This study aimed to highlight the experiences, struggles and challenges of those women who have experienced facial disability due to acid violence in Pakistan. It addressed the issues in terms of knowing the actual reasons behind acid violence, the role of patriarchal culture and how these women perceive themselves after the incident. Using a qualitative research design, nine in-depth interviews were conducted with women with facial disability. All of them were working in the profession of beauty. They were recruited with the help of one non-profit organization named “Depilex Smileagain Foundation” (DSF). The social/cultural context of disability in Pakistani society was examined from the perspectives of the participants to gain insider knowledge. The participants identified the role of Pakistani society/culture in their lives as negative and discouraging especially in relation to marriage, employability and seeking justice; whereas the role of DSF was strongly supported and appreciated by participants in bringing back their lost confidence post-attack. They shared their experiences which are thought provoking for policy makers, government agencies as well as for other readers in order to understand the continuous powerful societal pressure on the minds of women with facial disability. / May 2016

Recent years have seen the dramatic increase of wearable medical systems (WMS) that have demonstrated promise for improving health monitoring and overall well-being. Ensuring that the data collected are secure and trustworthy is crucial. This is especially true in the presence of adversaries who want to mount data manipulation attacks on WMS, which aim to manipulate the sensor measurements with fictitious data that is plausible but not accurate. Such attacks force clinicians or any decision support system AI analyzing the WMS data, to make incorrect diagnosis and treatment decisions about the user’s health. Given that there are different possible vulnerabilities found in WMS that can lead to data manipulation attacks, we take a different angle by developing an attack-agnostic approach, called Signal Interrelationship CApture for Physiological-process (SICAP), to detect data manipulation attacks on physiological sensor measurements in a WMS. SICAP approach leverages the idea that different physiological signals in the user’s body driven by the same underlying physiological process (e.g., cardiac process) are inherently related to each other. By capturing the interrelationship patterns between the related physiological signals, it can detect if any signal is maliciously altered. This is because the incorrect user data introduced by adversaries will have interrelationship patterns that are uncharacteris- tic of the individual’s physiological process and hence quite different from the ones SICAP expects. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in detecting data manipulation attacks by building different detection solutions for two commonly measured physiological sensor measurements in a WMS environment – electrocardiogram and arterial blood pressure. The advantage of using this approach is that it allows for detection of data manipulation attacks by taking advantage of different types of physiological sensors, which already exist in typical WMS, thus avoiding the need of redundant sensors of the same type. Furthermore, SICAP approach is not designed to be stand-alone but provides the last line of defense for WMS. It is complementary to, and coexist with, any existing or future security solutions that may be introduced to protect WMS against data manipulation attacks.

Cryptographic protocols are in general difficult to analyze, and complicated attacks exposing security flaws have remained hidden years after a protocol is developed. Recently developed tools such as strand spaces and inductive logical proofs provide mechanical procedures for analyzing protocols. The key to these methods is that a generous upper bound on the activity of a malicious penetrator is often much easier to work with than a tighter bound. However, these formalizations make strong assumptions about the algebraic structure of the cryptosystem that are never met in a real application. In this work, we show that an extended form of the strand space machinery can be used to analyze protocols which contain nontrivial algebraic structure, specifically that which arises from the XOR operation. This work also serves as one of the first steps in reconciling computational and formal methods of analyzing cryptographic security.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Benigno E. Aguirre, Dept. of Sociology. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of West Florida, 2007. / Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains 167 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

The Advanced Encryption Standard is one of the most common encryption algorithms. It is highly resistant to mathematical and statistical attacks, however, this security is based on the assumption that an adversary cannot access the algorithm’s internal state during encryption or decryption. Power analysis is a type of side-channel analysis that exploit information leakage through the power consumption of physical realisations of cryptographic systems. Power analysis attacks capture intermediate results during AES execution, which combined with knowledge of the plaintext or the ciphertext can reveal key material. This thesis studies and compares simple power analysis, differential power analysis and template attacks using a cheap consumer oscilloscope against AES-128 implemented on an 8-bit microcontroller. Additionally, the shuffling and masking countermeasures are evaluated in terms of security and performance. The thesis also presents a practical approach to template building and device characterisation. The results show that attacking a naive implementation with differential power analysis requires little effort, both in preparation and computation time. Template attacks require the least amount of measurements but requires significant preparation. Simple power analysis by itself cannot break the key but proves helpful in simplifying the other attacks. It is found that shuffling significantly increases the number of traces required to break the key while masking forces the attacker to use higher-order techniques.

This thesis investigates the experience of agoraphobia among one hundred research participants by focusing on how social interactions contribute to the onset, the unmanaged symptoms stage, and the managed symptoms stage of this anxiety disorder. The study investigates how social interactions such as family upbringings, familial stressful events, one-off and clusters of traumatic events and accumulated stressful events can contribute to the onset of agoraphobia. It examines how research participants' social interactions during their primary and secondary school years, youth, everyday life, travel, marriage/intimate relationships, parenting, post secondary education and employment were affected during the unmanaged symptom stage of agoraphobia. Participants' experiences of the public perception of agoraphobia, stigma and discrimination, coming out experiences and family and friends' reaction to agoraphobia are also explored. The third stage of the study examines social interactions that hinder or promote the management of agoraphobia. The former are found to include hiding panic attacks, making excuses, using flawed personal coping mechanisms and alcohol. Social interactions that were found to assist in the management of agoraphobia include labelling and learning about the mental illness from others, using companions in public places and situations, and seeking help from knowledgeable health professionals. Other forms of interaction that helped with management included participants' usage of Internet chat-rooms and websites as well as the discovery of faith and spiritual experience. Finally the study investigates research participants' changed social interactions following their emergence from the shadow of agoraphobia.