AN EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT OF USER ONLINE SECURITY BEHAVIOR: EVIDENCE FROM A UNIVERSITY

The ever-increasing number and severity of cybersecurity breaches makes it vital to understand the factors that make organizations vulnerable. Since humans are considered the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain of an organization, this study evaluates users’ individual differences (demographic factors, risk-taking preferences, decision-making styles and personality traits) to understand online security behavior. This thesis studies four different yet tightly related online security behaviors that influence organizational cybersecurity: device securement, password generation, proactive awareness and updating. A survey (N=369) of students, faculty and staff in a large mid-Atlantic U.S. public university identifies individual characteristics that relate to online security behavior and characterizes the higher-risk individuals that pose threats to the university’s cybersecurity. Based on these findings and insights from interviews with phishing victims, the study concludes with recommendations to help similat organizations increase end-user cybersecurity compliance and mitigate the risks caused by humans in the organizational cybersecurity chain.

Information security value in e-entrepreneurship

This paper researches the information security value in e-entrepreneurship by revising the literature that establishes the entrepreneurial domain and by relating it with the development of technological resources that create value for the customer in an online business. It details multiple paradigms regarding consumer’s values of information security, while relating them with common practices and previous researches in technological entrepreneurship. This research presents and discusses the benefits of information security standards in e-entrepreneurship. It details and discusses the ISO 27001 and PCI-DSS information security standards that can be used to differentiate security initiatives to achieve competitive advantage, while preserving information leadership as a critical resource for online business success. Based on the literature review, a theoretical research model is presented and research hypotheses are discussed. This model believes that information security affects information leadership and that information leadership, as a unique resource in e-business, contributes to e-entrepreneurship success. The adoption of information security standards affects customer’s trust in e-business, which also benefits e-entrepreneurial strategy.

Improvements in Hardware Transactional Memory for GPU Architectures

In the multi-core CPU world, transactional memory (TM)has emerged as an alternative to lock-based programming for thread synchronization. Recent research proposes the use of TM in GPU architectures, where a high number of computing threads, organized in SIMT fashion, requires an effective synchronization method. In contrast to CPUs, GPUs offer two memory spaces: global memory and local memory. The local memory space serves as a shared scratch-pad for a subset of the computing threads, and it is used by programmers to speed-up their applications thanks to its low latency. Prior work from the authors proposed a lightweight hardware TM (HTM) support based in the local memory, modifying the SIMT execution model and adding a conflict detection mechanism. An efficient implementation of these features is key in order to provide an effective synchronization mechanism at the local memory level. After a quick description of the main features of our HTM design for GPU local memory, in this work we gather together a number of proposals designed with the aim of improving those mechanisms with high impact on performance. Firstly, the SIMT execution model is modified to increase the parallelism of the application when transactions must be serialized in order to make forward progress. Secondly, the conflict detection mechanism is optimized depending on application characteristics, such us the read/write sets, the probability of conflict between transactions and the existence of read-only transactions. As these features can be present in hardware simultaneously, it is a task of the compiler and runtime to determine which ones are more important for a given application. This work includes a discussion on the analysis to be done in order to choose the best configuration solution.

Insights into the Fallback Path of Best-Effort Hardware Transactional Memory Systems

Current industry proposals for Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) focus on best-effort solutions (BE-HTM) where hardware limits are imposed on transactions. These designs may show a significant performance degradation due to high contention scenarios and different hardware and operating system limitations that abort transactions, e.g. cache overflows, hardware and software exceptions, etc. To deal with these events and to ensure forward progress, BE-HTM systems usually provide a software fallback path to execute a lock-based version of the code. In this paper, we propose a hardware implementation of an irrevocability mechanism as an alternative to the software fallback path to gain insight into the hardware improvements that could enhance the execution of such a fallback. Our mechanism anticipates the abort that causes the transaction serialization, and stalls other transactions in the system so that transactional work loss is mini- mized. In addition, we evaluate the main software fallback path approaches and propose the use of ticket locks that hold precise information of the number of transactions waiting to enter the fallback. Thus, the separation of transactional and fallback execution can be achieved in a precise manner. The evaluation is carried out using the Simics/GEMS simulator and the complete range of STAMP transactional suite benchmarks. We obtain significant performance benefits of around twice the speedup and an abort reduction of 50% over the software fallback path for a number of benchmarks.

Comparative study of human age estimation based on hand-crafted and deep face features

In the past few years, human facial age estimation has drawn a lot of attention in the computer vision and pattern recognition communities because of its important applications in age-based image retrieval, security control and surveillance, biomet- rics, human-computer interaction (HCI) and social robotics. In connection with these investigations, estimating the age of a person from the numerical analysis of his/her face image is a relatively new topic. Also, in problems such as Image Classification the Deep Neural Networks have given the best results in some areas including age estimation. In this work we use three hand-crafted features as well as five deep features that can be obtained from pre-trained deep convolutional neural networks. We do a comparative study of the obtained age estimation results with these features.

