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Statement of the ProblemThe paramount purpose of the study was to develop a model disaster plan to assist practicing school administrators in being prepared for fiscal loss impacts after major man-made or natural disasters.Procedure UsedThe study was limited to agencies, persons, and materials relating to fiscal losses resulting from major disasters. Department of education officials in eight states that had been repeatedly plagued by major natural disasters submitted information regarding what steps a school administrator should take to offset fiscal loss impact resulting from a major disaster. Officials ofthree major insurance companies were interviewed to provide defined procedures for underwriters to follow in writing exposure coverage when Insuring public school corporations. Data were gathered from literature and personal Interviews. Persons Interviewed Included school officials, Insurance officials, and underwriters.FindingsFindings were based on the data gathered.1. There was a lack of conformity In writing insurance schedules.2. School administrators generally, did not exhibit insurance schedule writing and marketing. 3. Clear guidelines for school administrators in handling fiscal losses resulting from major disasters were not being provided by any of the state departments of education. 4. The school corporations studied were found to have insufficient insurance coverage and had depended upon P.L. 81-815 and P.L. 81-874 for funds to offset fiscal losses.5. School administrators frequently were reluctant to purchase contingency insurance for added fiscal protection in the event of fiscal disaster.ConclusionsConclusions based on the findings were as follows: l. A reluctancy exists among school officials to plan adequately for future disasters by carrying adequate insurance.2. Generally, administrators lack knowledge in insurance programming.3. Educational inventories are, in general, outdated and Incomplete.4. Fiscal losses arise from inept selection of underwriters or marketing the schedule of exposures.GuidelinesThe following recommendations are guidelines to aid acting school administrators in offsetting fiscal losses caused by major disasters.The recommendations, based on the findings and conclusions of the study were divided into two categories: (I) pre-disaster action and (2) post-disaster action.I. Pre-disaster Action:A. Conduct a complete inventory of educational property initially.1. Attach a replacement cost of each category of property to the inventories.2. Update the inventories at least once each year.B. Have all educational facilities evaluated by professional appraisers.1. Subsequent inventory reevaluation should be conducted by professional appraisersannually.2. Inventories should be maintained under custodial care in a safe guarded place,protected from storm and fire.C. Use updated appraisal inventory as a basis for the purchase of necessary disaster insurance coverage.D. Utilize risk managers, professional appraisers, and insurance underwriters in preparing blanket insurance coverage as dictated by Inventories II.Post-disaster Action:Design a hazard survey chart to determine the losses and particular areas effected. B. Ascertain to what extent the losses are covered by insurance.Use immediate means and agencies to offset fiscal loss due to disaster. D. Immediately set about planning for reestablishing the educational curricular instructional programs.Recommendations for Further ResearchThe following recommendations for further research were generated as a result of the findings ofthe study.1. Research should be conducted to determine attitudes of school boards about allocating resources for the purchase of sufficient insurance to offset fiscal losses resulting from man-made or natural disasters.2. A study should be conducted to determine what school administrative courses should provide preparation for school administrators in insurance programming and the marketing of insurance schedules.3. A similar study with a broader based sample should be undertaken to validate and/or improve upon the guidelines for school administrators generated from this study.

We provide a simple and improved security analysis of PMAC, a Parallelizable MAC (Message Authentication Code) defined over arbitrary messages. A similar kind of result was shown by Bellare, Pietrzak and Rogaway at Crypto 2005, where they have provided an improved bound for CBC (Cipher Block Chaining) MAC, which was introduced by Bellare, Killan and Rogaway at Crypto 1994. Our analysis idea is much more simpler to understand and is borrowed from the work by Nandi for proving Indistinguishability at Indocrypt 2005 and work by Bernstein. It shows that the advantage for any distinguishing attack for n-bit PMAC based on a random function is bounded by O(??q / 2^n), where ?? is the total number of blocks in all q queries made by the attacker. In the original paper by Black and Rogaway at Eurocrypt 2002 where PMAC was introduced, the bound is O(??^2 / 2^n). We also compute the collision probability of CBC MAC for suitably chosen messages. We show that the probability is ??( lq^2 / N) where l is the number of message blocks, N is the size of the domain and q is the total number of queries. For random oracles the probability is O(q^2 / N). This improved collision probability will help us to have an efficient distinguishing attack and MAC-forgery attack. We also show that the collision probability for PMAC is ??(q^2 / N) (strictly greater than the birthday bound). We have used a purely combinatorial approach to obtain this bound. Similar analysis can be made for other CBC MAC extensions like XCBC, TMAC and OMAC.

