Our aim is to investigate and evaluate the efficiency of crisis management in European aviation, and to recommend enhancements. To fulfill this, we mapped the current crisis management plans and created a fictive scenario where a cyber-attack shut down the power at five of the major airports in Europe. Air traffic in Europe was reconstructed to a chosen day; the 16th of September 2013, and the reconstructed traffic situation was used in the scenario. We also created a model, for the purpose of showing the effect of a cut in time for the steps in the crisis management plan may have on the traffic waiting to depart at the closed airports. When using these means, we could implement the crisis management plans on the fictive scenario and make changes to the plans for a new implementation. The existing crisis management plans were compared to the modified plans made by us, and it was found that usage of a common platform for the different stakeholders involved in the crisis could improve the efficiency of the crisis management.

With the advance of wireless access technologies, the IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) has gained significant increase in popularity and deployment due to the substantially improved transmission rate and decreased deployment costs. However, this same widespread deployment makes WLANs an attractive target for network attacks. Several vulnerabilities have been identified and reported regarding the security of the current 802.11 standards. To address those security weaknesses, IEEE standard committees proposed the 802.11i amendment to enhance WLAN security. The 802.11i standard has demonstrated the capability of providing satisfactory mutual authentication, better data confidentiality, and key management support, however, the design of 802.11i does not consider network availability. Therefore, it has been suggested that 802.11i is highly susceptible to malicious denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, which exploit the vulnerability of unprotected management frames. This research first investigates common DoS vulnerabilities in a Robust Security Network (RSN), which is defined in the 802.11i standard, and presents an empirical analysis of such attacks – in particular, flooding-based DoS attacks. To address those DoS issues, this thesis proposes a novel design and implementation of a lightweight stateless authentication scheme that enables wireless access points (APs) to establish a trust relationship with an associating client and derive validating keys that can be used to mutually authenticate subsequent layer-2 (link layer) management frames. The quality of service provisioning for real-time services over a WLAN requires the total latency of handoff between APs to be small in order to achieve seamless roaming. Thus, this thesis further extends the proposed link-layer authentication into a secure fast handoff solution that addresses DoS vulnerabilities as well as improving the existing 802.11i handoff performance. A location management scheme is also proposed to minimise the number of channels required to scan by the roaming client in order to reduce the scanning delay, which could normally take up 90% of the total handoff latency. In order to acquire practical data to evaluate the proposed schemes, a prototype network has been implemented as an experimental testbed using open source tools and drivers. This testbed allows practical data to be collected and analysed. The result successfully demonstrated that not only the proposed authentication scheme eradicates most of the DoS vulnerabilities, but also substantially improved the handoff performance to a level suitable for supporting real-time services.

This thesis communicates a new approach for the future Library system using secure NFC technology. Today we can use NFC and Android based mobile phones to build modern library system in which user will instead of standing in the queue can directly borrow and return books. The NFC technology which will use in this thesis is capable of storing small amount of information. This storage will be used for maintaining the books records. Although the NFC works in close proximity but still there are possibilities of attacks. Due to contact less communication the victim cannot notice the attacks. There are different types of attacks which can occur including modification of data and listening to the communication by unknown user. Therefore in this thesis the author will look into how one can protect the system from these kinds of at-tacks. The motivation behind the thesis is to introduce scalable cloud based infrastructure as a backbone Library. Current systems using bar code technology are not secure. Therefore an infrastructure needs to be built which includes cloud based server for key distribution and data storage. Furthermore, this thesis includes a study of the encryption and decryption schemes for close proximity communications. A new novel algorithm has been introduced and implemented as an encryption scheme for this thesis work. The Huffman scheme has been modified and 16 bit keys have been used for the key exchange. The new approach is compared with the existing techniques and found that it is reliable as compared to other techniques.

While the cannon of objectivity has recently been called into question as the means for evaluating news merit, objectivity continues to harbor public expectation of the news media, especially during times of conflict. Results of past and current objectivity studies of conflict reporting, however, were shown to produce inconsistent and conflicting interpretations of whether the news media is presenting objective coverage of conflicts.To determine objectivity of news coverage, this content analysis examined objectivity differences between three newspapers--the Chicago Tribune, the Indianapolis Star, and the Anderson Herald Bulletin--and how they collectively presented front-page conflict and mainstream straight news stories.The study evaluated the newspapers' collective presentation of the September 11 h terrorist attack for a two-week period from September 12 through September 26, 2001. Presentation of the conflict was compared to a proportionate sample of mainstream straight news stories randomly selected from the months of January through December of 2001.Because the literature review indicated researchers most commonly evaluate news objectivity according to the presence of balance, attribution, or gatekeeping bias, the study assessed differences in objectivity level between conflict and straight news based upon the integration of all three objectivity variables The study's findings suggested that reporting of mainstream straight news was more objective than reporting of the September 11 terrorist attack conflict in the combined three newspapers. Reporting of the terrorist attack was found to be less balanced than reporting of straight news stories, as evidenced by a disproportionate amount of quotations afforded in support of United States war efforts. In addition, conflict stories were found to contain a significantly higher use of negative attributes-non-essential adjectives, inferences, collateral language and non-speech quotes--than straight news stories. Differences between page placement and revelation of theme were found to have no effect on objectivity differences. / Department of Journalism

