Equatorial Ionization Anomaly (EIA) is a region of peak plasma density found at ± 10 ◦ to 20 ◦ magnetic latitudes at F-region altitudes. In 2002, NASA launched the Global Ultra Violet Imager (GUVI), which can observe the EIA at various local times, longitudes, and seasons by the glow of the recombining electrons and ions in the plasma. This thesis presents the observations of the geomagnetic quiet time EIA and its global behavior at all local times using 1356 ˚A radiance data from high altitude GUVI limb scans. Limb data is prepared for analysis using reduction techniques that remove from the limb file, contaminating signatures of stars, glints, and low altitude day time neutral atmosphere emissions. A simple comparison of the subtracted data at different local times, longitudes, seasons, and magnetic activity reveals significant EIA variability with each of these factors. A global morphology of the quiet time EIA is developed using metrics such as the peak latitude and peak radiance, extracted from the EIA structures. The study shows that the EIA develops gradually in the day, peaking between 1100 to 1400 hours LT, and falls in the night time. Signatures of the prereversal drift enhancement due to enhanced post-sunset F-region vertical drifts appear during December solstice seasons between 19:00 to 21:00 local time. The GUVI EIA observations are compared with 1356 ˚A radiance data simulated from electron densities predicted by ionospheric models, namely USUGAIM and TIMEGCM. Results show that the models overestimate the radiance values by a small amount. However, the EIA variability with local time and longitudes as predicted by the models compares well with the GUVI observations.

The prevalence of side-channel attacks exploiting hardware vulnerabilities leads to the exfil- tration of secretive data such as secret keys, which poses a significant threat to the security of modern processors. The RISC-V BOOM core is an open-source modern processor design widely utilized in research and industry. It enables experimentation with microarchitec- tures and memory hierarchies for optimized performance in various workloads. The RISC-V BOOM core finds application in the IoT and Embedded systems sector, where addressing side-channel attacks becomes crucial due to the significant emphasis on security. While prior studies on BOOM mainly focus on the side channel in the memory hierarchy such as caches or physical attacks such as power side channel. Recently, the front-end of microprocessors, which is responsible for fetching and decoding instructions, is found to be another potential source of side-channel attacks on Intel Processors. In this study, I present four timing-based side-channel attacks that leverage components in the front-end of BOOM. I tested the effectiveness of the attacks using a simulator and Xilinx VCU118 FPGA board. Finally, I provided possible mitigation techniques for these types of attacks to improve the overall security of modern processors. Our findings underscore the importance of identifying and addressing vulnerabilities in the front-end of modern pro- cessors, such as the BOOM core, to mitigate the risk of side-channel attacks and enhance system security. / Master of Science / In today's digital landscape, the security of modern processors is threatened by the increasing prevalence of side-channel attacks that exploit hardware vulnerabilities. These attacks are a type of security threat that allows attackers to extract sensitive information from computer systems by analyzing the physical behavior. The risk of such attacks is further amplified when multiple users or applications share the same hardware resources. Attackers can ex- ploit the interactions and dependencies among shared resources to gather information and compromise the integrity and confidentiality of critical data. The RISC-V BOOM core, a widely utilized modern processor design, is not immune to these side-channel attacks. This issue demands urgent attention, especially considering its deploy- ment in data-sensitive domains such as IoT and embedded systems. Previous studies have focused on side-channel vulnerabilities in other areas of BOOM, ne- glecting the front-end. However, the front-end, responsible for processing initial information, has recently emerged as another potential target for side-channel attacks. To address this, I conducted a study on the vulnerability of the RISC-V BOOM core's front-end. By conduct- ing tests using both a software-based simulator and a physical board, I uncovered potential security threats and discussed potential techniques to mitigate these risks, thereby enhanc- ing the overall security of modern processors. These findings underscore the significance of addressing vulnerabilities in the front-end of processors to prevent side-channel attacks and safeguard against potential malicious activities.