MODELING AND HARDWARE-IN-THE-LOOP SIMULATION OF POWER-SPLIT HYBRID ELECTRIC VEHICLES

Conventional vehicles are creating pollution problems, global warming and the extinction of high density fuels. To address these problems, automotive companies and universities are researching on hybrid electric vehicles where two different power devices are used to propel a vehicle. This research studies the development and testing of a dynamic model for Prius 2010 Hybrid Synergy Drive (HSD), a power-split device. The device was modeled and integrated with a hybrid vehicle model. To add an electric only mode for vehicle propulsion, the hybrid synergy drive was modified by adding a clutch to carrier 1. The performance of the integrated vehicle model was tested with UDDS drive cycle using rule-based control strategy. The dSPACE Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulator was used for HIL simulation test. The HIL simulation result shows that the integration of developed HSD dynamic model with a hybrid vehicle model was successful. The HSD model was able to split power and isolate engine speed from vehicle speed in hybrid mode.

SECURITY, PRIVACY AND APPLICATIONS IN VEHICULAR AD HOC NETWORKS

With wireless vehicular communications, Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) enable numerous applications to enhance traffic safety, traffic efficiency, and driving experience. However, VANETs also impose severe security and privacy challenges which need to be thoroughly investigated. In this dissertation, we enhance the security, privacy, and applications of VANETs, by 1) designing application-driven security and privacy solutions for VANETs, and 2) designing appealing VANET applications with proper security and privacy assurance. First, the security and privacy challenges of VANETs with most application significance are identified and thoroughly investigated. With both theoretical novelty and realistic considerations, these security and privacy schemes are especially appealing to VANETs. Specifically, multi-hop communications in VANETs suffer from packet dropping, packet tampering, and communication failures which have not been satisfyingly tackled in literature. Thus, a lightweight reliable and faithful data packet relaying framework (LEAPER) is proposed to ensure reliable and trustworthy multi-hop communications by enhancing the cooperation of neighboring nodes. Message verification, including both content and signature verification, generally is computation-extensive and incurs severe scalability issues to each node. The resource-aware message verification (RAMV) scheme is proposed to ensure resource-aware, secure, and application-friendly message verification in VANETs. On the other hand, to make VANETs acceptable to the privacy-sensitive users, the identity and location privacy of each node should be properly protected. To this end, a joint privacy and reputation assurance (JPRA) scheme is proposed to synergistically support privacy protection and reputation management by reconciling their inherent conflicting requirements. Besides, the privacy implications of short-time certificates are thoroughly investigated in a short-time certificates-based privacy protection (STCP2) scheme, to make privacy protection in VANETs feasible with short-time certificates. Secondly, three novel solutions, namely VANET-based ambient ad dissemination (VAAD), general-purpose automatic survey (GPAS), and VehicleView, are proposed to support the appealing value-added applications based on VANETs. These solutions all follow practical application models, and an incentive-centered architecture is proposed for each solution to balance the conflicting requirements of the involved entities. Besides, the critical security and privacy challenges of these applications are investigated and addressed with novel solutions. Thus, with proper security and privacy assurance, these solutions show great application significance and economic potentials to VANETs. Thus, by enhancing the security, privacy, and applications of VANETs, this dissertation fills the gap between the existing theoretic research and the realistic implementation of VANETs, facilitating the realistic deployment of VANETs.

REALIZATION OF A DC MICROGRID USING A HAMILTONIAN BASED CONTROLS SOLUTION

Future power grids are envisioned to be serviced by heterogeneous arrangements of renewable energy sources. Due to their stochastic nature, energy storage distribution and management are pivotal in realizing microgrids serviced heavily by renewable energy assets. Identifying the required response characteristics to meet the operational requirements of a power grid are of great importance and must be illuminated in order to discern optimal hardware topologies. Hamiltonian Surface Shaping and Power Flow Control (HSSPFC) presents the tools to identify such characteristics. By using energy storage as actuation within the closed loop controller, the response requirements may be identified while providing a decoupled controller solution. A DC microgrid servicing a fixed RC load through source and bus level storage managed by HSSPFC was realized in hardware. A procedure was developed to calibrate the DC microgrid architecture of this work to the reduced order model used by the HSSPFC law. Storage requirements were examined through simulation and experimental testing. Bandwidth contributions between feed forward and PI components of the HSSPFC law are illuminated and suggest the need for well-known system losses to prevent the need for additional overhead in storage allocations. The following work outlines the steps taken in realizing a DC microgrid and presents design considerations for system calibration and storage requirements per the closed loop controls for future DC microgrids.

