Thesis (M.S. in Computer Science) Naval Postgraduate School, June 1997. / Thesis advisor, Debra A. Hensgen. Includes bibliographical references (p. 267-268). Also available online.

<p>&quot / The Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication Related Information Act 70 of 2002 (RICA) that regulates the monitoring of electronic communications has not yet been tested by our courts. This paper explores the likelihood of an infringement of an employee's right to privacy by an employer in the process of intercepting the latters electronic communications. It is argued that there is no explicit provision of the protection of the right to privacy that is provided in the LRA. It is further argued that the provisions of section 4, 5 and 6 of RICA as they stand do not necessarily provide for the protection of an employee's right to privacy, but the incorporation of these sections could be construed as meaning that the legislature or the framers of the legislation intended to limit the employers right to trade freely, at the same breath, limit the employees right to privacy. It is argued that RICA does not provide protection for the right to privacy wherein consent has been obtained under duress or based on misrepresentation of facts. It is contended that the interception of employees electronic communications in such circumstances would be regarded as an infringement of such employees right to privacy. The burden of proving duress or misrepresentation of facts rests on the employee who alleges that such consent was obtained under duress or based on misrepresentation of facts. It is also argued that RICA does not define the meaning of the words in the course of carrying on of business or reasonable steps provided in section 6 of RICA. It is argued that the meaning of in the course of carrying on of business would be determined by the type of the industry upon which the business operates, as well as the circumstances of the case. Reasonable steps would be regarded as being taken if employers notify employees that their electronic communications would be intercepted...&quot / </p>

<p>&quot / The Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication Related Information Act 70 of 2002 (RICA) that regulates the monitoring of electronic communications has not yet been tested by our courts. This paper explores the likelihood of an infringement of an employee's right to privacy by an employer in the process of intercepting the latters electronic communications. It is argued that there is no explicit provision of the protection of the right to privacy that is provided in the LRA. It is further argued that the provisions of section 4, 5 and 6 of RICA as they stand do not necessarily provide for the protection of an employee's right to privacy, but the incorporation of these sections could be construed as meaning that the legislature or the framers of the legislation intended to limit the employers right to trade freely, at the same breath, limit the employees right to privacy. It is argued that RICA does not provide protection for the right to privacy wherein consent has been obtained under duress or based on misrepresentation of facts. It is contended that the interception of employees electronic communications in such circumstances would be regarded as an infringement of such employees right to privacy. The burden of proving duress or misrepresentation of facts rests on the employee who alleges that such consent was obtained under duress or based on misrepresentation of facts. It is also argued that RICA does not define the meaning of the words in the course of carrying on of business or reasonable steps provided in section 6 of RICA. It is argued that the meaning of in the course of carrying on of business would be determined by the type of the industry upon which the business operates, as well as the circumstances of the case. Reasonable steps would be regarded as being taken if employers notify employees that their electronic communications would be intercepted...&quot / </p>

<p>&quot / The Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication Related Information Act 70 of 2002 (RICA) that regulates the monitoring of electronic communications has not yet been tested by our courts. This paper explores the likelihood of an infringement of an employee's right to privacy by an employer in the process of intercepting the latters electronic communications. It is argued that there is no explicit provision of the protection of the right to privacy that is provided in the LRA. It is further argued that the provisions of section 4, 5 and 6 of RICA as they stand do not necessarily provide for the protection of an employee's right to privacy, but the incorporation of these sections could be construed as meaning that the legislature or the framers of the legislation intended to limit the employers right to trade freely, at the same breath, limit the employees right to privacy. It is argued that RICA does not provide protection for the right to privacy wherein consent has been obtained under duress or based on misrepresentation of facts. It is contended that the interception of employees electronic communications in such circumstances would be regarded as an infringement of such employees right to privacy. The burden of proving duress or misrepresentation of facts rests on the employee who alleges that such consent was obtained under duress or based on misrepresentation of facts. It is also argued that RICA does not define the meaning of the words in the course of carrying on of business or reasonable steps provided in section 6 of RICA. It is argued that the meaning of in the course of carrying on of business would be determined by the type of the industry upon which the business operates, as well as the circumstances of the case. Reasonable steps would be regarded as being taken if employers notify employees that their electronic communications would be intercepted...&quot / </p>

