The study aims to assess vulnerability to sea level rise of the municipal population from the coastal region of the state of São Paulo. This vulnerability assessment focus on degrees of vulnerability and what are the main factors that affect vulnerability to sea level rise in the municipalities. The study has included indicators of vulnerability to sea level rise which were represented through vulnerability mapping reflecting the degrees of adaptive capacity, sensitivity, exposure and total vulnerability of the municipalities. The results have shown that São Vicente, São Sebastião, Praia Grande, Santos and Guarujá were classified as highly vulnerable to sea level rise and Santos as the most vulnerable municipality. The assessment indicated that approximately 1 million inhabitants of the coastal zone of São Paulo could be affected by a rise of up to 1 meter in the sea level in one generation time, around 100 years. Social factors are among the main factors that affect vulnerability, which are especially related to urban infrastructure; however biophysical factors, particularly linked to erosion and inundation are significant factors to vulnerability to sea level rise in the municipalities likewise, economic factors, as the most vulnerable municipalities concentrate industries with high polluting potential. The identified main factors that affect coastal vulnerability should be integrated in policy considerations that should also focus on long term urban management strategies.

To test if a host contains any known security flaws over a network connection a Vulnerability Assessment (VA) could be made. This thesis describes different techniques used by VA tools over a network connection to detect known security flaws. To decrease the risk of flaws not being detected, several VA tools could be used. There is no common way of merging information from different VA tools. Therefore the Vulnerability Assessment Information Handler (VAIH) has been developed. The VAIH system consists of three parts. First, a intermediate language format defined in XML. Second, modules that converts the output of VA tools to the intermediate language format. Third, a program for reading and displaying the intermediate language format. The VAIH system makes it possible to merge the results from vulnerability assessment tools into one file that can be displayed and edited through a GUI.

Kyoto University (京都大学) / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(工学) / 甲第15363号 / 工博第3242号 / 新制||工||1488(附属図書館) / 27841 / 京都大学大学院工学研究科都市環境工学専攻 / (主査)教授 寶 馨, 准教授 山敷 庸亮, 准教授 立川 康人 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当

Unlike municipal water supplies, provincial regulations do not require systematic testing of domestic well water, which may adversely impact local residents should contamination occur. Private wells are typically shallow relative to municipal wells, and thus, are particularly vulnerable to sources of surficial contamination if preferential recharge pathways such as natural fractures or faulty seals are present. In order to determine the relative importance of well seal integrity as a preferential pathway, a practical detection method was developed based on infiltrometry. This method successfully detected faulty well seals in a wide range of geological settings across Canada, including: Hobbema, Alberta; Lindsay, Ontario; and Chelsea, Québec. It was most successful in areas of minimal heterogeneity and where the surficial geology is composed of fine-grained sediments. The community of Chelsea (Québec) was also the primary study site to examine a range of factors affecting water quality including physical characteristics, faulty well seals, other anthropogenic activities and seasonality. Water samples were collected over a period of 14 months and analyzed for bacteria and major-ion chemistry. The results show that the consideration of physical features alone is not enough to predict vulnerability in the study area. Seasonal fluctuations in ionic concentrations (e.g. ionic strength, NO3-N and Cl-) and coliform bacteria are observed and result from disperse and rapid recharge events. Multivariate analysis techniques (e.g. principal components analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis) demonstrate that preferential recharge pathways and anthropogenic activities, such as domestic effluents affect the groundwater quality. The data and findings of this study were used to assist in the design of a probabilistic risk assessment model based on the Poisson distribution. This study demonstrates the complexity and the challenges related to bacterial contamination in drilled wells. In spite of these challenges, this analysis was useful as a baseline to assess the impact of anthropogenic activities, and may be used in future studies to assist municipalities in the evaluation and protection of groundwater supplies.

