Understanding Software Obfuscation and Diversification as Defensive Measures for the Cybersecurity of Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as an umbrella term to describe connecting smart everyday objects (such as washing machines, toilets and sound systems), sensors and industrial machines to the internet. While IoT devices hold potential to greatly enhance quality of life through automating and optimizing mundane tasks, there are a great deal of security and privacy challenges. For this reason, practitioners and academics have explored various ways to enhance the multi-layered security of IoT devices. One of these methods is obfuscation, which has been successfully applied to make accessing devices more difficult for adversaries. In this study, we systematically processed the literature on applying obfuscation and diversification to improve IoT cybersecurity (81 articles) and clustered this research according the obfuscation target (code, data, interface, location, traffic). We then conducted a follow-up bibliometric review of the entire research profile of IoT cybersecurity (3,682 articles) to understand how these obfuscation and diversification approaches relate to the general cybersecurity landscape and solutions of IoT. We also derive a comprehensive list of benefits and shortcomings of enhancing IoT security through diversification, and present points of departure for future research

Comparing Social Media Reactions to Early Game Songs and Final Boss Music in Single Player Adventure Games

Single player video games unite players through shared experiences, passion and knowledge about the game. We investigate the role of video game music in this setting. We analyse comments (n=1893) on 20 popular single player adventure game songs on social media sorted into four clusters based on the following two variables (1) age of the game; and (2) whether the song appears early on in the game or at the end. We discovered that there are more similarities in the types of comments and sentiments between early game songs across games than between songs from the same game. Early game songs had more comments related to nostalgia, sadness and "feeling of home" compared to late game songs. Comments on late game songs were more focused on players' experiences while playing. Overall, all 20 songs had overwhelmingly more comments on associations (both game and life related) than on the actual song itself

When Player Communities Revolt Against the Developer : A Study of Pokémon GO and Diablo Immortal

Several popular contemporary online multiplayer games and franchises are developed and managed with the aid of multiple data sources. Despite the control and insight that the utilization of data brings to game design and business decisions, video game developers occasionally receive backlash from their player communities. Examples include the announcement of Diablo Immortal at BlizzCon 2018, and the #HearUsNiantic campaign among Pokémon GO players in August 2021. In this article we analyze these two examples and demonstrate the importance of understanding player behavior more broadly than what can be derived from quantitative in-game data. In both the analyzed cases, players’ offline culture played a paramount role in the backlash. We argue that the primary reason for the observed backlash is that the players’ lives have become intertwined with digital products, and hence, changing these products alters the players’ lives as well.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe

Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2021

Pokémon has become the most profitable cross-media franchise since its creation 25 years ago. In this conceptual work, we go through the current eight generations of Pokémon games, movies and anime episodes to understand why the franchise appeals to humans. We focus on the following four core themes: (1) relationship with the Pokémon creatures; (2) exploration and adventure; (3) social connectedness and acceptance; and (4) green technologies and living in symbiosis with the environment. We discuss how these themes resonate with human primal desires and what aspects of Pokémon transcend into the real world. Our findings indicate that the Pokémon world is able to offer humans aspects of the hunter-gatherer era that are missing from the current urban way of living. The franchise appeals to human primal desires by being about exploring the world, understanding it and finding harmony with other living creatures. Our findings support previous work on the appeal of specific Pokémon games, and contributes to our understanding of what has made the franchise popular.</p

A Case Study on Software Vulnerability Coordination

Context: Coordination is a fundamental tenet of software engineering. Coordination is required also for identifying discovered and disclosed software vulnerabilities with Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). Motivated by recent practical challenges, this paper examines the coordination of CVEs for open source projects through a public mailing list. Objective: The paper observes the historical time delays between the assignment of CVEs on a mailing list and the later appearance of these in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Drawing from research on software engineering coordination, software vulnerabilities, and bug tracking, the delays are modeled through three dimensions: social networks and communication practices, tracking infrastructures, and the technical characteristics of the CVEs coordinated. Method: Given a period between 2008 and 2016, a sample of over five thousand CVEs is used to model the delays with nearly fifty explanatory metrics. Regression analysis is used for the modeling. Results: The results show that the CVE coordination delays are affected by different abstractions for noise and prerequisite constraints. These abstractions convey effects from the social network and infrastructure dimensions. Particularly strong effect sizes are observed for annual and monthly control metrics, a control metric for weekends, the degrees of the nodes in the CVE coordination networks, and the number of references given in NVD for the CVEs archived. Smaller but visible effects are present for metrics measuring the entropy of the emails exchanged, traces to bug tracking systems, and other related aspects. The empirical signals are weaker for the technical characteristics. Conclusion: [...

Resemblance of religion and pervasive games : A study among church employees and gamers

Previous research suggests that the experience and practices related to gaming and extended realities, and religion and spiritualism, share similarities. In this study, we explore how both the employees of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (n=156) and pervasive game players (n=98) perceive and make sense of these connections. We approach the qualitative data from the perspective of Durkheim, who, similarly to how game theorists view games, views religion as a multi-faceted system that incorporates the rules, practices and communities that comprise the religion. From the data emerges the following prominent connection as perceived by both groups of informants: systems of (1) shared premise, (2) resilience and restoration, (3) symbolism, (4) extended reality and (5) day-to-day structuring. A numerical view of the data shows that 42,5% of the participants did not perceive similarities, and examination of these responses suggested that while religion and pervasive games share functional similarities, they are further apart from a substantive perspective.Peer reviewe

Proceedings of DELbA 2020 - Workshop on Designing and Facilitating Educational Location-based Applications co-located with the Fifteenth European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2020)

There are several implicit benefits to formal school education. One the most important is the learning of social skills i.e. how to behave, interact meaningfully and form social bonds with other people. However, there are multiple situations where the learning of social skills can be disrupted, e.g. bullying or the recent COVID-19 pandemic that forced schools to transition into distance education. In this work, we investigate the potential of pervasive games (PGs) to teach social skills and help acquire social capital. Using the theoretical viewpoints of affordance lens and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of capital, we argue that PGs are able create meaningful activities that not only help learn social skills, but can scaffold social bonding and increase social capital. We identify six social affordances in the PG Pokémon GO and show the game teaches a wide variety of social skills ranging from negotiation and bartering to group interaction. Our findings have implications on designing educational pervasive games that teach social skills and accrue social capital. Keywords: pervasive games, implicit learning, social capital, social capital theory, social skills. </p