VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Network traffic behaviour profiling
Keywords: malware detection
network traffic analysis
network flow
network security

Nowadays, computer networks have become incredibly complex due to the evolution of online services and the rapid growth of the number of smart devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops. Most of users’ information, even the most sensitive ones, are transmitted over the Internet. Unfortunately, due to this phenomenon we also see an increasing interest of malware developers who are able to find and exploit novel vulnerabilities in network devices to carry out their malicious intents. To tackle these threats, network analysts should be aided with advanced techniques to identify malicious traffic in order to guarantee the security of networks.
In this thesis, we aim to reduce the asymmetric advantage of attackers by examining malware detection and classification using flow-level network traffic. Our methods explore the ability to extract network behaviours generated by malware. We further evaluate the challenge of working with limited amount of data offered by flows to detect and classify network traffic of malware. Malicious flows are intertwined with benign ones originating from a production network to simulate the real-world settings. We gather one of the largest network flow datasets of malware in order to evaluate our proposals and show that we can detect unseen malware variants.
Moreover, we explore the behaviour profiling of network hosts in order to identify them on large networks. We extract unique behaviours and show that we can work only with the amount of information exchanged by hosts in order to successfully extract their unique behaviours and hence distinguish them from others. We show that while such an approach could be used for maintenance of networks, it may also be employed as an attack against network-based moving target defence (NMTD) systems, which is followed by countermeasures and guidelines to avoid such scenarios.
Finally, we propose a novel method of storing network flow data in a domain specific binary file format, which is motivated by the lack of sufficient methods to process large-scale network data on the order of billions of flows. The binary format makes the analyses of methods in this thesis possible, especially when working with the University of Oxford dataset, which contains more than 181 billion flows. We show that our binary format improves the state of the art in terms of storage, while offering faster data processing techniques.
Optimizing a primitive based approach to generic taint analysis
Keywords: Dynamic Taint Analysis

Dynamic taint analysis is a fundamental technique in software security that tracks the flow of interesting or suspicious data during the execution of a target application. However, it is also known to suffer from excessively high runtime overhead which limits its overall practicality. The overhead is especially problematic when the taint analysis performed is generic. While this type of analysis is more powerful than standard taint status tracking, due to its support of user-defined custom taint policies, its versatility naturally implies that it cannot be optimized for a single task. Along these lines, this dissertation addresses the challenging problem of enhancing the performance of generic taint analysis.
Our research focuses on taint engines implemented using dynamic binary instrumentation. Essentially, the performance bottleneck of these systems stems from complex taint propagation code that is dynamically instrumented, at the level of machine instructions, into the target application. In order to facilitate the implementation of generic taint analysis, instrumentation is typically achieved by inserting transparent calls, which conveniently invoke propagation routines without disrupting the execution behaviour of the analysed application. However, these calls perform expensive context-switching, and therefore degrade overall runtime performance significantly.
We hypothesize that the overhead of generic taint analysis can be reduced in comparison to the slowdowns incurred by the analysis implemented with the use of transparent calls. This hypothesis is tested by investigating three optimizations. Firstly, call-free generic taint propagation is evaluated as a means to mitigate expensive context switching. Secondly, the idea of vectorized generic taint analysis is explored to determine the effectiveness of using SIMD features to propagate multiple taint labels simultaneously. Thirdly, dynamic fast path generation is proposed so that the execution of ineffective taint propagation can be adaptively elided. Our optimizations are presented with respect to a generic taint analysis driven by user-defined primitives, which act as building blocks for custom taint propagation. Crucially, this primitive based approach enables the user to focus on optimizing core pieces of functionality regarding the desired policy, without the need to delve into the complex internals of the system.
The optimizations are integrated into a generic taint tracker called the Taint Rabbit, and their effectiveness is evaluated on various real-world software and CPU-bound benchmarks. With average speed-ups of around 42% on SPEC CPU benchmarks, and as high as 99% on data compression tools, our results demonstrate the advancement of optimized and generic taint analysis.
Rethinking regions and status in international relations: The case of India
Keywords: Status-seeking
Global order
Indian foreign policy
Region-building
International Relations