The expansive nature of water distribution system makes them susceptible to threats such as natural disasters and man-made destructions. Vulnerability assessment research efforts have increased since the passing of “Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act” in 2002 to harden WDS. This study aimed to develop a method that locates critical nodes without hydraulic analysis of every failure scenario, applicable for any size WDS, incorporates critical infrastructure, and capable of verifying method accuracy. The Flow Distribution method is the application of the gravity model, typically used to predict traffic flows in transportation engineering, to a distribution system. Flow distribution predicts the amount of demand and population that would be affected if any node in the system were disabled by solving for the distribution of each node’s outflow. Flow Distribution is applied to the hypothetical city, Anytown, USA using the computer simulation program WaterCAD to model two different disaster scenarios. Results were verified by analyzing sixteen failure scenarios (one for each node) to measure the actual demand and population effect, which was then compared to the nodes predicted by Flow Distribution. Flow Distribution predicted the critical nodes with 70% accuracy and can still be improved with future work.

Med en ökad utmaning i samhället med att hantera risker och dess konsekvenser sätts en allt större press på samhällets förmåga att agera vid oönskade händelser. Studien omfattar Blekinge län och har som syfte att analysera hur flernivåstyrning påverkar arbetet med risk och sårbarhet. Syftet besvaras av två frågeställningar som behandlar samverkan och utmaningar mellan administrativa nivåer. Studien baseras på en abduktiv ansats där teorin väljs utifrån empirin. Teorin i studiens sammanhang är flernivåstyrning vars ändamål är att analysera studiens tidigare forskning och resultat. Studiens resultat utgörs av en dokumentanalys av risk- och sårbarhetsanalyser (RSA) samt en intervjustudie med tjänstemän som visar på att samverkan mellan administrativa nivåer fungerar. Däremot finns det utmaningar med ansvarsfördelningen som är en konsekvens av en bristande kommunikation i ett hierarkiskt beroende system. Utmaningarna påverkar hur arbetet aggregeras upp i de administrativa nivåerna. / With an increased challenge in society in managing risks and their consequences, an increasing pressure is put on society's ability to act in the event of undesirable events. The study covers Blekinge County and aims to analyze how multilevel governance affects risk and vulnerability. The purpose is answered by two questions that explore collaboration and challenges between administrative levels. The study is based on an abductive approach where the theory is chosen based on empirical data. Results from the study are created by a document analysis of risk- and vulnerability documents (RVA) as well as an interview study from municipal employees. The result shows that collaboration between administrative levels works. However, there are challenges with the division of responsibilities from a lack of communication in a hierarchically dependent system. The challenges affect how the analysis is aggregated up to the administrative levels.

The need to secure critical infrastructure (CI) systems against attacks is a topic that has been discussed recently in literature. Many examples of attacks against CI exist, such as the physical attack on the Pacific Gas and Electric Metcalf substation in 2013 that caused millions of dollars in damage or the Stuxnet cyber-attack which was identified in 2010 that caused damage to Iran’s nuclear program and alerted the world to the existence of cyber weapons. As a result of these types of events in which vulnerabilities in CI are exploited, it is important to have a comprehensive systems approach for assessing the vulnerabilities in CI systems. This dissertation seeks to provide a method for engineers to use system and human architectures to perform vulnerability assessment (VA) and decision analysis to enable decision makers to make tradeoffs on how to use their resources to protect CI against attacks.There are several gaps in literature in how to use system and human architectures to perform VA to protect CI from damage. First, no method exists that uses a model based approach and human and system architectures to perform a comprehensive analysis of CI to develop decision analysis models to aid decision makers in determining the most effective use of security resources to secure their CI systems. It is important that such models be comprehensive by including industry standards, system and human architectures, attack scenarios, subject matter expert opinion and models for analysis to help decision makers determine the best security investments. Second, there is not an established method to develop detailed mathematical models from an operational activity diagram that represents an attack scenario. This is important because the translation from architecture to high fidelity models will enable CI asset owners to make tradeoffs on security resource use. Finally, there is no method to evaluate the role of humans in a CI VA based on human views of the system. This dissertation provides an approach to use human and system architectures to perform VA and decision analysis to fill these gaps.