Security concerns became high with the rapid technology advancement andwith the open nature of the internet. BankID is the leading electronic identificationsystem in Sweden which is used by around 5 million people in a variety ofpublic and private services. BankID allows users to securely authenticate themselvesand digitally sign important documents and transactions over the internet.In 2011, BankID Security App was launched to be used in mobile smartphones and tablet computers. In this paper, different components of the PublicKey Infrastructure (PKI) which is a cryptographic technique that enables usersto safely communicate over the insecure internet has been studied in detail. Furthermore,a test BankID-integrated PhoneGap based app on the Android platformis implemented and a performance evaluation and security analysis wereperformed. The test implementation of the BankID-integrated app on theAndroid platform provides user authentication and digital signing functions.The implemented backend system consists of a server with digital certificateand a database. The performance test emphasizes on the measurement of the accesstime between the components of the system and usability of the application.Access time measurement includes a reasonable amount of time in whichthe user is able to perform different activities in the system. In usability assessmentnumber of actions to perform a certain task and the ease of the user interfacehas been taken into consideration. The security analysis aims to identifypotential security flaws in the system and discuss possible solutions. The potentialsecurity risks we identified during the implementation of the system are theman-in-the-middle-attack, the Heartbleed bug, losing the mobile device andphysical access to the backend system. The potential security risks in the systemwere examined with regard to severity and probability of occurrence. Finally,the thesis project has been discussed in terms of the future work and system expansions.The result of the thesis will be used as a base in production developmentby Dewire, the company for which the thesis work has been conducted.

Unchecked climate change has the potential to have devastating effect on the Earth and its inhabitants. However, there is still time to avoid most of the worst impacts climate change will bring through massive mitigative actions. While state led governance mechanisms must be employed to effectively mitigate climate change, states seem unwilling or unable to effectuate the needed actions. How can states be pushed to take action aimed at mitigating climate change? This thesis utilises Securitisation Theory, as a starting point to test not only whether or not securitising climate change can induce state action on it, but also whether induced policies constitute ‘good’ or ‘bad’ actions. This thesis undertakes two case studies that focus on the executive level of governance of two sate: the United States and California. / Graduate

The Universal Serial Bus, USB, is widely used for connecting peripheral devices to a computer. Through the years devices that use USB has evolved and more and more complicated communication protocols have been developed using the USB standard. There are many different ways to set up communication between a USB device and a host computer. The USB standard does not include any security and this poses risks when designing communication over such a connection. This thesis investigates how a USB-based picture transfer protocol can be designed between a small camera running embedded Linux and a host computer. The USB functionality in Windows and Mac OS/X operating systems are investigated. Solutions to create a secure USB communication are also investigated. One of three the methods of creating a USB connection with a USB device running embedded Linux are chosen based on the investigations. A protocol is then designed and an implementation developed. The protocol designed in the thesis uses existing USB functionality in the host computer operating systems Windows and Mac OS/X. The designed protocol is evaluated for performance and security. The evaluation is made on an evaluation platform for the camera. The transfer speed of the protocol is measured to around 18 MB/s in an ideal environment. The designed protocol could be improved by using one of the security methods found in the investigations.

