The purpose of this thesis was to observe people’s abilities to compute probability problems at a fundamental level. The problems in this study were presented in an abstract format to ensure non-ambiguity in its interpretation. The study was administered to university level students. The focus was to determine people’s ability to answer probability questions that combined the probabilities of two single events, using the most basic types of operations: AND and OR. The study found that while most people were able to compute AND type probability questions, most had trouble with OR operations. Of special interest was a switching strategy that was employed in computing OR operations as the probability of a single event varied. The study also revealed that statistically sophisticated people were able to adopt the mindset of people who were statistically naïve. Further research is required in order to develop a better framework in understanding people’s logical process of computing these basic probability questions as well as its application to our everyday lives.

The purpose of this thesis was to observe people’s abilities to compute probability problems at a fundamental level. The problems in this study were presented in an abstract format to ensure non-ambiguity in its interpretation. The study was administered to university level students. The focus was to determine people’s ability to answer probability questions that combined the probabilities of two single events, using the most basic types of operations: AND and OR. The study found that while most people were able to compute AND type probability questions, most had trouble with OR operations. Of special interest was a switching strategy that was employed in computing OR operations as the probability of a single event varied. The study also revealed that statistically sophisticated people were able to adopt the mindset of people who were statistically naïve. Further research is required in order to develop a better framework in understanding people’s logical process of computing these basic probability questions as well as its application to our everyday lives.

The IEEE 802.11 networks are vulnerable to numerous wireless-specific attacks. Attackers can implement MAC address spoofing techniques to launch these attacks, while masquerading themselves behind a false MAC address. The implementation of Intrusion Detection Systems has become fundamental in the development of security infrastructures for wireless networks. This thesis proposes the designing a novel security system that makes use of metrics from multiple layers of observation to produce a collective decision on whether an attack is taking place. The Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence is the data fusion technique used to combine the evidences from the different layers. A novel, unsupervised and self- adaptive Basic Probability Assignment (BPA) approach able to automatically adapt its beliefs assignment to the current characteristics of the wireless network is proposed. This BPA approach is composed of three different and independent statistical techniques, which are capable to identify the presence of attacks in real time. Despite the lightweight processing requirements, the proposed security system produces outstanding detection results, generating high intrusion detection accuracy and very low number of false alarms. A thorough description of the generated results, for all the considered datasets is presented in this thesis. The effectiveness of the proposed system is evaluated using different types of injection attacks. Regarding one of these attacks, to the best of the author knowledge, the security system presented in this thesis is the first one able to efficiently identify the Airpwn attack.

Yes / The broadcast nature of wireless local area networks has made them prone to several types of wireless injection attacks, such as Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) at the physical layer, deauthentication, and rogue access point attacks. The implementation of novel intrusion detection systems (IDSs) is fundamental to provide stronger protection against these wireless injection attacks. Since most attacks manifest themselves through different metrics, current IDSs should leverage a cross-layer approach to help toward improving the detection accuracy. The data fusion technique based on the Dempster–Shafer (D-S) theory has been proven to be an efficient technique to implement the cross-layer metric approach. However, the dynamic generation of the basic probability assignment (BPA) values used by D-S is still an open research problem. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised methodology to dynamically generate the BPA values, based on both the Gaussian and exponential probability density functions, the categorical probability mass function, and the local reachability density. Then, D-S is used to fuse the BPA values to classify whether the Wi-Fi frame is normal (i.e., non-malicious) or malicious. The proposed methodology provides 100% true positive rate (TPR) and 4.23% false positive rate (FPR) for the MitM attack and 100% TPR and 2.44% FPR for the deauthentication attack, which confirm the efficiency of the dynamic BPA generation methodology. / Gulf Science, Innovation and Knowledge Economy Programme of the U.K. Government under UK-Gulf Institutional Link Grant IL 279339985 and in part by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), U.K., under Grant EP/R006385/1.