Sea-level rise (SLR) is one consequence of global climate change and given Carpinteria's location right along the coast, the City will likely face the threats of sea-level rise and other impacts in greater frequency and intensity. The intent of this administrative draft is to provide a foundation for future development of a Climate Adaptation Plan, a starting point for the City’s climate initiatives. This administrative draft consists of background information on Carpinteria, a preliminary vulnerability assessment, and a list of potential strategies for City-led implementation. An adaptation plan is sound planning that recognizes the community’s vulnerabilities and attempts to minimize climate change impacts through preemptive action.

This thesis aims to assess the security of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) through penetration testing of some of its services. Targeted at cloud, cybersecurity, governance, and compliance professionals as well as administrators or cyber enthusiasts in general, this research uncovers specific best practices to OCI. We employ a methodology in three steps published by Astra aimed at cloud services auditing, combining penetration testing techniques and thorough documentation review to evaluate the security posture of OCI services. The scope encompasses IAM and MySQL Managed Databases. We found that unproperly supervised ABAC policies could lead to privilege escalation through the tagging of computing resources and that the MySQL service does not present the major issues that occurred in the managed services of OCI’s main competitors. This research contributes to the growing body of knowledge on cloud security and offers practical recommendations to strengthen OCI deployments, ultimately fostering greater confidence in adopting OCI services. / Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka säkerheten hos Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) genom penetrationstestning av några av dess tjänster. Riktad till moln-, cybersäkerhets-, styrnings- och efterlevnadsproffs, bidrar denna forskning till best-practice metoder för OCI. Vi tillämpar en metodik i tre steg som publicerats av Astra och som är inriktad på granskning av molntjänster. Metodiken kombinerar tekniker för penetrationstester och noggrann dokumentationsgenomgång för att utvärdera säkerhetsläget för OCI. Omfattningen inkluderar IAM och hanterade MySQL-databaser. Vi fann att bristfälligt övervakade ABAC-policyer kunde leda till privilegieeskaleringsproblem genom taggning av beräkningsresurser och att Oracles MySQL-tjänst inte har de större problem som hittades i hanterade tjänster hos OCIs främsta konkurrenter. Denna forskning bidrar till den växande kunskapsmängden om molnsäkerhet och erbjuder praktiska rekommendationer för att stärka implementeringar av OCI, vilket i slutändan främjar större förtroende för och antagandet av OCItjänster.

<p>Although decades of experience in human spaceflight have produced and refined a wealth of operational knowledge, the unique challenges posed to long-term extraterrestrial surface habitats will require new approaches to mission design. The key objectives of this thesis are to develop an understanding of 1) how to use simulation to study these habitats and 2) how to make contingency plans for these habitats under complex, changing conditions. In order to accurately represent the challenges posed, we identify the common qualities of mission architectures that are likely to be present in near-future habitats. These qualities are used to formulate sample crew schedules that contribute to developing realistic models for meaningful research. We discuss the development of such models and demonstrate the suitability of simulation to enable the design and study of resilient space habitats. Simulation can be used as a tool to understand the challenges and consequences associated with decision making, as well as the importance of resilient design choices in a hazard-prone environment. We then identify aspects of vulnerability in space habitat mission operations, the subfactors that influence changes in habitat vulnerability, and the effects of each identified category of vulnerability. These ‘vulnerability factors’ are subsystem availability, environmental conditions, safety control options, and recent events. Each vulnerability factor has several subfactors that influence its change during a mission.</p> <p><br></p> <p>The set of vulnerability factors is significant because each captures some category of behavior in surface habitats that changes over time and impacts the likelihood or consequences of risks to the habitat. We use these vulnerability factors to formulate six research questions which can be addressed via simulation-based research. A simulation set plan is developed to highlight the significant concepts at play in each research question. Finally, we conduct trials and analyses of these questions via simulation by injecting faults into a modular coupled virtual testbed for space habitats. The results of the simulations are used to develop lists of key implications for each vulnerability factor in practice. In addition, the lessons learned over the course of simulation set design and the usage of the simulation tool are discussed to support future simulation-based research efforts. We conclude by summarizing the major findings and potential for future work in the area.</p>