EviPlant: An efficient digital forensic challenge creation, manipulation and distribution solution

Education and training in digital forensics requires a variety of suitable challenge corpora containing realistic features including regular wear-and-tear, background noise, and the actual digital traces to be discovered during investigation. Typically, the creation of these challenges requires overly arduous effort on the part of the educator to ensure their viability. Once created, the challenge image needs to be stored and distributed to a class for practical training. This storage and distribution step requires significant time and resources and may not even be possible in an online/distance learning scenario due to the data sizes involved. As part of this paper, we introduce a more capable methodology and system as an alternative to current approaches. EviPlant is a system designed for the efficient creation, manipulation, storage and distribution of challenges for digital forensics education and training. The system relies on the initial distribution of base disk images, i.e., images containing solely base operating systems. In order to create challenges for students, educators can boot the base system, emulate the desired activity and perform a "diffing" of resultant image and the base image. This diffing process extracts the modified artefacts and associated metadata and stores them in an "evidence package". Evidence packages can be created for different personae, different wear-and-tear, different emulated crimes, etc., and multiple evidence packages can be distributed to students and integrated into the base images. A number of additional applications in digital forensic challenge creation for tool testing and validation, proficiency testing, and malware analysis are also discussed as a result of using EviPlant.Comment: Digital Forensic Research Workshop Europe 201

Evaluating the End-User Experience of Private Browsing Mode

Nowadays, all major web browsers have a private browsing mode. However, the mode's benefits and limitations are not particularly understood. Through the use of survey studies, prior work has found that most users are either unaware of private browsing or do not use it. Further, those who do use private browsing generally have misconceptions about what protection it provides. However, prior work has not investigated \emph{why} users misunderstand the benefits and limitations of private browsing. In this work, we do so by designing and conducting a three-part study: (1) an analytical approach combining cognitive walkthrough and heuristic evaluation to inspect the user interface of private mode in different browsers; (2) a qualitative, interview-based study to explore users' mental models of private browsing and its security goals; (3) a participatory design study to investigate why existing browser disclosures, the in-browser explanations of private browsing mode, do not communicate the security goals of private browsing to users. Participants critiqued the browser disclosures of three web browsers: Brave, Firefox, and Google Chrome, and then designed new ones. We find that the user interface of private mode in different web browsers violates several well-established design guidelines and heuristics. Further, most participants had incorrect mental models of private browsing, influencing their understanding and usage of private mode. Additionally, we find that existing browser disclosures are not only vague, but also misleading. None of the three studied browser disclosures communicates or explains the primary security goal of private browsing. Drawing from the results of our user study, we extract a set of design recommendations that we encourage browser designers to validate, in order to design more effective and informative browser disclosures related to private mode

eStorys: A visual storyboard system supporting back-channel communication for emergencies

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Journal of Visual Languages & Computing. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2010 Elsevier B.V.In this paper we present a new web mashup system for helping people and professionals to retrieve information about emergencies and disasters. Today, the use of the web during emergencies, is confirmed by the employment of systems like Flickr, Twitter or Facebook as demonstrated in the cases of Hurricane Katrina, the July 7, 2005 London bombings, and the April 16, 2007 shootings at Virginia Polytechnic University. Many pieces of information are currently available on the web that can be useful for emergency purposes and range from messages on forums and blogs to georeferenced photos. We present here a system that, by mixing information available on the web, is able to help both people and emergency professionals in rapidly obtaining data on emergency situations by using multiple web channels. In this paper we introduce a visual system, providing a combination of tools that demonstrated to be effective in such emergency situations, such as spatio/temporal search features, recommendation and filtering tools, and storyboards. We demonstrated the efficacy of our system by means of an analytic evaluation (comparing it with others available on the web), an usability evaluation made by expert users (students adequately trained) and an experimental evaluation with 34 participants.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Banco Santander

Three types of children’s informational web sites: an inventory of design conventions

"Purpose: Research on Web design conventions has an almost exclusive focus on Web design for adults. There is far less knowledge about Web design for children. For the first time, an overview is presented of the current design conventions for children's informational Web sites. Method: In this study a large corpus of 100 children's international, informational Web sites from four different domains (science, pets, arts, and health) is analyzed. The instrument for analyzing the Web sites included categories on visual design, navigation and information architecture. Results: The design conventions identified in this study show that designers of children's informational Web sites often follow general Web design guidelines. This study also shows that there is still much confusion about how to design Web sites for children. A closer look at the data revealed three categories of informational Web sites especially designed for children, diverging from a classical to a playful design approach. Conclusion: An overview is presented of the current design conventions for children's informational Web sites. The identified design conventions should be further tested and validated as design standards for children's informational Web design. Further, the design of children's informational Web sites is determined by two dimensions of aesthetics; classical and expressive. In this study, expressive aesthetics results in playful visual design or in a total playful interaction design. The effects of playful design on children's affect and cognition will be an important topic in future research on children's digital search behavior.

