Improving the Security of Critical Infrastructure: Metrics, Measurements, and Analysis

In this work, we propose three important contributions needed in the process of improving the security of the critical infrastructure: metrics, measurement, and analysis. To improve security, metrics are key to ensuring the accuracy of the assessment and evaluation. Measurements are the core of the process of identifying the causality and effectiveness of various behaviors, and accurate measurement with the right assumptions is a cornerstone for accurate analysis. Finally, contextualized analysis essential for understanding measurements. Different results can be derived for the same data according to the analysis method, and it can serve as a basis for understanding and improving systems security. In this dissertation, we look at whether these key concepts are well demonstrated in existing (networked) systems and research products. In the first thrust, we verified the validity of volume-based contribution evaluation metrics used in threat information sharing systems. Further, we proposed a qualitative evaluation as an alternative to supplement the shortcomings of the volume-based evaluation method. In the second thrust, we measured the effectiveness of the low-rate DDoS attacks in a realistic environment to highlight the importance of establishing assumptions grounded in reality for measurements. Moreover, we theoretically analyzed the low-rate DDoS attacks and conducted additional experiments to validate them. In the last thrust, we conducted a large-scale measurement and analyzed the behaviors of open resolvers, to estimate the potential threats of them. We then went beyond just figuring out the number of open resolvers and explored new implications that the behavioral analysis could provide. We also experimentally shown the existence of forwarding resolvers and their behavior by precisely analyzing DNS resolution packets

A Study of Very Short Intermittent DDoS Attacks on the Performance of Web Services in Clouds

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks for web applications such as e-commerce are increasing in size, scale, and frequency. The emerging elastic cloud computing cannot defend against ever-evolving new types of DDoS attacks, since they exploit various newly discovered network or system vulnerabilities even in the cloud platform, bypassing not only the state-of-the-art defense mechanisms but also the elasticity mechanisms of cloud computing. In this dissertation, we focus on a new type of low-volume DDoS attack, Very Short Intermittent DDoS Attacks, which can hurt the performance of web applications deployed in the cloud via transiently saturating the critical bottleneck resource of the target systems by means of external attack HTTP requests outside the cloud or internal resource contention inside the cloud. We have explored external attacks by modeling the n-tier web applications with queuing network theory and implementing the attacking framework based-on feedback control theory. We have explored internal attacks by investigating and exploiting resource contention and performance interference to locate a target VM (virtual machine) and degrade its performance

Ultrasound data communication system for bioelectronic medicines

PhD ThesisThe coming years may see the advent of distributed implantable devices to support bioelectronic medicinal treatments. Such treatments could be complementary and, in some cases, may even prove superior to pharmaceutical treatments for certain chronic disease conditions. Therefore, a significant research effort is being undertaken in the bioelectronics domain. Target conditions include diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, lupus, and arthritis. Modern active medical implantable devices require communications to transmit information to the outside world or other implantable sub-systems. This can include physiological data, diagnostics, and parameters to optimise the therapeutic protocol. However, the communication scheme can be very challenging especially for deeper devices. Challenges include absorption and scattering by tissue, and the need to ensure there are no undesirable heating effects. Wired connectivity is undesirable and tissue absorption of traditional radio frequency and optical methods mean that ultrasound communications have significant potential in this niche. In this thesis, a reliable and efficient ultrasonic communication telemetry is presented. An omnidirectional transducer has been employed to implement intra body communication inside a model of the human body. A prototype has been implemented to evaluate the system performance in saline and up to 30 distance between the transmitter and receiver. Short pulses sequences with guard intervals have been employed to minimise the multipath effect that leads to an increase in the bit and thus packet error rates with distance. Error detection and correction code have been employed to improve communication at a low signal to noise ratio. The data rate is limited to 0.6 due to the necessary guard intervals. Energy per bit and current consumption for the transmitter and receiver main parts are presented and discussed in terms of battery life. Transmission can be achieved at an energy cost of 642 per bit data packet using on/off power cycling in the electronics

Journeys into perversion: vision, desire and economies of transgression in the films of Jess Franco

Due to their characteristic themes (such as 'perverse' desire and monstrosity) and form (incoherence and excess), exploitation films are often celebrated as inherently subversive or transgressive. I critically assess such claims through a close reading of the films of the Spanish 'sex and horror' specialist Jess Franco. My textual and contextual analysis shows that Franco's films are shaped by inter-relationships between authorship, international genre codes and the economic and ideological conditions of exploitation cinema. Within these conditions, Franco's treatment of 'aberrant' and gothic desiring subjectivities appears contradictory. Contestation and critique can, for example, be found in Franco's portrayal of emasculated male characters, and his female vampires may offer opportunities for resistant appropriation. But these possibilities do not amount to the 'radicality' sometimes attributed to the exploitation field. Focusing on international co-productions from early 1960s to mid 1970s, I discuss the ideological ambivalence of their fascination with 'perversity' and 'otherness'. Chapter 1 argues that The Awful Dr Orlof challenges dominant standards of quality in contemporary Spanish cinema, that its figuring of monstrosity contains a potential critique of Francisco Franco's dictatorship, and that it only partially destabilises the genre's traditional gender codes. Chapter 2 discusses femme fatale stereotypes and fantasy tropes in Venus in Furs. Mixing visual discourses of 'high' and 'low' culture in an evocation of male 'mad love', this film dramatises vision in a way which problematises the notion of the mastering, coherent gaze. Chapter 3 argues that Franco's female vampire films embody, while reflexively estranging, heteronormative male fascination with the 'otherness' of female/'lesbian' desire. Franco's supposed transgressivity is often referred to as Sadeian; through a reading of Demoniac and Franco's 'captive women' imagery, the final chapter therefore discusses the political possibilities, contradictions and limitations of Franco's Sadeian representations

Intimate Cartographies: Irish and Diasporic Explorations of Gendered Space

Juxtaposing different chronological periods and genres from the ninth century to the present, Intimate Cartographies contends that contemporary Irish and diasporic artists employ an “ecologistical,” anthropocenic aesthetics in an effort to re-territorialize geopolitical, sociocultural, and “psychic space.” Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Nora Roberts, Nuala O’Faolain, and Tana French, among others, explore the gendered body politic of the Irish State and of individuals in various milieux. My dissertation contextualizes their work with regard to events in Irish and diasporic history and considers these authors in relation to other more established counterparts from W.B. Yeats, P.H. Pearse, and James Joyce to John Ford and Francis Bacon. Poised at the intersection of postcolonial cultural geography, transnational feminisms, and various theologies in engagement with various media from international archives, Intimate Cartographies demonstrates the ways in which contemporary authors and filmmakers cross borders literally (in terms of location), ideologically (in terms of syncretive politics and faiths), figuratively (in terms of conventions and canonicity), and linguistically to develop an epistemological “Fifth Space” of cultural actualization beyond borders. Through radical awareness of embeddedness in their respective environments, these writers/filmmaker-cartographers reshape Ireland both as real landscape and fantasy island, traversed in order to negotiate place in terms of terrain and subjectivity both within and outside of history in the realm of desire. I chart mutual fascinations and engagements with the biopolitics of transformative (re)production in spatial, communal, and intimate mis-en-scènes in addition to the dearth of comparative work concerning Irish-language, Anglo-Irish, and diasporic cultural production across forms necessitates such a uniquely geofeminist, bilingual study of these neglected artists. Ireland in these terms is charted through places on the map which address and redress past imaginings of both sovereignty and gender as they continue to be palimpsestically refigured in the present.Doctor of Philosoph