On Securing Communication From Profilers

A profiling adversary is an adversary which aims to classify messages into pre-defined profiles and thus gain useful information regarding the sender or receiver of such messages. Usual chosen-plaintext secure encryption schemes are capable of securing information from profilers, but these schemes provide more security than required for this purpose. In this paper we study the requirements for an encryption algorithm to be secure only against profilers and finally give a precise notion of security for such schemes. We also present a full protocol for secure (against profiling adversaries) communication, which neither requires a key exchange nor a public key infrastructure. Our protocol guarantees security against non-human profilers and is constructed using CAPTCHAs and secret sharing schemes

Pay as You Go: A Generic Crypto Tolling Architecture

The imminent pervasive adoption of vehicular communication, based on dedicated short-range technology (ETSI ITS G5 or IEEE WAVE), 5G, or both, will foster a richer service ecosystem for vehicular applications. The appearance of new cryptography based solutions envisaging digital identity and currency exchange are set to stem new approaches for existing and future challenges. This paper presents a novel tolling architecture that harnesses the availability of 5G C-V2X connectivity for open road tolling using smartphones, IOTA as the digital currency and Hyperledger Indy for identity validation. An experimental feasibility analysis is used to validate the proposed architecture for secure, private and convenient electronic toll payment

Media Effects and Criminal Profiling: How Fiction Influences Perception and Profile Accuracy

The objective of this dissertation was to investigate whether media and fictional information that is observed daily can influence perception to build a criminal psychological profile. Staggering between a distinguished art and science, the term profiling has been known by several different names – including criminal profiling, psychological profiling, offender profiling and more. Bandura (2009) believed that exposure to television and other media feeds into a socially constructed reality, where the audience is inevitably influenced by the beliefs and cognitions of observed media. The researcher believed that exposure to media can either influence criminal profiling and investigations with increasing accuracy or encourage perpetuated stereotypes. Kocsis, Hayes, and Irwin (2002) suggested that increased exposure to crime dramas creates a bias that decreases profile accuracy. The researcher examined the knowledge and perceptions of profiling and the crime scene examination skills of approximately 119 law enforcement professionals both active and retired at the local, state, and federal levels as well as college students to determine if these theories were accurate. This dissertation examines the literature on profiling and how it aids in criminal investigations for law enforcement officers, as well as in risk assessments for psychologists, approaches, and legal admissibility in courts. The data explores the reactions of exposure to media and crime television shows in relation to criminal psychological profiling, as well as the ability to accurately profile a crime and an offender based on the skills needed, specifically objective reasoning. The participants were asked questions utilizing a questionnaire to determine their exposure to crime related television shows and fictional media, and their views on profiling. The participants were then given a case scenario and asked to provide a criminal psychological profile based on the information given in the case paired with completing the Profiling Offender Characteristics Questionnaire adapted from Kocsis et al. (2000). Active and retired law enforcement professionals as well as college students seemed to agree on the belief that criminal profiling can be influenced by fictional and non-fictional media. The researcher found in a regression analysis that media consumption influenced the ability for participants to accurately create a criminal profile. This research contributes to the field of crime and media because it aids in law enforcement training, as well as criminal justice and psychology studies to ensure time and resources are invested correctly – ensuring that individuals are creating a criminal profile that will not have law enforcement searching for the wrong offender. The results of this study expound on previous profiling research leading to the determination if profiling should continue to be considered as a viable tool

