Organizations are looking at various cost effective methods to reduce the overall cost of data storage systems. This measure is taken essentially to reduce the hardware that is currently being used for hosting servers. In recent years, the organizations around the world have looked at various options such as parallel computing and grid computing. However, these techniques have not been implemented in organizations due to their limitations. Virtualization is a new technique that is being adopted by system administrators to overcome the hardware issues within a computer network. Virtualization has the main advantages such as secure logging and terra architecture which enhances overall performance of the server and effectively reduces the cost. Virtualization can be broadly classified into 2 types: Full Virtualization and Para-Virtualization. As, with every new technology that comes into existence, there arise the security concerns associated with it. This thesis addresses the growing security concerns associated with Virtual Machines (VM's) in a Para-virtualized environment. Some of the most common threats are Denial of Resource Attack, Sniffing Attack, and Authentication and Authorization issues. Thus, it becomes essential to derive a threat model so that these issues are identified based on their severities and addressed more effectively with appropriate security algorithms. This thesis provides the readers an insight to modeling threats, analyzing threat parameters, deriving risk equations, and validating the results. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The goal of this project was to establish a datum for acoustics generated in an exhaust flow from a jet pipe, due to the presence of an opening with a hatch at an angle, by using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool FLUENT. After validating the geometry using a supersonic case employing a fully expanded jet, a secondary supersonic test case was produced to compare results with the former using a Detached Eddy Simulation with Spalart-Allmaras (DES-SA) scheme. Two subsonic cases using the same boundary conditions (BCs) were then computed using a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) turbulence model in order to solve for flow-field data and Sound Pressure Level (SPL) of the given geometry. Focus was given to the region around the opening, and the computed pressure data was stored in three regions: above the opening, under the opening, and past the opening. Pressure contours in the region around the hatch were captured well and shown to be consistent between the two geometries employed for the domain of solution. Results concluded that using the smaller domain of solution maintained resolution quality while decreasing overall computation time tremendously. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Aerospace Engineering.

The beginning of the 20th century was marked by a need for a departure, for Britain, from the Victorian sentiments of a bygone era, foremost among which were the soon-to-be antiquated thoughts about her colonies and colonial subjects. Because that moment was quite past the high noon of the British Empire, and yet, it was still significant enough geographically for the sun to never have to set on it, its shadows were looming long and haunting. At this juncture, it became the calling of a few to insist on a restatement of what it meant to be British in the larger context of the world, much of which she still commanded. Some of the more vocal proponents for reconfiguring Britain in the new world context were writers. Among them Rudyard Kipling, Leonard Woolf, and George Orwell are seen as heralds and disseminators of thought prominent from the 1900s till World War II, which resulted in the dismantling of the Empire. Kim, The Village in the Jungle, and Burmese Days, the novels of the respective authors discussed within the following pages, are as much cultural delineations of alterity, as they are portraits of the British entrenched haplessly to their colonial missions. Using Edward Said’s Orientalism and Homi Bhaba’s theory of hybridity, the point of convergence between the British colonial mission and its subjects coupled with the curious tendency to not see it as a confluence can be seen as the wellspring of most perceptions and misperceptions of the “Other” or the Oriental. This “othering” is seen at various degrees in the three novels, and with the exception of Kipling in Kim, Woolf and Orwell in their novels question, rather self-reflexively, the effect on the Briton of this “othering”. While Kipling’s is the rallying cry to a slowly unraveling Empire, Woolf and Orwell raise their voices in dissent understanding that what is unraveling is not just a geographical mandate but also a moral one. / Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English.

Securing SCADA systems is a critical aspect of Smart grid security. As sophisticated attacks continue to target industrial systems, the focus should be on planning and developing new security techniques that will adapt to the SCADA environment and protocols. Traditional SCADA protocols such as DNP3, Modbus and ICCP do not support encryption, authentication and data integrity in their native form. Although they can be secured with VPN tunnels, IPSEC adds significant network overhead and complexity to the end hosts. SCADA devices may lack the computing resources to implement this kind of technique. In this thesis, a security design is proposed that can help make communications between the master stations and slave devices in a SCADA network secure without putting additional overhead on the remote devices. This research designs a SCADA Security Device (SSD), which can work in conjunction with other network elements to implement a secure architecture for SCADA protocols. Several components of the SSD were implemented and tested during this research to evaluate the security features in a SCADA network. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

This study examined participants of the DUI/ Drug Pilot Court Program located in the Eighteenth Judicial District of Sedgwick County, Kansas. A discriminant analysis was conducted to determine if age, number of days in jail, gender, fine amount, number of charges in a single stop, continuances and number of convictions were factors for predicting the outcome group for a given offender. The three outcome groups were: technical violators, new charges and successful completers group. This study also examined the differences of each group. This study utilized secondary data which was provided by the DUI Victim Center of Kansas and the District Attorney’s Office. The sample population consisted of 362 offenders and from that 140 cases were selected. This study evaluated the offenders at 2 years post-conviction. The participants that was used in this study were (N= 140), 85.7% (N=120) were male and 14.3% (N=20) were female. The age ranges of the participants were from 19-67 years old. Results of the discriminant analysis indicate that age, gender, number of days in jail, fine amount and number of charges were significant in determining offender outcome groups. The results also indicate that males in their late 30’s are more likely to receive new charges while under the commitment of the court if they spent a significant amount of time in jail while awaiting treatment and rehabilitation. This study also indicates that males in their early 40’s are receiving technical violations, but if they get into treatment and rehabilitation faster they are more likely to complete the program successfully. / Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Criminal Justice.