Do regions enable or constrain states’ claims to status? Looking for answers in the regional power literature, current scholarship in International Relations remains divided. On one hand, regions enable the consolidation of power in a specific geographic space, making states regional hegemons, therefore strengthening their claims to status. On the other hand, regions involve troublesome neighbourhoods, or the spill-over effects of unresolved conflicts which can constrain claims to status. Based on this debate, states would be expected to either work hard at being regional powers, or, to disentangle themselves from the responsibility. It seems however, that states do neither and yet both. Drawing on the Indian case, this thesis establishes that states find regions to be potentially status-enabling, but not just as spaces in which they can achieve hegemony. As geographic collectives, they offer the important function of social recognition that allows them to be differentiated from others to global audiences. Anchored in a constructivist approach, this thesis argues that states find value in ‘building’ or ‘framing’ regions in specific ways to their claims to status at the global level. By mapping boundaries through the region-building process, states forge a sense of commonality and group membership allowing them to be recognised in a specific way by targeted audiences. Through its qualitative and historically informed study of Indian region-building across time, this thesis notes that since independence, Indian framings of its ‘region’ have shifted to include ‘Asia’, ‘South Asia’, ‘Asia-Pacific’ and most recently the ‘Indo-Pacific’. It demonstrates how the changing notions of its region have informed its claims to status at the global level over time. It studies three cases Indian region-building: ‘Asia’ in the early Cold War years and ‘Asia-Pacific’ in the Post-Cold War years and the ‘Indo-Pacific’ in recent years. Within these the first two cases, it investigates India’s understudied role in Indonesian decolonisation struggle (1945-1949) and India’s Look-East policy in 1991. Given the contemporary and evolving nature of its Indo-Pacific case, this thesis engages with it as whole to demonstrate how it informs Indian claims to higher status at the global level.
Persisting or dropping out: a grounded theory of school-to-work transitions of young migrants in China
Keywords: Interest-environment fit
School-to-work transition
Grounded Theory
Vocational school
China
Drop out
Decision-making
Work-bound youth
Shanghai
Persistence
Migrant youth

This doctoral thesis inductively develops a grounded theory of school-to-work transitions of young rural-to-urban internal migrants in China. It seeks to explain why some young people persist, whereas others drop off their pathways beyond compulsory education. It draws on intensive interviews with young migrants (n = 35) and their parents (n = 15) conducted during 11 months of fieldwork in an outskirt district of Shanghai. The scope of this thesis covers school-to-work transitions of young people, particularly those in restrictive institutional and social contexts.
It finds that an empirically grounded, multidimensional concept, ‘interest-environment fit’, and its link to motivation explain persistence and dropping out on all three major pathways beyond middle school: the academic, the vocational school and the work track. The underlying mechanism suggests that finding a good interest-environment fit around middle school graduation leads young people to subjectively link their interests to their pathway, achieve a higher level of motivation and persist, while the reverse holds for those who do not achieve a good fit. The concept of interest-environment fit explicitly incorporates social class and institutional restrictions, underscoring the sociological perspective taken in this thesis. Moreover, the analysis highlights that the decision-making phase in middle school is crucial for understanding young people’s trajectories beyond middle school graduation.
The thesis adds to the theoretical literature on dropping out and persisting in the sociology of education and work by (1) conceptually integrating the decision-making process about pathways in middle school, (2) analysing all three main pathways beyond middle school within one comprehensive theoretical framework that highlights important parallels, and (3) grounding the theory in a Chinese context. Moreover, through its application of grounded theory methodology, this study emphasises the benefits and potential of employing an approach that prioritises data over pre-existing theoretical knowledge.
Femtosecond electron dynamics in hot solid-density plasmas
Keywords: atomic kinetics
x-ray free electron lasers
collisional ionisation
x-ray spectroscopy
Fokker-Planck equation
high energy density