Effective Performance Analysis and Debugging

Performance is once again a first-class concern. Developers can no longer wait for the next generation of processors to automatically optimize their software. Unfortunately, existing techniques for performance analysis and debugging cannot cope with complex modern hardware, concurrent software, or latency-sensitive software services. While processor speeds have remained constant, increasing transistor counts have allowed architects to increase processor complexity. This complexity often improves performance, but the benefits can be brittle; small changes to a program’s code, inputs, or execution environment can dramatically change performance, resulting in unpredictable performance in deployed software and complicating performance evaluation and debugging. Developers seeking to improve performance must resort to manual performance tuning for large performance gains. Software profilers are meant to guide developers to important code, but conventional profilers do not produce actionable information for concurrent applications. These profilers report where a program spends its time, not where optimizations will yield performance improvements. Furthermore, latency is a critical measure of performance for software services and interactive applications, but conventional profilers measure only throughput. Many performance issues appear only when a system is under high load, but generating this load in development is often impossible. Developers need to identify and mitigate scalability issues before deploying software, but existing tools offer developers little or no assistance. In this dissertation, I introduce an empirically-driven approach to performance analysis and debugging. I present three systems for performance analysis and debugging. Stabilizer mitigates the performance variability that is inherent in modern processors, enabling both predictable performance in deployment and statistically sound performance evaluation. Coz conducts performance experiments using virtual speedups to create the effect of an optimization in a running application. This approach accurately predicts the effect of hypothetical optimizations, guiding developers to code where optimizations will have the largest effect. Amp allows developers to evaluate system scalability using load amplification to create the effect of high load in a testing environment. In combination, Amp and Coz allow developers to pinpoint code where manual optimizations will improve the scalability of their software

Crime scene of the mind: Prohibition, enjoyment, and the criminal profiler in film and television

Scope and Method of Study: This dissertation traces the evolution of the FBI agent in American popular culture from the 1930s to the present day. Until the 1950s, the FBI agent's symbolic status as an elite moral crusader was transmitted through the figure of the G-Man, an action-detective hero featured in such films as G-Men (1935) and The House on 92nd Street (1945). In the 1970s, however, the death of J. Edgar Hoover and the revelation of the FBI's abuse of civil rights changed the image of the FBI agent, often shifting it from the hero to the villain. The fallen status of the FBI agent is redeemed by the emergence of the criminal profiler in the 1980s, and this dissertation shows that the criminal profiler first seen in Manhunter (1986) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991) combined the heroism of the G-Man with the disgraced agent of the 1970s to form an ambiguous character that reflected, on the one hand, the Bureau's attempt to recuperate its image, and, on the other hand, changing attitudes towards the symbolic authority of the FBI. This dissertation theorizes the appeal of the shift from the G-Man's moral clarity to the profiler's ambiguity.Findings and Conclusions: The shifting image of the FBI depends on the difference between two portrayals of solving crime; whereas the G-Man solves crimes through a physically challenging quest, which leads to the satisfactory apprehension and punishment of the criminal, the profiler replaces the G-Man's quest with the injunction to become the criminal, authorizing a fantasy of complete criminal satisfaction, in which the audience is invited to enjoy. Working within the tradition of Jacques Lacan and neoLacanian theorists such as Todd McGowan, Slavoj Zizek, and Renata Salecl, this study contends that contemporary culture is in the process of transforming itself from a society based on prohibition to one based on private enjoyment. Ultimately, this dissertation concludes that the appeal of the criminal profiler is a reflection of society's inward turn towards private enjoyment and away from social and communal obligations

Building an Emulation Environment for Cyber Security Analyses of Complex Networked Systems

Computer networks are undergoing a phenomenal growth, driven by the rapidly increasing number of nodes constituting the networks. At the same time, the number of security threats on Internet and intranet networks is constantly growing, and the testing and experimentation of cyber defense solutions requires the availability of separate, test environments that best emulate the complexity of a real system. Such environments support the deployment and monitoring of complex mission-driven network scenarios, thus enabling the study of cyber defense strategies under real and controllable traffic and attack scenarios. In this paper, we propose a methodology that makes use of a combination of techniques of network and security assessment, and the use of cloud technologies to build an emulation environment with adjustable degree of affinity with respect to actual reference networks or planned systems. As a byproduct, starting from a specific study case, we collected a dataset consisting of complete network traces comprising benign and malicious traffic, which is feature-rich and publicly available

The Sociological Eye 2018

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Rebecca Sager & Dr. Stacy Burns Co-Editors: Jonathan Santos, Alex Meek, & Kees Wilcoxhttps://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/thesociologicaleyestudentjournal/1003/thumbnail.jp