Interoperable Resource Brokering with Policy-based Provisioning and Job Allocation

The increasing needs for computational power in areas such as weather simulation, genomics or Internet applications have led to sharing of geographically distributed and heterogeneous resources from commercial data centers and scientific institutions. Research in the areas of utility, grid and cloud computing, together with improvements in network and hardware virtualization has resulted in methods to locate and use resources to rapidly provision virtual environments in a flexible manner, while lowering costs for consumers and providers. However, there is still a lack of methodologies to enable efficient and seamless sharing of resources among institutions. In this work, we concentrate in the problem of executing parallel scientific applications across distributed resources belonging to separate organizations. Our approach can be divided in three main points. First, we define and implement an interoperable grid protocol to distribute job workloads among partners with different middleware and execution resources. Second, we research and implement different policies for virtual resource provisioning and job-to-resource allocation, taking advantage of their cooperation to improve execution cost and performance. Third, we explore the consequences of on-demand provisioning and allocation in the problem of site-selection for the execution of parallel workloads, and propose new strategies to reduce job slowdown and overall cost.

Identity, ideology, and cinema: Making sense of Japan's foreign and security policies in the 1950s and 2000s

Japan is an important ally of the United States–the world’s third biggest economy, and one of the regional great powers in Asia. Making sense of Japan’s foreign and security policies is crucial for the future of peace and stability in Northeast Asia, where the possible sources of conflict such as territorial disputes or the disputes over Japan’s war legacy issues are observed.^ This dissertation explored Japan’s foreign and security policies based on Japan’s identities and unconscious ideologies. It employed an analysis of selected Japanese films from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, as well as from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s. The analysis demonstrated that Japan’s foreign and security policies could be understood in terms of a broader social narrative that was visible in Japanese popular cultural products, including films and literatures. Narratives of Japanese families from the patriarch’s point of view, for example, had constantly shaped Japan’s foreign and security policies. As a result, the world was ordered hierarchically in the eyes of the Japan Self. In the 1950s, Japan tenaciously constructed close but asymmetrical security relations with the U.S. in which Japan willingly subjugated itself to the U.S. In the 2000s, Japan again constructed close relations with the U.S. by doing its best to support American responses to the 9/11 terrorist attacks by mobilizing Japan’s SDFs in the way Japan had never done in the past.^ The concepts of identity and unconscious ideology are helpful in understanding how Japan’s own understanding of self, of others, and of the world have shaped its own behaviors. These concepts also enable Japan to reevaluate its own behaviors reflexively, which departs from existing alternative approaches. This study provided a critical analytical explanation of the dynamics at work in Japan’s sense of identity, particularly with regard to its foreign and security policies.^

Hybrid power system intelligent operation and protection involving plug-in electric vehicles

Two key solutions to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and increase the overall energy efficiency are to maximize the utilization of renewable energy resources (RERs) to generate energy for load consumption and to shift to low or zero emission plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) for transportation. The present U.S. aging and overburdened power grid infrastructure is under a tremendous pressure to handle the issues involved in penetration of RERS and PEVs. The future power grid should be designed with for the effective utilization of distributed RERs and distributed generations to intelligently respond to varying customer demand including PEVs with high level of security, stability and reliability. This dissertation develops and verifies such a hybrid AC-DC power system. The system will operate in a distributed manner incorporating multiple components in both AC and DC styles and work in both grid-connected and islanding modes. ^ The verification was performed on a laboratory-based hybrid AC-DC power system testbed as hardware/software platform. In this system, RERs emulators together with their maximum power point tracking technology and power electronics converters were designed to test different energy harvesting algorithms. The Energy storage devices including lithium-ion batteries and ultra-capacitors were used to optimize the performance of the hybrid power system. A lithium-ion battery smart energy management system with thermal and state of charge self-balancing was proposed to protect the energy storage system. A grid connected DC PEVs parking garage emulator, with five lithium-ion batteries was also designed with the smart charging functions that can emulate the future vehicle-to-grid (V2G), vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-house (V2H) services. This includes grid voltage and frequency regulations, spinning reserves, micro grid islanding detection and energy resource support. ^ The results show successful integration of the developed techniques for control and energy management of future hybrid AC-DC power systems with high penetration of RERs and PEVs.^

Acceptance of smartphone-based mobile shopping:mobile benefits, customer characteristics, perceived risk and the impact of application context

