VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Security of mixed reality systems: authenticating users, devices, and data

Mixed reality devices continuously scan their environment in order to naturally blend the virtual objects with the user’s real-time view of their physical environment. Given the potential of these technologies to profoundly change how individuals interact with their environments, many of the largest technology companies are releasing their mixed reality systems and devoting significant resources towards achieving technological leadership in this field.
However, due to the recency of the first commercially available mixed reality devices and their specific interaction channels, existing research has yet to provide practical proposals to achieve many of the core security objectives. Furthermore, given that these devices continuously analyze their environment using multiple front-facing cameras, when designing secure system it becomes necessary to reassess the commonly assumed threat models.
In this thesis, we aim to bridge this gap by focusing on secure authentication on mixed reality headsets. Taking into account the stronger assumed adversary models and the interface capabilities of existing mixed reality devices, we propose methods for user and device authentication, as well as show how these devices can be used to secure one’s interactions with legacy systems.
Considering that mixed reality headsets are starting to support gaze tracking, in this thesis we propose, build a prototype and experimentally evaluate the use of reflexive eye movements as a biometric modality that is well suited as an authentication method on MR headsets. As an added benefit, the reflexiveness and predictability of one’s eye movement responses makes it possible to incorporate the biometric measurements into challenge-response protocols. This allows the system to prevent replay attacks, one of the most common attack vectors on biometrics.
Furthermore, given the many multi-user applications of mixed reality technologies that rely on direct communication between users’ devices, in this thesis we research secure and usable methods to mixed reality headsets. We propose a practical pairing protocol, implement a system prototype using two commercially available mixed reality headsets and evaluate its security and usability.
Finally, we show that front-facing cameras of mixed reality headsets can also serve as the means of securing legacy electronic systems. We therefore build and evaluate a prototype of a system that uses a trusted device with video capture and analysis capabilities to authenticate the data that the user inputs when using a potentially compromised local client to communicate with a remote server.

Keywords: Mixed Reality
Mixed Reality Security
Cyber Security
Systems Security
Virtual Reality
Cyber-physical systems security
Computer Systems Security
Augmented Reality Security
Augmented Reality
Advisor: Martinovic, I
Measuring operational realities of security and privacy for deployed avionics

Despite being renowned as an exceptionally safety-conscious industry, aviation has been slow to address the cyber security threat. A critical point has been reached whereby systems which were designed many years ago are in wide use, but lack meaningful security measures. Meanwhile, it has become easy to acquire and use tools which enable potential attackers to listen to---and even tamper with---these systems. Like many safety-critical industries, aviation lacks the ability to rapidly redeploy systems. This creates a situation where known-vulnerable systems must be kept and, even worse, heavily relied upon.
The work in this thesis focusses on two topics: analysis of a well-established and heavily used general-purpose avionic communication system, and a first look at a method to analyse and prepare for attacks caused by a lack of security measures on avionics.
For the former, we focus on the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS). We show that it has very few deployed security solutions, and the instances such solutions have been used are weak. As a consequence, we demonstrate the impact of the lack of meaningful confidentiality protection for non-commercial aviation actors---military, government and business aircraft. We show that even when efforts are made to protect privacy elsewhere, they stand a significant chance of leaking data via normal ACARS usage.
Moving to the cockpit, the second topic attempts to begin to address one of the current unknowns in the area of aviation cyber security - how attacks on avionic systems might affect the way the aircraft is flown. In this, we used a flight simulator to create the cockpit-based effects of attacks on three important systems. Using these, we created scenarios in which the aircraft was under attack and invited 30 Airbus A320 pilots to take part.
Whilst the current state of security and privacy in aviation is far from ideal, we believe that methods to provide security in the near- and long-term are achievable. Privacy in the near-term is somewhat harder, but steps towards it in the longer term are underway.