It is believed that the next few decades will witness the booming development of the Internet of Things (IoT). Vehicular network, as a significant component of IoT, has attracted lots of attention from both academia and industry in recent years. In the field of vehicular networks, Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET) is one of the hottest topics investigated. This dissertation focuses on VANET geocast, which is a special form of multicast in VANET. In geocast, messages are delivered to a group of destinations in the network identified by their geographic locations. Geocast has many promising applications, i.e., geographic messaging, geographic advertising and other location-based services. Two phases are usually considered in the geocast process: phase one, message delivery from the message source to the destination area by geographic routing; phase two, message broadcast within the destination area. This dissertation covers topics in the two phases of geocast in urban VANETs, where for phase one, a data-driven geographic routing scheme and a security and privacy preserving framework are presented; and for phase two, the networking connectivity is analyzed and studied. The contributions of this dissertation are three-fold. First, from a real-world data trace study, this dissertation studies the city taxi- cab mobility. It proposes a mobility-contact-aware geocast scheme (GeoMobCon)for metropolitan-scale urban VANETs. The proposed scheme employs the node mobility (two levels, i.e., macroscopic and microscopic mobilities) and contact history information. A buffer management scheme is also introduced to further improve the performance. Second, this dissertation investigates the connectivity of the message broadcast in urban scenarios. It models the message broadcast in urban VANETs as the directed connectivity problem on 2D square lattices and proposes an algorithm to derive the exact analytical solution. The approach is also applied to urban VANET scenarios, where both homogeneous and heterogeneous vehicle density cases are considered. Third, this work focuses on the security and privacy perspectives of the opportunistic routing, which is the main technique utilized by the proposed geographic routing scheme. It proposes a secure and privacy preserving framework for the general opportunistic-based routing. A comprehensive evaluation of the framework is also provided. In summary, this dissertation focuses on a few important aspects of the two phases of VANET geocast in urban scenarios. It shows that the vehicle mobility and contact information can be utilized to improve the geographic routing performance for large- scale VANET systems. Targeting at the opportunistic routing, a security and privacy preserving framework is proposed to preserve the confidentiality of the routing metric information for the privacy purpose, and it also helps to achieve the anonymous authentication and efficient key agreement for security purposes. On the other hand, the network connectivity for the message broadcast in urban scenarios is studied quantitatively with the proposed solution, which enables us to have a better understanding of the connectivity itself and its impact factors (e.g., bond probability and network scale). / Graduate

Flexible employment patterns is a fast growing organisational policy. The enormous growth of temporary employment suggests that time spent in temporary employment may increasingly characterise typical career paths. For individuals building a career within a temporary employment environment may mean something very different from building a career in a world of permanent and stable employment relationships. It is anticipated that those on temporary or otherwise precarious contracts will conceivably display lower levels of commitment to the work organisation than those enjoying job security and career advancement within the ladder of hierarchy. Indeed, the combined promise of job security and career advancement within corporate hierarchies as linked with incremental increases in authority status and pay have constituted the major rewards through which organisations have been able to elicit organisational attachment and commitment from their employees. The popularity of the concept appears to stem from its linkage with several desirable employee behaviours contributing to organisational effectiveness and efficiency. However, the HRM goals of improved employee commitment will potentially be undermined by the introduction of flexible work and employment patterns. The purpose of this study was to identify the degree the nature and antecedents of organisational commitment for short term professionals. The main argument of the present research is that the new forms of job security rest on the base of employability security. Employability security comes from the chance to accumulate human capital - skills reputation that can be invested in new opportunities as they arise. Our findings supported this argument and explained significant amount of variance in commitment. Additionally our findings reveal the changing nature of commitment. The emergence of "reflective" commitment put forward a new type of commitment. According to "reflective" commitment individuals develop primarily "commitment to self' which is projected to the organisation and reflects the realisation of individual and organisational pursuits.

The rapid growth in the use of computers and networks in government, commercial and private communications systems has led to an increasing need for these systems to be secure against unauthorised access and eavesdropping. To this end, modern computer security systems employ public-key ciphers, of which probably the most well known is the RSA ciphersystem, to provide both secrecy and authentication facilities. The basic RSA cryptographic operation is a modular exponentiation where the modulus and exponent are integers typically greater than 500 bits long. Therefore, to obtain reasonable encryption rates using the RSA cipher requires that it be implemented in hardware. This thesis presents the design of a high-performance VLSI device, called the WHiSpER chip, that can perform the modular exponentiations required by the RSA cryptosystem for moduli and exponents up to 506 bits long. The design has an expected throughput in excess of 64kbit/s making it attractive for use both as a general RSA processor within the security function provider of a security system, and for direct use on moderate-speed public communication networks such as ISDN. The thesis investigates the low-level techniques used for implementing high-speed arithmetic hardware in general, and reviews the methods used by designers of existing modular multiplication/exponentiation circuits with respect to circuit speed and efficiency. A new modular multiplication algorithm, MMDDAMMM, based on Montgomery arithmetic, together with an efficient multiplier architecture, are proposed that remove the speed bottleneck of previous designs. Finally, the implementation of the new algorithm and architecture within the WHiSpER chip is detailed, along with a discussion of the application of the chip to ciphering and key generation.

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