Improved algebraic cryptanalysis of QUAD, Bivium and Trivium via graph partitioning on equation systems

We present a novel approach for preprocessing systems of polynomial equations via graph partitioning. The variable-sharing graph of a system of polynomial equations is defined. If such graph is disconnected, then the corresponding system of equations can be split into smaller ones that can be solved individually. This can provide a tremendous speed-up in computing the solution to the system, but is unlikely to occur either randomly or in applications. However, by deleting certain vertices on the graph, the variable-sharing graph could be disconnected in a balanced fashion, and in turn the system of polynomial equations would be separated into smaller systems of near-equal sizes. In graph theory terms, this process is equivalent to finding balanced vertex partitions with minimum-weight vertex separators. The techniques of finding these vertex partitions are discussed, and experiments are performed to evaluate its practicality for general graphs and systems of polynomial equations. Applications of this approach in algebraic cryptanalysis on symmetric ciphers are presented: For the QUAD family of stream ciphers, we show how a malicious party can manufacture conforming systems that can be easily broken. For the stream ciphers Bivium and Trivium, we nachieve significant speedups in algebraic attacks against them, mainly in a partial key guess scenario. In each of these cases, the systems of polynomial equations involved are well-suited to our graph partitioning method. These results may open a new avenue for evaluating the security of symmetric ciphers against algebraic attacks.

On democracy

If one clear argument emerged from my doctoral thesis in political science, it is that there is no agreement as to what democracy is. There are over 40 different varieties of democracy ranging from those in the mainstream with subtle or minute differences to those playing by themselves in the corner. And many of these various types of democracy are very well argued, empirically supported, and highly relevant to certain polities. The irony is that the thing which all of these democratic varieties or the ‘basic democracy’ that all other forms of democracy stem from, is elusive. There is no international agreement in the literature or in political practice as to what ‘basic democracy’ is and that is problematic as many of us use the word ‘democracy’ every day and it is a concept of tremendous importance internationally. I am still uncertain as to why this problem has not been resolved before by far greater minds than my own, and it may have something to do with the recent growth in democratic theory this past decade and the innovative areas of thought my thesis required, but I think I’ve got the answer. By listing each type of democracy and filling the column next to this list with the literature associated with these various styles of democracy, I amassed a large and comprehensive body of textual data. My research intended to find out what these various styles of democracy had in common and to create a taxonomy (like the ‘tree of life’ in biology) of democracy to attempt at showing how various styles of democracy have ‘evolved’ over the past 5000 years.ii I then ran a word frequency analysis program or a piece of software that counts the 100 most commonly used words in the texts. This is where my logic came in as I had to make sense of these words. How did they answer what the most fundamental commonalities are between 40 different styles of democracy? I used a grounded theory analysis which required that I argue my way through these words to form a ‘theory’ or plausible explanation as to why these particular words and not others are the important ones for answering the question. It came down to the argument that all 40 styles of democracy analysed have the following in common 1) A concept of a citizenry. 2) A concept of sovereignty. 3) A concept of equality. 4) A concept of law. 5) A concept of communication. 6) And a concept of selecting officials. Thus, democracy is a defined citizenry with its own concept of sovereignty which it exercises through the institutions which support the citizenry’s understandings of equality, law, communication, and the selection of officials. Once any of these 6 concepts are defined in a particular way it creates a style of democracy. From this, we can also see that there can be more than one style of democracy active in a particular government as a citizenry is composed of many different aggregates with their own understandings of the six concepts.

