Workshop 2: Persistent identifiers for ETDs, institutional use cases - ETD 2021. November 15, 2021. Qatar. / Topics for persistint identifiers, especially ORCID IDs. Experience UPC University in using ORCID in theses.

Over the last decade, there has been a tremendous growth in the number of electronic devices and applications. One of the very important aspects to deal with such proliferation of ICs is their security. Establishing the Identity (ID) of a device is the cornerstone of any secure application. Typically, the IDs of devices are stored in non-volatile memories (NVM) or through burning fuses on ICs. However, through such traditional techniques, IDs are vulnerable to attacks. Further, maintaining such secrets in NVMs is expensive. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) provide an alternative method for creating chip IDs. They exploit the uncontrollable variations that exist in IC manufacturing to generate identifiers. However, since PUFs exploit the small mismatch across identically designed circuits, the responses of PUFs are prone to error in the presence of unwanted variations in the operating temperature, supply voltage, and other noises. The overarching goal of this work is to develop silicon PUFs that are highly efficient and stable to such noises. In addition, to make PUFs more attractive for low cost and tiny embedded systems, our goal is to develop PUFs with minimal area and power consumption for a given ID length and security requirement. Techniques to develop such PUFs span different abstraction levels ranging from technology-independent application-level techniques to technology-dependent device-level ones. In this dissertation, we present different technology-independent and technology-dependent techniques and evaluate which techniques are good candidates for improving different qualities of PUFs. In technology-independent techniques, we propose two modifications to a conventional PUF architecture, which are detailed in this thesis. Both modifications result in a PUF that is more efficient in terms of area and power. Compared to the traditional architecture, for a given silicon real estate, the proposed architecture provides over two orders of magnitude larger $C/R$ space and it has higher resistance toward modeling attacks. Under technology-dependent methods, we investigate multiple techniques that improve stability and efficiency of PUF designs. In one approach, we propose a novel PUF design with a similar architecture to that of a traditional design, where we replace large and power hungry digital components with more efficient analog components. In another technique, we exploit the differences between pMOS and nMOS transistors in their variation of threshold voltage (Vth) and in the temperature coefficients of Vth to significantly improve the stability of bi-stable PUFs. We also use circuit-level simulations to evaluate the stability of silicon PUFs to aging degradation. We believe that our technology-independent techniques are good candidates for improving overall efficiency of PUFs in terms of both operation and implementation costs, suitable for PUFs with tight constraints on cost for design and test. However, with regards to improving the stability of PUFs, it is cost-effective to use our technology-dependent techniques as long as the extra effort for implementation and testing can be tolerated. / Ph. D.

No description available.

The third-party tracking ecosystem continuously evolves in scope, therefore, understanding of it is at best elusive. In this thesis, we investigate this complex ecosystem from three dimen-sions. Firstly, we examine third-party trackers from a geographical perspective. We observe a non-uniform presence of local third-party trackers between regions and countries within re-gions, with some trackers focusing on specific regions and countries. Secondly, we focus on how trackers share user-specific identifiers (IDs). We identify user-specific IDs that we suspect are used to track users. We find a significant amount of ID-sharing practices across different organ-isations providing various service categories. Our observations reveal that ID-sharing happens at a large scale regardless of the user profile size and profile condition such as logged-in and logged-out. Finally, we quantify the effect of tracker-blockers, a popular option for the users to protect their privacy, on the page-load performance. The effect of such tools on the over-all user browsing experience is questionable as the blockage of trackers can disrupt the general website loading process. The tracker-blockers we studied have a considerable negative effect on page-load performance. Unexpectedly, we find that even highly popular websites are negatively affected. This thesis points to significant gaps in our knowledge about the inner workings of this complex ecosystem. Moreover, it highlights some of the challenges that we face when attempting to preserve user's privacy by using tracker-blockers.

In recent years, questions have risen regarding the language used to describe those who are supervised by the criminal justice system, participating in mental health services, and examined in research. This has resulted in recommendations to reduce labelling bias, as is evident from the recent editions of the APA Publication Manual (2009, 2019), editorials (Willis & Letourneau, 2018), and ethics discussions (Willis, 2018). In 2016, the United States Department of Justice adopted a policy of referring to their detainees and supervisees using person-first language, such as “individual who has offended,” rather than referring to individuals based on the nature of their offenses. With these developments, recent research has increased our focus on the way professionals identify those involved in the criminal justice system, how our labels impact these individuals, and the sociocultural implications of our language use (e.g., Denver, Pickett, & Bushway, 2017). The poster presents preliminary results of the sexual abuse terminology project, which examines professionals’ use of language to identify and describe individuals who have engaged in sexually abusive behaviors, the sexually abusive behaviors themselves, and sexual interests associated with abusive behavior, between 1981 and 2020. This poster will specifically highlight person identifiers across five-year intervals from 1981 through 2015 (as data collection from publications in 2020 will still be ongoing at the time of presentation), demonstrating trends is language use over time. For this analysis, 1,223 peer-reviewed studies were evaluated for language use. Eighty-three label categories (e.g., abusers, individuals, offenders, etc.) were identified, with 410 specific labels (e.g. intrafamilial child sexual abusers, men with sexual behavior problems, deviant patients, etc.) identified in total. While “offender” labels are the most consistently used terms across all years, trends in term use over time will be presented across five-year intervals. Trends in terminology usage will be graphically depicted, and hypotheses for changes in terminology used will be discussed.