X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFELs) have shown to be an extremely versatile tool for the experimental study of warm and hot dense matter. Their femtosecond pulse length, high peak brightness and tunable wavelength open up an immense window of opportunity to study solid-density plasmas that are created in a well-controlled manner. At these high densities, the light-matter interaction can be modelled with a collisional-radiative code that describes the ion charge state populations, electron distribution function (EDF) and radiative properties.
In this thesis I will outline a numerical scheme based on the inhomogeneous, isotropic Fokker-Planck equation that describes the non-equilibrium evolution of the EDF in a warm dense system. The scheme encompasses a variety of collisional and radiative interactions between electrons, ions and photons in the system and implicitly conserves density and energy. The Fokker-Planck scheme has been integrated into a non-Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium (LTE) collisional-radiative code that computes the ion charge state populations of a warm dense system under irradiation of an XFEL. The two schemes together constitute a self-consistent method to compute the population dynamics, energy- and density balance of the combined electron and ion system.
The experimental section of this thesis describes a measurement of the collisional ionisation frequencies in a solid-density magnesium plasma. These rates are of great interest as they relate to the optical and electrical properties of high energy-density materials. The experiment relies on the use of an XFEL both to produce and probe the sample, and obtain a spectroscopic measurement of the rate and plasma conditions. This is the first direct measurement of the ionisation rate in the strongly-coupled regime where the rates are significantly enhanced by density effects such as ionisation potential depression.
Monitoring internet censorship; linguistic connectivity within the webgraph
Keywords: internet censorship
censorship detection
network analysis
censorship
linguistic analysis
webgraph

This work offers a significant contribution to the ongoing endeavours in monitoring the effects of internet censorship. It can be freely accessed online by anyone who lives in a censorship free society where limitations on academic texts are not in effect. However, there are numerous places across the globe where this would be highly impractical—due to censorship mechanisms—and potentially illegal. A universal catalogue containing censored pieces of online content, online services and websites does not exist. This thesis discusses new approaches for monitoring internet censorship and the insights gained from experimental analysis with the results.
Key contributions of this work are: firstly, a method for determining if a website is censored in particular country from a remote vantage point; secondly, new approaches for constructing lists of censored domains via a recursive discovery strategy; thirdly, a first look into the relationships between newly discovered censored websites from the perspective of network topology and linguistics.
A number of experiments were conducted to evaluate newly designed frameworks for monitoring censored websites. Using a set of known censored websites from existing lists resulted in the discovery of an order of magnitude more censored material than was previously published. Furthermore, the discovery process yielded useful data and insight into how these censored websites exhibit a multitude of hard and soft connections between them. These results improve the perspicacity of analysis into how online material is censored and give new ways of identifying the motivations and intent of censorship regimes.
These new methods for monitoring internet censorship are significantly more effective than those previously in use, whilst maintaining a strong stance in regard to ethical issues with taking measurements for censorship research.
The historical and political significance of the reconstruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow
Keywords: Russia
cathedral
Cathedral of Christ the Saviour
Moscow
Christ the Saviour
cathedrals

A cathedral appeared in the centre of Moscow almost overnight. Where did it come from?
Today’s cathedral of Christ the Saviour is perceived as a chudo, a ‘miracle’, because it is the re-appearance of a building last seen in 1931. In the intervening years it was one of the "blank spots” in official Soviet history. The way silence was broken and information about the cathedral became widespread, is part of the case I wish to make, but, for the purpose of this introduction, a very brief summary of the cathedral’s biography is useful.
Tsar Alexander I, in a Manifesto issued on 25 December 1812, vowed to found a cathedral named Christ the Saviour, to thank God for having saved Russia from ruin in the hands of Napoleon's numerous and fierce troops; the church was also meant to uphold eternally for future generations the memory of "the unprecedented zeal, loyalty and love towards Faith and Fatherland" displayed by the Russian people in the course of battle. The young artist Alexander Vitberg was the architect of a first project, a classical-looking church composed of three parts expressing the trinity of suffering, death, and eternal life. To accommodate its colossal size (matching Russia's grandeur), it was located on Vorob’evy Gory (Sparrow Hills), across the river from the Kremlin. But the project foundered amid financial scandals and allegations of technical incompetence.
Continued in thesis ...
Climate change, human rights, and adaptive mobility
Keywords: human mobility
international human rights law
international climate change law
international law
migration
treaty interpretation
climate change
climate change adaptation

