The Need for Greater Pro Active Involvement by Regulators in Financial Regulation and Supervision:Lessons from the Legal and General Case

This paper considers the need for a more pro active approach which facilitates greater on site work being carried out by supervisors – as highlighted in the Legal and General Case. It also considers the recommendations made to the UK’s regulator - the FSA, and in particular to the FSA Board, following the Legal and General Case. The recommendations are compared to the Basel Committee’s Core Principles for Effective Banking Supervision. In drawing a comparison, the importance of independent verification of work carried out by external auditors, be it through on-site examinations or the use of external experts, is once again emphasised. The involvement of external auditors or other experts in the supervisory process should not relieve a regulator from on site supervisory responsibilities. As vital as an external auditor’s work is, it is also important to verify such work

Evaluating Security and Usability of Profile Based Challenge Questions Authentication in Online Examinations

© 2014 Ullah et al.; licensee Springer. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.Student authentication in online learning environments is an increasingly challenging issue due to the inherent absence of physical interaction with online users and potential security threats to online examinations. This study is part of ongoing research on student authentication in online examinations evaluating the potential benefits of using challenge questions. The authors developed a Profile Based Authentication Framework (PBAF), which utilises challenge questions for students’ authentication in online examinations. This paper examines the findings of an empirical study in which 23 participants used the PBAF including an abuse case security analysis of the PBAF approach. The overall usability analysis suggests that the PBAF is efficient, effective and usable. However, specific questions need replacement with suitable alternatives due to usability challenges. The results of the current research study suggest that memorability, clarity of questions, syntactic variation and question relevance can cause usability issues leading to authentication failure. A configurable traffic light system was designed and implemented to improve the usability of challenge questions. The security analysis indicates that the PBAF is resistant to informed guessing in general, however, specific questions were identified with security issues. The security analysis identifies challenge questions with potential risks of informed guessing by friends and colleagues. The study was performed with a small number of participants in a simulation online course and the results need to be verified in a real educational context on a larger sample sizePeer reviewedFinal Published versio