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11 – 20 of 334Di Wu, Lei Wu, Alexis Palmer, Dr Kinshuk and Peng Zhou
Interaction content is created during online learning interaction for the exchanged information to convey experience and share knowledge. Prior studies have mainly focused on the…
Abstract
Purpose
Interaction content is created during online learning interaction for the exchanged information to convey experience and share knowledge. Prior studies have mainly focused on the quantity of online learning interaction content (OLIC) from the perspective of types or frequency, resulting in a limited analysis of the quality of OLIC. Domain concepts as the highest form of interaction are shown as entities or things that are particularly relevant to the educational domain of an online course. The purpose of this paper is to explore a new method to evaluate the quality of OLIC using domain concepts.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper proposes a novel approach to automatically evaluate the quality of OLIC regarding relevance, completeness and usefulness. A sample of OLIC corpus is classified and evaluated based on domain concepts and textual features.
Findings
Experimental results show that random forest classifiers not only outperform logistic regression and support vector machines but also their performance is improved by considering the quality dimensions of relevance and completeness. In addition, domain concepts contribute to improving the performance of evaluating OLIC.
Research limitations/implications
This paper adopts a limited sample to train the classification models. It has great benefits in monitoring students’ knowledge performance, supporting teachers’ decision-making and even enhancing the efficiency of school management.
Originality/value
This study extends the research of domain concepts in quality evaluation, especially in the online learning domain. It also has great potential for other domains.
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Panagiotis Andriotis, George Oikonomou, Alexios Mylonas and Theo Tryfonas
The Android pattern lock screen (or graphical password) is a popular user authentication method that relies on the advantages provided by the visual representation of a password…
Abstract
Purpose
The Android pattern lock screen (or graphical password) is a popular user authentication method that relies on the advantages provided by the visual representation of a password, which enhance its memorability. Graphical passwords are vulnerable to attacks (e.g. shoulder surfing); thus, the need for more complex passwords becomes apparent. This paper aims to focus on the features that constitute a usable and secure pattern and investigate the existence of heuristic and physical rules that possibly dictate the formation of a pattern.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors conducted a survey to study the users’ understanding of the security and usability of the pattern lock screen. The authors developed an Android application that collects graphical passwords, by simulating user authentication in a mobile device. This avoids any potential bias that is introduced when the survey participants are not interacting with a mobile device while forming graphical passwords (e.g. in Web or hard-copy surveys).
Findings
The findings verify and enrich previous knowledge for graphical passwords, namely, that users mostly prefer usability than security. Using the survey results, the authors demonstrate how biased input impairs security by shrinking the available password space.
Research limitations/implications
The sample’s demographics may affect our findings. Therefore, future work can focus on the replication of our work in a sample with different demographics.
Originality/value
The authors define metrics that measure the usability of a pattern (handedness, directionality and symmetry) and investigate their impact to its formation. The authors propose a security assessment scheme using features in a pattern (e.g. the existence of knight moves or overlapping nodes) to evaluate its security strengths.
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Brenden Kuerbis and Farzaneh Badiei
There is growing contestation between states and private actors over cybersecurity responsibilities, and its governance is ever more susceptible to nationalization. The authors…
Abstract
Purpose
There is growing contestation between states and private actors over cybersecurity responsibilities, and its governance is ever more susceptible to nationalization. The authors believe these developments are based on an incomplete picture of how cybersecurity is actually governed in practice and theory. Given this disconnect, this paper aims to attempt to provide a cohesive understanding of the cybersecurity institutional landscape.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing from institutional economics and using extensive desk research, the authors develop a conceptual model and broadly sketch the activities and contributions of market, networked and hierarchical governance structures and analyze how they interact to produce and govern cybersecurity.
Findings
Analysis shows a robust market and networked governance structures and a more limited role for hierarchical structures. Ex ante efforts to produce cybersecurity using purely hierarchical governance structures, even buttressed with support from networked governance structures, struggle without market demand like in the case of secure internet identifiers. To the contrary, ex post efforts like botnet mitigation, route monitoring and other activities involving information sharing seem to work under a variety of combinations of governance structures.
Originality/value
The authors’ conceptual framework and observations offer a useful starting point for unpacking how cybersecurity is produced and governed; ultimately, we need to understand if and how these governance structure arrangements actually impact variation in observed levels of cybersecurity.
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Robin Mueller, Sebastian Schrittwieser, Peter Fruehwirt, Peter Kieseberg and Edgar Weippl
This paper aims to give an overview on a number of selected applications in comparison to a previous evaluation conducted two years ago, as well as performing an analysis on…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to give an overview on a number of selected applications in comparison to a previous evaluation conducted two years ago, as well as performing an analysis on several new applications. Mobile messaging and VoIP applications for smartphones have seen a massive surge in popularity, which has also sparked the interest in research related to their security and privacy protection, leading to in-depth analyses of specific applications or vulnerabilities.