Keywords: Avionics
Aviation
Flight simulation
Wireless security
Advisor: Martinovic, I
Cancer cell cycle modulation by metabolic gene expression and role of photoreceptor phosphodiesterase 6H in cancer cell growth

While the deregulation of cancer metabolism through oncogenic signalling, and the effect of the latter on proliferation and cell cycle control are widely studied, little is known on how metabolism in cancer cells leads to cell cycle control and progression. This project aimed to identify metabolic genes whose inhibition causes cell cycle arrest, which would allow further study of candidate genes in the context of cancer metabolism and cell proliferation. The screen was conducted with a custom siRNA library targeting metabolic genes commonly amplified in primary tumours, as well as those known to be involved in the key regulatory points of metabolic pathways.
Results show that TCA cycle, fatty acid metabolism and nucleotide metabolism are especially important during the transition into S phase, whereas enzymes of electron transport chain, glycolysis and pentose phosphate pathway are significant for the completion of both G1 and G2 phases. Among the genes whose knockdown caused G1, cone phosphodiesterase 6H (PDE6H) of the retina was selected for further study as a novel controller of cancer cell cycle and metabolism, recognised for a role in controlling retinal metabolism.
Besides causing G1 cell cycle arrest and disruption of G1/S checkpoint mechanism, PDE6H knockdown induced apoptosis and mitochondrial dysfunction. PDE6H depletion also inhibited cell proliferation and lowered basal levels of cellular metabolism. In xenograft experiments of PDE6H CRISPR/Cas9 knockout HCT116 cells we showed that PDE6H deletion slowed down tumour growth and improved animal survival. PDE6 inhibition via a drug, zaprinast, caused similar increase in tumour hypoxia and necrosis as well as an inhibition of tumour cell proliferation. Our results report PDE6H as a controller of cancer cell metabolism and proliferation, making it a potential target for therapy.

Keywords: cell cycle
cancer metabolism
phosphodiesterase
Advisor: Harris, AL
Muschel, RJ
Martyrology: a critical examination of the role of theological traditions in the narrative construction of the martyr

This thesis presents a socio-theological analysis of the process by which a martyr is made and presents an analytical framework for a theological analysis of martyrdom, as well as demonstrating the fruits that such analysis can bring. Building on the social constructivist view that the martyr is a narrative construct and martyrdom a particular way of imagining an individual’s death rather than an historical event, this thesis demonstrates the operation of theological conceptualisations of the meaning and significance of martyrdom, which it terms martyrologies. These martyrologies profoundly affect how the martyr is imagined and consequently the model of discipleship they represent to others. Martyrs have a unique power to validate a cause and to embody the possibility of extreme conviction and resistance in a way which can mobilise and radicalise their communities.
This thesis argues that critical analysis of these martyrologies is therefore imperative if we are to understand their role in defining the martyr and therefore shaping the way that the martyr’s community interpret and engage with their reality. Four martyrologies, rooted in the emergence of martyrdom in the early church, are presented and, through their critical examination, a methodological framework for their future analysis is exhibited and recommended. The theological ideas sustaining these martyrologies are shown to be radicalising, morally challenging, and logically and theologically incoherent. Most importantly, this thesis attends to the phenomenon of popular martyrdom, particularly prevalent in Latin America. It explains the martyrology responsible and, controversially, shows why this martyrology is in fact entirely orthodox, challenging the Church’s opposition to it. It also shows, however, that its claim that the basis for martyrdom can be a political cause makes this martyrology not only a threat to political theology, but even a potentially radicalising tool.

