O presente trabalho constitui uma avaliação prospectiva da utilização do método de esterilização feminina não-cirúrgica com quinacrina. O grupo em estudo é formado por dez mulheres, atendidas no período de abril a setembro de 1990, no Ambulatório de Planejamento Familiar do Hospital Sotero del Rio, Santiago, Chile. O perfil reprodutivo das mulheres, revela que o inicio da vida fértil foi, em media, aos 12.1 anos e aproximadamente quatro anos depois (16.4 anos), iniciaram a atividade sexual sem uso de métodos anticoncepcionais. Em consequência, verifica-se que a primeira gravidez ocorreu, em média, aos 19.1 anos, ou seja, ainda dentro do período que compreende a adolescência. Após este evento obstétrico - gravidez - a maioria iniciou o uso de métodos de planejamento familiar por volta dos 21 anos, tendo como resultado, uma variada e não muito bem sucedida história anticoncepcional. A decisão de encerrar a vida reprodutiva com medidas definitivas foi tomada pelo casal, baseado em informações fornecidas pelos profissionais de saúde e referindo razões de planejamento familiar, história anticoncepcional e obstétrica negativa. No momento de concretizar esta decisão, as mulheres faziam em média, 34.8 anos e parte de uma família legalmente constituída com 3.2 filhos vivos. Destas mulheres, 40 por cento ainda tinham a opção de utilizar métodos reversíveis modernos, no momento de submeter-se a este método definitivo. O seguimento prospectivo do método não-cirúrgico mostra que os efeitos colaterais, como os maiores níveis de quinacrina plasmática e urinária apresentam-se no período das primeiras 48 horas, após inserção intrauterina da primeira e segunda doses de \"pellets\" de quinacrina. / This paper consists of an evaluation on the use of quinacrine as a non-surgical irreversible method for female sterilization. The study group is made up of ten women, seen at the Sotero del Rio Hospital outpatient clinic in Santiago, Chile, from april to september 1990. This study reveals that the women\'s reproductive life began on average at the age of 12.1 years and approximately four years later they began their sexual activity without the use of contraceptive methods. Consequently their first pregnancy occurred at the age of 19.1 years, during late adolescent years. Two years after pregnancy many of these women began to use contraceptive methods (at the age of 21, on average). As a result their obstetric history shows a non well succeeded and varied response to anticonceptional methods. The decision to close reprodutive life taking permanent steps was made by the couples based on information furnished by health professionals. The reasons given were related to family planning, anticonceptional and negative obstetric history. On implementing their decision, the group averaged 34.8 years and averaged 3.2 a lived children per subject. A total of 40 per cent of these women could still use other modern reversible methods before being submited to this permanent one. The follow-up of this non-surgical procedure shows that side effects such as higher levels of quinacrine in the blood and urine ocurred in the first 48 hours after the first and second intrauterine insertion of quinacrine pellets.

This thesis describes a new method to evaluate the value of wind power combined with domestic demand response. The thesis gives a brief overview of current domestic demand management programmes, and highlights the demand response and its current application. Such technology has conventionally been used for different purposes, such as frequency regulation, and to minimize the spot electricity prices in the market. The aim is to show whether such technology may become useful to make the renewables, and in particular wind power more interesting for investors. An assessment framework based on generation scheduling is developed to quantify the value of wind power. A further important aspect of value of wind power is the impact of intermittency on overall reliability of the system. This necessitates increasing the spinning reserve level which will increase the production cost. The changes in the spinning reserve level has been investigated in this thesis and it has been shown that how different forecasting errors may change the overall value of a windfarm over its lifetime. One of the most important aspects of a system containing demand response, is the availability of demand response. A load modelling package is developed to show the potential for demand response in a real system from domestic sector. With every increasing the concerns with regard to future of generation mix in Britain, this work has proposed over 72 scenarios for the future of generation mix in Britain and the impact of demand response to increase the value of wind power in 2020 has been investigated. The assessment framework is enhanced by showing that how the value of wind power combined with domestic demand response may change by changes in emission price, and cost of demand response. This will show the degree of feasibility of such system in which demand response is treated like a commodity.

