Terrorist organizations and individuals make use of the Internet for supportive activities such as communication, recruiting, financing, training, and planning operations. However, little is known about the level of computer-based (“cyber”) threat such terrorist organizations and individuals pose. One step in facilitating the examination and assessment of the level of cyber threat posed by terrorist organizations and individuals is development of an assessment tool or methodology. This tool would guide intelligence collection efforts and would support and facilitate comparative assessment of the cyber threat posed by terrorist organizations and individuals through the provision of a consistent method of assessment across time, amongst organizations and individuals, and between analysts. This study leveraged the professional experience of experts to engineer a new functional construct – a structured analytical technique designed to assess the cyber threat posed by terrorist entities and individuals. The resultant instrument was a novel structured analytical construct that uses defined indicators of a terrorist organization/individual’s intent to carry out cyber attacks, and their capability to actually do so as measures of an organization/individual’s overall level of cyber threat.

Hydrologic research is increasingly data and computationally intensive, and often involves hydrologic model simulation and collaboration among researchers. With the development of cyberinfrastructure, researchers are able to improve the efficiency, impact, and effectiveness of their research by utilizing online data sharing and hydrologic modeling functionality. However, further efforts are still in need to improve the capability of cyberinfrastructure to serve the hydrologic science community. This dissertation first presents the evaluation of a physically based snowmelt model as an alternative to a temperature index model to improve operational water supply forecasts in the Colorado River Basin. Then it presents the design of the functionality to share multidimensional space-time data in the HydroShare hydrologic information system. It then describes a web application developed to facilitate input preparation and model execution of a snowmelt model and the storage of these results in HydroShare. The snowmelt model evaluation provided use cases to evaluate the cyberinfrastructure elements developed. This research explored a new approach to advance operational water supply forecasts and provided potential solutions for the challenges associated with the design and implementation of cyberinfrastructure for hydrologic data sharing and modeling.

High processing time and implementation complexity of the fully homomorphic encryption schemes intrigued cryptographers to extend partially homomorphic encryption schemes to allow homomorphic computation for larger classes of polynomials. In this thesis, we study several public key and partially homomorphic schemes and discuss a recent technique for boosting linearly homomorphic encryption schemes. Further, we implement this boosting technique on CGS linearly homomorphic encryption scheme to allow one single multiplication as well as arbitrary number of additions on encrypted plaintexts. We provide MAGMA source codes for the implementation of the CGS scheme along with the boosted CGS scheme. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Accelerated by on-demand computing, the number and diversity of the Internet services is increasing. Such online services often have unique requirements for the underlying wide-area network: For instance, online gaming service might benefit from low delay and jitter paths to client, while online data backup service might benefit from cheaper paths. Unfortunately, today's Internet does not accommodate fine-grained, service-specific wide-area route control. In this dissertation, I achieve the following goals: 1) improve the access to the routes, 2) quantify the benefits of fine-grained route control, and 3) evaluate the efficiency of current payment schemes for the wide-area routes. * Improving access to wide-area route control. Online services face significant technological and procedural hurdles in accessing the routes: Each service in need to control the Internet routes, has to obtain own equipment, Internet numbered resources, and establish contracts with upstream ISPs. In this dissertation, I propose and describe implementation and deployment of a secure and scalable system which provides on-demand access to the Internet routes. In setting such as cloud data center, the system can support multiple online services, providing each service with an illusion of direct connectivity to the neighboring Internet networks, which, for all practical purposes, allows services to participate fully in the Internet routing. * Quantifying the benefits of fine-grained route control. Even if online services are presented with wide-area route choice, it is not clear how much tangible benefit such choice provides. Most modern Online Service Providers (OSP) rely primarily on the content routing to improve network performance between the clients and the replicas. In this dissertation, I quantify the potential benefit the OSPs can gain if they perform a joint network and content routing. Among other findings, I find that by performing joint content and network routing, OSPs can achieve 22% larger latency reduction than can be obtained by content routing alone. * Modeling and evaluating the efficiency of the current payment schemes for wide-area routes. Finally, increasing diversity and sophistication of the online services participating in the Internet routing poses a challenge to payment models used in today's Internet. Service providers today charge business customers a blended rate: a single, "average" price for unit of bandwidth, without regard to cost or value of individual customer's flows. In my dissertation, I set to understand how efficient this payment model is and if more granular payment model, accounting for the cost and value of different flows could increase the ISP profit and the consumer surplus. I develop an econometric demand and cost model and map three real-world ISP data sets to it. I find that ISPs can indeed improve the economic efficiency with just a few pricing tiers.

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This thesis describes a research study to understand the current state of human trafficking data collection practices and reporting in the province of Alberta, Canada, and gather end-user design considerations for cyberinfrastructure that will enable data sharing between multiple and diverse stakeholders. The research also examines the barriers to change and the needs of stakeholders to improve the collective understanding of human trafficking in the province. Virtual semi-structured interviews were conducted with nineteen organizations including law enforcement and community serving non-profit agencies. While the research resulted in design considerations for a cyberinfrastructure prototype, findings revealed the complexity of the human trafficking ecosystem in Alberta and suggestions for how the community of stakeholders can shift towards a sustained collaborative data sharing culture. This study responds to the need to collect actionable data from multiple sources to reflect the prevalence and context of human trafficking more accurately.