The Curious Case of the PDF Converter that Likes Mozart: Dissecting and Mitigating the Privacy Risk of Personal Cloud Apps

Third party apps that work on top of personal cloud services such as Google Drive and Dropbox, require access to the user's data in order to provide some functionality. Through detailed analysis of a hundred popular Google Drive apps from Google's Chrome store, we discover that the existing permission model is quite often misused: around two thirds of analyzed apps are over-privileged, i.e., they access more data than is needed for them to function. In this work, we analyze three different permission models that aim to discourage users from installing over-privileged apps. In experiments with 210 real users, we discover that the most successful permission model is our novel ensemble method that we call Far-reaching Insights. Far-reaching Insights inform the users about the data-driven insights that apps can make about them (e.g., their topics of interest, collaboration and activity patterns etc.) Thus, they seek to bridge the gap between what third parties can actually know about users and users perception of their privacy leakage. The efficacy of Far-reaching Insights in bridging this gap is demonstrated by our results, as Far-reaching Insights prove to be, on average, twice as effective as the current model in discouraging users from installing over-privileged apps. In an effort for promoting general privacy awareness, we deploy a publicly available privacy oriented app store that uses Far-reaching Insights. Based on the knowledge extracted from data of the store's users (over 115 gigabytes of Google Drive data from 1440 users with 662 installed apps), we also delineate the ecosystem for third-party cloud apps from the standpoint of developers and cloud providers. Finally, we present several general recommendations that can guide other future works in the area of privacy for the cloud

伏在するサイバー攻撃の発見: 機械学習によるアプローチ

早大学位記番号:新7796早稲田大

Factors Influencing Hotel Managers’ Perceptions Regarding the Use of Mobile Apps to Gain a Competitive Advantage

The purpose of this quantitative study is to examine the opinions of hotel managers regarding the use of mobile applications in the hotel industry and to analyse the influence of these applications on a hotel’s perceived competitive advantage. Factor analysis and multiple regression analysis were performed to analyse the data collected from 106 hotel managers in Turkey. The results of the study indicate that the factors connection and assistance had a significant impact on hotel managers’ perceived competitive advantage. The findings of this study, one of the few that have examined managers’ attitudes toward the use of mobile apps in the hotel industry, provide valuable information that will help to guide technology vendors and software companies that develop mobile apps for hotel

Development of a BIM and Barcode based Material Management System for Curtain Wall Industry

The construction industry is slower to adopt new technologies than other industries. Traditional construction industry material management system involves tedious paperwork, frequent phone calls and challenging coordination, posing many difficulties for the project management. Recent development in the use of information and communication technologies in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC), namely the building information modeling (BIM), promises to introduce major changes in visualization, coordination and planning processes of the engineering projects. The impact of the building’s curtain wall has become increasingly more important when determining the operational and economic performance of construction projects. And as a recognized discipline of the construction industry, curtain wall design, and fabrication and installation process involves numerous stakeholders including designers, contractors, purchasing staff, suppliers, distributors, and on-site installers. It is believed that the material tracking system, when integrated with BIM, can successfully address the major problems of the curtain wall industry. In this paper, the authors analyzed the current practice of material management in the curtain wall industry and proposed a BIM and barcode integrated material management system, which aims to provide a BIM based material management framework from the design phase to the construction phase, streamlining material management process and promoting collaborative working processes in the curtain wall industry