With the emerging computing technologies and applications in the past decades, cryptography is facing tremendous challenges in its position of guarding our digital world. The advent of quantum computers is potentially going to cease the dominance of RSA and other public key algorithms based on hard problems of factorization and discrete logarithm. In order to protect the Internet at post-quantum era, great efforts have been dedicated to the design of RSA substitutions. One of them is code- based McEliece public key schemes which are immune to quantum attacks. Meanwhile, new infrastructures like Internet of Things are bringing the world enormous benefits but, due to the resource-constrained nature, require compact and still reliable cryptographic solutions. Motivated by this, many lightweight cryptographic algorithms are introduced. Nevertheless, side channel attack is still a practical threat for implementations of these new algorithms if no countermeasures are employed. In the past decades two major categories of side channel countermeasures, namely masking and hiding, have been studied to mitigate the threat of such attacks. As a masking countermeasure, Threshold Implementation becomes popular in recent years. It is sound in providing provable side channel resistance for hardware-based cryptosystems but meanwhile it also incurs significant overheads which need further optimization for constrained applications. Masking, especially for higher order masking schemes, requires low signal-to-noise ratio to be effective which can be achieved by applying hiding countermeasures. In order to evaluate side channel resistance of countermeasures, several tools have been introduced. Due to its simplicity, TVLA is being accepted by academy and industry as a one-size-fit-all leakage detection methodolgy that can be used by non-experts. However, its effectiveness can be negatively impacted by environmental factors such as temperature variations. Thus, a robust and simple evaluation method is desired. In this dissertation, we first show how differential power analysis can efficiently exploit the power consumption of a McEliece implementation to recover the private key. Then, we apply Threshold Implementation scheme in order to protect from the proposed attack. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first time of applying Threshold Implementation in a public key cryptosystem. Next, we investigate the reduction of shares in Threshold Implementation so as to bring down its overhead for constrained applications. Our study shows that Threshold Implementation using only two shares reduces the overheads while still provides reliable first-order resistance but in the meantime it also leaks a strong second-order leakage. We also propose a hiding countermeasure, namely balanced encoding scheme based on the idea of Dual- Rail Pre-charge logic style in hardwares. We show that it is effective to mitigate the leakage and can be combined with masking schemes to achieve better resistance. Finally, we study paired t-test versus Welch's t-test in the original TVLA and show its robustness against environmental noises. We also found that using moving average in computing t statistics can detect higher-order leakage faster.

"Securing data transmission has always been a challenge. While many cryptographic algorithms are available to solve the problem, many applications have tough area constraints while requiring high-level security. Lightweight cryptography aims at achieving high-level security with the benefit of being low cost. Since the late nineties and with the discovery of side channel attacks the approach towards cryptography has changed quite significantly. An attacker who can get close to a device can extract sensitive data by monitoring side channels such as power consumption, sound, or electromagnetic emanation. This means that embedded implementations of cryptographic schemes require protection against such attacks to achieve the desired level of security. In this work we combine a low-cost embedded cipher, Simon, with a stateof-the-art side channel countermeasure called Threshold Implementation (TI). We show that TI is a great match for lightweight cryptographic ciphers, especially for hardware implementation. Our implementation is the smallest TI of a block-cipher on an FPGA. This implementation utilizes 96 slices of a low-cost Spartan-3 FPGA and 55 slices a modern Kintex-7 FPGA. Moreover, we present a higher order TI which is resistant against second order attacks. This implementation utilizes 163 slices of a Spartan-3 FPGA and 95 slices of a Kintex-7 FPGA. We also present a state of the art leakage analysis and, by applying it to the designs, show that the implementations achieve the expected security. The implementations even feature a significant robustness to higher order attacks, where several million observations are needed to detect leakage."