Keywords: Latin America
Religion
Canonisation
Discipleship
Book of Revelation
Sacrifice
Imitatio Christi
Witness
Praxis
Suffering
Aquinas
El Salvador
Saints
Social Constructivism
Asceticism
Social Narratives
Martyrology
Acts of the Apostles
Radicalisation
Christian Persecution
Martyrdom
Gospel of John
Political Theology
Romero
Benedict XIV
Death
Odium Fidei
Advisor: Ward, G
Connecting past and present: the archaeology of the contemporary past in the glades of Embobut, Kenya

At its most basic, this project aims to explore the recent archaeology and history of Sengwer communities and the Embobut Forest in the Cherangani Hills, Kenya, in order to better understand how they conceptualise their ‘indigeneity’. Such work is especially relevant in Cherangani given recent attempts by Kenya’s national government to move the Sengwer from the forest within the context of the ‘National Resource Management Project’ funded by the World Bank. These evictions resulted in a legal case hinged upon the issues of conservation and ‘indigeneity’, partly due to a change in the World Bank status of the Sengwer from ‘Indigenous People’ to a ‘Vulnerable and Marginalised Group’. This alteration was rejected by the Sengwer not least because the term ‘Indigenous People’ is both a part of a much larger, international dialogue and alludes to a relationship between humans and their landscape in a way that ‘Vulnerable and Marginalised Group’ does not. Thus, the Sengwer have been attempting to re-assert their right to live in Cherangani by drawing upon a range of historical and cultural ideas that demonstrate the importance of the relationship they bear with their landscape.
Unfortunately, realising this aim has been hindered by a lack of wider intellectual interest, since no academic studies have hitherto explored the history, archaeology or ethnography of the Sengwer in any detail. As such, I have worked with the Sengwer community in order to conduct a diachronic analysis of how they have constructed their landscape and engaged with their forest environment. In turn, a more rigorous understanding of the temporality and materiality of the Embobut landscape as understood from the ground up helps contextualise what has become a complicated and contested narrative of landscape modification over the past century. Indeed, different perspectives of deforestation and conservation as gleaned from government reports and activist documents illuminates how landscape change is multifaceted, not only being caused by shifting livelihoods of the people residing there, but also the imposition of conservation boundaries by the colonial Forest Department in the early twentieth century. Ultimately, then, my work aims to bring a more materially centred approach to help better comprehend how the Embobut Forest has changed in conjunction with different perceptions, understandings and experiences of the landscape.

Keywords: Forests
Landscape
Indigenous
Kenya
Advisor: Mitchell, P
Davies, M
Time and moral responsibility

The central theme of the thesis is how time—namely, what has happened in the past, what has happened in one’s history—relates to moral responsibility. The most common way this is discussed in the compatibilism literature is how someone’s history is relevant to whether he can be morally responsible. Non-historicists believe moral responsibility only depends on what state a person is in when he acts—what his causal springs are—and not how he came to be in that state. Historicists believe that moral responsibility also depends on how we come to possess our causal springs, and in the first part of the thesis I argue for a new type of historicist account of moral responsibility over existing versions.
What has happened in one’s history might not just affect whether he is responsible for what is done; it also might affect whether he is responsible for what was done. The second part investigates how historical considerations bear on whether a person at some time is responsible for what a person at some previous time did, a field which is little explored because most, but not all, authors assume the criterion is personal identity. I argue that alternatives to the personal identity criterion, namely those invoking psychological connectedness, face serious complications.
There is no literature to my knowledge on how positions we take on responsibility for what is done have implications for the plausible positions we could take on responsibility for what was done. In the third part of this thesis, I explore how these two ways in which history might affect moral responsibility relate to one another, arguing that of the permutations of historicist and non-historicist accounts with personal identity and psychological connectedness accounts, only historicist accounts of moral responsibility that require personal identity seem to lack serious complications.

