Many recent discoveries in animal cognition have shown that species once thought to be relatively simple are in fact capable of complex problem-solving in accordance with their ecological needs. These findings have resulted from experiments designed with the evolutionary history of the focal species in mind. Transitive inference (TI), the abiliy to infer the ordering of non-adjacent objects within a series, is a cognitive skill once thought to be exclusive to humans. Now considered a litmus-test for logical-relational reasoning, TI is thought to have evolved in social species in order to help track dominance relationships. Although recent work has shown that animals can display TI, it has yet to be demonstrated in the natural context in which it evolved. Songbirds may use TI to gain relative dominance information about others during countersinging interactions, through their use of network communication. Here I demonstrate that black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) use TI to judge the relative rank of unknown territorial intruders during the breeding season using dominance information provided through song contests. Using a multispeaker playback, I provided focal males with the relative ranks of three simulated “males” through two countersinging interactions (A > B, B > C). I predicted that when presented with the non-adjacent pair (A and C) with no relative rank information provided, focal males would choose to defend against the intruder they perceived as the greater threat. Consistent with my predictions, the majority of focal males approached “male” A. Additionally, male responses were influenced by age, with older males (in their second or later breeding season) approaching the dominant intruder more consistently than younger males (in their first breeding season). This is the first instance of TI being demonstrated in a natural population of untrained animals, and has important implications for the understanding of songbird communication networks. Transitive inference may be used in several natural situations by chickadees throughout the breeding season and a number of possible avenues for future TI research are discussed. Additionally, methods are suggested for the examination of TI during the non-breeding season. / Thesis (Master, Biology) -- Queen's University, 2010-09-24 10:45:17.316

No description available.

With the ever increasing number of Internet of Things devices going out on the market for consumers that are Zigbee certified there is a need for security testing. This is to make sure that security standards are upheld and improved upon in order to make sure networks are protected from unauthorized users. Even though a lot of research and testing has been done on the Zigbee key exchange mechanism, called Zigbee commissioning, improvements have still not been enough with severe vulnerabilities in consumer grade devices still existing today. The devices tested in this study use EZ-mode commissioning in order to exchange the network key between a Zigbee coordinator and a Zigbee end device in order to encrypt later communication after being paired.  By using a simple radio receiver and a packet capturing program such as Wireshark an eavesdropping attack was conducted in order to capture the network key. The experiment demonstrates that this is still a weak point as the network key was successfully captured using eavesdropping. The analysis of the results show that previous criticisms of Zigbee commissioning have still not fully been addressed and can be a potential weak point in networks that use Zigbee certified IoT products.

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Offentliga trådlösa nätverk finns idag mer tillgängliga än någonsin. Samtidigt haralla dessa nätverk något gemensamt – de går alla att avlyssna och risken finns attanvändarens information kan komma i fel händer. Uppsatsen behandlarallmänhetens säkerhetsmedvetenhet med avseende på denna typ av nätverk genomtvå undersökningar. Den första undersökningen sker via ett tekniskt experiment därdet på flera geografiska platser har erbjudits ett trådlöst nätverk till allmänheten. Pådetta nätverk har det i realtid getts möjligheten att bedöma användarnassäkerhetsmedvetenhet genom att analysera deras nätverkstrafik. Den andraundersökningen sker via en enkät för att få ett resultat från ett teoretiskt perspektiv,hur användarna tror sig agera vid användning av ett sådant nätverk. Således ger denen inblick i den kunskap och säkerhetsmedvetenhet människor i allmänhet tror sigbesitta.Resultaten från undersökningarna tyder på att människors säkerhetsmedvetenhetkan och bör förbättras. Ett första steg är ytterligare utbildning angående de riskersom existerar och hur man undviker dem, något som tas upp i denna uppsats. / Public wireless networks are more available than ever. The networks all havesomething in common—they can be tapped in to, which poses the risk of sensitiveuser information being compromised. This research paper explores the public’ssecurity awareness with regards to public wireless networks by two differentmethods. One technical experiment in which, access to a public wireless networks inseveral different locations were offered. This allowed us to, in real-time, assess thesafety awareness of the users of our public wireless network, by analyzing theirnetwork traffic. The second was a survey, which were distributed to our sample ofpeople. It asked the sample questions about how they perceive their own behavioron a public wireless network. Thus, the survey allowed us to get an idea of theknowledge and the security awareness the public in general believe that they have.The results from our research indicate that people’s security awareness can andshould be improved. One first step towards improvement would be educationconcerning the risks that exist and how to avoid them, which is something that will be brought up in this paper.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2008. / Bruno Braunrot, committee chair; Georges Perla, committee member. Title from file title page. Electronic text (88 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Oct. 2, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 85-88).

