Enhancing Security in the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)

The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) cares for all steps to have a sound implementation of projects. So many projects are tested to be delivering but with the test of time, security challenges arise. In cases where projects have executed required tasks for decades, software evolution expands the scope and security requirements increase beyond what the developer initially cared for. This work explores the critical security incorporations that ensure a better security of software so that at any level of evolution, security challenges do not arise. There is always focus on security of design but this work is on information security in the software development life cycle to avoid tampering, endeavour integrity and authentication of information

The Adoption of E-tourism: An Empirical Investigation

Man’s desire to discover more, enjoy more, and acquire more is an unquenchable thirst, which gives relevance to tourism. The act of food-searching, safety, and environmental-friendliness search in animals is naturally consistent; this is applicable to humans too, and it boosts tourism which involves customer reservation services (CRS), hospitality, airline reservation, car hire reservation and others. E-tourism is a revolution from traditional way of physically present in multiple locations to plan a tour, to achieving numerous tour planning tasks with maximum convenience using ICT. This work is a survey research, it investigates the acceptance and adoption of e-tourism in Nigeria, adopting the UTAUT/UTAUT2 model, and analyzed the gathered data from the questionnaires using SmartPLS 3 to confirm the reliability and validity of the measurement instruments

Enhancing Graduate Employability in Nigeria: A Review of the Computer Science Curriculum

The quality of Nigerian graduates has come under severe criticisms lately. Employers of labour pronounced the graduates unemployable hence the preference for overseas-trained over Nigerian-trained graduates. Consequently, most parents, particularly the rich, prefer to send their children abroad for quality education thus confirming the poor funding, unstable calendar, inadequate infrastructure and manpower situations that surround the higher education institutions (HEIs) in Nigeria. This paper presents a review of the curriculum of Computer Science programme in Nigeria in comparison to other countries in Africa, Europe, America and Asia with a view to identifying the major gaps in curriculum design, implementation and delivery. Also, the quality assurance parameters of these countries are considered in other to formulate a suitable policy for enhanced quality of education in Nigeria

Enhancing Educational Learning with Social Network Platform.

In our world today, education is important to improving and making life more comfortable. The traditional educational system developed in the last century is not fully capable of delivering effective and borderless learning. With the advent of social networks on the internet, interaction has been improved round the world and the reality of connecting everyone in the world is just at hand. As the use of social networks increases, there are no specific platforms that provide a way of structured learning in a social context. This work intends to make the process of learning in the educational system more effective by providing tools and services in the social networking space. The social network was implemented using a variety of programming languages and tools used for web development such as PHP and MYSQL, HTML, Ajax and Jquery with integration of other frameworks and libraries

Applying Diffusion of Innovation Theory to Mobile Learning for Quality Education

It is an undeniable fact that students and youths are among the most carriers of mobile phones in the developing countries. Most students of today are connected with a mobile device for communication, and now it's time to connect them to the classroom. Embracing of new learning services using mobile devices such as iPads, iPod, PDA, etc, can enhance students’ engagement, enthusiasm, reduce cost of textbook and enhance quality of education. Studies on use of mobile devices for learning are on the increase. However, several mobile learning researches have been on adoption of mobile learning with respect to usage. In order to take advantage of potentials of mobile learning, research that addresses the adoption with respect to quality of education is essential. Diffusion of innovation is one of theories used to ascertain the level of adoption and quality of service from mobile learning. This study used the diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to study the level of adoption and quality derived from using mobile learning in Nigeria. Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) was used for data analysis. The results of the findings from the survey will provide insights into m-learning usage in Nigeria and other developing countries

Energizing the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) for Better Performance

