“The Dreadful Chasm”: American Recognition and Response to the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1916 and the Holocaust

This paper won 2nd place for the 2009 Burgess Award and was written for Prof. Mark Roseman's Spring 2009 class

Education Fraud at the Margins: Using the Federal False Claims Act to Curb Enrollment Abuses in Online, For-Profit K-12 Schools

America’s online schools have some things to account for. In recent years, an increase in the number of for-profit K–12 schools has coincided with the rise of online education. Meanwhile, funding models that award money for each additional student incentivize for-profit schools to overenroll students in online programs that were once reserved for specialized subsets of students. Although, to date, reported incidents of enrollment fraud have been rare, there are many reasons to think that the problem has gone largely undetected. As education reformers on both sides of the political spectrum continue to push privatization and charter schools, figuring out how to avoid waste and minimize fraud will only become more important. This Note argues that the federal False Claims Act (FCA) is the best short-term option for curbing this kind of enrollment-reporting abuse. By drawing an analogy to health-care fraud, this Note makes the case that prosecutors and individuals can and should use expanded theories of false claiming to hold accountable online charter schools that exaggerate their enrollment

From Object to Subject: Young women\u27s experience of sexuality education within sex-negative taboos

Young female sexuality continues to be portrayed as problematic within cultural expectations of acceptable sexual conduct among young people (Moran, 2000; Russell, 2005; Welles, 2005). Contributing to this negativity is the marginalization of positive conceptualizations of female sexuality and the silencing of female sexual desire and pleasure within sexual education practices (Fields & Tolman, 2006; Fine, 1988; Tolman, 2002; Tolman, Hirschman, & Impett, 2005). This feminist critical ethnography utilizes the narratives of four young women participants in the From Object to Subject (O2S) curriculum--a curriculum emphasizing a sex-positive approach to sexuality education--to explore: (a) how adolescent females have been educated about sex and sexuality in the past; (b) how young women have experienced their own sexuality; and (c) the societal circumstances and messages that young women experience and have contributed to their sexual socialization. Findings revealed two major societal taboos that contribute to the marginalization of young female sexuality. The taboo of sexual awareness and the taboo of female sexuality, desire, and pleasure are described in detail. These taboos inform understanding of the realities young women experience within our nation\u27s contemporary climate of sex-negative sexual education practices and the nature of sexual socialization of young people. Implications for future research regarding young female sexuality and sexuality education policy reform are addressed

Adolescent sexuality and positive youth development: the influence of youth extracurricular activity participation on attitudes regarding sex

This study explored relationships among individual factors, parental factors, and youth activity involvement factors and the outcome variable, attitudes regarding sex, in 304 adolescent participants. Multiple regression results suggested that parental influence contributed the most influence on adolescent attitudes regarding sex. Other significant factors included self-esteem, sexual experience, family living arrangement, and amount of time spent in non-school based extracurricular activities. Support for the idea that Positive Youth Development (PYD) research and programming should include promoting healthy sexuality is suggested. PYD theory and literature tends to focus on outcomes such as citizenship, leadership, altruism, and initiative. While these outcomes are important, it seems reasonable to address a broader array of influences as well as outcomes of adolescent development, in particular healthy sexuality, which includes sexual attitudes

Using graphic methods to challenge cryptographic performance

Block and stream ciphers have formed the traditional basis for the standardisation of commercial ciphers in the DES, AES, RC4, and so on. More recently alternative graphic methods such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) have been adopted for performance gains. In this research we reviewed a range of graphic and non-graphic methods and then designed our own cipher system based on several graphic methods, including Visual Cryptography (VC). We then tested our cipher against RC4 and the AES algorithms for performance and security. The results showed that a graphics based construct may deliver comparable or improved security and performance in many of the required areas. These findings offer potential alternative avenues for post-quantum cryptographic research