Symmetric block ciphers are among the most widely used cryptographic primitives. In addition to providing privacy via encryption, block ciphers are used as basic components in the construction of hash functions, message authentication codes, pseudorandom number generator, as part of various cryptographic protocols and etc. One of the most popular block ciphers nowadays is AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), which has been used as a standard of encryption in many countries of the world. In spite of popularity of this cipher a huge attack was found on its key-expansion algorithm some years ago. That is why it is important to analyze carefully this component and understand what weak points admit attacks. Since we know that we can improve existing algorithm to protect cipher from attacks or build up a new algorithm taking into account founded weaknesses so there will be no chance to break it with existing knowledge. The goal of this project is to create some method which can estimate security of encryption algorithm against related-key attacks. For this reason the perspective block cipher is introduced. This cipher is a candidate to the public standard of encryption in Ukraine so that is why this research is very important. Actually the introduced method of estimation is created especially for this cipher but also can be used for other ciphers based on the substitution-permutation network. The developed method was applied to the cipher and results are represented in the report. Also the complexity estimation of this algorithm is expressed. The software implementation is described in the last chapter of report.

This report describes the works done since May 2010 to December 2012 on breaking Whitenoise encryption algorithm. It is mainly divided into two sections: Studying the stream-cipher developed by Whitenoise lab and its implementation on a FPGA against certain group of indirect attacks called Power Analysis Attacks, and reviewing the process of development and results of experiments applied on a power sampling board which was developed during this project. For the first part the algorithm and the implementation would be reverse engineered and reviewed. Various blocks of the implementation would be studied one by one against some indirect attacks. It would be shown that those attacks are useless or at least very weak against Whitenoise. A new scenario would then be proposed to attack the implementation. An improvement to the new scenario would also be presented to completely hack the implementation. However it would also be shown that the complete hack requires very accurate equipment, large number of computations and applying a lot of tests and thus Whitenoise seems fairly strong against this specific group of attacks. In the next section the requirements of a power consumption measurement setup would be discussed. Then the motivations and goals of building such a board would be mentioned. Some important concepts and consideration in building the board, such as schematic of the amplifier, multilayer designing, embedding a BGA component, star grounding, inductance reduction, and other concepts would be presented. Then the results of applied tests on the produced board would be discussed. The precision of the measurements, some pattern recognition along with some other results would be illustrated. Also some important characteristics such as linearity of measurements would be investigated and proved to exist. In the end some topics as possible future works, such as more pattern recognition, or observing the effect of masks on the power consumption would be suggested. / Graduate

This thesis focuses on video watermarking robust against geometric attacks and video compressions. In addition to the requirements for an image watermarking algorithm, a digital video watermarking algorithm has to be robust against advanced video compressions, frame loss, frame swapping, aspect ratio change, frame rate change, intra- and inter-frame filtering, etc. Video compression, especially, the most efficient compression standard, H.264, and geometric attacks, such as rotation and cropping, frame aspect ratio change, and translation, are considered the most challenging attacks for video watermarking algorithms. In this thesis, we first review typical watermarking algorithms robust against geometric attacks and video compressions, and point out their advantages and disadvantages. Then, we propose our robust video watermarking algorithms against Rotation, Scaling and Translation (RST) attacks and MPEG-2 compression based on the logpolar mapping and the phase-only filtering method. Rotation or scaling transformation in the spatial domain results in vertical or horizontal shift in the log-polar mapping (LPM) of the magnitude of the Fourier spectrum of the target frame. Translation has no effect in this domain. This method is very robust to RST attacks and MPEG-2 compression. We also demonstrate that this method can be used as a RST parameters detector to work with other watermarking algorithms to improve their robustness to RST attacks. Furthermore, we propose a new video watermarking algorithm based on the 1D DFT (one-dimensional Discrete Fourier Transform) and 1D projection. This algorithm enhances the robustness to video compression and is able to resist the most advanced video compression, H.264. The 1D DFT for a video sequence along the temporal domain generates an ideal domain, in which the spatial information is still kept and the temporal information is obtained. With detailed analysis and calculation, we choose the frames with highest temporal frequencies to embed the fence-shaped watermark pattern in the Radon transform domain of the selected frames. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by video compression standards MPEG-2 and H.264; geometric attacks such as rotation, translation, and aspect-ratio changes; and other video processing. The most important advantages of this video watermarking algorithm are its simplicity, practicality and robustness.