Security is a never ending challenge. The security researchers must be steps ahead to avoid attacks and threats, thereby keeping businesses running and avoiding calamities. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is to this rescue after its official acceptance and recommendation by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001. However, timing attacks have called for a modification to it to retain its potency and effectiveness. This research boosts the Rijndael by incorporating an invented playfair ciphering into the algorithm using 256 ASCII codes. The concept counters possible leakages from the S-box lookups from the cache. The research introduces mixcolumn in the last round against the standard to make it a constant time algorithm. The encryption and decryption were validated. Previous researches implemented Architectural and operating system modifications, placing all the lookup tables in CPU registers, Parallel Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation , Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) implementation, the Dynamic Cache Flushing Algorithm but none keeps AES assets of good speed and memory conservation; most especially in embedded systems

Improving Security Using Refined 16 X 16 Playfair Cipher for Enhanced Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

The conventional playfair cipher has lost its potency due to the sophistication of modern systems that can break it by brute force. This work proposes an improved playfair encryption and decryption that will be hard to break by brute force procedure. It uses a 16 X 16 arrays of ASCII characters ensuring relevance in all computing fields instead of the conventional 26 upper case alphabets substitution. An implementation of the cryptographic concept was realized using PHP programming language and embedded in the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm. We argue from the perspective of cryptanalysis that our proposed approach is stronger and will be more difficult to break

A Systematic Literature Review of Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is a relatively new concept that leverages the combination of cloud technology, mobile computing, and wireless networking to enrich the usability experiences of mobile users. Many fields of application such as mobile health, mobile learning, mobile commerce and mobile entertainment are now taking advantage of MCC technologies. Since MCC is new, there is need to advance research in MCC in order to deepen practice. Currently, what exist are mostly descriptive literature reviews in the area of MCC. In this paper, a systematic literature review (SLR), which offers a structured, methodical, and rigorous approach to the understanding of the trend of research in MCC, and the least and most researched issue is presented. The objective of the study is to provide a credible intellectual guide for upcoming researchers in MCC to help them identify areas in MCC research where they can make the most impact. The SLR was limited to peer-reviewed conference papers and journal articles published from 2002 to 2014. The study reveals that privacy, security and trust in MCC are the least researched, whereas issues of architecture, context awareness and data management have been averagely researched, while issues on operations, end users, service and applications have received a lot of attention in the literature

E-Banking Use Behaviour: E-Service Quality, Attitude, and Customer Satisfaction.

Advances in electronic service technology have created great opportunities as well as threats to organizations including the banking sector. Nigerian banks have invested immensely on electronic services as a measure to meet up with the global standard, reduce transaction cost, provide better services to customers and promote efficiency. While e-banking services are numerous, there is no enough evidence of its acceptance among customers as the volume of cash transaction continues to be on the increase. This study aims at investigating factors affecting e-banking usage based on electronic service (e-service) quality. The survey instrument employed involved administering survey questionnaires to a total of 400 respondents within the Lagos metropolis and its environs. E-services quality integrated with diffusion of innovations (DOI) theory was developed as a conceptual framework for analyzing the factors influencing customer’ satisfaction and usage of e-banking. The model employed reliability, responsiveness, availability, service portfolio and competence as extensions to the constructs of DOI: complexity, compatibility, and relative advantage to better reflect the users’ views. Our result reveals that perceived e-service quality alone had a strong relationship with customer satisfaction and use which means that greater quality of e-service has the potential to increase satisfaction and consequently in more use of e-banking. However, in this research finding, competence of e-service support staff, system availability, service portfolio, responsiveness and reliability, in that order, were found to be most significant in rating e-service quality

Fine-tuning the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

The Advanced Encryption Standard has been playing a prominent role in embedded systems security for a decade after being announced by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). However, vulnerabilities have emerged, especially timing attacks, that challenges its security. This paper demonstrates the introduction of a unique diffusion and confusion scheme in Rijndael by incorporating ASCII codes manipulations using playfair ciphering into the algorithm; it is not dependent on the key and input thereby making it a constant time module in AES algorithm. The concept counters possible leakages from the S-box lookups; intermediary operations (SubstituteByte, ShiftRows, MixColumns, AddRoundKey) of the AES are still applicable but it becomes impossible for cryptanalysis discovery of enciphering method and ciphertext bits. Success of cracking efforts will be beyond human patience as it avoids statistical precision, thereby curbing timing attacks