Using HTML5 to Prevent Detection of Drive-by-Download Web Malware

The web is experiencing an explosive growth in the last years. New technologies are introduced at a very fast-pace with the aim of narrowing the gap between web-based applications and traditional desktop applications. The results are web applications that look and feel almost like desktop applications while retaining the advantages of being originated from the web. However, these advancements come at a price. The same technologies used to build responsive, pleasant and fully-featured web applications, can also be used to write web malware able to escape detection systems. In this article we present new obfuscation techniques, based on some of the features of the upcoming HTML5 standard, which can be used to deceive malware detection systems. The proposed techniques have been experimented on a reference set of obfuscated malware. Our results show that the malware rewritten using our obfuscation techniques go undetected while being analyzed by a large number of detection systems. The same detection systems were able to correctly identify the same malware in its original unobfuscated form. We also provide some hints about how the existing malware detection systems can be modified in order to cope with these new techniques.Comment: This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the article: \emph{Using HTML5 to Prevent Detection of Drive-by-Download Web Malware}, which has been published in final form at \url{http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/sec.1077}. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archivin

Information scraps: how and why information eludes our personal information management tools

In this paper we describe information scraps -- a class of personal information whose content is scribbled on Post-it notes, scrawled on corners of random sheets of paper, buried inside the bodies of e-mail messages sent to ourselves, or typed haphazardly into text files. Information scraps hold our great ideas, sketches, notes, reminders, driving directions, and even our poetry. We define information scraps to be the body of personal information that is held outside of its natural or We have much still to learn about these loose forms of information capture. Why are they so often held outside of our traditional PIM locations and instead on Post-its or in text files? Why must we sometimes go around our traditional PIM applications to hold on to our scraps, such as by e-mailing ourselves? What are information scraps' role in the larger space of personal information management, and what do they uniquely offer that we find so appealing? If these unorganized bits truly indicate the failure of our PIM tools, how might we begin to build better tools? We have pursued these questions by undertaking a study of 27 knowledge workers. In our findings we describe information scraps from several angles: their content, their location, and the factors that lead to their use, which we identify as ease of capture, flexibility of content and organization, and avilability at the time of need. We also consider the personal emotive responses around scrap management. We present a set of design considerations that we have derived from the analysis of our study results. We present our work on an application platform, jourknow, to test some of these design and usability findings

Drag it together with Groupie: making RDF data authoring easy and fun for anyone

One of the foremost challenges towards realizing a “Read-write Web of Data” [3] is making it possible for everyday computer users to easily find, manipulate, create, and publish data back to the Web so that it can be made available for others to use. However, many aspects of Linked Data make authoring and manipulation difficult for “normal” (ie non-coder) end-users. First, data can be high-dimensional, having arbitrary many properties per “instance”, and interlinked to arbitrary many other instances in a many different ways. Second, collections of Linked Data tend to be vastly more heterogeneous than in typical structured databases, where instances are kept in uniform collections (e.g., database tables). Third, while highly flexible, the problem of having all structures reduced as a graph is verbosity: even simple structures can appear complex. Finally, many of the concepts involved in linked data authoring - for example, terms used to define ontologies are highly abstract and foreign to regular citizen-users.To counter this complexity we have devised a drag-and-drop direct manipulation interface that makes authoring Linked Data easy, fun, and accessible to a wide audience. Groupie allows users to author data simply by dragging blobs representing entities into other entities to compose relationships, establishing one relational link at a time. Since the underlying representation is RDF, Groupie facilitates the inclusion of references to entities and properties defined elsewhere on the Web through integration with popular Linked Data indexing services. Finally, to make it easy for new users to build upon others’ work, Groupie provides a communal space where all data sets created by users can be shared, cloned and modified, allowing individual users to help each other model complex domains thereby leveraging collective intelligence

A Typographic Dilemma: Reconciling the old with the new using a new cross-disciplinary typographic framework

