Security considerations in the open source software ecosystem

Open source software plays an important role in the software supply chain, allowing stakeholders to utilize open source components as building blocks in their software, tooling, and infrastructure. But relying on the open source ecosystem introduces unique challenges, both in terms of security and trust, as well as in terms of supply chain reliability. In this dissertation, I investigate approaches, considerations, and encountered challenges of stakeholders in the context of security, privacy, and trustworthiness of the open source software supply chain. Overall, my research aims to empower and support software experts with the knowledge and resources necessary to achieve a more secure and trustworthy open source software ecosystem. In the first part of this dissertation, I describe a research study investigating the security and trust practices in open source projects by interviewing 27 owners, maintainers, and contributors from a diverse set of projects to explore their behind-the-scenes processes, guidance and policies, incident handling, and encountered challenges, finding that participants’ projects are highly diverse in terms of their deployed security measures and trust processes, as well as their underlying motivations. More on the consumer side of the open source software supply chain, I investigated the use of open source components in industry projects by interviewing 25 software developers, architects, and engineers to understand their projects’ processes, decisions, and considerations in the context of external open source code, finding that open source components play an important role in many of the industry projects, and that most projects have some form of company policy or best practice for including external code. On the side of end-user focused software, I present a study investigating the use of software obfuscation in Android applications, which is a recommended practice to protect against plagiarism and repackaging. The study leveraged a multi-pronged approach including a large-scale measurement, a developer survey, and a programming experiment, finding that only 24.92% of apps are obfuscated by their developer, that developers do not fear theft of their own apps, and have difficulties obfuscating their own apps. Lastly, to involve end users themselves, I describe a survey with 200 users of cloud office suites to investigate their security and privacy perceptions and expectations, with findings suggesting that users are generally aware of basic security implications, but lack technical knowledge for envisioning some threat models. The key findings of this dissertation include that open source projects have highly diverse security measures, trust processes, and underlying motivations. That the projects’ security and trust needs are likely best met in ways that consider their individual strengths, limitations, and project stage, especially for smaller projects with limited access to resources. That open source components play an important role in industry projects, and that those projects often have some form of company policy or best practice for including external code, but developers wish for more resources to better audit included components. This dissertation emphasizes the importance of collaboration and shared responsibility in building and maintaining the open source software ecosystem, with developers, maintainers, end users, researchers, and other stakeholders alike ensuring that the ecosystem remains a secure, trustworthy, and healthy resource for everyone to rely on

Transactions of 2015 International Conference on Health Information Technology Advancement Vol.3, No. 1

The Third International Conference on Health Information Technology Advancement Kalamazoo, Michigan, October 30-31, 2015 Conference Chair Bernard Han, Ph.D., HIT Pro Department of Business Information Systems Haworth College of Business Western Michigan University Kalamazoo, MI 49008 Transactions Editor Dr. Huei Lee, Professor Department of Computer Information Systems Eastern Michigan University Ypsilanti, MI 48197 Volume 3, No. 1 Hosted by The Center for Health Information Technology Advancement, WM

Multiuser Privacy and Security Conflicts in the Cloud

Collaborative cloud platforms make it easier and more convenient for multiple users to work together on files (GoogleDocs, Office365) and store and share them (Dropbox, OneDrive). However, this can lead to privacy and security conflicts between the users involved, for instance when a user adds someone to a shared folder or changes its permissions. Such multiuser conflicts (MCs), though known to happen in the literature, have not yet been studied in-depth. In this paper, we report a study with 1,050 participants about MCs they experienced in the cloud. We show what are the MCs that arise when multiple users work together in the cloud and how and why they arise, what is the prevalence and severity of MCs, what are their consequences on users, and how do users work around MCs. We derive recommendations for designing mechanisms to help users avoid, mitigate, and resolve MCs in the cloud

Factors that Facilitate or Impede the Effective Implementation of Open Source Software to Support Learning and Teaching in a New Zealand Senior High School

This study’s main focus was on critical success factors in the implementation of open source software to support learning and teaching in a senior high school. Research questions involved the nature of open source software, rationales for its use in the school, its advantages and disadvantages in education, and the pedagogy used in classrooms by teachers in relation to open source software. This study contributes to knowledge about the use of OSS in education

The Innovative Use of Personal Smart Devices by Students to Support their Learning

Research into the autonomous use of MP3 audio recorders by students in UK Higher Education demonstrated that students were innovative in their autonomous use of the devices. They used them to capture learning conversations from formal and informal situations to personalise and enhance their learning. However, today smartphones and other smart devices have replaced the necessity for students to carry multiply mobile devices including MP3 recorders. This chapter builds upon the earlier work and presents a small qualitative study into how students are autonomously using their smart devices to support their learning. The research explores the hypothesis that students are being innovative in the ways in which they are use their smart devices to support their formal and informal learning. The study involved five students who own smart devices who were invited to discuss their ownership of smartphone and tablet technologies and the ways they used them in their studies. The students first completed a short questionnaire and were then interviewed in small groups. The results agree with previous research into the student use of smart devices and describe autonomous engagement facilitated by personally owned smart technologies. The study identifies continuous patterns of pervasive engagement by students and concludes that more thought should be given to disruptive innovation, digital literacy and employability

