Classifying network attack scenarios using an ontology
- Authors: Van Heerden, Renier , Irwin, Barry V W , Burke, I D
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: Conference paper
- Identifier: vital:6606 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1009326
- Description: This paper presents a methodology using network attack ontology to classify computer-based attacks. Computer network attacks differ in motivation, execution and end result. Because attacks are diverse, no standard classification exists. If an attack could be classified, it could be mitigated accordingly. A taxonomy of computer network attacks forms the basis of the ontology. Most published taxonomies present an attack from either the attacker's or defender's point of view. This taxonomy presents both views. The main taxonomy classes are: Actor, Actor Location, Aggressor, Attack Goal, Attack Mechanism, Attack Scenario, Automation Level, Effects, Motivation, Phase, Scope and Target. The "Actor" class is the entity executing the attack. The "Actor Location" class is the Actor‟s country of origin. The "Aggressor" class is the group instigating an attack. The "Attack Goal" class specifies the attacker‟s goal. The "Attack Mechanism" class defines the attack methodology. The "Automation Level" class indicates the level of human interaction. The "Effects" class describes the consequences of an attack. The "Motivation" class specifies incentives for an attack. The "Scope" class describes the size and utility of the target. The "Target" class is the physical device or entity targeted by an attack. The "Vulnerability" class describes a target vulnerability used by the attacker. The "Phase" class represents an attack model that subdivides an attack into different phases. The ontology was developed using an "Attack Scenario" class, which draws from other classes and can be used to characterize and classify computer network attacks. An "Attack Scenario" consists of phases, has a scope and is attributed to an actor and aggressor which have a goal. The "Attack Scenario" thus represents different classes of attacks. High profile computer network attacks such as Stuxnet and the Estonia attacks can now be been classified through the “Attack Scenario” class.
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- Date Issued: 2012
Futures studies for the southern African region : ‘from Africa’ not ‘on Africa’
- Authors: Fox, Roddy C , Rowntree, Kate M , Kaskinen, J
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: Conference paper
- Identifier: vital:6668 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006685
- Description: Futures studies is well established in the Nordic region and its history can be readily charted, but in Africa it barely exists in an institutional form and its evolution and impact is little known or understood. The first two sections of our paper briefly examine the history of futures studies, spending most attention on the African experience. We go on to show that the Higher Education landscape in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region is very different to that in the Nordic region. Recent futures reports present forecasts and scenarios that show a differentiated Higher Education landscape in the SADC; there are few Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and even the most optimistic forecasts show that the region as a whole will not meet the international enrollment norm of 30% by 2050. The last part of the paper examines our experience of collaboration with Finland and its well developed linkages between state and Universities. One outcome of three years of collaboration from 2007 to 2009 between two SANORD members, the Finland Futures Research Centre (now a part of the University of Turku) and Rhodes University, was a proposal to develop a multi-disciplinary, inter-institutional futures studies program intended to help Africa find its own voice in futures studies. The final part of our presentation reflects on the unsuccessful experiences that we have had to date in finding funding. We conclude by asking whether our experience can be seen as highlighting some of the challenges SANORD may be positioned to overcome if the SADC region’s HEIs are to achieve the Knowledge Village scenario and begin to match their Nordic counterparts.
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- Date Issued: 2012
Political agency in South African shack settlements
- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: Conference paper
- Identifier: vital:6194 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008580
- Description: (From the introduction) In 2004 Mike Davis asked whether or not what he called 'the informal proletariat' could attain historical agency. The question posed by Davis sparked a largely speculative discussion in the radical edge of the metropolitan academy that often paid scant regard to the many careful studies dealing with the political agency of shack dwellers. The debate about the political capacities of the urban poor stretches back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose views on the matter are well known, and Mikhail Bakunin who sustained their objectification but inverted its logic to conclude that “in them and only in them [the lumpen-proletariat ], and not in the bourgeois strata of workers, are there crystallized the entire intelligence and power of the coming Social Revolution”. In Africa the rational discussion of this question begins with Frantz Fanon who,dying of leukaemia and dictating his words from a mattress on the floor of a flat in Tunis in 1961, insisted that “Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.” One of the many ways in which he stretched the Marxism in the air at the time was to take the view that the lumpen-proletariat, as a sociological category, had no fixed political meaning. People who had been 'circling the cities' hoping, he said, 'to be let in', had sometimes offered their services to colonial oppression and had sometimes joined the revolution against colonialism. Moreover he argued that in the colonial context the urban poor, living outside of the “world of compartments”, did not only become a “gangrene eating into the heart of colonial domination” as an unintended consequence of a desire to survive, of a “biological decision to invade the enemy citadels”, but that some amongst these people would assume explicit political agency and that it is: “in the people of the shanty towns and in the lumpen-proletariat that the insurrection will find its urban spearhead.” In reaching this conclusion, and in insisting on this particular stretching of the dominant currents of the Marxism of the time, Fanon was sustaining a fidelity both to the actually existing politics that he had witnessed in various African countries as well as to his founding ethical axiom - to recognise “the open door of every consciousness.”
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- Date Issued: 2012
Thought amidst waste : conjunctural notes on the Democratic Project in South Africa
- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: Conference paper
- Identifier: vital:6195 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008581
- Description: (from the introduction} In a recent essay Achille Mbembe argues that the rendering of human beings as waste by the interface of racism and capitalism in South Africa means that “for the democratic project to have any future at all, it should necessarily take the form of a conscious attempt to retrieve life and 'the human' from a history of waste”. He adds that “the concepts of 'the human', or of 'humanism', inherited from the West will not suffice. We will have to take seriously the anthropological embeddedness of such terms in long histories of "the human" as waste.”
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- Date Issued: 2012