Despite their generally increasing use, the adoption of mobile shopping applications often differs across purchase contexts. In order to advance our understanding of smartphone-based mobile shopping acceptance, this study integrates and extends existing approaches from technology acceptance literature by examining two previously underexplored aspects. Firstly, the study examines the impact of different mobile and personal benefits (instant connectivity, contextual value and hedonic motivation), customer characteristics (habit) and risk facets (financial, performance, and security risk) as antecedents of mobile shopping acceptance. Secondly, it is assumed that several acceptance drivers differ in relevance subject to the perception of three mobile shopping characteristics (location sensitivity, time criticality, and extent of control), while other drivers are assumed to matter independent of the context. Based on a dataset of 410 smartphone shoppers, empirical results demonstrate that several acceptance predictors are associated with ease of use and usefulness, which in turn affect intentional and behavioral outcomes. Furthermore, the extent to which risks and benefits impact ease of use and usefulness is influenced by the three contextual characteristics. From a managerial perspective, results show which factors to consider in the development of mobile shopping applications and in which different application contexts they matter.

What Influences Information Security Behavior? A Study with Brazilian Users

The popularization of software to mitigate Information Security threats can produce an exaggerated notion about its full effectiveness in the elimination of any threat. This situation can result reckless users behavior, increasing vulnerability. Based on behavioral theories, a theoretical model and hypotheses were developed to understand the extent to which human perception of threat, stress, control and disgruntlement can induce responsible behavior. A self-administered questionnaire was created and validated. The data were collected in Brazil, and complementary results regarding similar studies conducted in USA were found. The results show that there is influence of information security orientations provided by organizations in the perception about severity of the threat. The relationship between threat, effort, control and disgruntlement, and the responsible behavior towards information security was verified through linear regression. The contributions also involve relatively new concepts in the field and a new research instrument.

The issue of data protection and data security in the (pre-Lisbon) EU third pillar

The key functional operability in the pre-Lisbon PJCCM pillar of the EU is the exchange of intelligence and information amongst the law enforcement bodies of the EU. The twin issues of data protection and data security within what was the EU’s third pillar legal framework therefore come to the fore. With the Lisbon Treaty reform of the EU, and the increased role of the Commission in PJCCM policy areas, and the integration of the PJCCM provisions with what have traditionally been the pillar I activities of Frontex, the opportunity for streamlining the data protection and data security provisions of the law enforcement bodies of the post-Lisbon EU arises. This is recognised by the Commission in their drafting of an amending regulation for Frontex , when they say that they would prefer “to return to the question of personal data in the context of the overall strategy for information exchange to be presented later this year and also taking into account the reflection to be carried out on how to further develop cooperation between agencies in the justice and home affairs field as requested by the Stockholm programme.” The focus of the literature published on this topic, has for the most part, been on the data protection provisions in Pillar I, EC. While the focus of research has recently sifted to the previously Pillar III PJCCM provisions on data protection, a more focused analysis of the interlocking issues of data protection and data security needs to be made in the context of the law enforcement bodies, particularly with regard to those which were based in the pre-Lisbon third pillar. This paper will make a contribution to that debate, arguing that a review of both the data protection and security provision post-Lisbon is required, not only in order to reinforce individual rights, but also inter-agency operability in combating cross-border EU crime. The EC’s provisions on data protection, as enshrined by Directive 95/46/EC, do not apply to the legal frameworks covering developments within the third pillar of the EU. Even Council Framework Decision 2008/977/JHA, which is supposed to cover data protection provisions within PJCCM expressly states that its provisions do not apply to “Europol, Eurojust, the Schengen Information System (SIS)” or to the Customs Information System (CIS). In addition, the post Treaty of Prüm provisions covering the sharing of DNA profiles, dactyloscopic data and vehicle registration data pursuant to Council Decision 2008/615/JHA, are not to be covered by the provisions of the 2008 Framework Decision. As stated by Hijmans and Scirocco, the regime is “best defined as a patchwork of data protection regimes”, with “no legal framework which is stable and unequivocal, like Directive 95/46/EC in the First pillar”. Data security issues are also key to the sharing of data in organised crime or counterterrorism situations. This article will critically analyse the current legal framework for data protection and security within the third pillar of the EU.

Knowledge-based management systems for the police force

Knowledge-Based Management Systems enable new ways to process and analyse knowledge to gain better insights to solve a problem and aid in decision making. In the police force such systems provide a solution for enhancing operations and improving client administration in terms of knowledge management. The main objectives of every police officer is to ensure the security of life and property, promote lawfulness, and avert and distinguish wrongdoing. The administration of knowledge and information is an essential part of policing, and the police ought to be proactive in directing both explicit and implicit knowledge, whilst adding to their abilities in knowledge sharing. In this paper the potential for a knowledge based system for the Mauritius police was analysed, and recommendations were also made, based on requirements captured from interviews with several long standing officers, and surveying of previous works in the area.