Pro-active protection against racialist discrimination in employment law - lessons from South Africa?

This study investigates the potential of the prohibition of indirect race discrimination to be used for law reform, and to uncover discriminatory practices. It reflects on the history and contents of the concept, and focuses in particular on its application in the Republic of South Africa

The effect of probe interval estimation on attack detection performance of a WLAN independent intrusion detection system

A new niche of densely populated, unprotected networks is becoming more prevalent in public areas such as Shopping Malls, defined here as independent open-access networks, which have attributes that make attack detection more challenging than in typical enterprise networks. To address these challenges, new detection systems which do not rely on knowledge of internal device state are investigated here. This paper shows that this lack of state information requires an additional metric (The exchange timeout window) for detection of WLAN Denial of Service Probe Flood attacks. Variability in this metric has a significant influence on the ability of a detection system to reliably detect the presence of attacks. A parameter selection method is proposed which is shown to provide reliability and repeatability in attack detection in WLANs. Results obtained from ongoing live trials are presented that demonstrate the importance of accurately estimating probe request and probe response timeouts in future Independent Intrusion Detection Systems.

Mechanism of effluent attack on Portland cement and alkali activated mortars

The alkali activation of waste products has become a widespread topic of research, mainly due to environmental benefits. Portland cement and alkali-activated mortar samples were prepared to compare their resistance to silage effluent which contains lactic acid. The mechanism of attack on each sample has also been investigated.

Merit, Speech Disability and Discrimination

There is a substantial body of evidence – going back over decades – which indicates that the employment sphere is difficult for those who suffer a speech disability. To a large extent, I argue, this is due to the setting of merit in terms of orality and aesthetic. It also relates to the low perception of competence of the speech disabled. I argue that to be effective against discrimination the notion of merit and its assessment requires focus. ‘Merit’ as a concept in discrimination law has had its critics, yet it remains important to investigate it as social construct in order to help understand discrimination and how to counter this. For example, in this article I look at an instance where the resetting of what was viewed as ‘meritorious’ in judicial recruitment successfully improved the diversity in lower judicial posts.

Further, given the relative failure of the employment tribunal system to improve the general position of those who are disabled, I look to alternative methods of countering disability discrimination. The suggestion provided is that an enforced ombudsman type approach capable of dealing with what may be the core issue around employment discrimination (‘merit’) would provide a better mechanism for handling the general situation of disability discrimination than the tribunal system.

European Union non-discrimination law and intersectionality:Investigating the triangle of racial, gender and disability discrimination

This book contributes to a critical reflection of current legislative and jurisprudential developments in Non-Discrimination Law, focusing on the European Union. The book is focused on intersectionality between gender, race and disability and the question of whether, and to what extent, this intersection can be adequately addressed in (EU) law. The discussion rests on two basic assumptions. First, the multiplication of 'discrimination grounds' in EU law and other legal regimes should not result in a dilution of the demands of equality law. Accordingly, the book focuses on the three key grounds - race, gender and disability. These constitute nodes around which other discrimination grounds can be grouped. Second, any multi-ground non-discrimination law framework needs to engage with the question of discrimination on several grounds. This book provides a critical evaluation of some of the problems presented by such intersectionality and an opportunity to explore the issues in depth. This collection offers some new proposals relating to the regrouping of identity categories and to the general approach to socio-legal research in the field. It also contains a comparative section, which expands on practical experiences with intersectionality and law, and a section dedicated to juridical responses to intersectionality.

Gendered Violence and International Human Rights: Thinking Non-Discrimination Beyond the Sex Binary

The concept of non-discrimination has been central in the feminist challenge to gendered violence within international human rights law. This article critically explores non-discrimination and the challenge it seeks to pose to gendered violence through the work of Judith Butler. Drawing upon Butler’s critique of heteronormative sex/gender, the article utilises an understanding of gendered violence as effected by the restrictive scripts of sex/gender within heteronormativity to illustrate how the development of non-discrimination within international human rights law renders it ineffective to challenge gendered violence due to its own commitments to binarised and asymmetrical sex/gender. However, the article also seeks to encourage a reworking of non-discrimination beyond the heteronormative sex binary through employing Butler’s concept of cultural translation. Analysis via the lens of cultural translation reveals the fluidity of non-discrimination as a universal concept and offers new possibilities for feminist engagement with universal human rights.

Neural Network Based Attack on a Masked Implementation of AES

Masked implementations of cryptographic algorithms are often used in commercial embedded cryptographic devices to increase their resistance to side channel attacks. In this work we show how neural networks can be used to both identify the mask value, and to subsequently identify the secret key value with a single attack trace with high probability. We propose the use of a pre-processing step using principal component analysis (PCA) to significantly increase the success of the attack. We have developed a classifier that can correctly identify the mask for each trace, hence removing the security provided by that mask and reducing the attack to being equivalent to an attack against an unprotected implementation. The attack is performed on the freely available differential power analysis (DPA) contest data set to allow our work to be easily reproducible. We show that neural networks allow for a robust and efficient classification in the context of side-channel attacks.

Intersectionality and the Notion of Disability in EU discrimination law

Defining the characteristics targeted by banning discrimination constitutes a central challenge for EU discrimination law, and defining disability is particular-ly challenging due to the dispute around the very concept of disability. From 2006, the Court of Justice has wrestled with this definition in six judgments, five of which were delivered from 2013. Instead of classifying the case law definition as conforming to a medical or social model of disability, this article analyses the case law with a view to illustrate challenges of defining discrimination grounds generally, demanding that a sufficiently precise and non-exclusive definition of each discrimination ground can be achieved by re-focusing EU discrimination law around the nodes of sex, race and disability. The analysis exposes that the ECJ definition of disability neither complies with the UN CRPD nor adequately responds to intersectionality theory, for example because the definition is exclu-sionary in relation to female experience of disability.