The prevalence of cloud storage has yielded significant benefits to consumers. Trusted Exe- cution Environments (TEEs) have been introduced to protect program execution and data in the cloud. However, an attacker targeting the cloud storage server through side-channel attacks can still learn some data in TEEs. This data retrieval is possible through the monitor- ing and analysis of the encrypted ciphertext as well as a program's memory access patterns. As the attacks grow in complexity and accuracy, innovative protection methods must be de- signed to secure data. This thesis proposes and implements an ORAM controller primitive in TEE and protects it from all potential side-channel attacks. This thesis presents two vari- ations, each with two different encryption methods designed to mitigate attacks targeting both memory access patterns and ciphertext analysis. The latency for enabling this protec- tion is calculated and proven to be 75.86% faster overall than the previous implementation on which this thesis is based. / Master of Science / Cloud storage and computing has become ubiquitous in recent times, with usage rising ex- ponentially over the past decade. Cloud Service Providers also offer Confidential Computing services for clients requiring data computation which is encrypted and protected from the service providers themselves. While these services are protected against attackers directly looking to access secure data, they are still vulnerable against attacks which only observe, but do not interfere. Such attacks monitor a client's memory access pattern or the encrypted data in the server and can obtain sensitive information including encryption keys. This work proposes and implements an Oblivious RAM design which safeguards against the aforemen- tioned attacks by using a mix of confidential computing in hardware and special algorithms designed to randomize the client's data access patterns. The evaluation of this work shows a significant increase in performance over previous works in this domain while using the latest technology in confidential computing.

This paper describes a three part analysis to characterize the interaction between the female upper extremity and a helicopter cockpit side airbag system and to develop dynamic hyperextension injury criteria for the female elbow joint. Part I involved a series of 10 experiments with an original Army Black Hawk helicopter side airbag. A 5th percentile female Hybrid III instrumented upper extremity was used to demonstrate side airbag upper extremity loading. Two out of the 10 tests resulted in high elbow bending moments of 128 Nm and 144 Nm. Part II included dynamic hyperextension tests on 24 female cadaver elbow joints. The energy source was a drop tower utilizing a three-point bending configuration to apply elbow bending moments matching the previously conducted side airbag tests. Post-test necropsy showed that 16 of the 24 elbow joint tests resulted in injuries. Injury severity ranged from minor cartilage damage to more severe joint dislocations and transverse fractures of the distal humerus. Peak elbow bending moments ranged from 42.4 Nm to 146.3 Nm. Peak bending moment proved to be a significant indicator of any elbow injury (p=0.02) as well as elbow joint dislocation (p=0.01). Logistic regression analyses were used to develop single and multivariate injury risk functions. Using peak moment data for the entire test population, a 50% risk of obtaining any elbow injury was found at 56 Nm while a 50% risk of sustaining an elbow joint dislocation was found at 93 Nm for the female population. These results indicate that the peak elbow bending moments achieved in Part I are associated with a greater than 90% risk for elbow injury. Subsequently, the airbag was re-designed in an effort to mitigate this as well as the other upper extremity injury risks. Part III assessed the enhanced side airbag module to ensure injury risks had been reduced prior to implementing the new system. To facilitate this, 12 enhanced side airbag deployments were conducted using the same procedures as Part I. Results indicate that the re-designed side airbag has effectively mitigated elbow injury risks induced by the original side airbag design. It is anticipated that this study will provide researchers with additional injury criteria for assessing upper extremity injury risk caused by both military and automotive side airbag deployments. / Master of Science