Advisor: Hills, A
Spin chemistry for biology: fluorescence detection of magnetic field effects on flavin photoreactions

Magnetic fields as weak as the Earth’s can change the yields and/or kinetics of radical pair reactions even though the interaction energies involved are orders of magnitude smaller than kT at room temperature. Proposed as the source of the light-dependent magnetic compass in migratory birds, Magnetic Field Effects (MFEs) on chemical reactions can be understood by the radical pair mechanism (Chapter 1) and are thought to operate in flavin-containing protein photoreceptors in the retina. Numerous studies on flavin-based model systems of biological importance have shown MFEs under physiological conditions. In many instances, these effects are small and are only likely to be of any importance to the postulated chemical compass if the primary effects of the magnetic fields on the geminate radical pairs are further enhanced via yet unknown amplification mechanisms.
In this thesis, a novel technique is introduced which measures MFEs on the prompt fluorescence of continuously photoirradiated flavin/electron donor model systems (Chapter 2). By exploiting the sensitivity of this method it is possible to probe the effects of the magnetic interaction characteristics within the radical pair as well as those of the embedding media. In Chapter 3, the flavin-ascorbic acid system and rare examples of Low Field Effects relevant for magnetosensitivity to weak magnetic fields under biologically relevant conditions are explored. The possibility for the chemical amplification of MFEs is demonstrated for cryptochromes and related model systems through experiment and simulation (Chapter 4-5). Under conditions of continuous photoexcitation, any change in the kinetics of radicals formed downstream to the geminate radical pair can significantly enhance the prompt field effect over the timescale of milliseconds and longer. Given the efficiency of amplification and the simplicity of its implementation, it is not inconceivable for nature to have adopted these effects for improved magnetoreception.

Advisor: Timmel, C
Re-engineering Caenorhabditis elegans SAS-6: from spirals to rings

Centrioles have conserved 9-fold symmetry. This symmetry is templated by a scaffold of SAS-6. SAS-6 oligomerises to form a stack of rings, each with 9-fold radial symmetry, that forms the cartwheel, which imparts symmetry to the organelle. However, crystallographic and electron microscopy studies suggest that C. elegans is unique in that it forms a spiral SAS-6 scaffold instead of a cartwheel. Thus, there are two competing architectures of SAS-6 scaffold. Inconclusive electron microscopy of C. elegans centrioles mean it is unclear which architecture is present in vivo. C. elegans is used as a model for centriole biology, it is therefore important to determine which SAS-6 oligomer structure is present at the centre of the centriole because a spiral scaffold would have implications for centriole duplication and elongation. To probe the nature of the C. elegans SAS-6 scaffold, I use a protein engineering approach to convert spiral-forming SAS-6 into a ring oligomer. Molecular dynamics simulations of SAS-6 are used to screen the architecture of the SAS-6 mutants. The conformation of the engineered SAS-6 oligomers in vitro is determined using atomic force microscopy. I show that there is flexibility in the architectures sampled by wild-type C. elegans SAS-6 and that two point mutations are sufficient to increase the number of rings formed by C. elegans SAS-6 by >20%.

Advisor: Vakonakis, I
Theorising the relationship between kalām and uṣūl al-fiqh: the theological-legal epistemology of Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 792/1390)

This thesis examines the appropriation and naturalisation of philosophical theology (kalām) and Arabic logic (manṭiq) into Islamic legal hermeneutics (uṣūl al-fiqh) in the 8th/14th century in the works of the Persian theologian cum jurist Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 792/1390). By the 5th/11th centaury, uṣūl al-fiqh works across madhhabs contained an extensive introduction on epistemology. This practice brought two main questions: the first is concerning the classification of the sciences and their hierarchy (whether this epistemological introduction pertains to an Islamic science, kalām, or a non-Islamic science, logic). The second is concerning the status and function of uṣūl al-fiqh as a key contributor to the late-classical rational sciences. This thesis offers an original contribution to answering these two questions. It studies the development of uṣūl al-fiqh as a source of epistemology through investigating its relationship to kalām and Arabic logic. More specifically, it investigates the so-called theological principles (al-mabādi’ al-kalāmiyya) as they appear in the above three sciences from the 11th to the 14th centuries. The analysis in this thesis shows that these mabādi’ play an epistemological role, insofar as they deal with the objects and classification of knowledge (ʿilm and ẓann), the character and typology of epistemic indication (dalāla), and the nature of theoretical investigation (naẓar). The main features of these theories, this study shows, are their occasionalist and foundationalist concerns, developed through three centuries of debates. This thesis also offers new insights on the features of Taftāzānī’s intellectual project, concluding that the originality of Taftāzānī’s thought is best seen in his concern with scholastic verification (taḥqīq), spurning madhhab-affiliations.

