Security in online learning assessment towards an effective trustworthiness approach to support e-learning teams

(c) 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.This paper proposes a trustworthiness model for the design of secure learning assessment in on-line collaborative learning groups. Although computer supported collaborative learning has been widely adopted in many educational institutions over the last decade, there exist still drawbacks which limit their potential in collaborative learning activities. Among these limitations, we investigate information security requirements in on-line assessment, (e-assessment), which can be developed in collaborative learning contexts. Despite information security enhancements have been developed in recent years, to the best of our knowledge, integrated and holistic security models have not been completely carried out yet. Even when security advanced methodologies and technologies are deployed in Learning Management Systems, too many types of vulnerabilities still remain opened and unsolved. Therefore, new models such as trustworthiness approaches can overcome these lacks and support e-assessment requirements for e-Learning. To this end, a trustworthiness model is designed in order to conduct the guidelines of a holistic security model for on-line collaborative learning through effective trustworthiness approaches. In addition, since users' trustworthiness analysis involves large amounts of ill-structured data, a parallel processing paradigm is proposed to build relevant information modeling trustworthiness levels for e-Learning.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Survey of Security in Grid Services

This article provides a survey of Security in Grid Services coming from a study of many papers most of which were done by the Grid Forum OGSA-SEC (Open Grid Service Architecture Security) working group, GSI (Grid Security Infrastructure) working group, and Globus Alliance team and other people who contributed to Grid. It describes the best practice in terms of Grid Security Challenges, Grid Security Requirements, and the GT3 (Globus Toolkit version 3) Security Model for OGSA. Most of these were further refined in separate documents

Towards a science of security games

Abstract. Security is a critical concern around the world. In many domains from counter-terrorism to sustainability, limited security resources prevent complete security coverage at all times. Instead, these limited resources must be scheduled (or allocated or deployed), while simultaneously taking into account the impor-tance of different targets, the responses of the adversaries to the security posture, and the potential uncertainties in adversary payoffs and observations, etc. Com-putational game theory can help generate such security schedules. Indeed, casting the problem as a Stackelberg game, we have developed new algorithms that are now deployed over multiple years in multiple applications for scheduling of secu-rity resources. These applications are leading to real-world use-inspired research in the emerging research area of “security games”. The research challenges posed by these applications include scaling up security games to real-world sized prob-lems, handling multiple types of uncertainty, and dealing with bounded rationality of human adversaries.

What is Stopping the Renewable Energy Transformation and What Can the U.S. Government Do?

WE NEED CHEAP, RELIABLE, SAFE RENEWABLE ENERGY Across the world we all inhabit, the economic system that we depend on is based on the one-time use of fossil fuels and other material resources. Our planet’s population has grown to over 7 billion people. We simply cannot continue using up materials and dumping the waste into a hole in the ground; we need to develop and deploy the technology to create a renewable resource-based economy. The future wellbeing of the United States, and of the planet as a whole, depends on the US government playing a more strategic and future-oriented role to bring about the transition to a renewable-resource-based economy. We know that we must transition to renewable energy eventually, but with energy technology advancing every decade, why hasn’t the transformation to a renewable economy happened yet? What is preventing a more fundamental shift in our energy production and use? There are three barriers to this transformation: (1) technologies that still need advancing; (2) infrastructure that is not designed for distributed generation; and (3) complicated political challenges that limit our ability to make the tough choices necessary for long-term energy policies. The public sector is critical in the transition to a sustainable global economy. Smart sustainability policy and management can help the United States and other countries move past technological, market, and political barriers, and there are a range of federal policies that could lead us on the path toward a sustainable economy powered by clean energy

Con-Resistant Trust for Improved Reliability in a Smart Grid Special Protection System

This paper applies a con-resistant trust mechanism to improve the performance of a communications-based special protection system to enhance its effectiveness and resiliency. Smart grids incorporate modern information technologies to increase reliability and efficiency through better situational awareness. However, with the benefits of this new technology come the added risks associated with threats and vulnerabilities to the technology and to the critical infrastructure it supports. The research in this paper uses con-resistant trust to quickly identify malicious or malfunctioning (untrustworthy) protection system nodes to mitigate instabilities. The con-resistant trust mechanism allows protection system nodes to make trust assessments based on the node\u27s cooperative and defective behaviors. These behaviors are observed via frequency readings which are prediodically reported. The trust architecture is tested in experiments by comparing a simulated special protection system with a con-resistant trust mechanism to one without the mechanism via an analysis of the variance statistical model. Simulation results show promise for the proposed con-resistant trust mechanism. © IEE

Attribute-Based, Usefully Secure Email

A secure system that cannot be used by real users to secure real-world processes is not really secure at all. While many believe that usability and security are diametrically opposed, a growing body of research from the field of Human-Computer Interaction and Security (HCISEC) refutes this assumption. All researchers in this field agree that focusing on aligning usability and security goals can enable the design of systems that will be more secure under actual usage. We bring to bear tools from the social sciences (economics, sociology, psychology, etc.) not only to help us better understand why deployed systems fail, but also to enable us to accurately characterize the problems that we must solve in order to build systems that will be secure in the real world. Trust, a critically important facet of any socio-technical secure system, is ripe for analysis using the tools provided for us by the social sciences. There are a variety of scopes in which issues of trust in secure systems can be stud- ied. We have chosen to focus on how humans decide to trust new correspondents. Current secure email systems such as S/MIME and PGP/MIME are not expressive enough to capture the real ways that trust flows in these sorts of scenarios. To solve this problem, we begin by applying concepts from social science research to a variety of such cases from interesting application domains; primarily, crisis management in the North American power grid. We have examined transcripts of telephone calls made between grid manage- ment personnel during the August 2003 North American blackout and extracted several different classes of trust flows from these real-world scenarios. Combining this knowl- edge with some design patterns from HCISEC, we develop criteria for a system that will enable humans apply these same methods of trust-building in the digital world. We then present Attribute-Based, Usefully Secure Email (ABUSE) and not only show that it meets our criteria, but also provide empirical evidence that real users are helped by the system