This thesis explores the way that international law and its rules, rights, and obligations can address the impacts of climate change and respond to the risks they create for those most vulnerable. More specifically, it focuses on obligations related to adaptation within the climate change regime and argues that human mobility is part of the process of adaptation that States are obliged to enable in certain circumstances. In doing so, the thesis offers an addition to the legal protection provided by other areas of international law, which is often limited to movement that is forced and tends to provide legal status only after people have moved or crossed State borders. Furthermore, unlike legal scholarship that considers the problems posed by climate-related displacement, this thesis begins from the premise that mobility can be a beneficial adaptation strategy—particularly if undertaken in an anticipatory, proactive, and precautionary manner.
To reach this conclusion, the thesis applies the tools of treaty interpretation to argue that international human rights law should be integrated into the interpretation and application of adaptation obligations in the climate change regime. The analysis focuses on the rights to life and to an adequate standard of living. It highlights the need to integrate the positive duties accompanying these rights, particularly those related to survival and subsistence, which are central to the ability and decision to move. The process of interpretation also includes the operative principles of the regime, with precaution, equity, and common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities being the most pertinent. Combined with the integration of international human rights law, these principles provide the basis for the key arguments of this thesis: that States must act to address foreseeable risks to human rights; in doing so, they must prioritize those most vulnerable; in some contexts, this requires that States plan for and implement measures to facilitate adaptive mobility, whether within or across borders; and that developed countries are obliged to support vulnerable developing countries in undertaking such measures.
Knowledge of the natural law in the theology of John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas
Keywords: Jacques Maritain
Stephen Brock
Catholic-Reformed Dialogue
Divine Providence
Moral Epistemology
Natural Inclination
Natural Law
Thomas Aquinas
Thomism
Calvinism
Culpability
John Calvin
Conscience
Ten Commandments

This dissertation seeks to answer, by close reading of primary texts, the question of whether John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas share a common theory of natural law.
Calvin and Aquinas both use a common vocabulary of natural law inherited from antiquity. They both speak of a morally normative natural order, and appeal to nature as a morally evaluative standard when discussing practical questions. While they share a common vocabulary of natural law, however, it is not clear whether this is undergirded by a common set of theological assumptions, or whether Calvin and Aquinas have different visions of natural law, reflecting major theological differences between Reformed and Roman Catholic Christianity. Existing literature raises, but does not adequately explore, questions concerning the compatibility of Calvin’s thought on natural law with that of Aquinas.
There currently exists no book-length study of Calvin’s thought on natural law, but by comparing Calvin with Aquinas, rather than studying him alone, I hope the features of his approach can be more easily identified. The contention of this thesis is that Calvin and Aquinas do share a common vision of natural law. To establish this conclusion, I examine areas of apparent disagreement between Aquinas and Calvin that I have identified by reviewing existing comparative literature. These disagreements concern the role that natural law plays in systematic theology, the relationship between natural law and conscience, the relationship between natural law and the Decalogue, the noetic effects of sin, and the moral status of natural inclinations. In each case, I argue, apparent differences mask a deeper agreement between Aquinas and Calvin that becomes clearer when a broader range of primary texts are subjected to closer scrutiny than has hitherto been the case.
Structural cell biology of mammalian sperm
Keywords: mitochondria
cryo-electron tomography
cilia
cytoskeleton
sperm
centrioles
membrane fusion

Reflecting the sheer diversity of reproductive modes and fertilization arenas, sperm are among the most structurally specialized and structurally diverse eukaryotic cell types. In this thesis, I apply recent developments in cellular cryo-electron tomography and image processing to explore the molecular landscape of mammalian sperm in a near-native state, free of artefacts from chemical fixation and heavy metal staining. I show that the major organelle-cytoskeleton interfaces in sperm, the head-tail junction and the mitochondrial sheath, are characterized by ordered supramolecular assemblies that are conserved across species. I also detail the structural elaborations that enable mammalian sperm flagella to swim through viscous fluids, from protofilament-bracing structures that reinforce microtubules at the nano-scale to large accessory structures that impose micron-scale asymmetries and anisotropies on the entire assembly. I report the native subcellular organization of the flagellar base, which is crucial for generating and shaping the flagellar beat, revealing that the connecting piece is an elastic scaffold that is remodelled during the beat cycle. I then trace membrane remodelling events during capacitation and the acrosome reaction, which are functional maturation events necessary for sperm to become fertilization-competent. I find that the unique geometry of the sperm head supports an atypical membrane fission-fusion process that maintains cell integrity while facilitating massive membrane protein relocalization, thus transforming the molecular landscape of the sperm surface and creating a platform for interaction and fusion with the egg. This thesis unveils new aspects of sperm biology at unprecedented levels of detail, thus providing vital foundations for linking molecular structure to sperm motility and energetics, sperm-egg fusion, and gamete evolution.