Combatting Advanced Persistent Threat via Causality Inference and Program Analysis

Cyber attackers are becoming more and more sophisticated. In particular, Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is a new class of attack that targets a specifc organization and compromises systems over a long time without being detected. Over the years, we have seen notorious examples of APTs including Stuxnet which disrupted Iranian nuclear centrifuges and data breaches affecting millions of users. Investigating APT is challenging as it occurs over an extended period of time and the attack process is highly sophisticated and stealthy. Also, preventing APTs is diffcult due to ever-expanding attack vectors. In this dissertation, we present proposals for dealing with challenges in attack investigation. Specifcally, we present LDX which conducts precise counter-factual causality inference to determine dependencies between system calls (e.g., between input and output system calls) and allows investigators to determine the origin of an attack (e.g., receiving a spam email) and the propagation path of the attack, and assess the consequences of the attack. LDX is four times more accurate and two orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art taint analysis techniques. Moreover, we then present a practical model-based causality inference system, MCI, which achieves precise and accurate causality inference without requiring any modifcation or instrumentation in end-user systems. Second, we show a general protection system against a wide spectrum of attack vectors and methods. Specifcally, we present A2C that prevents a wide range of attacks by randomizing inputs such that any malicious payloads contained in the inputs are corrupted. The protection provided by A2C is both general (e.g., against various attack vectors) and practical (7% runtime overhead)

The specification of a consumer design toolkit to support personalised production via additive manufacturing

This thesis stems from the future scenario that as additive manufacturing (AM) technologies become cheaper and more readily available, consumers without formal design training will begin to customise, design and manufacture their own products. Much of this activity is likely to infringe on brands' intellectual property. The research explores the feasibility of a situation in which, rather than attempting to prohibit such activity, manufacturers engage with consumers to facilitate it, thus retaining control (albeit reduced) over their brand's image and the quality of products offered. The research begins with a literature review encompassing AM technologies and their adoption by consumers; mass customisation (MC) and the management of variation in product offering; and traditional models of industrial design (ID), including user-centred design and co-design. It finds that conventional definitions of MC and ID are unable to provide for the possibility of consumer intervention in the shape and non-modular configuration of products. Further research was then conducted in the areas of Open Design (including crowdsourcing, open sourcing and 'hardware hacking') as well as bespoke customisation, which were found to be much more accommodating of the scenario proposed. A new term, 'consumer design', is introduced and defined, together with the hypothesis that in future, the role of the industrial designer may be to design 'unfinished' products. An original classification of consumer involvement in ID is presented. Empirical research, undertaken with consumers using an iterative design software package (Genoform), demonstrated a preference for designing within pre-determined boundaries. Action research was conducted to assess consumer-oriented 3D CAD software, and compare its capabilities with that of MC toolkits. A survey of senior designers and brand managers revealed strategies for implementing and managing a brand's product design language, and a guide was created to show the relative importance of designed features. Using these findings, a prototype toolkit was created to demonstrate how a brand might facilitate consumer interaction with the shape design of a complex consumer electronics product (in this case a mobile phone). The toolkit was tested with both consumers and experienced designers to assess its viability. The research finds that it is possible to create a consumer-design toolkit which enables untrained users to change the form of a product, whilst maintaining brand equity and ensuring the product's functionality and manufacturability

Fulldome Content Production: A bricoleur's approach

It has been only a little more than ten years since the introduction in planetaria of digital projection systems that can fill the entire dome of the theater. This technology called fulldome video has considerably changed the experience delivered by these institutions as it brings the immersive power of wide field displays and the possibility of interactive shows to astronomy education. Today, many established venues have upgraded their traditional system and many others are about to follow the trend. This technology facilitates content creation because it allows to make use of the digital tools already available to more conventional digital audiovisual productions such as 3D animation. Therefore fulldome also opens new vistas for artistic expression beyond traditional astronomy and science themed content. As the new medium redefines the experience delivered by dome theaters, it also challenges the identity of these venues. By looking at the technical and cultural aspect of this transition through the media theory of remediation, this thesis identifies areas of tension between tradition and innovation as well as challenges and opportunities for new productions. Complementing this research, a design enquiry on new means of productions inspired by the do-it-yourself methodolgy and defined as design as bricolage is explored. The result is a specification for an open source fulldome production pipeline and an implementation using existing software and custom built tools. The metaphor of bricolage is evaluated as a practical mental model for the activity of design, and provides insights on the practice of design itself. In a synthesis of the theoritical and practical research results, a strategy based on the notion of property rights as distribution (open source) is proposed to promote new alternative fulldome productions. Problems and affordances of this model in the context of fulldome are discussed on the basis of previous implementations in software development and 3d animation production,and including thoughts and comments from members of the fulldome industry

Understanding and Supporting Trade-offs in the Design of Visualizations for Communication.