One of the most important data elements recorded in the National Automotive Sampling System / Crashworthiness Data System (NASS/CDS) is the vehicle change in velocity, or ?V. ?V is the vector change in velocity experienced by a vehicle during a collision, and is widely used as a measure of collision severity in crash safety research. The ?V information in NASS/CDS is used by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to determine research needs, regulatory priorities, design crash test procedures (e.g., test speed), and to determine countermeasure effectiveness. The WinSMASH crash reconstruction code is used to compute the ?V estimates in the NASS/CDS. However, the reconstruction accuracy of the current WinSMASH version has not previously been examined for side impacts. Given the importance of side impact crash modes and the widespread use of NASS/CDS data, an assessment of the program's reconstruction accuracy is warranted. The goal of this thesis is to quantify the accuracy of WinSMASH ?V estimations for side impact crashes, and to suggest possible means of improving side impact reconstruction accuracy. Crash tests provide a wealth of controlled crash response data against which to evaluate WinSMASH. Knowing the accuracy of WinSMASH in reconstructing crash tests, we can infer WinSMASH accuracy in reconstructing real-world side crashes. In this study, WinSMASH was compared to 70 NHTSA Moving Deformable Barrier (MDB) - to - vehicle side crash tests. Tested vehicles were primarily cars (as opposed to Light Trucks and Vans, or LTVs) from model years 1997 - 2001. For each test, the actual ?V was determined from test instrumentation and this ?V was compared to the WinSMASH-reconstructed ?V of the same test. WinSMASH was found to systemically over-predict struck vehicle resultant ?V by 12% at time of vehicle separation, and by 22% at time of maximum crush. A similar pattern was observed for the MDB ?V; WinSMASH over-predicted resultant MDB ?V by 6.6% at separation, and by 23% at maximum crush. Error in user-estimated reconstruction parameters, namely Principal Direction Of Force (PDOF) error and damage offset, was controlled for in this analysis. Analysis of the results indicates that this over-prediction of ?V is caused by over-estimation of the energy absorbed by struck vehicle damage. In turn, this ultimately stems from the vehicle stiffness parameters used by WinSMASH for this purpose. When WinSMASH was forced to use the correct amount of absorbed energy to reconstruct the crash tests, systemic over-prediction of ?V disappeared. WinSMASH accuracy when reconstructing side crash tests may be improved in two ways. First, providing WinSMASH with side stiffness parameters that are correlated to the correct amount of absorbed energy will correct the systemic over-prediction of absorbed energy when reconstructing NHTSA side crash tests. Second, providing some treatment of restitution in the reconstruction process will correct the under-prediction of ?V due to WinSMASH's assumption of zero restitution. At present, this under-prediction partially masks the over-prediction of ?V caused by over-prediction of absorbed energy. If the over-prediction of absorbed energy is corrected, proper treatment of restitution will correct much of the remaining error observed in WinSMASH reconstructions of NHTSA side crash tests. / Master of Science

Side-channel leakage, caused by imperfect implementation of cryptographic algorithms in hardware, has become a serious security threat for connected devices that generate and process sensitive data. This side-channel leakage can divulge secret information in the form of power consumption or electromagnetic emissions. The side-channel leakage of a crytographic device is commonly assessed after tape-out on a physical prototype. This thesis presents a methodology called Gate-level Leakage Assessment (GLA), which evaluates the power-based side-channel leakage of an integrated circuit at design time. By combining side-channel leakage assessment with power simulations on the gate-level netlist, GLA is able to pinpoint the leakiest cells in the netlist in addition to assessing the overall side-channel vulnerability to side-channel leakage. As the power traces obtained from power simulations are noiseless, GLA is able to precisely locate the sources of side-channel leakage with fewer measurements than on a physical prototype. The thesis applies the methodology on the design of a encryption co-processor to analyze sources of side-channel leakage. Once the gate-level leakage sources are identified, this thesis presents a logic level replacement strategy for the leakage sources that can thwart side-channel leakage. The countermeasures presented selectively replaces gate-level cells with a secure logic style effectively removing the side-channel leakage with minimal impact in area. The assessment methodology along with the countermeasures demonstrated is a turnkey solution for IP module designers and is also applicable to larger system level designs. / Master of Science / Consider how a lie detector machine works. It looks for subtle changes in a person’s pulse to tell if the person is telling the truth. This unintentional divulgence of secret information is called a side-channel leakage. Integrated circuits reveal secret information in a similar way through their power consumption. This is caused by the transistors, used to build these integrated circuits, switching in concert with the secret data being processed by the integrated circuit. Typically, integrated circuits are evaluated for side-channel leakage only after they have been manufactured into a physical prototype. If the integrated circuit is found vulnerable it is too expensive to manufacture the prototype again with an updated design. This thesis presents a methodology, Gate-level Leakage Assessment (GLA) to evaluate integrated circuits for side-channel leakage during their design process even before they are manufactured. This methodology uses simulations to identify the specific transistors in the design that cause side-channel leakage. Moreover, this thesis presents a technique to selectively replace these problematic transistors in the design with an implementation that thwarts side channel leakage.