Celestial sources for random number generation

In this paper, we present an alternative method of gathering seed data for random number generation (RNG) in cryptographic applications. Our proposed method utilises the inherent randomness of signal data from celestial sources in radio astronomy to provide seeds for RNG. The data sets were collected from two separate celestial sources, and run through the SHA-256 algorithm to deskew the data and produce random numbers with a uniform distribution. The resulting data sets pass all tests in the NIST Statistical Test Suite for random data, with a mean of 98.9% of the 512 total bitstreams from the two sources passing all tests in the NIST suite, as well as further testing in R. These results are on par with the control set generated using Java’s SecureRandom function. An explanation of the sources, the data processing and detailed results of each of the tests are presented

Using Graphic Based Systems to Improve Cryptographic Algorithms

With the ever-expanding use of technology for communications, the demand for strong cryptographic methods is continually growing. The implementation of cryptographic algorithms in modern networked systems is crucial to ensure the security and confidentiality of data. Standardized encryption algorithms have emerged to allow users and developers a quantifiable and thoroughly tested level of security within their systems. While much research has been done to improve the security of traditional ciphers such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and the now-defunct Rivest Cipher 4 (RC4), there are opportunities for the development and improvement of alternative ciphers based on graphic methods. Encryption using graphic methods, such as Visual Cryptography (VC) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), give high levels of security, and demonstrate alternative approaches to achieve secure methods for the ever-expanding online world. This thesis proposes an alternative word-oriented symmetric stream cipher based on graphic methods called Coordinate Matrix Encryption (CME), which offers quantifiably high levels of security and a non-singular mapping of plaintext to ciphertext. The focus of this thesis was to explore the security offered by alternative graphic methods, in comparison to traditional classical methods, as well as the difficulties faced in implementing these alternative systems. It is hypothesized that graphic-based methods would offer higher levels of security with lower overheads than classical methods, and that the proposed CME system would prove secure against attack. The proposed system was implemented in Java along with four comparable algorithms, both graphic-based and traditional, which were AES, RC4, ECC, and VC. The algorithms were all tested for security and efficiency, and the comparative results show the high levels of security achievable by alternative graphic-based ciphers. The resistance of the proposed 8-bit CME system to brute force attacks was shown to be 157,899 orders of magnitude higher than that of a 128-bit key in traditional ciphers such as AES. Examination of the avalanche effect of the CME scheme showed that less than 0.5% of all bytes within the ciphertext remained in the same position when a single bit of the plaintext was altered. While the RC4 scheme offered the best efficiency in terms of time required to encrypt and decrypt the data, the CME scheme had lower memory requirements and was faster in the setup execution. Further research into alternative graphic methods is required to explore the applications of alternative systems such as CME. The security offered by the proposed CME scheme makes it an ideal candidate for post-quantum cryptographic research. The system?s alternative key structure and non-singular mapping allow for resistance to known and chosen plaintext attacks, and these features require further exploration. Further comparative analysis between traditional and graphic-based ciphers is required to determine whether alternative graphic methods are able to offer higher security for lower overheads. Optimization of the CME scheme requires further testing, to ensure it has competitive advantage, and it is able to be implemented in application development. There is currently little standardisation in stream ciphers to replace RC4, and as such the opportunity exists for an optimized version of CME to assist in this particular space in applications such as TLS that utilize stream ciphers for encryption on a day-to-day basis

Invasion of the Botnet Snatchers: A Case Study in Applied Malware Cyberdeception

In this paper, we provide the initial steps towards a botnet deception mechanism, which we call 2face. 2face provides deception capabilities in both directions – upward, to the command and control (CnC) server, and downward, towards the botnet nodes – to provide administrators with the tools they need to discover and eradicate an infestation within their network without alerting the botnet owner that they have been discovered. The key to 2face is a set of mechanisms for rapidly reverse engineering the protocols used within a botnet. The resulting protocol descriptions can then be used with the 2face network deception tool to generate high-quality deceptive messaging, against the attacker. As context for our work, we show how 2face can be used to help reverse engineer and then generate deceptive traffic for the Mirai protocol. We also discuss how this work could be extended to address future threats