My dissertation focuses on a set of Anglo-American novels that deal with the events of 9/11. Identifying thematic and stylistic differences in the fiction on this topic, I distinguish between novels that represent directly the jolts of trauma in the wake of the attacks, and novels that, while still holding the events as an underlying operative force in the narrative, do not openly represent them but envision their long-term aftermath. The first group of novels comprises Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall (2005), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). The second one includes Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs (2009), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008). Drawing on concepts from trauma theory, particularly by Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra, and combining them with the ethical philosophies of Levinas and Heidegger, I argue that the constructions of 9/11 in Anglo-American fiction are essentially twofold: authors who narrate 9/11 as a tragic human loss in the city of New York turn it into an occasion for an ethical dialogue with the reader and potentially with the “Other,” whereas authors who address 9/11 as a recent sociopolitical event transform it into a goad toward a bitter cultural indictment of the US middle-class, whose ingrained inertia, patriotism and self-righteousness have been either magnified or twisted by the attacks. Considering processes of meaning-making, annihilation, ideological reduction and apathy that arose from 9/11 and its versions, I have identified what could be called, adapting Peter Elbow’s expression from pedagogical studies, the “forked” rhetoric of media and politics, a rhetorical mode in which both discourses are essentially closed, non-hermeneutic, and rooted in the same rationale: exploiting 9/11 for consensus. On the contrary, in what I call the New-Yorkization of 9/11, I highlighted how the situatedness of the public discourses that New Yorkers constructed to tell their own tragedy rescues the Ur-Phaenomenon of 9/11 from the epistemological commodification that intellectual, mediatic and political interpretations forced on it. Furthermore, pointing to the speciousness of arguments that deem 9/11 literature sentimental and unimaginative, I claim that the traumatic literature on the attacks constitutes an example of ethical practice, since it originates from witnesses of the catastrophe, it represents communal solidarity, and it places a crucial demand on the reader as an empathic listener and ethical agent. Ethical counternarratives oppose the ideological simplification of the 9/11 attacks and develop instead a complex counter-rhetoric of emotions and inclusiveness that we could read as a particular instantiation of an ethics of the self and “Other.” As much as the 9/11 “ethical” novels suggest that “survivability” in times of trauma depends on “relationality” (J. Butler), the “cultural” ones unveil the insensitivity and superficiality of the actual US society far away from the site of trauma. The binary framework I use implies that, outside of New York City, 9/11 is narrated neither traumatically (in terms of literary form), nor as trauma (in terms of textual fact). Consequently, on the basis of a spatial criterion and in parallel to the ethical novels, I have identified a category of “cultural” fiction that tackles the events of 9/11 at a distance, spatially and conceptually. In essence, 9/11 brings neither shock, nor promise of regeneration to these peripheral settings, except for Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, a story in which we are returned to a post-9/11 New York where different ethnic subjects can re-negotiate creatively their identities. The cultural novels are ultimately pervaded by a mode of tragic irony that is unthinkable for the ethical novels and that is used in these texts to convey the inanity and hubris of a politically uneducated and naïve America – one that has difficulties to point Afghanistan on a map, or to transcend dualistic schemes of value that embody precisely Bush’s Manichaeism. The potential for cultural pluralism, solidarity and historical memory set up by the New York stories does not ramify into the America that is far away from the neuralgic epicenter of historical trauma. This proves that the traumatizing effects and the related ethical calls engendered by 9/11 remain confined to the New York literature on the topic.

This thesis is an examination of representations of Muslim women in the American print media. I focus on one particular publication, The New York Times within a time frame surrounding the events of September 11, 2001. Articles were selected from this publication that fell within the time period of September 11, 2000 to September 11, 2002, in selecting articles, I chose those based on their inclusion of any discussion that clearly identified those discussed as Muslim women, through the use of the words "Muslim" or "Islamic" in their descriptions. The case study was carried out by reading through each daily edition of The New York Times in order to identify any articles that fell within my criteria. I also used an online database containing abstracts of the publication to verify that no article of relevance was overlooked. I then devised 5 categories within which to analyze the representations of Muslim women that were found within these articles, "Veil", "Biographical", "Women's Issues", "Politics" and "Muslims in the West". The main goal of this thesis is to determine how Muslim women are represented within this particular publication and to analyze whether the events of September 11, 2001 had any effect on how Muslim women were portrayed in The New York Times articles.

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), due to their unique characteristics (e.g., unsecured wireless channel, dynamic mobility, absence of central supportive infrastructure and limited resources), are suffering from a wide range of security threats and attacks. Particularly, MANETs are susceptible to the Denial of Service (DoS) attack that aims to disrupt the network by consuming its resources. In MANETs, a special form of DoS attack has emerged recently as a potentially major threat: the flooding attack. This attack recruits multiple attack nodes to flood the MANET with overwhelming broadcast traffic. This flooding traffic is so large that all, or most of, MANET resources are exhausted. As a result, the MANET is not able to provide any services. This thesis aims to investigate the flooding attack and propose detective security measures to defend MANETs against such an attack.