Does This Icon Tell Me This Site Is Secure?: A Study Of User Perceptions

This research examined how people perceive current site connection indicator icons and corresponding informational message statements found in six web browsers. The paper begins by providing some background of the research area as well as an overview of the site connection indicator icon and informational message statement. An online survey was also conducted, which asked participants to best match statements from the informational messages with site connection indicator icons. The main finding of this research was that based on the wording of the informational message statements, participants often chose corresponding site connection indicator icons in a manner similar to how web browser developers paired the site connection indicator icons and informational message statements. This provides evidence that web browser users perceive the informational message statements as generally matching the site connection indicator icons that represent them.Master of Science in Information Scienc

Security Analysis and Evaluation of Smart Toys

During the last years, interconnectivity and merging the physical and digital technological dimensions have become a topic attracting the interest of the modern world. Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly evolving as it manages to transform physical devices into communicating agents which can consecutively create complete interconnected systems. A sub-category of the IoT technology is smart toys, which are devices with networking capabilities, created for and used in play. Smart toys’ targeting group is usually children and they attempt to provide a higher level of entertainment and education by offering an enhanced and more interactive experience. Due to the nature and technical limitations of IoT devices, security experts have expressed concerns over the effectiveness and security level of smart devices. The importance of securing IoT devices has an increased weight when it pertains to smart toys, since sensitive information of children and teenagers can potentially be compromised. Furthermore, various security analyses on smart toys have discovered a worryingly high number of important security flaws. The master thesis focuses on the topic of smart toys’ security by first presenting and analyzing the necessary literature background. Furthermore, it presents a case study where a smart toy is selected and analyzed statically and dynamically utilizing a Raspberry Pi. The aim of this thesis is to examine and apply methods of analysis used in the relevant literature, in order to identify security flaws in the examined smart toy. The smart toy is a fitness band whose target consumers involve children and teenagers. The fitness band is communicating through Bluetooth with a mobile device and is accompanied by a mobile application. The mobile application has been installed and tested on an Android device. Finally, the analyses as well as their emerged results are presented and described in detail. Several security risks have been identified indicating that developers must increase their efforts in ensuring the optimal level of security in smart toys. Furthermore, several solutions that could minimize security risks and are related to our findings are suggested, along with potentially interesting topics for future work and further research

ATTACKS AND COUNTERMEASURES FOR WEBVIEW ON MOBILE SYSTEMS

ABSTRACT All the mainstream mobile operating systems provide a web container, called ``WebView\u27\u27. This Web-based interface can be included as part of the mobile application to retrieve and display web contents from remote servers. WebView not only provides the same functionalities as web browser, more importantly, it enables rich interactions between mobile apps and webpages loaded inside WebView. Through its APIs, WebView enables the two-way interaction. However, the design of WebView changes the landscape of the Web, especially from the security perspective. This dissertation conducts a comprehensive and systematic study of WebView\u27s impact on web security, with a particular focus on identifying its fundamental causes. This dissertation discovers multiple attacks on WebView, and proposes new protection models to enhance the security of WebView. The design principles of these models are also described as well as the prototype implementation in Android platform. Evaluations are used to demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of these protection models