Modern processors use architecture like caches, branch predictors, and speculative execution in order to maximize computation throughput. For instance, recently accessed memory can be stored in a cache so that subsequent accesses take less time. Unfortunately microarchitecture-based side channel attacks can utilize this cache property to enable unauthorized memory accesses. The Spectre attack is a recent example of this attack. The Spectre attack is particularly dangerous because the vulnerabilities that it exploits are found in microprocessors used in billions of current systems. It involves the attacker inducing a victim’s process to speculatively execute code with a malicious input and store the recently accessed memory into the cache. This paper describes the previous microarchitecture side channel attacks. It then describes the three variants of the Spectre attack. It describes and evaluates proposed defenses against Spectre.

The infusion of intravenous immunoglobulin therapy in the home setting requires a critical nursing assessment and interventions aimed at managing and preventing the escalation of adverse events. Some patients experience side effects that necessitate a rapid response by field nurses, requiring standing orders for nursing administration and the availability of essential medications to alleviate symptoms in the patient's home. The clinical practice issue was that the home health agency did not have a uniform clinical practice nursing guideline to assist field nurses in providing rapid responses for managing infusion-related reactions. The purpose of this project was to develop an evidence-based clinical practice guideline using standing orders for the comprehensive management of immunoglobulin side effects in the patient's home. The practice-focused question centered on whether the use of a nursing practice guideline based on interprofessional collaboration could manage the side effects of patients in the home by decreasing the use of emergent care and improved quality of care for those patients susceptible to significant side effects. An interdisciplinary expert panel experience in IVIG l used Newman's system theory and the reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, maintenance framework for interprofessional collaboration in developing a clinical nursing guideline with a standing order for rating side effects. Panelists used the appraisal of guidelines, research, and evaluation II tool to appraise the evidence for the guideline. The use of clinical guideline with standing orders to address the needs of patients in the home setting may lead to positive social change by enabling more rapid management of symptoms, more effective care in the home, and improved patient outcomes

Bibliography: leaves 107-109.

Background. Medication-related patient injuries (adverse drug events, ADEs) are an important problem in all hospitalised populations; however, the potential for injury is reported to be greater in children than adults. Many ADEs are due to error and therefore could be prevented. Data regarding the risk factors (or predictors) for these events in paediatric inpatients is limited. It was hypothesised that "identification of risk factors for ADEs and medication errors in the paediatric inpatient setting will inform likely prevention strategies". Aims. To determine the frequency, nature and risk factors for ADEs and potential ADEs occurring in a paediatric inpatient population; to assess the vulnerable processes in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) medication use process; and to provide recommendations for the targeting of likely prevention strategies. Setting. A general paediatric ward (PW), postnatal ward (PNW) and NICU of a University- affiliated urban general hospital. Design. There were two study components: the medEVENT study which involved identification of actual ADEs and potential ADEs over a twelve week period, through prospective review of medical records, medication charts and administration records along with voluntary and solicited staff report and parent interview; and the FMEA study which used a proactive risk assessment technique, Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA), to rank all potential failures in the NICU medication use process according to risk. Results. In the MedEVENT study 3160 prescription episodes were reviewed (which represented 520 admissions, 3037 patient-days) and revealed a total of 67 ADEs and 77 potential ADEs. The greatest number of events occurred in NICU with very few events in the PNW. However, paediatric surgical admissions experienced the highest rate of ADEs per 1000 patient-days (80) as compared to medical (65) then NICU admissions (19). Over half of the ADEs were deemed preventable, 38 (57%), with the �more serious� ADEs more likely to be preventable than �not serious� ADEs. The impact on hospital resources was considerable with the cost attributed to extra bed days due to ADEs to be $NZD 50,000. Dosing errors were the most common type of error, particularly when prescribing and administering medications. Antibacterial and narcotic analgesics were commonly implicated, as was the intravenous route of administration. Few events were related to unlicensed use of medications. For ADEs, the major risk factors when analysed by admission, were greater medication exposure and increasing age; by prescription, were increasing age, oral route and narcotics and antibacterial agents; for paediatric ward admission, were increasing age and increased length of stay; and for NICU admission, no major risk factors emerged. For potential ADEs, the major risk factors when analysed by admission were greater medication exposure; by prescription, were junior prescriber, intravenous route, narcotics and antibacterials; for paediatric ward admission, were junior prescriber and narcotics; and for NICU admission were antibacterials, electrolytes and umbilical venous catheter administration. Neither ADEs nor potential ADEs were associated with unlicensed use of medicines or high alert status drugs. The FMEA study identified 72 potential failures in the NICU medication use process with 193 associated causes and effects. Multiple failures were possible in the process of �prescribing medication� and in the process of �preparation of medication for administration�. The highest ranking issues were found to occur at the administration stage. Common potential failures related to errors in the dose, timing of administration, infusion pump settings and route of administration. Conclusions. Analysis of the risk factors of ADEs and potential ADEs found that the most vulnerable processes were when prescribing and when preparing a medicine for administration; especially when involving narcotic and antibacterial agents and for children with greater medication exposure Strategies that selectively target these high risk areas are therefore likely to have the greatest impact on preventing drug-related injuries in hospitalised children.