Embedded systems are increasingly ubiquitous. Many of them have security requirements such as smart cards, mobile phones, and internet connected appliances. It can be a challenge to fulfill security requirements due to the constrained nature of embedded devices. This security challenge is worsened by the possibility of implementation attacks. Despite well formulated cryptosystems being used, the underlying hardware can often undermine any security proven on paper. If a secret key is at play, an adversary has a chance of revealing it by simply looking at the power variation. Additionally, an adversary can tamper with an embedded system's environment to get it to skip a security check or generate side channel information. Any adversary with physical access to an embedded system can conduct such implementation attacks. It is the focus of this work to explore different countermeasures against both side channel and fault attacks. A new countermeasure call Intra-instruction Redundancy, based on bit-slicing, or N-bit SIMD processing, is proposed. Another challenge with implementing countermeasures against implementation attacks, is that they need to be able to be combined. Most proposed side channel countermeasures do not prevent fault injection and vice versa. Combining them is non-trivial as demonstrated with a combined implementation attack. / Master of Science / Consider a mechanical dial lock that must be opened without knowing the correct combination. One technique is to use a stethoscope to closely listen to the internal mechanical sounds and try to pick out any biases in order to figure out the correct combination without having to go through an exhaustive search. This is what a side channel is. Embedded systems do not have mechanical sound side channels like mechanical locks but they do leak information through power consumption. This is the basis for power analysis attacks on embedded systems. By observing power, secret information from an embedded system can be revealed despite any cryptographic protections implemented. Another side channel is the behavior of the processor when it is physically tampered with, specifically known as a fault attack. It is important that embedded systems are able to detect when they are tampered with and respond accordingly to protect sensitive information. Side channel and fault attack countermeasures are methods for embedded systems to prevent such attacks. This work presents a new state of the art fault attack countermeasure and a framework for combining the countermeasure with existing side channel countermeasures. It is nontrivial to combine countermeasures as there is a potential for combined attacks which this work shows as well.

Modern web applications use several third-party JavaScript libraries to achieve higher levels of engagement. The third-party libraries range from utility libraries such as jQuery to libraries that provide services such as Google Analytics and context- sensitive advertisement. These third-party libraries have access to most (if not all) the elements of the displayed webpage. This allows malicious third-party libraries to perform attacks that steal information from the end-user or perform an action without the end-user consent. These types of attacks are the stealthiest and the hardest to defend against, because they are agnostic to the browser type and platform of the end-user and at the same time they rely on web standards when performing the attacks. Such kind of attacks can perform actions using the victim’s browser without her permission. The nature of such actions can range from posting an embarrassing message on the victim’s behalf over her social network account, to performing online biding using the victim’s account. This poses the need to develop effective mechanisms for protecting against client-side web attacks that mainly target the end-user. In the proposed research, we address the above challenges from information flow monitoring perspective by developing a framework that restricts the flow of information on the client-side to legitimate channels. The proposed model tracks sensitive information flow in the JavaScript code and prevents information leakage from happening. The main component of the framework is a hybrid flow-sensitive security monitor that controls, at runtime, the dissemination of information flow and its inlining. The security monitor is hybrid as it combines both static analysis and runtime monitoring of the running JavaScript program. We provide the soundness proof of the model with respect to termination-insensitive non-interference security policy and develop a new security benchmark to establish experimentally its effectiveness in detecting and preventing illicit information flow. When applied to the context of client-side web-based attacks, the proposed model provides a more secure browsing environment for the end-user. / Graduate