WikiLeaks.org has rapidly become the most important new medium for the publication of previously secret documents. Arguably most important among these documents is the Afghan War Diary: a collection of 91,000 classified reports (minus 15,000 deemed too sensitive to immediately release), allegedly stolen and sent to WikiLeaks by Pfc. Bradley Manning. Daniel Ellsberg, the source of the 1971 Pentagon Papers leak to the New York Times, appearing on a July 26, 2010, airing of NPR's Talk of the Nation described the leak as "the first unauthorized disclosure, I would say, in 30 years that is comparable in scale to the Pentagon Papers. And of course, actually it's very much greater, partially reflecting the technology of the day." This research asks the research question: What frames are used to represent the Afghan War Diary, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and WikiLeaks in American print journalism? Using inductive, qualitative analysis on three major American print news sources in the three months following the leak (July 25th, 2010-October 25th, 2010), this rhetorical criticism attempts to identify frames for future research on the WikiLeaks phenomenon's coverage, validate the constructivist of news framing paradigm, and broaden communication scholars understanding of news frame construction and media effects. / Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, The Elliott School of Communication.

Virtualization has become an essential technology for organizations. With on-demand services from vendors, a substantial rise in the use of virtualization has been noticed. Today there are various kinds of virtualization techniques offering different advantages. One of the important features of virtualization is live virtual machine (VM) migration. In live VM migration, the controls of a VM are migrated from one physical host to another. Workload balancing, and server maintenance becomes easy by migrating the VM. The ability to reboot or shut down the physical server without affecting running applications is greatly beneficial to an organization. With this indispensable feature of live VM migration, the security factor is still unanswered. Very little research has been done in exploring the security concerns inherent while data moves between the two physical machines. This thesis looks at this poorly explored area and attempts to propose a proper solution, and thereby maintain security. Man–in–the–middle attack could be created by sniffing data between the hypervisors and confidentiality is lost. Data in transit could be read and then tampered with or misused, and can create havoc in the network and bring it down completely. The research shows how a malicious attacker can sniff the data while performing live VM migration over Xen hypervisor and exploit information. Using this experiment the author proposes strategies that can be used to have a secure live migration process. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Medium contention in saturated ad hoc networks increase collisions and retransmissions. As the number of transmissions for a frame exceeds the maximum retransmission count in the IEEE 802.11 networks, the medium access control (MAC) layer drops the frame and forwards this information to the network layer. The network layer further drops all the subsequent packets destined to the same next hop node or passing through this node, assuming the node to be unavailable. Furthermore, the transmitting node propagates this information through the route error (RERR) packet. The receiving nodes drop their packets destined to the same next hop node or if the packets are destined to through it to another destination. The network, therefore, experiences burst losses at several nodes, leading to the degradation of quality of real-time applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP). Hence, burst losses must be reduced and this requires a well-defined model to explain the burst losses and their causes. This thesis uses semi-Markov process based model for illustrating the burst losses in the IEEE 802.11 saturated ad hoc networks. It describes the frame transmission process in the IEEE 802.11 networks and the effect of medium contention on burst losses. Furthermore, the proposed model also computes the average frame service-time in the saturated ad hoc networks. Simulations are conducted to analyze the effect of variations in the network size (number of nodes in the network) and the data transmission rate on the burst losses. The results show that an increase in the network size and data transmission rate, independently increases burst losses. Simulation results present a range of acceptable network sizes to minimize the burst losses in the saturated IEEE 802.11 networks. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Data entities from various data sources could be ordered according to a variety of attributes associated with those entities. These orderings result in a ranking of entities in terms of the values in the attribute domains. In query processing, user preferences are desired to be tied to values of specific rank attributes. A way to incorporate such preference is by utilizing a function f that combines user preferences and rank attribute values and returns numerical value. Top-k queries seek to identify the tuples with the highest numerical value. We consider the top-k selection query on relational database: SELECT * FROM S ORDER BY f(t) LIMIT k.We propose efficient indexes on S to find the top-k tuples, for a given linear monotone preference function f . The efficiency of our approach depends on the number of dimensions: the number of rank attributes used to compute f . We present efficient algorithms for two dimensions. Our results for two dimensions improve upon Tsaparas et. al. Our approach is based on convex layers, which is more appropriate for linear preference function. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Incidence rates for breast cancer continue to rise with improved methods of screening, detection, diagnosis and treatment. The chance of developing breast cancer is 12%, or 1 out of 8 women (American Cancer Society, 2011b). Increased survival equates to increased needs for support services to restore or promote healthy living. This includes leading an active lifestyle with independent physical and mental capabilities. This study assesses body composition, balance, and upper extremity muscular strength and endurance in breast cancer survivors (BCS) shortly after diagnosis and during and after chemotherapy. Design: Prospective exploratory design with one control arm. Methods: Adult females (N = 7) within 1 month of breast cancer diagnosis, currently undergoing chemotherapy and/or have completed chemotherapy for the treatment of breast cancer were recruited for this study. Variables assessed include weight, body fat percentage, lean body mass percentage, body mass index (BMI), bone mineral density (BMD), bone mineral content (BMC), balance (sway index), and upper extremity muscular strength and endurance (peak torque, power, and total work). Results: Lean body mass percentage was significantly lower than healthy, age-matched controls (p=0.047). BCS had increased body fat percentage and weight compared to controls, and showed a significant increase in weight from initial diagnosis to treatment completion (p=0.037). BMI, BMD, and BMC did not significantly differ from controls. BCS produced increased measures of sway compared to normative values. Muscular strength and endurance did not differ between affected and unaffected arm. Conclusion: Current findings align with previous studies in terms of body composition and balance and serve to inform future research utilizing larger sample sizes. / Thesis (M.Ed.)--Wichita State University, College of Education, Dept. of Human Performance Studies.