Keywords: manṭiq
kalām
uṣūl al-fiqh
Taftāzānī
Advisor: Melchert, C
Investigating the spectrum of atoms in multiple-radiofrequency dressed potentials for coherent splitting of quantum gases

This thesis presents experimental work to investigate the properties of ultracold rubidium atoms in multiple-radiofrequency dressed potentials and detailed theoretical calculations to understand this system. The use of multiple frequencies rather than a single dressing frequency increases the complexity of the spectrum, and we present theoretical calculations that predict all possible transitions as well as the corresponding strengths. Extensive measurements for dressing with a single and multiple frequencies have verified these predictions, observing transitions up to tenth order in the probe field. We observe previously unknown transitions even for the single-frequency case and have uncovered further transitions which we explain by the non-linearity of the Zeeman effect even at our small field strengths.
These results are used to understand the absorption spectrum as the potential transforms from a single to a double well in order to split a Bose-Einstein condensate. This is important for applications since spurious noise leads to atom loss if it is resonant with a transition between eigenstates. We present a new method of splitting, replacing adiabatic ramps with a projection, that reduces the duration of the ramps as well as the spectrum of resonances throughout the ramps, thus reducing losses.
The new experimental techniques will allow observation of the thermalisation of a two-dimensional quantum system using ultracold gases. We discuss how multiple-radiofrequency dressed potentials can be used to confine ultracold atoms in two dimensions, and subsequently split the trapped cloud into two parallel sheets. After a varying hold time, the atoms can be released and overlapped to produce interference fringes. Analysis of the fringes determines how the relative phase between the two sheets thermalises. Information can be accumulated to determine the probability distribution of the integrated contrast, which can then be compared to the equilibrium distribution to determine if and how the relative phase thermalises. This promises to answer key questions in non-equilibrium physics.

Keywords: Non-equilibrium physics
radiofrequency spectroscopy
multiple-frequency interaction
radiofrequency-dressed potentials
Bose-Einstein condensation
Advisor: Foot, C
An economic analysis of liability for continuing corporate disclosures in English law

I analyse and evaluate the effectiveness of the English law regime governing public companies’ continuing disclosures with a focus on the incentives it creates. In this area, EU regulation stipulates most of the disclosure content as well as the process for how and when to disclose, while the design of disclosure liability is left almost entirely to member states. Nonetheless, perceptions of an increasingly strained relationship between EU regulation and the common law caused the UK to introduce in 2006 its first statutory regime for issuer liability for continuing disclosures. The design of this regime provided the original motivation for this inquiry.
I make four principal claims that I believe to be new to the literature. First, the statutory liability regime fails to address the main problem it was introduced to solve – preventing an expansionary development of the common law tort of negligent misstatement into the corporate disclosure context – and both heads of liability could now be available in many cases.
Second, the substantive rules of the EU’s continuous disclosure regime are well-designed to support the work of information traders and this is also a suitable policy goal for disclosure regulation.
Third, issuer liability regimes (such as the new UK regime) will be ineffective in deterring disclosure misstatements, but could potentially have some compensatory justification by protecting information traders. However, information traders do not need issuer liability and should perform a more useful role in the markets when not offered such protection. The new regime is therefore unnecessary and unhelpful.
Fourth, the FCA’s recent initiative of requiring that a misstating issuer establish an investor restitution scheme is a significant development. Investors may find such schemes attractive compared to private litigation since the FCA appears to consider itself unrestrained by the doctrine preventing shareholder compensation for corporate losses.

Advisor: Armour, J