Security testing is a topic that many organizations are discussing to impose on their tool in order to detect security threats. During my thesis work I used HIAB (Hacker in a Box) and Nessus (remote vulnerability security tool) to find out the vulnerabilities in the remote client PC. This thesis describes in detail the severe security issues which were found while running an experiment at an office network and individual home PC also through remote accessing and scanning. The results were inferred by describing the different security threats and vulnerabilities. / This is 60 point Master Programme in Computer Science Thesis

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, many researchers turned to remote testing to continue to collect data. This shift provided new insights and exciting opportunities for researchers, including the ability to gain access to larger demographic pools. However, remote work has come with unique challenges. One factor that has proved to be challenging is the level of control researchers have when conducting remote studies. For example, compared to in-lab room setup and design, participants' home environments have numerous distractions for young toddlers (e.g., family members, pets, tv, toys). Thus, the increased variability has led to important questions regarding methodology, implementation, and in the current study, variability in participation. That is, are there systematic biases in final samples due to differences in participant characteristics, such as temperament? Particularly for remote work, the increased variability has created challenges for researchers to collect data but also exciting opportunities to understand how temperament may interact with participation and study completion rates. The current study aimed to understand whether temperament plays a role in study completion rates in remote research for toddlers ages 18 and 24 months. It was expected that effortful control would significantly influence participation and study completion, and that both negative affectivity and surgency would negatively influence participation in the remote study. Both effortful control and negative affectivity were not significantly related to participation, while surgency positively related to participation. / Doctor of Philosophy / Since the pandemic, many developmental researchers shifted from in-person settings to online testing. Although remote testing is not new, this shift provided many research labs with new opportunities to reach more participants. However, with this shift to remote testing, researchers relinquished control that has been designed in the lab, in that each home environment is different. For example, noise, internet speed, and computer size will vary across participants, whereas in the laboratory, these factors remained constant. Moreover, toys, tvs, pets, and/or siblings may be distracting for toddlers participating in a remote study. Thus, these differences across home environments have illuminated differences in toddlers' successful participation. For example, are some toddlers more likely to maintain their attention to the current task? Temperament was investigated in the current study to determine if certain skills may influence study participation and completion rates for toddlers ages 18 to 24-months. It was expected that effortful control (e.g., inhibitory control, attention focusing) would significantly influence the likelihood of a toddler completing the remote task. On the other hand, it was expected that both surgency (e.g., impulsivity, activity level) and negative affectivity (e.g., fear, shyness) would negatively influence task participation. Only surgency positively influenced task participation, and will be discussed in the context of toddler motivation, and engagement in the task.

The population of seniors is growing and will continue to increase in the next decade. Computer technology holds the promise of enhancing the quality of life and independence of older people as it may increase their ability to perform a variety of tasks. This is true for elderly. By the year 2030, people age 65 or older will comprise 22% of the population in the United States. As the population shifts so that a greater percentage are middle-aged and older adults, and as dependence on computer technology increases, it becomes more crucial to understand how to design computer displays for these older age groups. The research has compared various display representation formats to try to find out which is the best way to represent information to seniors in any form of display and the reason for the preferences. The formats compared include high and low density screens for abstract icon representation, concrete icon representation, tabular representation and graphical representation.This research also endeavored to study the effectiveness of remote usability testing as compared to inlab testing for seniors. Results indicated that density of screen is a very important factor affecting the performance of older adults. Density effect showed statistical significance F (1,112)=8.934, p< .05 from further post-hoc analysis that was conducted. Although significant results were not obtained, different formats of display representations may still be an area worth pursuing. Also it was noted that remote usability testing is not as effective as inlab testing for seniors in terms of time taken to conduct the study and the number of user comments collected. Implications, as well as recommendations and conclusions, of the study are presented. / Master of Science

<p>This thesis aims to investigate how one fundamental component of the inner-ear (cochlear) response to all sounds, the temporal fine structure (TFS), is used by the auditory system in everyday hearing. Although it is well known that neurons in the cochlea encode the TFS through exquisite phase locking, how this initial/peripheral temporal code contributes to everyday hearing and how its degradation contributes to perceptual deficits are foundational questions in auditory neuroscience and clinical audiology that remain unresolved despite extensive prior research. This is largely because the conventional approach to studying the role of TFS involves performing perceptual experiments with acoustic manipulations of stimuli (such as sub-band vocoding), rather than direct physiological or behavioral measurements of TFS coding, and hence is intrinsically limited. The present thesis addresses these gaps in three parts: 1) developing assays that can quantify TFS coding at the individual level 2) comparing individual differences in TFS coding to differences in speech-in-noise perception across a range of real-world listening conditions, and 3) developing deep neural network (DNN) models of speech separation/enhancement to complement the individual-difference approach. By comparing behavioral and electroencephalogram (EEG)-based measures, Part 1 of this work identified a robust test battery that measures TFS processing in individual humans. Using this battery, Part 2 subdivided a large sample of listeners (N=200) into groups with “good” and “poor” TFS sensitivity. A comparison of speech-in-noise scores under a range of listening conditions between the groups revealed that good TFS coding reduces the negative impact of reverberation on speech intelligibility, and leads to reduced reaction times suggesting lessened listening effort. These results raise the possibility that cochlear implant (CI) sound coding strategies could be improved by attempting to provide usable TFS information, and that these individualized TFS assays can also help predict listening outcomes in reverberant, real-world listening environments. Finally, the DNN models (Part 3) introduced significant improvements in speech quality and intelligibility, as evidenced by all acoustic evaluation metrics and test results from CI listeners (N=8). These models can be incorporated as “front-end” noise-reduction algorithms in hearing assistive devices, as well as complement other approaches by serving as a research tool to help generate and rapidly sub-select the most viable hypotheses about the role of TFS coding in complex listening scenarios.</p>