Current cryptographic algorithms pose high standards of security yet they are susceptible to side-channel analysis (SCA). When it comes to implementation, the hardness of cryptography dangles on the weak link of side-channel information leakage. The widely adopted AES encryption algorithm, and others, can be easily broken when they are implemented without any resistance to SCA. This work applies state of the art techniques, namely Secret Sharing and Secure Multiparty Computation (SMC), on AES-128 encryption as a countermeasure to those attacks. This embedded C implementation explores multiple time-memory trade-offs for the design of its fundamental components, SMC and field arithmetic, to meet a variety of execution and storage demands. The performance and leakage assessment of this implementation for an ARM based micro-controller demonstrate the capabilities of masking schemes and prove their feasibility on embedded software.

It is not a secret that communications between client sides and server sides in web applications can leak user confidential data through side-channel attacks. The lower lever traffic features, such as packet sizes, packet lengths, timings, etc., are public to attackers. Attackers can infer a user's web activities including web browsing histories and user sensitive information by analysing web traffic generated during communications, even when the traffic is encrypted. There has been an increasing public concern about the disclosure of user privacy through side-channel attacks in web applications. A large amount of work has been proposed to analyse and evaluate this kind of security threat in the real world. This dissertation addresses side-channel vulnerabilities from different perspectives. First, a new approach based on verification and quantitative information flow is proposed to perform a fully automated analysis of side-channel leakages in web applications. Core to this aim is the generation of test cases without developers' manual work. Techniques are implemented into a tool, called SideAuto, which targets at the Apache Struts web applications. Then the focus is turned to real-world web applications. A black-box methodology of automatically analysing side-channel vulnerabilities in real-world web applications is proposed. This research demonstrates that communications which are not explicitly involving user sensitive information can leak user secrets, even more seriously than a traffic explicitly transmitting user information. Moreover, this thesis also examines side-channel leakages of user identities from Google accounts. The research demonstrates that user identities can be revealed, even when communicating with external websites included in Alexa Top 150 websites, which have no relation to Google accounts.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

My thesis contributes to the firms and trade literature, both theoretically and empirically, focusing on the export participation strategy by firms in one particular market, introducing products sequentially. I illustrate differences in export dynamics between firms according to their experience in that destination, and move further in my analysis by exploring how fast that experimentation is. I am particularly interested in the influence of trade liberalisation, as well as differences between products in terms of production effciency. Chapters 3 and 4 present a two-period analysis on firms' sequential exporting strategy to a single destination. Chapter 3 shows theoretically, inspired by Albornoz et al. (2012), that new exporters in a market tend to grow faster in that destination than expert exporters, both at the intensive and extensive margin, across products; but those newcomers are also more prone to exit that business, while trade liberalisation, as well as the focus on \core competence" products, helps new exporters to remain in the market and continue experimenting. With a rich dataset of Peruvian export transactions to the USA market, Chapter 4 backs most predictions from the theory empirically. In Chapter 5, I go deeper into the sequential exporting strategy with a theoretical framework, based on Nguyen (2012), to explain how quickly exporters in one market move from one product to another. I find, supported by empirical evidence, that trade liberalisation accelerates firms' experimentation in that destination.