Current theory and vocabulary used to describe typographic practice and scholarship are based on a historically print-derived framework. As yet, no new paradigm has emerged to address the divergent path that screen-based typography is taking from its traditional print medium. Screen-based typography is becoming as common and widely used as its print counterpart. It is now timely to re-evaluate current typographic references and practices under these environments, which introduces a new visual language and form. This paper will attempt to present an alternate typographic framework to address these growing changes by appropriating concepts and knowledge from different disciplines. This alternate typographic framework has been informed through a study conducted as part of a research Doctorate in the School of Design at Northumbria University, UK. This paper posits that the current typographic framework derived from the print medium is no longer sufficient to address the growing differences between the print and screen media. In its place, an alternate cross-disciplinary typographic framework should be adopted for the successful integration and application of typography in screen-based interactive media. The development of this framework will focus mainly on three key characteristics of screen-based interactive media ¬¬– hypertext, interactivity and time-based motion – and will draw influences from disciplines such as film, computer gaming, interactive digital arts and hypertext fictions

Supporting document management in complex multitask environments

In this thesis, the challenges for the support of information workers in the domain of personal information management are addressed. In Chapter 1 three major challenges are identified: 1) information overload and fragmentation, 2) multitasking within an unstructured, frequently interrupted workflow, and 3) increasing mobility demand. It has been argued that dedicated support of current needs in personal information management will help to overcome the challenges, reduce information and cognitive overload, and facilitate performance of information workers. Investigating the current needs of information workers, one has to focus on those that are currently supported by paper document management and transfer the mechanisms of this support to the digital domain. Our studies have addressed the role of paper documents in dealing with each of the three identified challenges. In the first study, presented in Chapter 2, paper document management has been discussed in relation with information overload and fragmentation. The study used contextual interviewing technique, with participants interviewed at their workplace. The results showed that information workers keep actively using task-related collections of paper documents. By grouping task-related documents from different origins together, information workers create a representation of a "stable state" within a task, which helps to resume the task after an interruption that is almost inevitable in a multitasking environment. To investigate task-switching patterns, related to document manipulation, and factors influencing the occurrence of the patterns, an observational study was performed, described in Chapter 3. This study identified eight task switching patterns, which varied in the explicitness of an indication of a task state in the environment and in the level of subject’s activity directed to indicate the task state at the moments of switching. Among the identified influencing factors, the reason for the switch (self-switching or external interruption) had an effect on the occurrence of subjectactive patterns. Self-switching usually resulted in user-active document manipulation in the environment which could not be observed during external interruptions. The domain where the last action was performed also had an influence on the switching pattern, with active manipulation of documents occurring more often in the physical than in the digital domain. It has been concluded that, while switching tasks in an unstructured multitasking workflow, manipulation of paper documents plays an important role in creating a stable state at the moments of switching between tasks. We hypothesized that paper documents possess visually distinctive attributes that are associated with the semantics of the related tasks. By manipulating task-related documents at the moments of task switching, these visually distinctive attributes change, reflecting the changes in the task state. This hypothesis has been tested in a study using triad elicitation interview technique in combination with laddering, presented in Chapter 4. As a result, we developed a clustered model of relationships among identified visual cues of paper documents and semantic judgments of the tasks. The relationships among clusters have been analyzed based on three criteria: content-dependency, flexibility, and effort, which together define ease of manipulation for each cluster of visual cues. It has been concluded that physical environment, in particular, task-relevant paper documents, allow flexible encoding of task-related semantic cues into available environmental visual cues. This mechanism needs to be transferred to the digital domain, especially to support mobility of information workers. This research suggested that the extensive use of paper documents in the digital era can be largely explained by the embodiment of paper as a part of physical environment in which a human acts. Chapter 5 summarized the results of all studies into a set of requirements for the design of a personal information management system. We proposed a layered framework for presenting the requirements from the point of view of task decomposition and discussed the needs of the information workers related to each layer. For each of the aforementioned layers within the framework, requirements for the design of a digital system were presented and discussed in detail. Chapter 6 revised the challenges discussed in Chapter 1 from the point of view of the findings, summarized methodology and contribution of the research and reflected on the most prominent results

From the ecology of the human spirit to the development of the orchestral theory of communication: the inclusion of the medium-message axiom