A shift in the availability of usable tools and public data has prompted mass manufacturing of information visualizations to communicate data insights to broad audiences. Despite available software, professional and novice creators of visualizations that are intended to communicate data insights to broad audiences may struggle to balance conflicting considerations in design. Studying professional practice suggests that expert visualization designers and analysts negotiate difficult design trade-offs in creating customized visualizations, many of which involve deciding how and how much data to present given a priori design goals. This dissertation presents three studies that demonstrate how studying expert visual design and data modeling practice can advance visualization design tools. Insights from these formative studies inform the development of specific frameworks and algorithms. The first study addresses the often ignored, persuasive dimension of narrative visualizations. The framework I propose characterizes the persuasive dimension of visualization design by providing empirical evidence of several classes of rhetorical design strategies that trade-off comprehensive, unbiased data presentation goals with intentions to persuade users toward intended interpretations. The rhetorical visualization framework highlights a second trade-off: the act of dividing and sequencing information from a multivariate data set in separate visualizations for ordered presentation. I contribute initial evidence of ordering principles that designers apply to ease comprehension and support storytelling goals with a visualization presentation. The principles are used in developing a novel algorithmic approach to supporting designers of visualizations in making decisions related to visualization presentation order and structuring, highlighting the importance of optimizing for both local or “single visualization” design in tandem with global “sequence” design. The final design trade-off concerns how to convey uncertainty to end-users in order to support accurate conclusions despite diverse educational backgrounds. I demonstrate how non-statistician end-users can produce more cautious and at times more accurate estimates of the reliability of data patterns through the use of a comparative sample plots method motivated by statistical resampling approaches to modeling uncertainty. Taken together, my results deepen understanding of the act of designing visualizations for potentially diverse online audiences, and provide tools to support more effective design.PHDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107170/1/jhullman_1.pd

Twining : Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives

Twining is both a critical consideration of Twine and works made with it during the first decade of the software; and an exploration of concepts and techniques for making things with Twine.https://dc.uwm.edu/english_facbooks/1000/thumbnail.jp

Merging the Real and the Virtual: An Exploration of Interaction Methods to Blend Realities

We investigate, build, and design interaction methods to merge the real with the virtual. An initial investigation looks at spatial augmented reality (SAR) and its effects on pointing with a real mobile phone. A study reveals a set of trade-offs between the raycast, viewport, and direct pointing techniques. To further investigate the manipulation of virtual content within a SAR environment, we design an interaction technique that utilizes the distance that a user holds mobile phone away from their body. Our technique enables pushing virtual content from a mobile phone to an external SAR environment, interact with that content, rotate-scale-translate it, and pull the content back into the mobile phone. This is all done in a way that ensures seamless transitions between the real environment of the mobile phone and the virtual SAR environment. To investigate the issues that occur when the physical environment is hidden by a fully immersive virtual reality (VR) HMD, we design and investigate a system that merges a realtime 3D reconstruction of the real world with a virtual environment. This allows users to freely move, manipulate, observe, and communicate with people and objects situated in their physical reality without losing their sense of immersion or presence inside a virtual world. A study with VR users demonstrates the affordances provided by the system and how it can be used to enhance current VR experiences. We then move to AR, to investigate the limitations of optical see-through HMDs and the problem of communicating the internal state of the virtual world with unaugmented users. To address these issues and enable new ways to visualize, manipulate, and share virtual content, we propose a system that combines a wearable SAR projector. Demonstrations showcase ways to utilize the projected and head-mounted displays together, such as expanding field of view, distributing content across depth surfaces, and enabling bystander collaboration. We then turn to videogames to investigate how spectatorship of these virtual environments can be enhanced through expanded video rendering techniques. We extract and combine additional data to form a cumulative 3D representation of the live game environment for spectators, which enables each spectator to individually control a personal view into the stream while in VR. A study shows that users prefer spectating in VR when compared with a comparable desktop rendering

Artistic Cartography and Design Explorations Towards the Pluriverse

This edited volume uses an interdisciplinary approach to art and design that not only reframes but also repositions agendas and actions to address fragmented global systems. Contributors explore the pluriverse of art and design through epistemological and methodological considerations. What kinds of sustainable ways are there for knowledge transfer, supporting plural agendas, finding novel ways for unsettling conversations, unlearning and learning and challenging power structures with marginalised groups and contexts through art and design? The main themes of the book are art and design methods, epistemologies and practices that provide critical, interdisciplinary, pluriversal and decolonial considerations. The book challenges the domination of the white logic of art and design and shifts away from the Anglo-European one-world system towardsthe pluriverse. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, arts-based research, and design studies

Hate Speech and Polarization in Participatory Society

This timely volume offers a comprehensive and rigorous overview of the role of communication in the construction of hate speech and polarization in the online and offline arena. Delving into the meanings, implications, contexts and effects of extreme speech and gated communities in the media landscape, the chapters analyse misleading metaphors and rhetoric via focused case studies to understand how we can overcome the risks and threats stemming from the past decade’s defining communicative phenomena. The book brings together an international team of experts, enabling a broad, multidisciplinary approach that examines hate speech, dislike, polarization and enclave deliberation as cross axes that influence offline and digital conversations. The diverse case studies herein offer insights into international news media, television drama and social media in a range of contexts, suggesting an academic frame of reference for examining this emerging phenomenon within the field of communication studies. Offering thoughtful and much-needed analysis, this collection will be of great interest to scholars and students working in communication studies, media studies, journalism, sociology, political science, political communication and cultural industries

A techniques-based framework for domain-specific synthesis of simulation models

The formal specification community has produced many languages but few structured design methods. Those which exist tend to be abstract, providing little guidance in tackling problems in particular domains. One way of devising domain -specific design methods is by reconstructing an example in the domain using the target method; then generalising the design structures to cover a class of designs in the domain and finally building an environment in which these structures may more easily be re- applied to new problems. We demonstrate this approach using animal population dynamics models as the domain and Prolog techniques as the target method.We have identified domain -specific techniques which use a parameterisation method from techniques editing but which contain information specific to the population dynamics domain; we define a problem description language which uses concepts from population dynamics; an interface which allows these concepts to be supplied; and provide an automated system which bridges between population dynamics problem description and the domain -specific techniques needed for model generation.TeMS - Techniques -based Model Synthesiser, is the system constructed as the main instrument of our research. Because it is an embodiment of our views on the issues addressed, we submitted TeMS to user evaluation by ecological modelling experts, which produced material for a broad discussion of the system itself, its approach to modelling and its potential uses on the ecological modelling scenario