D. Tech. Education / Safety and security in schools is not only a South African issue, but a global challenge too. Learners and educators are assaulted and killed on school premises in the province despite the presence of a plethora of educational legislation. This study investigates how safety and security is managed in schools in the Province of KwaZulu-Natal.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

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This dissertation proposes a model supporting the creation of trustable privacies in public online spaces, with the model demonstrating the potential for supporting trustable data handling in the qualitative domain. Privacy and trust, from the pivotal perspective of the individual were identified as crucial intangibles in the qualitative research and personal trust domains. That both privacy and trust depend heavily upon credible mechanisms for privacy became clear during the literature review and interview processes. Privacy, in its many forms, is a concept requiring greatly varying degrees of anonymity, confidentiality and control (Rotenberg, 2001; Lessig, 1998) and this was position was validated by literature and by qualitative comments by academic interviewees. Facilitation of secondary users including academics, public and private organisations, communities, casual information browsers is a goal of this research. This goal of facilitation is supported by the model proposed, and is discussed in Chapter 6, where future work is discussed. The core requirement to address confidentiality, ethics, privacy, ownership and control of data (Corti, 2000) is satisfied by the model as proposed and discussed. Expected outcomes of this research project are summarised as: • Proposed model for the creation of trustable privacies in public spaces. [Primary outcome] • Promotion of collaboration amongst domains and disciplines through improved universal access to archived data [Secondary outcome] • Identification of application domains outside of the initially identified domain set [Secondary outcome]. Self-Contained ReposItory ProcesSIng Template (SCRIPSIT) describes a model supporting a decentralised, trustable set of structures and mechanisms. SCRIPSIT has its eponymous origin in the Latin word scripsit, meaning "he or she wrote". / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2004.

Piracy is still a significant threat to ships in a maritime environment. Areas such as the coast of Somalia and the Strait of Malacca are still plagued by pirates, and the total international cost of piracy numbers in the billions of dollars. The first line of defence against these threats is early detection and thus maritime surveillance has become an increasingly important task over the years. While surveillance has traditionally been a manual task using crew members in lookout positions on parts of the ship, much work is being done to automate this task using digital cameras equipped with computer vision software. While these systems are beneficial in that they do not grow tired like their human counterparts, the maritime environment is a challenging task for computer vision systems. This dissertation aims to address some of these challenges by presenting a system that is able to use prior knowledge of an object’s shape to aid in detection and tracking of the object. Additionally, it aims to test this system under various environmental conditions (such as weather). The system is based around the segmentation technique known as the level set method, which uses a contour in the image that is evolved to separate regions of interest. The system is split into two parts, comprising of an object detection stage that initially finds objects in a scene, and an object tracking stage that tracks detected objects for the rest of the sequence. The object detection stage uses a kernel density estimation-based background subtraction and a binary image level set filter, while the object tracker makes use of a tracking level set algorithm for its functionality. The object detector was tested using a group of 4 sequences, of which it was able to find a prior-known object in 3. The object tracker was tested on a group of 10 sequences for 300 frames a sequence. In 6 of these sequences the object tracker was able to successfully track the object in every single frame. It is shown that the developed video tracking system outperforms level set–based systems that don’t use prior shape knowledge, working well even where these systems fail. / Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.