Design/methodology/approach
The evaluation methods mostly focus on known vulnerabilities in connection with authentication and validation mechanisms but also describe some newly identified attack vectors.
Findings
The results show a positive trend for new applications, which are mostly being developed with security and privacy features, whereas some of the older applications have shown little progress or have even introduced new vulnerabilities. In addition, this paper shows privacy implications of smartphone messaging that are not even solved by today’s most sophisticated “secure” smartphone messaging applications, as well as discusses methods for protecting user privacy during the creation of the user network.
Research limitations/implications
Currently, there is no perfect solution available; thus, further research on this topic needs to be conducted.
Originality/value
In addition to conducting a security evaluation of existing applications together with newly designed messengers that were designed with a security background in mind, several methods for protecting user privacy were discussed. Furthermore, some new attack vectors were discussed.
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Muhammad Awais Azam, Jonathan Loo, Usman Naeem and Muhammad Adeel
Recognizing daily life activities and human behaviour from contextual information is a challenging task. The purpose of the research work in this paper is to develop a system that…
Abstract
Purpose
Recognizing daily life activities and human behaviour from contextual information is a challenging task. The purpose of the research work in this paper is to develop a system that can detect indoor and outdoor daily life activities of low entropy mobile people such as elderly people and patients with regular routines using non-intrusive sensor and contextual information.
Design/methodology/approach
A framework is proposed that utilises a hierarchical approach in which high-level activities are divided into sub-activities and tasks and recognises the high-level outdoor and indoor activities of daily life. Tasks are recognised at lower level from sensor data and then used by the “activity recogniser” at higher level to recognise the high-level activities. For outdoor activities recognition, wireless proximity data are used, whereas for indoor activities, object usage data obtained through radio frequency identification sensors are used.
Findings
For outdoor tasks, results have shown 100 per cent recognition for experiment 1 and a decrease in recognition from 100 to 82.7 per cent, respectively, for experiment 2-9 due to increase in the entropy of individual tasks. Outdoor activity recognition ranges from 84.1 to 100 per cent. For indoor tasks, generating alternative tasks sequences approach effectively recognised the single tasks that were conducted with objects without any order. Average indoor activity recognition rate remains above 90 per cent. The reason why this approach is able to detect the activities without their distinct features is the planning capability of the Asbru that is used in the modelling of high-level activities.
Originality/value
The novelty of this research work is a framework that utilises different types of sensor data and recognises both indoor and outdoor daily life activities of individuals.
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Ahmed Patel, Wei Qi and Mona Taghavi
Mobile agent‐based e‐marketplace is one type of business application that has been developed as a flexible and efficient approach to help companies or corporations to extend their…
Abstract
Purpose
Mobile agent‐based e‐marketplace is one type of business application that has been developed as a flexible and efficient approach to help companies or corporations to extend their businesses to outreach larger markets without regional and continental boundaries. However, every distributed system is unable to avoid the security problems due to the open internet environment. Mobile agent‐based e‐marketplaces are no exception. Thus, the security of mobile agents is a crucial factor in the design of mobile agent‐based e‐marketplaces. To overcome this kind of problem, the purpose of this paper is to design and implement a framework and system of secure and trustworthy mobile agent based e‐marketplace.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper presents the system design for the system implementation based on the designed framework. It includes three major aspects: the design issues, system design and development environment and tools for system implementation. The system architecture, use case diagram and use case specifications are presented in the system design section.
Findings
The system design is an essential step that is required before a prototype system is implemented. The system is designed based on the described and outlined requirements and evaluation criteria, therefore, to support a secure and trustworthy trading environment. The paper is concluded by discussing and highlighting further research work.
Originality/value
This paper presents the system design for implementing a secure and trustworthy mobile agent‐based e‐marketplace system by using the latest version of UML modeling tool and techniques.
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R.I. Ferguson, Karen Renaud, Sara Wilford and Alastair Irons
Cyber-enabled crimes are on the increase, and law enforcement has had to expand many of their detecting activities into the digital domain. As such, the field of digital forensics…
Abstract
Purpose
Cyber-enabled crimes are on the increase, and law enforcement has had to expand many of their detecting activities into the digital domain. As such, the field of digital forensics has become far more sophisticated over the years and is now able to uncover even more evidence that can be used to support prosecution of cyber criminals in a court of law. Governments, too, have embraced the ability to track suspicious individuals in the online world. Forensics investigators are driven to gather data exhaustively, being under pressure to provide law enforcement with sufficient evidence to secure a conviction.