A cybernetic approach to land management issues

This work is a digital version of a dissertation that was first submitted in partial fulfillment of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in March 1994. The work was concerned with problems of self-organisation and organisation ranging from local to global levels of hierarchy. It considers organisations as living entities from local to global things that a living entity – more particularly, an individual, a body corporate or a body politic - must know and do to maintain an existence – that is to remain viable – or to be sustainable. The term ‘land management’ as used in 1994 was later subsumed into a more general concept of ‘natural resource management’ and then merged with ideas about sustainable socioeconomic and sustainable ecological development. The cybernetic approach contains many cognitive elements of human observation, language and learning that combine into production processes. The approach tends to highlight instances where systems (or organisations) can fail because they have very little chance of succeeding. Thus there are logical necessities as well as technical possibilities in designing, constructing, operating and maintaining production systems that function reliably over extended periods. Chapter numbers and titles to the original thesis are as follows: 1. Land management as a problem of coping with complexity 2. Background theory in systems theory and cybernetic principles 3. Operationalisation of cybernetic principles in Beer’s Viable System Model 4. Issues in the design of viable cadastral surveying and mapping organisation 5. An analysis of the tendency for fragmentation in surveying and mapping organisation 6. Perambulating the boundaries of Sydney – a problem of social control under poor standards of literacy 7. Cybernetic principles in the process of legislation 8. Closer settlement policy and viability in agricultural production 9. Rate of return in leasing Crown lands

Applying the open innovation system concept to infrastructure projects

Purpose: The goal of this conceptual paper is to provide tools to help maximise the value delivered by infrastructure projects, by developing methods to increase adoption of innovative products during construction. Methods: The role of knowledge flows in determining innovation adoption rates is conceptually examined. A promising new approach is developed. Open innovation system theory is extended, by reviewing the role of three frameworks: (1) knowledge intermediaries, (2) absorptive capacity and (3) governance arrangements. Originality: We develop a novel open innovation system model to guide further research in the area of adoption of innovation on infrastructure projects. The open innovation system model currently lacks definition of core concepts, especially with regard to the impact of different degrees and types of openness. The three frameworks address this issue and add substance to the open innovation system model, addressing widespread criticism that it is underdeveloped. The novelty of our model is in the combination of the three frameworks to explore the system. These frameworks promise new insights into system dynamics and facilitate the development of new methods to optimise the diffusion of innovation. Practical Implications: The framework will help to reveal gaps in knowledge flows that impede the uptake of innovations. In the past, identifying these gaps has been difficult given the lack of nuance in existing theory. The knowledge maps proposed will enable informed policy advice to effectively harness the power of knowledge networks, increase innovation diffusion and improve the performance of infrastructure projects. The models developed in this paper will be used in planned empirical research into innovation on large scale infrastructure projects in the Australian built environment.

Modernising charity : steps to an alternative architecture for common law charity jurisprudence

This chapter addresses the question, how can the common law concept of charity law be modernised? There are difficulties with the present jurisprudential conception. The focus of the chapter is not on those difficulties, however, but rather on the development of an alternative architecture for common law jurisprudence. The conclusion to which the chapter comes is that charity law can be modernised by a series of steps to include all civil society organisations. It is possible if the ‘technical’ definition of charitable purpose is abandoned in favour of a contemporary, not technical concept of charitiable purpose. This conclusion is reached by proposing a framework, developed from the common law concept of charities, that reconciles into a cohesive jurisprudential architecture all of the laws applying to civil society organisations, not just charities. In this section, first the argument is contextualised in an idea of society and located in a gap in legal theory. An analogy is then offered to introduce the problems in the legal theory applying, not just to charities, but more broadly to civil society organisations. The substantive challenge of mapping an alternative jurisprudence is then taken in steps. The final substantive section conceptualises the changes inherent in a move beyond charities to a jurisprudence centred on civil society organisations and how this would bring legal theory into line with sectoral analysis in other disciplines.

Prevalence and determinants of the health promotion and risk reduction practices of younger female survivors of breast cancer