Security Enhanced Applications for Information Systems

Every day, more users access services and electronically transmit information which is usually disseminated over insecure networks and processed by websites and databases, which lack proper security protection mechanisms and tools. This may have an impact on both the users’ trust as well as the reputation of the system’s stakeholders. Designing and implementing security enhanced systems is of vital importance. Therefore, this book aims to present a number of innovative security enhanced applications. It is titled “Security Enhanced Applications for Information Systems” and includes 11 chapters. This book is a quality guide for teaching purposes as well as for young researchers since it presents leading innovative contributions on security enhanced applications on various Information Systems. It involves cases based on the standalone, network and Cloud environments

Computer Science's Digest Volume 2

This series of textbooks was created for the students of the Systems Engineering Program at the University of Nariño. They have been intentionally written in English to promote reading in a foreign language. The textbooks are a collection of reflections and workshops on specific situations in the field of computer science, based on the authors’ experiences. The main purpose of these textbooks is essentially academic. The way in which the reflections and workshops were constructed follows a didactic structure, to facilitate teaching and learning, making use of English as a second language. This book covers Internet and Multimedia Technology, System Analysis and Design, and Software Engineerin

A framework to evaluate user experience of end user application security features

The use of technology in society moved from satisfying the technical needs of users to giving a lasting user experience while interacting with the technology. The continuous technological advancements have led to a diversity of emerging security concerns. It is necessary to balance security issues with user interaction. As such, designers have adapted to this reality by practising user centred design during product development to cater for the experiential needs of user - product interaction. These User Centred Design best practices and standards ensure that security features are incorporated within End User Programs (EUP). The primary function of EUP is not security, and interaction with security features while performing a program related task does present the end user with an extra burden. Evaluation mechanisms exist to enumerate the performance of the EUP and the user’s experience of the product interaction. Security evaluation standards focus on the program code security as well as on security functionalities of programs designed for security. However, little attention has been paid to evaluating user experience of functionalities offered by embedded security features. A qualitative case study research using problem based and design science research approaches was used to address the lack of criteria to evaluate user experience with embedded security features. User study findings reflect poor user experience with EUP security features, mainly as a result of low awareness of their existence, their location and sometimes even of their importance. From the literature review of the information security and user experience domains and the user study survey findings, four components of the framework were identified, namely: end user characteristics, information security, user experience and end user program security features characteristics. This thesis focuses on developing a framework that can be used to evaluate the user experience of interacting with end user program security features. The framework was designed following the design science research method and was reviewed by peers and experts for its suitability to address the problem. Subject experts in the fields of information security and human computer interaction were engaged, as the research is multidisciplinary. This thesis contributes to the body of knowledge on information security and on user experience elements of human computer interaction security regarding how to evaluate user experience of embedded InfoSec features. The research adds uniquely to the literature in the area of Human Computer Interaction Security evaluation and measurement in general, and is specific to end user program security features. The proposed metrics for evaluating UX of interacting with EUP security features were used to propose intervention to influence UX in an academic setup. The framework, besides presenting UX evaluation strategies for EUP security features, also presents a platform for further academic research on human factors of information security. The impact can be evaluated by assessing security behaviour, and successful security breaches, as well as user experience of interaction with end user programs

Cognitive Hyperconnected Digital Transformation

Cognitive Hyperconnected Digital Transformation provides an overview of the current Internet of Things (IoT) landscape, ranging from research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies in a global context. It is intended as a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC-Internet of Things European Research Cluster, including both research and technological innovation, validation and deployment. The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European Research Cluster, the IoT European Platform Initiative (IoT-EPI) and the IoT European Large-Scale Pilots Programme, presenting global views and state-of-the-art results regarding the challenges facing IoT research, innovation, development and deployment in the next years. Hyperconnected environments integrating industrial/business/consumer IoT technologies and applications require new IoT open systems architectures integrated with network architecture (a knowledge-centric network for IoT), IoT system design and open, horizontal and interoperable platforms managing things that are digital, automated and connected and that function in real-time with remote access and control based on Internet-enabled tools. The IoT is bridging the physical world with the virtual world by combining augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to support the physical-digital integrations in the Internet of mobile things based on sensors/actuators, communication, analytics technologies, cyber-physical systems, software, cognitive systems and IoT platforms with multiple functionalities. These IoT systems have the potential to understand, learn, predict, adapt and operate autonomously. They can change future behaviour, while the combination of extensive parallel processing power, advanced algorithms and data sets feed the cognitive algorithms that allow the IoT systems to develop new services and propose new solutions. IoT technologies are moving into the industrial space and enhancing traditional industrial platforms with solutions that break free of device-, operating system- and protocol-dependency. Secure edge computing solutions replace local networks, web services replace software, and devices with networked programmable logic controllers (NPLCs) based on Internet protocols replace devices that use proprietary protocols. Information captured by edge devices on the factory floor is secure and accessible from any location in real time, opening the communication gateway both vertically (connecting machines across the factory and enabling the instant availability of data to stakeholders within operational silos) and horizontally (with one framework for the entire supply chain, across departments, business units, global factory locations and other markets). End-to-end security and privacy solutions in IoT space require agile, context-aware and scalable components with mechanisms that are both fluid and adaptive. The convergence of IT (information technology) and OT (operational technology) makes security and privacy by default a new important element where security is addressed at the architecture level, across applications and domains, using multi-layered distributed security measures. Blockchain is transforming industry operating models by adding trust to untrusted environments, providing distributed security mechanisms and transparent access to the information in the chain. Digital technology platforms are evolving, with IoT platforms integrating complex information systems, customer experience, analytics and intelligence to enable new capabilities and business models for digital business