The contributions of the biologist, anthropologist and communication theorist Gregory Bateson (1904- 1980) form the nucleus of the cross-disciplinary theoretical principles which led to the founding of the web of thought spun by Watzlawick, Weakland, Beavin, Fish, Jackson, Erickson, Foster, Haley and Satir, amongst others. These authors were united by a common theoretical standpoint which foregrounded the ecology of the human spirit and saw communication as process, a system of transactional interaction. They were also similarly influenced by cybernetics, systems theory and constructivism. Energised by the clash of the ideas in their exchanges, they constructed the orchestral theory of communication, formalised by Paul Watzlawick, Donald Jackson and Janet Beavin. Today, Watzlawick (1967) is regarded as a seminal publication in the annals of interpersonal communication studies. Moving beyond the confines of the original object of study – face-to-face communication – this theory has been increasingly applied to the analysis of institutionally mediated communication and to the understanding of the construction of learning and change in organisations. However, in current circumstances, its set of axiomatic principles would benefit from the inclusion of a medium-message axiom to allow a fuller understanding of the realities of the mediated communication process that the process contains. This paper proposes the inclusion of this new axiom, medium-message; a proposal which is based on the work of Gregory Bateson, the ecology of the human spirit, the orchestral theory of communication and the thinking of the Media Ecology Association. It aims to help build a more profound insight into the realities of the process of human communication

Customer empowerment in tourism through Consumer Centric Marketing (CCM)

We explain Consumer Centric Marketing (CCM) and adopt this new technique to travel context. Benefits and disadvantages of the CCM are outlined together with warnings of typical caveats Value: CCM will be expected as the norm in the travel industry by customers of the future, yet it is only the innovators who gain real tangible benefits from this development. We outline current and future opportunities to truly place your customer at the centre and provide the organisation with some real savings/gains through the use of ICT Practical Implications: We offer tangible examples for travel industry on how to utilise this new technology. The technology is already available and the ICT companies are keen to establish ways how consumers can utilise it, i.e. by providing ‘content’ for these ICT products the travel industry can fully gain from these developments and also enhance consumers’ gains from it. This can result in more satisfied customers for the travel (as well as ICT) companies thus truly adopting the basic philosophy of marketin

Development of a database and its use in the Investigation of Interferences in SRM assay design

Selected Reaction Monitoring (SRM), is a form of mass spectrometry that guarantees high throughput and also a high level of selectivity and specificity. Performing SRM experiments requires the development of assays to aid in peptide identification. This is a time consuming and expensive process thus biological researchers have come up with bioinformatics solutions for the design of SRM assay. The accuracy of these bioinformatics methods is quite high and the next step is to optimise the process by tackling the interference issue. As various analytes may have the same signals within an SRM experiment and thus interfere with each other’s signals, different solutions are being derived to tackle the issue. This thesis describes the development of a SRM transition database to store peptide and transition data, software to populate the database and also software to retrieve the data from the database. Finally the database is tested with the MRMaid transitions for the human proteome which were mined from the PRIDE database and the results analysed to investigate the transition interference issue. The database currently contains data for 20220 proteins and approximately 870,000 tryptic peptides from the human proteome

Task-based Adaptation of Graphical Content in Smart Visual Interfaces

To be effective visual representations must be adapted to their respective context of use, especially in so-called Smart Visual Interfaces striving to present specifically those information required for the task at hand. This thesis proposes a generic approach that facilitate the automatic generation of task-specific visual representations from suitable task descriptions. It is discussed how the approach is applied to four principal content types raster images, 2D vector and 3D graphics as well as data visualizations, and how existing display techniques can be integrated into the approach.Effektive visuelle Repräsentationen müssen an den jeweiligen Nutzungskontext angepasst sein, insbesondere in sog. Smart Visual Interfaces, welche anstreben, möglichst genau für die aktuelle Aufgabe benötigte Informationen anzubieten. Diese Arbeit entwirft einen generischen Ansatz zur automatischen Erzeugung aufgabenspezifischer Darstellungen anhand geeigneter Aufgabenbeschreibungen. Es wird gezeigt, wie dieser Ansatz auf vier grundlegende Inhaltstypen Rasterbilder, 2D-Vektor- und 3D-Grafik sowie Datenvisualisierungen anwendbar ist, und wie existierende Darstellungstechniken integrierbar sind