Disaster resilience in development and humanitarian interventions

The connections between disaster recovery and the resilience of affected communities have become common features of disaster risk reduction programmes since the adoption of The Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) 2005–2015. Increasing attention is paid to the capacity of disaster-affected communities to recover with little or no external assistance following a disaster. This highlights the need for a change in the disaster risk reduction work culture, with stronger emphasis being put on resilience rather than just needs or vulnerability. The aim of this thesis is to determine the extent to which development and humanitarian interventions promote resilience in disaster-prone areas. Three case studies with elements of resilience building were examined in 2002, 2004 and 2005 using an evaluation framework. Survey and participatory interviewing methods involving more than 1200 participants were employed to gain insights from the implementation of: The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe; The Institutional Support Project in Ethiopia; and The Agricultural Rehabilitation Project in East Timor. There are no easy answers for enhancing disaster resilience through development and humanitarian interventions. However, four conclusions emerging from this study contribute to the emerging disaster resilience body of knowledge, spanning social science disciplines such as geography, environmental management and sociology. Firstly, disaster resilience is the ability to ‘bounce forward’ rather than ‘bounce back’ following a disaster. The notion of ‘bounce back’ implies the capacity to return to a pre- disaster state, which fails to capture the ‘new’ reality created by the disaster. ‘Bounce forward’ encapsulates community continuity within the context of changed realities brought about by the disaster. Secondly, resilience and vulnerability are confirmed as discrete constructs, the one not being the ‘flip side’ of the other. Thirdly, local resilience to disasters is about agency, albeit in a political and economic context. Community agency continuously creates and re-creates, and owns and controls the disaster institutional structures. Fourthly, resilience building resonates with the contiguum approach - it can occur at any phase or multiple phases of the disaster cycle. Thus, the process of resilience building does not necessarily need to adopt a ‘linear’ or continuum approach. The contiguum approach offers opportunities for linking (existing) resilience, relief, rehabilitation and development (LRRRD). Finally, on the basis of the author’s broader experience with similar evaluations elsewhere, the findings of this thesis are robust and generalisable and would not have been significantly different, if different case studies were used. Similarly, the focus of this thesis has been on structures and evaluation processes and outcomes; a different approach might have given rise to different findings

Nature-inspired survivability: Prey-inspired survivability countermeasures for cloud computing security challenges

As cloud computing environments become complex, adversaries have become highly sophisticated and unpredictable. Moreover, they can easily increase attack power and persist longer before detection. Uncertain malicious actions, latent risks, Unobserved or Unobservable risks (UUURs) characterise this new threat domain. This thesis proposes prey-inspired survivability to address unpredictable security challenges borne out of UUURs. While survivability is a well-addressed phenomenon in non-extinct prey animals, applying prey survivability to cloud computing directly is challenging due to contradicting end goals. How to manage evolving survivability goals and requirements under contradicting environmental conditions adds to the challenges. To address these challenges, this thesis proposes a holistic taxonomy which integrate multiple and disparate perspectives of cloud security challenges. In addition, it proposes the TRIZ (Teorija Rezbenija Izobretatelskib Zadach) to derive prey-inspired solutions through resolving contradiction. First, it develops a 3-step process to facilitate interdomain transfer of concepts from nature to cloud. Moreover, TRIZ’s generic approach suggests specific solutions for cloud computing survivability. Then, the thesis presents the conceptual prey-inspired cloud computing survivability framework (Pi-CCSF), built upon TRIZ derived solutions. The framework run-time is pushed to the user-space to support evolving survivability design goals. Furthermore, a target-based decision-making technique (TBDM) is proposed to manage survivability decisions. To evaluate the prey-inspired survivability concept, Pi-CCSF simulator is developed and implemented. Evaluation results shows that escalating survivability actions improve the vitality of vulnerable and compromised virtual machines (VMs) by 5% and dramatically improve their overall survivability. Hypothesis testing conclusively supports the hypothesis that the escalation mechanisms can be applied to enhance the survivability of cloud computing systems. Numeric analysis of TBDM shows that by considering survivability preferences and attitudes (these directly impacts survivability actions), the TBDM method brings unpredictable survivability information closer to decision processes. This enables efficient execution of variable escalating survivability actions, which enables the Pi-CCSF’s decision system (DS) to focus upon decisions that achieve survivability outcomes under unpredictability imposed by UUUR

Improving embedding efficiency by incorporating SDCS and WPC

Embedding efficiency, which is defined as the average number of secret data bits embedded per one embedding change, is an important attribute directly influencing the security of steganography. Higher embedding efficiency is usually expected to get more secure steganographic method. In this paper, by incorporating two previously introduced techniques: the "sum and difference covering set" (SDCS) and the "wet paper code" (WPC), a novel double-layered embedding method is presented. As compared with the original SDCS-based steganography, the novel method can embed more bits without introducing additional embedding distortion, therefore the embedding efficiency is improved. In summary. the proposed method provides some steganographic schemes with diverse embedding rates and good embedding efficiency.http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000277357000250&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=8e1609b174ce4e31116a60747a720701Computer Science, Software EngineeringComputer Science, Theory & MethodsEngineering, Electrical & ElectronicCPCI-S(ISTP)