 Announcing the Final Examination of Mr. Sanjeeb Nanda for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Date: October 29, 2007 Abstract The popularity of RAID has soared because of the enhanced I/O bandwidths and large capacities they offer at low cost. However, the demand for bigger capacities has led to the use of larger arrays with increased probability of random disk failures. This has motivated the need for RAID systems to tolerate two or more disk failures, without sacrificing performance or storage space. To this end, we shall first perform a comparative study of the existing techniques that achieve this objective. Next, we shall devise novel graph-theoretic algorithms for placing data and parity in arrays of n disks (n ≥ 3) that can recover from two random disk failures, for n = p – 1, n = p and n = 2p – 2, where p is a prime number. Each shall be shown to utilize an optimal ratio of space for storing parity. We shall also show how to extend the algorithms to arrays with an arbitrary number of disks, albeit with non-optimal values for the aforementioned ratio. The growth of the Internet has led to the increased proliferation of malignant applications seeking to breach the security of networked systems. Hence, considerable effort has been focused on detecting and predicting the attacks they perpetrate. However, the enormity of the Internet poses a challenge to representing and analyzing them by using scalable models. Furthermore, forecasting the systems that they are likely to exploit in the future is difficult due to the unavailability of complete information on network vulnerabilities. We shall present a technique that identifies attacks on large networks using a scalable model, while filtering for false positives and negatives. Furthermore, it also forecasts the propagation of security failures proliferated by attacks over time and their likely targets in the future. Outline of Studies: Committee in Charge: Approved for distribution by Dr. Narsingh Deo, Committee Chair, on October 19, 2007.
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