Ecommerce refers to the buying and selling of products and services electronically via the Internet and other computer networks (Electronic Commerce 2011). The critical components of ecommerce are a well designed website and a merchant account for payment by the customer (Ecommerce critical components 2008). Merchants that sell their products and services via the Internet have a competitive edge over those that do not. It is therefore becoming common practice for both small and large business to transact electronically. With the vast opportunities, new risks and vulnerabilities are introduced. Consumers are reluctant to transact electronically because of the fear of unauthorized access and interception of confidential information (Online Banking Concerns 2011). Other fears include the changing of data with malicious intent, denial of use, hacking, deliberate disclosure of confidential information and e-mail associated risks (Safeena, Abdulla & Date 2010). The use of technology such as encryption and decryption has not adequately addressed these problems because fraudsters have found new and sophisticated methods of attaining consumer information illegally. Phishing is one such method. Phishing results in identity theft and financial fraud when the fraudster tricks the online users into giving their confidential information like passwords, identity numbers, credit card number and personal information such as birthdates and maiden names. The fraudster will then use the information to impersonate the victim to transfer funds from the victim‟s account or use the victim‟s information to make purchases (Srivastava 2007). Since 2002, many laws passed in South Africa have attempted to allay fears so that consumers can conduct business electronically with confidence. The following legislation aims to protect consumers: - The Electronic Communications and Transactions Act (Republic of South Africa 2002). - The Consumer Protection Act (Republic of South Africa 2008). - The Protection of Personal Information Bill which is expected to be passed in 2011 (Republic of South Africa 2009). This research aims to examine the extent to which these legislation can address the security concerns of consumers. The researcher is also interested in ascertaining how knowledgeable consumers are on these legislation and what their attitudes are towards their personal information security. / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, 2011.

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Access to abstract permanently restricted to Ball State community only / Access to thesis permanently restricted to Ball State community only / Department of Educational Leadership

The majority of the security policy and enforcement frameworks deployed today require a centralized security model. These models are often tied to a central authentication service or operating system (OS) service. In collaboration environments, such as the Internet, there is no guarantee that users will be using the same OSs, authentication services, or access control policies. In such context, the risk of data interception or information leakage is extremely high during collaborations. Therefore, there is a need to control access to information that remains independent of these, and other, platform specific security features. Owner-retained access control, derived from labeling practices that historically have been used in paper based access control schemes, such as the military use of ORCON label, can provide such a feature. The owner-retained access control model allows for the owner of a document, not necessarily the creator of the document, to specify and maintain the access control restrictions for their data, even after disseminating such data. The access control policy itself is not sufficient to guarantee security; an enforcement framework is also required to ensure that the rules specified in the policy are enforced. The framework will allow us to overcome some of the limitations found in other access control policies. Discretionary access control, as an example, allows for authorized users to copy and distribute data once it has been accessed; thus breaking the principle of attenuation of privilege. In an attempt to satisfy this objective, we propose in this thesis, a formal security model and flexible policy specification and enforcement framework that allows for owner-retained control for document distribution in scalable collaborative environments. The body of the thesis also includes a description and validation of the security protocols that were developed to provide a framework for enforcing the security policy, the architecture and implementation of the prototype application (ORCS), case studies, and a performance evaluation of the most costly operations.

In this dissertation, we propose an effective and efficient online unsupervised anomaly detection framework. The framework consists of new anomalousness metrics, named IP Weight, and a new hybrid clustering algorithm, named I-means. IP Weight metrics provide measures of anomalousness of IP packet flows on networks. A simple classification of network intrusions consists of distinguishing between single-connection based attacks and multiple-connection based attacks. The IP weight metrics proposed in this work characterize specifically multiple-connection based attacks. The definition of specific metrics for single-connection based attacks is left for future work. The I-means algorithm combines mixture resolving, a genetic algorithm automatically estimating the optimal number of clusters for a set of data, and the k-means algorithm for clustering. Three sets of experiments are conducted to evaluate our new unsupervised anomaly detection framework. The first experiment empirically validates that IP Weight metrics reduce dimensions of feature space characterizing IP packets at a level comparable with the principal component analysis technique. The second experiment is an offline evaluation based on 1998 DARPA intrusion detection dataset. In the offline evaluation, we compare our framework with three other unsupervised anomaly detection approaches, namely, plain k-means clustering, univariate outlier detection and multivariate outlier detection. Evaluation results show that the detection framework based on I-means yields the highest detection rate with a low false alarm rate. Specifically, it detects 18 types of attacks out of a total of 19 multiple-connection based attack types. The third experiment is an online evaluation in a live networking environment. The evaluation result not only confirms the detection effectiveness observed with the DARPA dataset, but also shows a good runtime efficiency, with response times falling within few seconds ranges.