Co-browsing the Greenstone digital library collection

Context: Social interaction is an important aspect of a successful web page. Social network sites attract many people worldwide. The social interaction aspect is missing from digital libraries, including the Greenstone Digital Library. Objectives: This study investigates how two distant users exchange information while in front of the computer and browsing the same Greenstone Digital library collection, in real time, and identifies the features that support their needs. Methods: To answer the research questions, an observation methodology is applied to gain more insight into users’ information-seeking behaviour for an online DL. Two recording elements were used to gather data from a sample of eight pairs of university students (n=16). The two elements were video camera (with audio) and screen capture. Further, a questionnaire was used to collect data about the workload during the session. Results: The data obtained was analysed using conversation and content analysis methods. The findings of this user study related to the metadata presentation, referencing information and search box activities. A Co-browsing GDL system is proposed based on the requirements derived from findings from the user study and also the related works. Evaluation: A usability test is used to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of the proposed system. Think aloud and questionnaire methods are used to gather the data of this usability test. Results: The result of this study “debug” the proposed Co-browsing GDL system and explore issues related to communication and private works, with it having become apparent through the study that improvements can be made to some parts of the system presentation. Conclusions: The findings of the thesis research have been used to provide recommendations for future work to develop and implement a Co-browsing Greenstone digital library (GDL) system

Interaction with information in work and everyday life contexts: a qualitative study of the information behaviour of Saudi female academics

This study aims to investigate Saudi female academics’ information behaviour (IB) within their work and everyday life contexts. A qualitative research approach was adopted to investigate the range of information behaviour that the research participants engaged in. The data for this study were collected via in-depth semi-structured interviews and diaries. Participants’ accounts were then subject to a rigorous thematic data analysis process. The research findings indicated that female academics who participated in this study engaged in three main categories of information behaviour: information acquisition, information avoidance, and information sharing. The motivations and the strategies associated with each category have been depicted in a taxonomy of information behaviour. In addition, a detailed analysis of participants’ IB as an action-oriented process has been presented visually, leading to the development of a model that depicts IB as a contextual process. [Continues.

Towards a Physiological Computing Infrastructure for Researching Students’ Flow in Remote Learning – Preliminary Results from a Field Study

With the advent of physiological computing systems, new avenues are emerging for the field of learning analytics related to the potential integration of physiological data. To this end, we developed a physiological computing infrastructure to collect physiological data, surveys, and browsing behavior data to capture students’ learning journey in remote learning. Specifically, our solution is based on the Raspberry Pi minicomputer and Polar H10 chest belt. In this work-in-progress paper, we present preliminary results and experiences we collected from a field study with medical students using our developed infrastructure. Our results do not only provide a new direction for more effectively capturing different types of data in remote learning by addressing the underlying challenges of remote setups, but also serve as a foundation for future work on developing a less obtrusive, (near) real-time measurement method based on the classification of cognitive-affective states such as flow or other learning-relevant constructs with the captured data using supervised machine learning

A Study On The Information Collecting Mode Of Secondary School Students In A Digital Setting

The widespread use of the Internet has opened up a significant amount of knowledge and is available immediately upon any search at anytime and anywhere. The Internet is tremendously useful for educational purposes by teachers as well as students and educational administrators and it has superseded libraries as a source for information gathering and research. In the present scenario the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) have brought tremendous changes in gathering information among the primary and secondary students. The information-gathering of the students moved from print to online. The main focus of the study was to know the various information needs, the different techniques used to gather the information, perception and the various problems faced by the secondary students in collecting the information. 420 secondary students (plus 1 and 2) were taken from the aided and unaided schools of Trivandrum district and considered as the sample for the study. A structured questionnaire was used to collect the data. The results of the study showed that the majority of the students preferred to collect information from the internet than libraries. They faced various problems while accessing the information form the libraries as well as online, they preferred to use print and online information. They also satisfied with the information available from their respective libraries. The majority of them are aware of the current information regarding their particular subject areas. They preferred relevant information in their academic activities. Based on the outcome of research the researcher put forward a few suggestions