<p>&quot / The Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication Related Information Act 70 of 2002 (RICA) that regulates the monitoring of electronic communications has not yet been tested by our courts. This paper explores the likelihood of an infringement of an employee's right to privacy by an employer in the process of intercepting the latters electronic communications. It is argued that there is no explicit provision of the protection of the right to privacy that is provided in the LRA. It is further argued that the provisions of section 4, 5 and 6 of RICA as they stand do not necessarily provide for the protection of an employee's right to privacy, but the incorporation of these sections could be construed as meaning that the legislature or the framers of the legislation intended to limit the employers right to trade freely, at the same breath, limit the employees right to privacy. It is argued that RICA does not provide protection for the right to privacy wherein consent has been obtained under duress or based on misrepresentation of facts. It is contended that the interception of employees electronic communications in such circumstances would be regarded as an infringement of such employees right to privacy. The burden of proving duress or misrepresentation of facts rests on the employee who alleges that such consent was obtained under duress or based on misrepresentation of facts. It is also argued that RICA does not define the meaning of the words in the course of carrying on of business or reasonable steps provided in section 6 of RICA. It is argued that the meaning of in the course of carrying on of business would be determined by the type of the industry upon which the business operates, as well as the circumstances of the case. Reasonable steps would be regarded as being taken if employers notify employees that their electronic communications would be intercepted...&quot / </p>

Magister Legum - LLM / The Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication Related Information Act 70 of 2002 (RICA) that regulates the monitoring of electronic communications has not yet been tested by our courts. This paper explores the likelihood of an infringement of an employee's right to privacy by an employer in the process of intercepting the latters electronic communications. It is argued that there is no explicit provision of the protection of the right to privacy that is provided in the LRA. It is further argued that the provisions of section 4, 5 and 6 of RICA as they stand do not necessarily provide for the protection of an employee's right to privacy, but the incorporation of these sections could be construed as meaning that the legislature or the framers of the legislation intended to limit the employers right to trade freely, at the same breath, limit the employees right to privacy. It is argued that RICA does not provide protection for the right to privacy wherein consent has been obtained under duress or based on misrepresentation of facts. It is contended that the interception of employees electronic communications in such circumstances would be regarded as an infringement of such employees right to privacy. The burden of proving duress or misrepresentation of facts rests on the employee who alleges that such consent was obtained under duress or based on misrepresentation of facts. It is also argued that RICA does not define the meaning of the words in the course of carrying on of business or reasonable steps provided in section 6 of RICA. It is argued that the meaning of in the course of carrying on of business would be determined by the type of the industry upon which the business operates, as well as the circumstances of the case. Reasonable steps would be regarded as being taken if employers notify employees that their electronic communications would be intercepted. / South Africa

<div>Cloud and parallel computing are fundamental components in the processing of large data sets. Deployments of distributed computers require network infrastructure that is fast, efficient, and secure. Software Defined Networking (SDN) separates the forwarding of network data by switches (data plane) from the setting and managing of network policies (control plane). While this separation provides flexibility for setting network policies affecting the establishment of network flows in the data plane, it provides little to no fault tolerance for failures, either benign or caused by corrupted/malicious applications. Such failures can cause network flows to be incorrectly routed through the network or stop such flows altogether. Without protection against faults, cloud network providers using SDN run the risk of inefficient allocation of network resources or even data loss. Furthermore, the asynchronous nature existing protocols for SDN does not provide a mechanism for consistency in network policy updates across multiple switches.</div><div>In addition, cloud and parallel applications require an efficient means for accessing local system data (input data sets, temporary storage locations, etc.). While in many cases it may be possible for a process to access this data by making calls directly to a file system (FS) kernel driver, this is not always possible (e.g. when using experimental distributed FSs where the needed libraries for accessing the FS only exist in user space).</div><div>This dissertation provides a design for fault tolerance of SDN and infrastructure for advancing the performance of user space FSs. It is divided into three main parts. The first part describes a fault tolerant, distributed SDN control plane framework. The second part expands upon the fault tolerant approach to SDN control plane by providing a practical means for dynamic control plane membership as well as providing a simple mechanism for controller authentication through threshold signatures. The third part describes an efficient framework for user space FS access.</div><div>This research makes three contributions. First, the design, specification, implementation, and evaluation of a method for fault tolerant SDN control plane that is inter-operable with existing control plane applications involving minimal instrumentation of the data plane runtime. Second, the design, specification, implementation and evaluation of a mechanism for dynamic SDN control plane membership that all ensure consistency of network policy updates and minimizes switch overhead through the use of distributed key generation and threshold signatures. Third, the design, specification, implementation, and evaluation of a user space FS access framework that is correct to the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) specification with significantly better performance over existing user space access methods, while requiring no implementation changes for application programmers.</div>