This thesis examines the impact of CEO compensation, analysts' characteristics, earnings management and country governability on the accuracy of analysts' earnings forecasts. In summary, the thesis includes the following chapters: Firstly, Chapter 2 examines the interplay between CEO compensation and analysts' forecast errors over different forecasting horizons. A unique analyst-level sample for U.S. firms covering the period between 1992 and 2015 has been employed. Evidence obtained from this analysis suggests that CEO compensation, measured by various forms such as restricted stock holdings and stock ownership would correct for optimism in analysts' earnings forecasts, whereas CEO bonus and sensitivity to changes in firm's value would exacerbate analysts' optimism. Results also show that CEO compensation would augment the effect of earnings management on analysts' forecasts with CEO bonus being of importance. The findings of this chapter also indicate that analysts' characteristics and regulation can affect earnings forecasts. Next, Chapter 3 investigates the effect of governance on analysts' earnings forecasts. By employing a comprehensive dataset of 911 U.S. firms for the period 2000 – 2014, this chapter demonstrates a strong positive association between the government effectiveness and analysts' earnings forecasts. We extend this analysis employing corporate governance variables such as CEO equity incentives and CEO power, whilst a possible cross-term association between governability and the former has also been examined. This chapter explores further the effects of earnings management on analysts' forecasts accuracy documenting a negative impact of the former on the latter. Lastly, underlying causality strands and endogeneity issues are addressed opting for a flexible panel VAR model. Finally, Chapter 4 presents evidence of the effects of corruption on the accuracy of analysts' forecasts. Using a global sample, this chapter reveals that analysts face greater difficulty in forecasting earnings in advanced and emerging countries due to the detrimental effect of corruption. Interestingly, findings suggest that for firms located in developing countries, corruption enhances analysts' accuracy. This chapter also shows that the effect of earnings manipulation on the accuracy of forecasts is aggravated in the presence of corruption, whilst greater country freedom would enhance analysts' accuracy when corruption is present.

O presente trabalho constitui uma avaliação prospectiva da utilização do método de esterilização feminina não-cirúrgica com quinacrina. O grupo em estudo é formado por dez mulheres, atendidas no período de abril a setembro de 1990, no Ambulatório de Planejamento Familiar do Hospital Sotero del Rio, Santiago, Chile. O perfil reprodutivo das mulheres, revela que o inicio da vida fértil foi, em media, aos 12.1 anos e aproximadamente quatro anos depois (16.4 anos), iniciaram a atividade sexual sem uso de métodos anticoncepcionais. Em consequência, verifica-se que a primeira gravidez ocorreu, em média, aos 19.1 anos, ou seja, ainda dentro do período que compreende a adolescência. Após este evento obstétrico - gravidez - a maioria iniciou o uso de métodos de planejamento familiar por volta dos 21 anos, tendo como resultado, uma variada e não muito bem sucedida história anticoncepcional. A decisão de encerrar a vida reprodutiva com medidas definitivas foi tomada pelo casal, baseado em informações fornecidas pelos profissionais de saúde e referindo razões de planejamento familiar, história anticoncepcional e obstétrica negativa. No momento de concretizar esta decisão, as mulheres faziam em média, 34.8 anos e parte de uma família legalmente constituída com 3.2 filhos vivos. Destas mulheres, 40 por cento ainda tinham a opção de utilizar métodos reversíveis modernos, no momento de submeter-se a este método definitivo. O seguimento prospectivo do método não-cirúrgico mostra que os efeitos colaterais, como os maiores níveis de quinacrina plasmática e urinária apresentam-se no período das primeiras 48 horas, após inserção intrauterina da primeira e segunda doses de \"pellets\" de quinacrina. / This paper consists of an evaluation on the use of quinacrine as a non-surgical irreversible method for female sterilization. The study group is made up of ten women, seen at the Sotero del Rio Hospital outpatient clinic in Santiago, Chile, from april to september 1990. This study reveals that the women\'s reproductive life began on average at the age of 12.1 years and approximately four years later they began their sexual activity without the use of contraceptive methods. Consequently their first pregnancy occurred at the age of 19.1 years, during late adolescent years. Two years after pregnancy many of these women began to use contraceptive methods (at the age of 21, on average). As a result their obstetric history shows a non well succeeded and varied response to anticonceptional methods. The decision to close reprodutive life taking permanent steps was made by the couples based on information furnished by health professionals. The reasons given were related to family planning, anticonceptional and negative obstetric history. On implementing their decision, the group averaged 34.8 years and averaged 3.2 a lived children per subject. A total of 40 per cent of these women could still use other modern reversible methods before being submited to this permanent one. The follow-up of this non-surgical procedure shows that side effects such as higher levels of quinacrine in the blood and urine ocurred in the first 48 hours after the first and second intrauterine insertion of quinacrine pellets.