Data surveillance is the systematic use of personal data systems in the investigation or monitoring of the actions or communications of one or more persons. This collection of papers was the basis for a supplication under Rule 28 of the ANU's Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Rules. The papers develop a body of theory that explains the nature, applications and impacts of the data processing technologies that support the investigation or monitoring of individuals and populations. Literature review and analysis is supplemented by reports of field work undertaken in both the United States and Australia, which tested the body of theory, and enabled it to be articulated. The research programme established a firm theoretical foundation for further work. It provided insights into appropriate research methods, and delivered not only empirically-based descriptive and explanatory data, but also evaluative information relevant to policy-decisions. The body of work as a whole provides a basis on which more mature research work is able to build.

No description available.

The Swedish Transportation Administration started an initiative to create a new e-infrastructure for the railroad sector in Sweden. The purpose is to follow the movement of railroad vehicles on the railway tracks and enhance logistics aspects of the transportation of goods by train. The Swedish initiative works as a pilot project for the railroad sector in the EU and if successful the e-infrastructure could be rolled out in the entire EU. It is a rare opportunity to be a part from the beginning of the creation of such a potential large scale e-infrastructure. The aim of this thesis is to provide advice early in the development process to aid in the success of the design and creation on the e-infrastructure. In the doing of this we will need to evaluate the areas: (1) the current state of the e-infrastructure, (2) the usefulness of the EPCGlobal standard for this e-infrastructure and (3) the usefulness on established e-infrastructures design principles. As a result of the thesis we have provided advice to enhance the design and implementation of the e-infrastructure, also advice is given on how to make the EPCGlobal standard’s more compatibility with the transportation sector. We have found the design principles by Hanseth & Lyytinen (2004) and Eriksson & Ågerfalk (2010) useful for the evaluation of the e-infrastructure. We also advocate that new design principles should be created to encompass the new concept of Internet of Things in e-infrastructures.

REST (Representational state transfer) is an architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems. The simplicity of REST allows straightforward communication between HTTP clients and servers using URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) and HTTP methods, e.g., GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. To do the communication effectively between clients and servers, there is a set of best design practices (design and linguistic patterns) shall be followed, and a set of poor design practices (design and linguistic antipatterns) shall be avoided. This study aims to determine whether there is a relationship between design and linguistic quality in Google RESTful APIs. To find this relation, a tool is developed to detect patterns and antipatterns in REST APIs both in terms of design and linguistic quality. The input of this tool is qualitative data (Google APIs) and its output is quantitative data. Using this quantitative data, a statistical study is then performed to detect the relation. The tests that are conducted to obtain the final results are Chi-squared and Phi Coefficient tests. The result of Chi-squared that considered all the groups of patterns and antipatterns shows that there is a statistically significant relation between design and linguistic quality. However, when we assess the individual pair of patterns and antipatterns, our Phi Coefficient tests show that for most of the cases, there is no or negligible relationship between linguistic and design patterns and antipatterns.

REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is commonly used for designing APIs. Two main categories of REST API quality have been identified in previous research: linguistic and design quality. Linguistic quality revolves around the design of the URIs. Design quality revolves around the metadata and body in HTTP requests and responses. For enabling and simplifying communications with REST, both linguistic and design quality are important, however, previous research has shown that even major APIs using REST are not always following best practices for linguistic and design quality. This study investigates if there is a statistical relation between linguistic and design quality. We selected 326 API endpoints from ten public APIs for this study. This study has reused and improved a Java-based tool in previous research for detecting aspects of linguistic quality in the APIs endpoints. For this study, we also developed a tool based on Node.js for detecting aspects of design quality in the API endpoints. These two tools are applied on the same API endpoints to be able to study the statistical relation. A Chi-Square test, implemented with R, showed that there is a significant statistical relation in our findings between linguistic and design quality. Pairwise phi-coefficient comparisons, implemented with Python, between each combination of the linguistic and design aspects used in this study identified eight weak and two moderate relations among the linguistic and design quality aspects. However, sample tests showed that the Java-based tool for detecting linguistic quality were not accurate, which made us fail to answer our problem formulation.