Doxorubicin is one of the most effective anti-cancer agents; however its use is associated with adverse cardiac effects, including cardiomyopathy and progressive heart failure. Mitochondrial function and integrity are crucial for cellular processes in general and play an important role during diseased development. These characteristics of the mitochondria make them the prime target for treatments for majority of diseases and in particular of the cardiovascular system. The mitochondria are also considered to play an integral role in the manifestation of the cardiotoxic effects of compounds such as doxorubicin. The current project is designed to investigate the cardiotoxic effects of doxorubicin at tissue, cellular and protein level. In addition, it is investigated whether the inhibition of the mitochondrial permeability transition pore (mPTP) with cyclosporin A (CsA) or the inhibition of mitochondrial fission with the mitochondrial division inhibitor (mdivi-1) protects against the detrimental effects of doxorubicin on cardiac function. We also investigated whether co-treatment of doxorubicin with either CsA or mdivi-1 has any negative interaction with the cytotoxicity of doxorubicin against cancer cells. Langendorff results indicated that doxorubicin caused a time dependent reduction in the haemodynamic function of the heart as well as causing an increase in the infarct size to risk ratio in both naïve conditions and in conditions of ischaemia and reperfusion. Detrimental effects of doxorubicin on cardiac function were abrogated by co-treatment of doxorubicin with CsA or mdivi-1 in naïve conditions and in conditions of ischaemia and reperfusion. Cell viability data of isolated cardiac myocytes revealed that doxorubicin caused a concentration dependant decrease in the viability of neonatal cardiac myocytes as well as causing a reduction in the time taken to depolarisation and hypercontracture under sustained oxidative stress, all of which were prevented when co-treated with either CsA or mdivi-1. Doxorubicin significantly elevated the levels of p-Akt, p-Erk, p-Drp1 and p-p53. Co-treatment with CsA prevented the increase in the levels of p-Akt and p-Erk caused by doxorubicin in both naïve and IR condition whereas mdivi-1 prevented the increase in the levels of p-Erk, p-Drp1 and p-p53 and caused further increase in the levels of p-Akt. Using sinusoidal muscle length change during contraction and relaxation, it is demonstrated that doxorubicin caused a decrease in the power output, peak force and force during shorting. Detrimental effects of doxorubicin on work-loop contraction were abrogated when doxorubicin was co-administered with CsA. To conclude, results demonstrated that doxorubicin caused cardiotoxicity at tissue, cellular and protein level in both naïve conditions and in conditions of ischaemia and reperfusion injury. In addition, it is shown that the inhibition of mitochondrial permeability transition pore with CsA or the inhibition of the mitochondrial fission with mdivi-1 protect against doxorubicin-induced toxicity without affecting its anti-cancer properties.

Bicomponent composite fibers have been widely used in the textile industry and are gaining increasing attention on biomedical applications. In this research, polycaprolactone/poly (lactic acid) side-by-side bicomponent fibers were created for the application of a biodegradable scaffold. The side-by-side structure endowed the fiber with self-crimps when it was processed under certain conditions. This material was produced by electrospinning and collected on a high speed rotating mandrel to get highly oriented fibers. A mechanical stretch at the same direction was done followed by a wet heat treatment for polymer retraction. Crimped fibers were demonstrated by scanning electron microscopy. The quantitative porosity and uniaxial tensile strength was not affected by the post-treatments, but the cell ingrowth and proliferation after seeding the scaffold were significantly improved. In conclusion, the side-by-side crimped material serves as a better extracellular matrix analogue without sacrificing mechanical properties.