Rapid Mission Assurance Assessment via Sociotechnical Modeling and Simulation

How do organizations rapidly assess command-level effects of cyber attacks? Leaders need a way of assuring themselves that their organization, people, and information technology can continue their missions in a contested cyber environment. To do this, leaders should: 1) require assessments be more than analogical, anecdotal or simplistic snapshots in time; 2) demand the ability to rapidly model their organizations; 3) identify their organization’s structural vulnerabilities; and 4) have the ability to forecast mission assurance scenarios. Using text mining to build agent based dynamic network models of information processing organizations, I examine impacts of contested cyber environments on three common focus areas of information assurance—confidentiality, integrity, and availability. I find that assessing impacts of cyber attacks is a nuanced affair dependent on the nature of the attack, the nature of the organization and its missions, and the nature of the measurements. For well-manned information processing organizations, many attacks are in the nuisance range and that only multipronged or severe attacks cause meaningful failure. I also find that such organizations can design for resiliency and provide guidelines in how to do so

Analytics over Encrypted Traffic and Defenses

Encrypted traffic flows have been known to leak information about their underlying content through statistical properties such as packet lengths and timing. While traffic fingerprinting attacks exploit such information leaks and threaten user privacy by disclosing website visits, videos streamed, and user activity on messaging platforms, they can also be helpful in network management and intelligence services. Most recent and best-performing such attacks are based on deep learning models. In this thesis, we identify multiple limitations in the currently available attacks and defenses against them. First, these deep learning models do not provide any insights into their decision-making process. Second, most attacks that have achieved very high accuracies are still limited by unrealistic assumptions that affect their practicality. For example, most attacks assume a closed world setting and focus on traffic classification after event completion. Finally, current state-of-the-art defenses still incur high overheads to provide reasonable privacy, which limits their applicability in real-world applications. In order to address these limitations, we first propose an inline traffic fingerprinting attack based on variable-length sequence modeling to facilitate real-time analytics. Next, we attempt to understand the inner workings of deep learning-based attacks with the dual goals of further improving attacks and designing efficient defenses against such attacks. Then, based on the observations from this analysis, we propose two novel defenses against traffic fingerprinting attacks that provide privacy under more realistic constraints and at lower bandwidth overheads. Finally, we propose a robust framework for open set classification that targets network traffic with this added advantage of being more suitable for deployment in resource-constrained in-network devices

Abstracts of Papers, 89th Annual Meeting of the Virginia Academy of Science, May 25-27, 2011, University of Richmond, Richmond VA

Full abstracts of the 89th Annual Meeting of the Virginia Academy of Science, May 25-27, 2011, University of Richmond, Richmond V

TV in the Age of the Internet: Information Quality of Science Fiction TV Fansites

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Information Science, 2011Communally created Web 2.0 content on the Internet has begun to compete with information provided by traditional gatekeeper institutions, such as academic journals, medical professionals, and large corporations. On the one hand, such gatekeepers need to understand the nature of this competition, as well as to try to ensure that the general public are not endangered by poor quality information. On the other hand, advocates of free and universal access to basic social services have argued that communal efforts can provide as good or better-quality versions of commonly needed resources. This dissertation arises from these needs to understand the nature and quality of information being produced on such websites. Website-oriented information quality (IQ) literature spans at least 15 different academic fields, a survey of which identified two types of IQ: perceptual and artifactual fitness-related, and representational accuracy and completeness-related. The current project studied websites in terms of all of these, except perceptual fitness. This study may be the only of its kind to have targeted fansites: websites made by fans of a mass media franchise. Despite the Internet's becoming a primary means by which millions of people consume and co-produce their entertainment, little academic attention has been paid to the IQ of sites about the mass media. For this study, the four central non-studio-affiliated sites about a highly popular and fan-engaging science fiction television franchise, Stargate, were chosen, and their IQ examined across sites having different sizes as well as editorial and business models. As exhaustive of samples as possible were collected from each site. Based on 21 relevant variables from the IQ literature, four qualitative and 17 exploratory statistical analyses were conducted. Key findings include: five possibly new IQ criteria; smaller sites concerned more with pleasing connoisseuring fans than the general public; larger sites being targeted towards older users; professional editors serving their own interests more than users'; wikis' greater user freedom attracting more invested and balanced writers; for-profit sites being more imposing upon, and less protecting of, users than non-profit sites; and the emergence of common writing styles, themes, data fields, advertisement types, linking strategies, and page types

Knowledge and Management Models for Sustainable Growth

In the last years sustainability has become a topic of global concern and a key issue in the strategic agenda of both business organizations and public authorities and organisations. Significant changes in business landscape, the emergence of new technology, including social media, the pressure of new social concerns, have called into question established conceptualizations of competitiveness, wealth creation and growth. New and unaddressed set of issues regarding how private and public organisations manage and invest their resources to create sustainable value have brought to light. In particular the increasing focus on environmental and social themes has suggested new dimensions to be taken into account in the value creation dynamics, both at organisations and communities level. For companies the need of integrating corporate social and environmental responsibility issues into strategy and daily business operations, pose profound challenges, which, in turn, involve numerous processes and complex decisions influenced by many stakeholders. Facing these challenges calls for the creation, use and exploitation of new knowledge as well as the development of proper management models, approaches and tools aimed to contribute to the development and realization of environmentally and socially sustainable business strategies and practices

Proceedings / 6th International Symposium of Industrial Engineering - SIE 2015, 24th-25th September, 2015, Belgrade

editors Vesna Spasojević-Brkić, Mirjana Misita, Dragan D. Milanovi

Proceedings / 6th International Symposium of Industrial Engineering - SIE 2015, 24th-25th September, 2015, Belgrade

editors Vesna Spasojević-Brkić, Mirjana Misita, Dragan D. Milanovi