<div>Advances in virtualization technologies have revolutionized the design of the core of cellular networks. However, the adoption of microservice design patterns and migration of services from purpose-built hardware to virtualized hardware has adversely affected the delivery of latency-sensitive services.</div><div><br></div><div>In this dissertation, we make a case for cloud-native (microservice container packaged) network functions in the cellular core by proposing domain knowledge-driven, traffic-aware, orchestration frameworks to make network placement decisions. We begin by evaluating the suitability of virtualization technologies for the cellular core and demonstrating that container-driven deployments can significantly outperform other virtualization technologies such as Virtual Machines for control and data plane applications.</div><div><br></div><div>To support the deployment of latency-sensitive applications on virtualized hardware, we propose using Virtual Network Function (VNF) bundles (aggregates) to handle transactions. Specifically, we design Invenio to leverage a combination of network traces and domain knowledge to identify VNFs involved in processing a specific transaction, which are then collocated by a traffic-aware orchestrator. By ensuring that a user request is processed by a single aggregate of collocated VNFs, Invenio can significantly reduce end-to-end latencies and improve user experience.</div><div><br></div><div>Finally, to understand the challenges in using container-driven deployments in real-world applications, we develop and evaluate a novel caller-ID spoofing detection solution in Voice over LTE (VoLTE) calls. Our proposed solution, NASCENT, cross validates the caller-ID used during voice-call signaling with a previously authenticated caller-ID to detect caller-ID spoofing. Our evaluation with traditional and container-driven deployments shows that container-driven deployment can not only support complex cellular services but also outperform traditional deployments.</div><div><br></div>

<div> <div> <div> <p>With the prevalence of web and cloud-based services, there is an ever growing requirement on the underlying network infrastructure to ensure that business critical traffic is continually serviced with acceptable performance. Networks must meet their performance requirements under failures. The global scale of cloud provider networks and the rapid evolution of these networks imply that failures are the norm in production networks today. Unplanned downtime can cost billions of dollars, and cause catastrophic consequences. The thesis is motivated by these challenges and aims to provide a principled solution to certifying network performance under failures. Network performance certification is complicated, due to both the variety of ways a network can fail, and the rich ways a network can respond to failures. The key contributions of this thesis are: (i) a general framework for robustly certifying the worst-case performance of a network across a given set of uncertain scenarios. A key novelty is that the framework models flexible network response enabled by recent emerging trends such as Software-Defined Networking; (ii) a toolkit which automates the key steps needed in robust certification making it suitable for use by a network architect, and which enables experimentation on a wide range of robust certification of practical interest; (iii) Slice, a general framework which efficiently classifies failure scenarios based on whether network performance is acceptable for those scenarios, and which allows reasoning about performance requirements that must be met over a given percentage of scenarios. We also show applications of our frameworks in synthesizing designs that are guaranteed to meet a performance goal over all or a desired percentage of a given set of scenarios. The thesis focuses on wide-area networks, but the approaches apply to data-center networks as well.</p></div></div></div>

<div>Cognitive agent architectures embed social learning algorithms and normative frameworks for adopting others’ influenced goals. However, there exists inefficiency in providing continuous, situational decision-making to emerge social, altruistic norms. The thesis reconstructs social-ecological learning mechanisms to functionally and efficiently internalize situational cooperation. By orienting agents to be self-aware of their three-dimensional vectors, i.e., physical, emotional and intellectual in graphical representations, this thesis hypothesizes the parsimonious, action-predictive four emotions that not only link perceptions, action, and cognition by events but also the emotional continuity functional to social-ecological rationality of agents in continuum. Twelve Meridian system is employed to conceptualize the equalizing, complementary, heuristic orientation (ECHO) model. ECHO simulates “naturalistic” cooperation to model embodied, social-ecological orientations by self-organizing emotions to emerge functional social network formations. ECHO delineates the soma links to perceptions, namely Twelve Meridian channels as “direct pipes” that initiates and conduct emotions and consciousness of three dimensional agenthood: physical, emotional, and intellectual desires. ECHO reconstructs emotions as entities to induce systemic, self-organized rule of delegation by integrating agents’ percepts and actuations. By modeling constitutional emotions and consciousness of eight entities, emotions within entities as “individualized emotional processors,” are constructing and integrating purposeful social, altruistic events for the efficacy of situated agents.<br></div>