From cyber-security deception to manipulation and gratification through gamification

Over the last two decades the field of cyber-security has experienced numerous changes associated with the evolution of other fields, such as networking, mobile communications, and recently the Internet of Things (IoT) [3]. Changes in mindsets have also been witnessed, a couple of years ago the cyber-security industry only blamed users for their mistakes often depicted as the number one reason behind security breaches. Nowadays, companies are empowering users, modifying their perception of being the weak link, into being the center-piece of the network design [4]. Users are by definition "in control" and therefore a cyber-security asset. Researchers have focused on the gamification of cyber- security elements, helping users to learn and understand the concepts of attacks and threats, allowing them to become the first line of defense to report anoma- lies [5]. However, over the past years numerous infrastructures have suffered from malicious intent, data breaches, and crypto-ransomeware, clearly showing the technical "know-how" of hackers and their ability to bypass any security in place, demonstrating that no infrastructure, software or device can be consid- ered secure. Researchers concentrated on the gamification, learning and teaching theory of cyber-security to end-users in numerous fields through various techniques and scenarios to raise cyber-situational awareness [2][1]. However, they overlooked the users’ ability to gather information on these attacks. In this paper, we argue that there is an endemic issue in the the understanding of hacking practices leading to vulnerable devices, software and architectures. We therefore propose a transparent gamification platform for hackers. The platform is designed with hacker user-interaction and deception in mind enabling researchers to gather data on the techniques and practices of hackers. To this end, we developed a fully extendable gamification architecture allowing researchers to deploy virtualised hosts on the internet. Each virtualised hosts contains a specific vulnerability (i.e. web application, software, etc). Each vulnerability is connected to a game engine, an interaction engine and a scoring engine

Mechanism of grain refinement of aluminium alloy in shear spinning under different deviation ratios

To investigate the grain refinement and its mechanism in shear spinning, microstructures of shear spun parts made by aluminium alloy under different deformation conditions, induced by different shear spinning deviation ratios, are studied. The results show that, after shear spinning, the microstructure is distributed symmetrically about a zone in sheet thickness defined as the neutral zone which is located between the inner surface and the middle plane of spun sheet thickness. Various deviation ratios in shear spinning can lead to grain refinement in different regions along thickness direction of the spun part. The microstructure characteristics indicate that the mechanism of grain refinement is due to the formation of deformation bands (DBs). It is observed that in DBs, parallel geometrically necessary boundaries (GNBs) formed by a zero deviation ratio and crossed GNBs formed by positive and negative deviation ratios are due to the different stress states induced by various deviation ratios in shear spinning. Due to the influence of grain refinement, micro hardness increases with the decreasing of the deviation ratio. The average value is increased by 16.04% under a negative deviation ratio compared to the initial micro hardness of the sheet