Yet, there are concerns about the ethics and justice of untrammeled investigations on a number of levels. On an organizational level, unconstrained investigations could interfere with, and damage, the organization's right to control the disclosure of their intellectual capital. On an individual level, those being investigated could easily have their legal privacy rights violated by forensics investigations. On a societal level, there might be a sense of injustice at the perceived inequality of current practice in this domain.
This paper argues the need for a practical, ethically grounded approach to digital forensic investigations, one that acknowledges and respects the privacy rights of individuals and the intellectual capital disclosure rights of organizations, as well as acknowledging the needs of law enforcement. The paper derives a set of ethical guidelines, and then maps these onto a forensics investigation framework. The framework to expert review in two stages is subjected, refining the framework after each stage. The paper concludes by proposing the refined ethically grounded digital forensics investigation framework. The treatise is primarily UK based, but the concepts presented here have international relevance and applicability.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, the lens of justice theory is used to explore the tension that exists between the needs of digital forensic investigations into cybercrimes on the one hand, and, on the other, individuals' rights to privacy and organizations' rights to control intellectual capital disclosure.
Findings
The investigation revealed a potential inequality between the practices of digital forensics investigators and the rights of other stakeholders. That being so, the need for a more ethically informed approach to digital forensics investigations, as a remedy, is highlighted and a framework proposed to provide this.
Research limitations/implications
The proposed ethically informed framework for guiding digital forensics investigations suggests a way of re-establishing the equality of the stakeholders in this arena, and ensuring that the potential for a sense of injustice is reduced.
Originality/value
Justice theory is used to highlight the difficulties in squaring the circle between the rights and expectations of all stakeholders in the digital forensics arena. The outcome is the forensics investigation guideline, PRECEpt: Privacy-Respecting EthiCal framEwork, which provides the basis for a re-aligning of the balance between the requirements and expectations of digital forensic investigators on the one hand, and individual and organizational expectations and rights, on the other.
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Ahmed Patel, Wei Qi and Christopher Wills
There is a need to provide secure and safe information security systems through the use of firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, encryption, authentication, and…
Abstract
Purpose
There is a need to provide secure and safe information security systems through the use of firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, encryption, authentication, and other hardware and software solutions. The purpose of this paper is therefore to propose a framework which includes safe, secure, trusted, and auditable services, as well as forensic mechanisms to provide audit trails for digital evidence of transactions and protection against malicious and illegal activities.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper reviews the literature as the foundation and knowledge base for the proposed framework and system of secure and trustworthy mobile agent (MA)‐based e‐marketplaces. It consists of the current state of the art taxonomy for the classified MA‐based frameworks for e‐marketplace trading, underlying supporting systems, e‐payment systems, and the essential issues related to auditable and digital forensic services.
Findings
The current knowledge shows that there is a serious lack of auditable and digital forensic services to make secure and trustworthy MA‐based e‐marketplaces systems. The paper draws conclusions and highlights further research work which is ongoing and new work that needs to be performed.
Originality/value
The paper perceives the needs to define the requirements for secure and trustworthy MA‐based e‐marketplaces and proposes a framework to design effective systems using the latest techniques and technologies.
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Building on the findings of a British Academy-funded project on the development of digital forensics (DF) in England and Wales, the purpose of this paper is to explore how triage…
Abstract
Purpose
Building on the findings of a British Academy-funded project on the development of digital forensics (DF) in England and Wales, the purpose of this paper is to explore how triage, a process that helps prioritise digital devices for in-depth forensic analysis, is experienced by DF examiners and police officers in four English police forces. It is argued that while as a strategy triage can address the increasing demand in the examination of digital exhibits, careful consideration needs to be paid to the ways in which its set-up, undertaking and outcomes impact on the ability of law enforcement agencies to solve cases.
Design/methodology/approach
The methodological approach adopted here builds on the ethnographic turn in criminology. The analysis draws on 120 h of ethnographic observations and 43 semi-structured interviews. Observational data of the working DF environment at each location and a systematic evaluation of internal documents, organisational settings and police priorities helped refine emergent analysis threads, which were analytically compared between sites and against the testimonies of members of different occupational groups to identify similarities and differences between accounts.
Findings
The findings emphasise the challenges in the triage of digital exhibits as they are encountered in everyday practice. The discussion focusses on the tensions between the delivery of timely and accurate investigation results and current gaps in the infrastructural arrangements. It also emphasises the need to provide police officers with a baseline understanding of the role of DF and the importance of clearly defined strategies in the examination of digital devices.
Originality/value
This paper aims to bridge policy and practice through an analysis of the ways in which DF practitioners and police officers in four English constabularies reflect on the uses of triage in DF to address backlogs and investigative demands. Highlighting the importance of digital awareness beyond the technical remit of DF units, it offers new insights into the ways in which police forces seek to improve the evidential trail with limited resources.
Details