This thesis presents a Web-based geographic information system (GIS) application for campus emergency management that allows users to visualize, integrate, and analyze student population, facilities, and hazard data for efficient emergency management of University of North Texas before, during, and after a terrorism event. End-users can locate and search the source area of an event on a digital map from the ArcIMS-based Website. The website displays corresponding population information and attributes of impacted facilities in real time. School officials and first responders including police, firefighters and medical personnel can promptly plan the appropriate rescue and response procedures according to the displayed results. Finally, the thesis outlines the limitations of Web-based GIS in the arena of campus emergency management.

The multimedia revolution has made a strong impact on our society. The explosive growth of the Internet, the access to this digital information generates new opportunities and challenges. The ease of editing and duplication in digital domain created the concern of copyright protection for content providers. Various schemes to embed secondary data in the digital media are investigated to preserve copyright and to discourage unauthorized duplication: where digital watermarking is a viable solution. This thesis proposes a novel invisible watermarking scheme: a discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain based watermark embedding and blind extraction algorithm for copyright protection of the color images. Testing of the proposed watermarking scheme's robustness and security via different benchmarks proves its resilience to digital attacks. The detectors response, PSNR and RMSE results show that our algorithm has a better security performance than most of the existing algorithms.

Analog technology has been around for a long time. The use of analog technology is necessary since we live in an analog world. However, the transmission and storage of analog technology is more complicated and in many cases less efficient than digital technology. Digital technology, on the other hand, provides fast means to be transmitted and stored. Digital technology continues to grow and it is more widely used than ever before. However, with the advent of new technology that can reproduce digital documents or images with unprecedented accuracy, it poses a risk to the intellectual rights of many artists and also on personal security. One way to protect intellectual rights of digital works is by embedding watermarks in them. The watermarks can be visible or invisible depending on the application and the final objective of the intellectual work. This thesis deals with watermarking images in the discrete wavelet transform domain. The watermarking process was done using the JPEG2000 compression standard as a platform. The hardware implementation was achieved using the ALTERA DSP Builder and SIMULINK software to program the DE2 ALTERA FPGA board. The JPEG2000 color transform and the wavelet transformation blocks were implemented using the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) configuration.

Due to the accelerated growth in digital music distribution, it becomes easy to modify, intercept, and distribute material illegally. To overcome the urgent need for copyright protection against piracy, several audio watermarking schemes have been proposed and implemented. These digital audio watermarking schemes have the purpose of embedding inaudible information within the host file to cover copyright and authentication issues. This thesis proposes an audio watermarking model using MATLAB® and Simulink® software for 1K and 2K fast Fourier transform (FFT) lengths. The watermark insertion process is performed in the frequency domain to guarantee the imperceptibility of the watermark to the human auditory system. Additionally, the proposed audio watermarking model was implemented in a Cyclone® II FPGA device from Altera® using the Altera® DSP Builder tool and MATLAB/Simulink® software. To evaluate the performance of the proposed audio watermarking scheme, effectiveness and fidelity performance tests were conducted for the proposed software and hardware-in-the-loop based audio watermarking model.

The central theme of this study is to explore the growth and causes of a relatively new form of "property crime" - the large scale theft of high technology products while the products are in transit from the point of manufacture to the point of market (retail stores, end users). For the purpose of this study, high technology products may be defined as computers, computer monitors, computer hard drives, microchips and other computer peripherals.

The Master Thesis deals with the design of security measures in accordance with the information security management system and as well as the standards applicable to the critical infrastructure element since it is a healthcare institution. It consists of theoretical background, analysis of the current state of the network and certain areas of the hospital. The practical part is devoted to the risk analysis and the design of concrete measures that result in an increase in the information security level. This part also includes an economic evaluation of the design implementation.

Terrorist organizations and individuals make use of the Internet for supportive activities such as communication, recruiting, financing, training, and planning operations. However, little is known about the level of computer-based (“cyber”) threat such terrorist organizations and individuals pose. One step in facilitating the examination and assessment of the level of cyber threat posed by terrorist organizations and individuals is development of an assessment tool or methodology. This tool would guide intelligence collection efforts and would support and facilitate comparative assessment of the cyber threat posed by terrorist organizations and individuals through the provision of a consistent method of assessment across time, amongst organizations and individuals, and between analysts. This study leveraged the professional experience of experts to engineer a new functional construct – a structured analytical technique designed to assess the cyber threat posed by terrorist entities and individuals. The resultant instrument was a novel structured analytical construct that uses defined indicators of a terrorist organization/individual’s intent to carry out cyber attacks, and their capability to actually do so as measures of an organization/individual’s overall level of cyber threat.

