Abstract
In a world increasingly reliant on interconnected digital communities, both network infrastructures and online social platforms shape how individuals experience security, identity, and belonging. The Capstone Project focused on vulnerability assessments and penetration tests– procedural security measures performed against networks and systems to analyze or exploit their strengths and weaknesses– that contribute heavily to the continued safety of these platforms. As these digital systems become larger and more widely used, certifying their resiliency through objective and reproducible security assessments, such as vulnerability assessments and penetration tests, is extremely important to maintaining security. Specifically, ensuring our national security systems remain impervious to attack is essential to the continued function and safety of our national government. The STS project questions if women with disabilities are restricted in the ways they are able to present themselves online, and if outsiders without these disabilities see only distorted versions of their lives, obscuring reality and reinforcing stereotypes such as those emphasizing aesthetics or resilience. While social media can also offer safe places for connection between women with disabilities, the STS paper details the tension between performance and genuineness that reflects the empowering and constraining effects of social media.
Both topics explore the intersection of technology and humanity. The Capstone Project focuses on developing a reproducible testbed to assess network security for national security systems, whereas the STS Project examines how social technologies perpetuate or challenge societal biases against disabled women. Together, they highlight the significance of how technological design and implementation carry ethical and cultural consequences.
Government sponsors need objective and reproducible vulnerability assessments and penetration tests for national security systems. To visualize and assess the resiliency of these networks, GNS3, Ansible, and Docker were utilized to develop an automated process to create these networks, manage the system, and execute these assessments. Through a given YAML file of network specifications from the sponsor, Python parses the file, connects to GNS3 to create the specified system using custom Docker images, further manages the nodes through Ansible, and executes the assessment. With this ability to automate the creation of these networks, the capabilities of this assessment tool can now be tested and expanded upon in an efficient and reliable manner. Additionally, sponsors will be able to visualize given networks and the findings of this tool comprehensibly. Further work on this new feature includes connecting the network to the internet, allowing for the incorporation of AI and other online tools to aid in the creation and assessment of networks. Furthermore, additional Docker images modelling more real-world devices could be added to increase the applicability of this feature in relation to real national security systems.
The current state of social media influences society’s views, beliefs, and stigmas about women with disabilities through decisions embedded in platform design, algorithmic behavior, and everyday user practices. These suggest that while social media offers shared communities and opportunities for wider visibility, it also perpetuates and reinforces existing gender and ableist norms through these technical structures that were not originally designed with disabled users in mind. The experiences of women with disabilities can be understood through three main categories: physical accessibility barriers that inhibit users with certain physical or sensory disabilities, algorithmic barriers that affect mental disabilities or perpetuate harmful narratives in which recommendation systems may amplify emotions or stigmatize content, and through both the positive and negative online communities that serve in both stigmatizing and destigmatizing content related to women with disabilities. Social media accessibility exists in a transitional moment where a growing awareness of accessibility gaps and algorithmic harm function as amassing anomalies in the current usage and design of social media platforms, pushing platforms towards emerging shifts in how gender and disability are represented online.
As a result of both of these analyses, it becomes clear that technological systems are not only technical constructs but are representative of broader social contexts. Ensuring the security and reliability of network infrastructures is important for both protecting national systems and recognizing that the design of digital platforms can shape social experiences and representation. Together, these projects show the importance of developing technologies that are both technically resilient and socially responsible.
Working on both the Capstone Project and the STS research paper provided the opportunity to understand technology from both a technical and societal perspective. The Capstone Project gave practical skills required to design and implement automated vulnerability assessments and penetration testing environments, while the STS project gave a deeper understanding of how technological systems shape and are shaped by social structures. Studying the representation of women with disabilities on social media showed how deeply design decisions influence how individuals can participate online. Working on these projects together reinforced the idea that technological development cannot be separated from societal implications. While the Capstone Project focused on strengthening technical security systems, the STS research emphasized the responsibility engineers have in the social consequences of the systems they build.
