MTO HR0011- 18-C-0016 ("ECATS") Arm Ltd Google Inc This work was also supported by EPSRC EP/R012458/1 (“IOSEC”)

Sustainable water management in urban environments (Gestão sustentável da água em ambiente urbano)

Os recursos de água doce enfrentam sérios desafios decorrentes do crescimento populacional e das exigências do desenvolvimento social, industrial e agrícola global, além das mudanças climáticas, que, na sua totalidade, causam a escassez dos recursos de água doce disponíveis e a deterioração de sua qualidade. Esses desafios são exacerbados nos centros urbanos como pontos focais para as atividades e necessidades hídricas. Portanto, surge a necessidade de uma gestão sustentável dos recursos hídricos, principalmente em ambientes urbanos, por meio do uso eficiente dos recursos hídricos disponíveis e da busca por alternativas aos recursos naturais de água doce. Nesta dissertação, procura-se caraterizar a realidade da água em áreas urbanas, tendências de desenvolvimento tendo em conta o crescimento demográfico e económico, e potenciais desafios futuros. Também se apresentam algumas medidas que podem ser implementadas para aumentar a eficiência do uso da água nos ambientes urbanos, tanto em termos da procura de água como da sua disponibiliadade, o que por sua vez irá reduzir a pressão sobre os recursos de água doce e atender à procura crescente de água em consequência do desenvolvimento social e económico, melhorando, assim, a gestão e a sustentabilidade dos recursos hídricos nas áreas urbanas