Browsing by Author "Rafferty, Laura"

Filter results by typing the first few letters
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Agent-based modeling framework for adaptive cyber defence of the Internet of Things
    (2022-12-01) Rafferty, Laura; Hung, Patrick
    The adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to increase significantly, introducing unique challenges and threats to cybersecurity. In parallel, adaptive and autonomous cyber defence has become an emerging research topic leveraging Artificial Intelligence for cybersecurity solutions that can learn to recognize, mitigate, and respond to cyber attacks, and evolve over time as the threat surface continues to increase in complexity. This paradigm presents an environment strongly conducive to agent-based systems, which offer a model for autonomous, cooperative, goal-oriented behaviours which can be applied to perform adaptive cyber defence activities. This thesis aims to bridge the gap between theoretical multi-agent systems research and cybersecurity domain knowledge by presenting a novel applied framework for adaptive cyber defence that can address a wide range of challenges and provide a foundation for significant future research in systems modeling for cybersecurity. Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent architecture is extended within this work through a novel application of knowledge graphs to provide a scalable data model for agents to understand their environment, infer the context of threats, create goals associated with security requirements, and select plans based on possible actions and expected results. The framework has been implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of the architecture and evaluate the design properties through applied security use cases. While the experimental results have demonstrated the value of the framework applied to IoT systems, the concept can be easily expanded to other domains. This thesis provides the foundation to inspire further research works in this area for continued development, application, and optimization to support the advancement of the industry and bring autonomous, adaptive cyber defence to realization.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A location privacy model and framework for mobile toy computing
    (2015-08-01) Rafferty, Laura; Hung, Patrick
    Many toys on the market are becoming integrated with the sensory and networking capabilities of mobile technology. Toy computing is an emerging area of research with the characteristics of physical computing, services computing, mobile technologies, and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). There is currently no standard privacy-preserving framework for mobile toy computing applications. Children’s privacy is becoming a major concern for parents who wish to protect their children from potential harms related to the collection or misuse of their private data, particularly their location. This thesis provides an access control model for location privacy for children in the mobile toy computing environment. From this model we derive a policy specification language using XACML vocabulary with extensions for location privacy, as well as a technical framework to enforce the policies. Finally, the framework is tested through prototyping and case studies for proof of concept.