Corrigenda inserted opposite title page. / Copies of author's previously published articles inserted inside back cover. / Bibliography: leaves 245-291. / xvii, 291 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / An improved HPLC method was developed to measure the concentration of the three compounds in plasma and urine. The stability of the compounds during storage in plasma was also established. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology, 1995?

Two problems of computer security are investigated. On one hand, we are facing a practical problematic of actual processors: the cache, an element of the architecture that brings flexibility and allows efficient utilization of the resources, is demonstrated to open security breaches from which secret information can be extracted. This issue required a delicate study to understand the problem and the role of the incriminated elements, to discover the potential of the attacks and find effective countermeasures. Because of the intricate behavior of a processor and limited resources of the cache, it is extremely hard to write constant-time software. This is particularly true with cryptographic applications that often rely on large precomputed data and pseudo-random accesses. The principle of time-driven attacks is to analyze the overall execution time of a cryptographic process and extract timing profiles. We show that in the case of AES those profiles are dependent on the memory lookups, i.e. the addition of the plaintext and the secret key. Correlations between some profiles with known inputs and some with partially unknown ones (known plaintext but unknown secret key) lead to the recovery of the secret key. We then detail access-driven attacks: another kind of cache-based side channel. This case relies on stronger assumptions regarding the attacker's capacities: he must be able to run another process, concurrent to the security process. Even if the security policies prevent the so-called "spy" process from accessing directly the data of the "crypto" process, the cache is shared between them and its behavior can lead the spy process to deduce the secrets of the crypto process. Several ways are explored for mitigations, depending on the security level to reach and on the attacker's capabilities. The respective performances of the mitigations are given. The scope is however oriented toward software mitigations as they can be directly applied to patch programs and reduce the cache leakage. On the other hand, we tackle a situation of computer science that also concerns many people and where important economical aspects are at stake: although spam is often considered as the other side of the Internet coin, we believe that it can be defeated and avoided. A increasing number of researches for example explores the ways cryptographic techniques can prevent spams from being spread. We concentrated on studying the behavior of the spammers to understand how e-mail addresses can be prevented from being gathered. The motivation for this work was to produce and make available quantitative results to efficiently prevent spam, as well as to provide a better understanding of the behavior of spammers. Even if orthogonal, both parts tackle practical problems and their results can be directly applied.

Fujian is the closest province between Taiwan and China. Fujian is also the important area that Taiwan¡¦s businesses invested in China. The economical development and industrial structure in Taiwan and Fujian is very closely. Fujian is the key area that for the Taiwan ¡¥s businesses entering to China. It is necessary to understand the trade relation and history between Taiwan and Fujian, the economical position in Fujian, the plan of the west side of the Straits and the compare with other economical area. The study researched and analysed the history of Fujian, Xizmen economical zone, the Quanzhou pattern and the plan of the west side of the Straits to know the regional economical development between Fujian and Taiwan.

Graduation date: 1994

The performance of multiple input single output (MISO) broadcast channels is strongly dependent on the availability of channel side information (CSI) at the transmitter. In many practical systems, CSI may be available to the transmitter only in a corrupted and incomplete form. It is natural to assume that the flaws in the CSI are random and can be represented by a probability distribution over the channel. This work is concerned with two key issues concerning MISO broadcast systems with random CSI: performance analysis and system design. First, the impact of noisy channel information on system performance is investigated. A simple model is formulated where the channel is Rayleigh fading, the CSI is corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise and a zero forcing precoder is formed by the noisy CSI. Detailed analysis of the ergodic rate and outage probability of the system is given. Particular attention is given to system behavior at asymptotically high SNR. Next, a method to construct precoders in a manner that accounts for the uncertainty in the channel information is developed. A framework is introduced that allows one to quantify the tradeoff between the risk (due to the CSI randomness) that is associated with a precoder and the resulting transmission rate. Using ideas from modern portfolio theory, the risk-rate problem is modified to a tractable mean-variance optimization problem. Thus, we give a method that allows one to efficiently find a good precoder in the risk-rate sense. The technique is quite general and applies to a wide range of CSI probability distributions.

Power grids in today's developed societies are designed to meet consumer demands in a highly reliable manner. In order to guarantee reliability to consumers, the grid is required to be sized for infrequently occurring demand peaks. The cost of maintaining generation sources that make up the relatively unused capacity of the grid can be extremely high. In addition to high costs, environmental impacts of these sources are also of great concern. In order to serve highly fluctuating peak demands, energy sources such as coal, gas and bio-gas are commissioned by utilities. These sources have a high carbon footprint. In order to prevent wasting extensive amounts of money in maintaining infrequently used grid capacity and causing an adverse environmental impact, a comprehensive study on how elasticity of domestic appliances can be used to reduce the impact of these issues is made. A thorough analysis of appliances in four distinct regions is presented. Significant reduction of peak demands is shown quantitatively for all of the four regions. Based on these positive results, an elasticity based scheme that takes into account user discomfort is proposed for reducing monetary and environmental issues faced by today's utilities.