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

Secure Cloud-Edge Deployments, with Trust

Assessing the security level of IoT applications to be deployed to heterogeneous Cloud-Edge infrastructures operated by different providers is a non-trivial task. In this article, we present a methodology that permits to express security requirements for IoT applications, as well as infrastructure security capabilities, in a simple and declarative manner, and to automatically obtain an explainable assessment of the security level of the possible application deployments. The methodology also considers the impact of trust relations among different stakeholders using or managing Cloud-Edge infrastructures. A lifelike example is used to showcase the prototyped implementation of the methodology

Critique of Architectures for Long-Term Digital Preservation

Evolving technology and fading human memory threaten the long-term intelligibility of many kinds of documents. Furthermore, some records are susceptible to improper alterations that make them untrustworthy. Trusted Digital Repositories (TDRs) and Trustworthy Digital Objects (TDOs) seem to be the only broadly applicable digital preservation methodologies proposed. We argue that the TDR approach has shortfalls as a method for long-term digital preservation of sensitive information. Comparison of TDR and TDO methodologies suggests differentiating near-term preservation measures from what is needed for the long term. TDO methodology addresses these needs, providing for making digital documents durably intelligible. It uses EDP standards for a few file formats and XML structures for text documents. For other information formats, intelligibility is assured by using a virtual computer. To protect sensitive information—content whose inappropriate alteration might mislead its readers, the integrity and authenticity of each TDO is made testable by embedded public-key cryptographic message digests and signatures. Key authenticity is protected recursively in a social hierarchy. The proper focus for long-term preservation technology is signed packages that each combine a record collection with its metadata and that also bind context—Trustworthy Digital Objects.

Towards Identifying and closing Gaps in Assurance of autonomous Road vehicleS - a collection of Technical Notes Part 1

This report provides an introduction and overview of the Technical Topic Notes (TTNs) produced in the Towards Identifying and closing Gaps in Assurance of autonomous Road vehicleS (Tigars) project. These notes aim to support the development and evaluation of autonomous vehicles. Part 1 addresses: Assurance-overview and issues, Resilience and Safety Requirements, Open Systems Perspective and Formal Verification and Static Analysis of ML Systems. Part 2: Simulation and Dynamic Testing, Defence in Depth and Diversity, Security-Informed Safety Analysis, Standards and Guidelines

Economics and Engineering for Preserving Digital Content

Progress towards practical long-term preservation seems to be stalled. Preservationists cannot afford specially developed technology, but must exploit what is created for the marketplace. Economic and technical facts suggest that most preservation ork should be shifted from repository institutions to information producers and consumers. Prior publications describe solutions for all known conceptual challenges of preserving a single digital object, but do not deal with software development or scaling to large collections. Much of the document handling software needed is available. It has, however, not yet been selected, adapted, integrated, or deployed for digital preservation. The daily tools of both information producers and information consumers can be extended to embed preservation packaging without much burdening these users. We describe a practical strategy for detailed design and implementation. Document handling is intrinsically complicated because of human sensitivity to communication nuances. Our engineering section therefore starts by discussing how project managers can master the many pertinent details.

Towards a normalized trustworthiness approach to enhance security in on-line assessment

(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 an approach to enhance information security in on-line assessment based on a normalized trustworthiness model. Among collaborative e-Learning drawbacks which are not completely solved, we have investigated information security requirements in on-line assessment (e-assessment). To the best of our knowledge, security requirements cannot be reached with technology alone, therefore, new models such as trustworthiness approaches can complete technological solutions and support e-assessment requirements for e-Learning. Although trustworthiness models can be defined and included as a service in e-assessment security frameworks, there are multiple factors related to trustworthiness which cannot be managed without normalization. Among these factors we discuss trustworthiness multiple sources, different data source formats, measure techniques and other trustworthiness factors such as rules, evolution or context. Hence, in this paper, we justify why trustworthiness normalization is needed and a normalized trustworthiness model is proposed by reviewing existing normalization procedures for trustworthy values applied to e-assessments. Eventually, we examine the potential of our normalized trustworthiness model in a real online collaborative learning course.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Cross-layer Approach for Designing Resilient (Sociotechnical, Cyber-Physical, Software-intensive and Systems of) Systems

Our society’s critical infrastructures are sociotechnical cyber-physical systems (CPS) increasingly using open networks for operation. The vulnerabilities of the software deployed in the new control system infrastructure will expose the control system to many potential risks and threats from attackers. This paper starts to develop an information systems design theory for resilient software-intensive systems (DT4RS) so that communities developing and operating different security technologies can share knowledge and best practices using a common frame of reference. By a sound design theory, the outputs of these communities will combine to create more resilient systems, with fewer vulnerabilities and an improved stakeholder sense of security and welfare. The main element of DT4RS is a multi-layered reference architecture of the human, software (cyber) and platform (physical) layers of a cyber-physical system. The layered architecture can facilitate the understanding of the cross-layer interactions between the layers. Cyber security properties are leveraged to help analyzing the interactions between these layers