Over the last decade, we have witnessed an explosion in cloud services for hosting software applications (Software-as-a-Service), for building distributed services (Platform- as-a-Service), and for providing general computing infrastructure (Infrastructure-as-a- Service). Today, most cloud services are programmatically accessed through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that follow the REpresentational State Trans- fer (REST) software architectural style and cloud service developers use interface-description languages to describe and document their services. My thesis is that we can leverage the structured usage of cloud services through REST APIs and feedback obtained during interaction with such services in order to build systems that test cloud services in an automatic, efficient, and learning-based way through their APIs. In this dissertation, I introduce stateful REST API fuzzing and describe its implementation in RESTler: the first stateful REST API fuzzing system. Stateful means that RESTler attempts to explore latent service states that are reachable only with sequences of multiple interdependent API requests. I then describe how stateful REST API fuzzing can be extended with active property checkers that test for violations of desirable REST API security properties. Finally, I introduce Pythia, a new fuzzing system that augments stateful REST API fuzzing with coverage-guided feedback and learning-based mutations.

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of M.Bibl in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Zululand, 1995. / The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a collection security problem in South African libraries, with specific reference to Natal, to determine the extent of the problem, to find out why these problems exist, and to see if the countermeasures applied by the Natal libraries were effective-Data collection was done by means of a literature study, three empirical surveys, and a sample stocktaking exercise at the four libraries included in this project, to determine their loss rate. The results show that theft/loss and mutilation of library materials are problems of considerable magnitude, locally and internationally. (In 1991 it was estimated that in the United Kingdom library materials to the value of ± £100 million were lost) - The stocktake completed at three of the four Natal libraries included in this study <The University of Natal, Durban's was incomplete) revealed that the combined, average loss rate was 15.5*/. (with a monetary value of Rl,6^8,710.00) which was above the accepted norm of E5.-105i. The Durban Municipal Library had the lowest rate ) followed by the University of Durban-Westvil le (11%), and the University of Zululand (23K). The two university libraries, where it was possible to complete the sample stocktake (i.e. the University of Durban-Westville and the University of Zululand>, used the 3M electronic security system and the Durban Municipal Library the Checkpoint system. The main reasons for theft varied from, not having enough funds, and being selfish, to the book was not available in the bookshop and the user thought s/he would not get caught. The reasons for mutilation varied from, the user was not aware of the cost of replacing mutilated material, being selfish and to prevent others from getting the same information. It was also found that the photocopy services needed to be upgraded to prevent frustrated users from stealing or mutilating library materials, of the 343 respondents who participated in the survey conducted at the four libraries included in this study were inconvenienced by mutilation. The reasons for theft and mutilation by users in the Natal libraries coincided with those of the international world as found in the literature survey. Security or countermeasures are not effective and must be improved, i.e. the librarians must change their attitude towards library crimes, facilitate user access, implement a regular stocktaking programme, educate the library users, and publicise acts of theft and mutilation.

Improving the functioning and the safety of the electrical grids is a topic of great concern, given its magnitude and importance in today's world. In this thesis, we focus in these two subjects. In the first part, we study undetectable cyber-physical attacks on power grids, which are attacks that involve physical disruptions, including tripping lines and load modifications, and sensor output alterations. We propose a sophisticated attack model described under the full Alternating Current (AC) power flow equations and show its feasibility on large grids from a test cases library. As counter-measures, we propose different defensive strategies that the network's controller can apply under a suspected cyber attack. These are random, simple and fast procedures that change the voltages across the network and aim to unmask the current status of the system, assuming that the attacker cannot react against their randomness. Secondly, with access to data collected through Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) by a power utility in the United States, we perform statistical analyses on the frequency and voltage time series that have been recorded at a rate of 30 Hz. We focus on intervals of time where the sampled data shows to be in steady-state conditions and, with the use of appropriate signal processing filters, we are able to extract hidden anomalies such as spatio-temporal correlations between sensors and harmonic distortions.