Medical area has been benefited by the use of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in recent days. CMIS (Combined Mobile Information System), our proposed model system, is such a system targeted for health care system. IMIS (Integrated Mobile Information System), a system for diabetic healthcare, which is being developed in Blekinge Institute of Technology will be taken as a case study for our proposed system. CMIS is a multi-role system with core service being medical-care related and others like self-monitoring, journal-writing, communicating with fellow patients, relatives, etc. The main reason for not using CMIS could be the security and privacy of the users' information. Any system connected to Internet is always prone to attack, and we think CMIS is no exception. The security and privacy is even more important considering the legal and ethical issues of the sensitive medical data. The CMIS system can be accessed through PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), smart phones or computer via Internet using GPRS (General Packet Radio Service)/UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunication System) and wired-communication respectively. On the other hand, it also increases the burden for security and privacy, related to the use of such communications. This thesis discusses various security and privacy issues arising from the use of mobile communication and wired communication in context of CMIS i.e., issues related to GPRS (mobile) and web application (using wired communication). Along with the threats and vulnerabilities, possible countermeasures are also discussed. This thesis also discusses the prospect of using MP2P (Mobile Peer-to-Peer) as a service for some services (for example, instant messaging system between patients) in CMIS. However, our main concern is to study MP2P feasibility with prospect to privacy. In this thesis, we have tried to identify various security and privacy threats and vulnerabilities CMIS could face, security services required to be achieved and countermeasure against those threats and vulnerabilities. In order to accomplish the goal, a literature survey was carried out to find potential vulnerabilities and threats and their solution for our proposed system. We found out that XSS (cross-site scripting), SQL injection and DoS attack being common for a web application. We also found that attack against mobile communication is relatively complex thus difficult to materialize. In short, we think that an overall planned security approach (routinely testing system for vulnerabilities, applying patches, etc) should be used to keep threats and attacks at bay.

This paper is about security of the RFID systems, attacks on them and countermeasures. Attack to obtain secret key from Mifare Classic card was implemented. Options for eavesdropping RFID communication, security of the NFC technology and biometric passports are descibed too.

With ZigBee being the world’s leading IoT protocol, users are vulnerable to attacks on the wireless communication between ZigBee devices and the information that can be gained from them. For users to protect themselves from potential attacks they need to be aware of what information can be extracted and how it can be countered. Through an eavesdropping experiment, done using three individual sensors from different vendors, various packets with potential for misuse have been identified within the area of building security. With the potential areas of misuse identified, there is also a need for countermeasures against these threats. Countermeasures were identified through a collection of literature that was summarized in order to provide a wide range of alternatives, suitable to different scenarios. The experiment was limited to the functions of the sensors used, as well as traffic using the ZigBee protocol. This study pinpoints a potential for misuse of the ZigBee traffic sent between devices and shows that the ZigBee protocol is fundamentally flawed from a security aspect. Whilst countermeasures exist, they are not applicable to every situation which is why the ZigBee protocol itself needs further development to be considered secure.

Smart antenna technique has emerged as one of the leading technologies for enhancing the quality of service in wireless networks. Because of its ability to concentrate transmit power in desired directions, it has been widely adopted by academia and industry to achieve better coverage, improved capacity and spectrum efficiency of wireless communication systems. In spite of its popularity in applications of performance enhancement, the smart antenna's capability of improving wireless network security is relatively less explored. This dissertation focuses on exploiting the smart antenna technology to develop physical layer solutions to anti-eavesdropping and location security problems. We first investigate the problem of enhancing wireless communication privacy. A novel scheme named "artificial fading" is proposed, which leverages the beam switching capability of smart antennas to prevent eavesdropping attacks. We introduce the optimization strategy to design a pair of switched beam patterns that both have high directional gain to the intended receiver. Meanwhile, in all the other directions, the overlap between these two patterns is minimized. The transmitter switches between the two patterns at a high frequency. In this way, the signal to unintended directions experiences severe fading and the eavesdropper cannot decode it. We use simulation experiments to show that the artificial fading outperforms single pattern beamforming in reducing the unnecessary coverage area of the wireless transmitter. We then study the impact of beamforming technique on wireless localization systems from the perspectives of both location privacy protection and location spoofing attack. For the location privacy preservation scheme, we assume that the adversary uses received signal strength (RSS) based localization systems to localize network users in Wireless LAN (WLAN). The purpose of the scheme is to make the adversary unable to uniquely localize the user when possible, and otherwise, maximize error of the adversary's localization results. To this end, we design a two-step scheme to optimize the beamforming pattern of the wireless user's smart antenna. First, the user moves around to estimate the locations of surrounding access points (APs). Then based on the locations of the APs, pattern synthesis is optimized to minimize the number of APs in the coverage area and degenerate the localization precision. Simulation results show that our scheme can significantly lower the chance of being localized by adversaries and also degrade the location estimation precision to as low as the coverage range of the AP that the wireless user is connected to. As personal privacy preservation and security assurance at the system level are always conflictive to some extent, the capability of smart antenna to intentionally bias the RSS measurements of the localization system also potentially enables location spoofing attacks. From this aspect, we present theoretical analysis on the feasibility of beamforming-based perfect location spoofing (PLS) attacks, where the attacker spoofs to a target fake location by carefully choosing the beamforming pattern to fool the location system. The PLS problem is formulated as a nonlinear feasibility problem, and due to its intractable nature, we solve it using semidefinite relaxation (SDR) in conjunction with a heuristic local search algorithm. Simulation results show the effectiveness of our analytical approach and indicate the correlation between the geometry of anchor deployment and the feasibility of PLS attacks. Based on the simulation results, guidelines for guard against PLS attacks are provided. / Ph. D.