This thesis describes a discrete component of a larger mixed-method (survey and interview) study that explored the health-promotion and risk-reduction practices of younger premenopausal survivors of ovarian, breast and haematological cancers. This thesis outlines my distinct contribution to the larger study, which was to: (1) Produce a literature review that thoroughly explored all longer-term breast cancer treatment outcomes, and which outlined the health risks to survivors associated with these; (2) Describe and analyse the health-promotion and risk-reduction behaviours of nine younger female survivors of breast cancer as articulated in the qualitative interview dataset; and (3) Test the explanatory power of the Precede-Proceed theoretical framework underpinning the study in relation to the qualitative data from the breast cancer cohort. The thesis reveals that breast cancer survivors experienced many adverse outcomes as a result of treatment. While they generally engaged in healthy lifestyle practices, a lack of knowledge about many recommended health behaviours emerged throughout the interviews. The participants also described significant internal and external pressures to behave in certain ways because of the social norms surrounding the disease. This thesis also reports that the Precede-Proceed model is a generally robust approach to data collection, analysis and interpretation in the context of breast cancer survivorship. It provided plausible explanations for much of the data in this study. However, profound sociological and psychological implications arose during the analysis that were not effectively captured or explained by the theories underpinning the model. A sociological filter—such as Turner’s explanation of the meaning of the body and embodiment in the social sphere (Turner, 2008)—and the psychological concerns teased out in Mishel’s (1990) Uncertainty in Illness Theory, provided a useful dimension to the findings generated through the Precede-Proceed model. The thesis concludes with several recommendations for future research, clinical practice and education in this context.

The cultural economy moment?

This paper explores the rise of cultural economy as a key organising concept over the 2000s. While it has intellectual precursors in political economy, sociology and postmodernism, it has been work undertaken in the fields of cultural economic geography, creative industries, the culture of service industries and cultural policy where it has come to the forefront, particularly around whether we are now in a ‘creative economy’. While work undertaken in cultural studies has contributed to these developments, the development of neo-liberalism as a meta-concept in critical theory constitutes a substantive barrier to more sustained engagement between cultural studies and economics, as it rests upon a caricature of economic discourse. The paper draws upon Michel Foucault’s lectures on neo-liberalism to indicate that there are significant problems with the neo-Marxist account hat became hegemonic over the 2000s. The paper concludes by identifying areas such as the value of information, the value of networks, motivations for participation in online social networks, and the impact of business cycles on cultural sectors as areas of potentially fruitful inter-disciplinary engagement around the nature of cultural economy.

Focus of attention and its impact on movement behaviour

Investigations into the relative effectiveness of either focusing on movement form (internal focus) or movement effects (external focus) have tended to dominate research on instructional constraints. However, rather than adopting a comparative approach to determine which focus of attention is more effective, analysis of the relative efficacy of each specific instruction focus during motor learning could be more relevant for both researchers and practitioners. Theoretical advances in the motor learning literature from a nonlinear dynamics perspective might explain the processes that underlie the effect of different attentional focus instructions. Referencing ideas and concepts from a current motor learning model, differential effects of either internal or external focus of instructions are examined. This paper also highlights some deficiencies in extant theory and research design on focus of attention which require further investigations.

Access control : allocating resources to selfish agents

The ultimate goal of an authorisation system is to allocate each user the level of access they need to complete their job - no more and no less. This proves to be challenging in an organisational setting because on one hand employees need enough access to perform their tasks, while on the other hand more access will bring about an increasing risk of misuse - either intentionally, where an employee uses the access for personal benefit, or unintentionally through carelessness, losing the information or being socially engineered to give access to an adversary. With the goal of developing a more dynamic authorisation model, we have adopted a game theoretic framework to reason about the factors that may affect users’ likelihood to misuse a permission at the time of an access decision. Game theory provides a useful but previously ignored perspective in authorisation theory: the notion of the user as a self-interested player who selects among a range of possible actions depending on their pay-offs.

Right to the city, desire for the suburb?

The 2000s have been a lively decade for cities. The Worldwatch Institute estimated that 2007 was the first year in human history that more people worldwide lived in cities than the countryside. Globalisation and new digital media technologies have generated the seemingly paradoxical outcome that spatial location came to be more rather than less important, as combinations of firms, industries, cultural activities and creative talents have increasingly clustered around a select node of what have been termed “creative cities,” that are in turn highly networked into global circuits of economic capital, political power and entertainment media. Intellectually, the period has seen what the UCLA geographer Ed Soja refers to as the spatial turn in social theory, where “whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective”. This is related to the dynamic properties of socially constructed space itself, or what Soja terms “the powerful forces that arise from socially produced spaces such as urban agglomerations and cohesive regional economies,” with the result that “what can be called the stimulus of socio-spatial agglomeration is today being assertively described as the primary cause of economic development, technological innovation, and cultural creativity”