Johnnes Arreymbi

Is Cyber Tribalism Winning Online Information Warfare

Cyber tribalism is the term that defines alliances and associations formed by Cyber tribes usually a group of people in a virtual community that have attributes such as a common language, similar belief systems, culture, traditions, practices and interest. The purpose of such a tribe, just like any tribe is formed to communicate, disseminates information and build relationships. In such an alliance, people who communicate do not necessarily know each other, although this is not always the case. Communication is done in a virtual manner. There is no assurance of personal interest protection, control and safeguards. Tribesmen have autonomy with respect to their activities. Members can each converse or relate to total strangers for social or business purposes. Examples of such communities are news groups, electronic chat rooms, and search engines such as Google, subject interest based communities and many more. Although there are several challenges and issues arising as a result of these associations, the immediate ones are spoofing and spam attacks, malware trace, theft, sabotage and sale of critical business information and more recently cyber terrorism.

Security Assessment of Software Design using Neural Network

Security flaws in software applications today has been attributed mostly to design flaws. With limited budget and time to release software into the market, many developers often consider security as an afterthought. Previous research shows that integrating security into software applications at a later stage of software development lifecycle (SDLC) has been found to be more costly than when it is integrated during the early stages. To assist in the integration of security early in the SDLC stages, a new approach for assessing security during the design phase by neural network is investigated in this paper. Our findings show that by training a back propagation neural network to identify attack patterns, possible attacks can be identified from design scenarios presented to it. The result of performance of the neural network is presented in this paper.

Applicability of Neural Networks to Software Security

Software design flaws account for 50% software security vulnerability today. As attacks on vulnerable software continue to increase, the demand for secure software is also increasing thereby putting software developers under more pressure. This is especially true for those developers whose primary aim is to produce their software quickly under tight deadlines in order to release it into the market early. While there are many tools focusing on implementation problems during software development lifecycle (SDLC), this does not provide a complete solution in resolving software security problems. Therefore designing software with security in mind will go a long way in developing secure software. In this paper some of the current approaches used in integrating security at the design level of SDLC are discussed briefly and a new method of evaluating software design using neural network is presented. With the aid of the proposed neural network tool, this research found out that software design scenarios can be matched to attack patterns that identify the security flaws in the design scenarios. The result of performance of the neural network is presented in this paper.

Guest editorial: Advances in Digital and Multimedia Convergence

Digital and Multimedia convergence is propelled by the advent of digital and multimedia technology. This special issue is intended to foster state-of-the-art research in the area of digital and multimedia convergence (DMC). The DMC offers unprecedented opportunities for various modern multimedia applications and systems, such as ubiquitous computing technology, human-computer interaction, and convergence in multimedia technology, bio-chips, RFID, and multimedia visualization. Its purpose is to solve the various problems of advanced digital and multimedia processing using computer science technology. This special issue focuses on advances in digital and multimedia convergence. This special issue has become one of the hottest topics in digital and multimedia convergence. This special issue will also serve as a landmark source for digital and multimedia convergence and will provide the reader with the most important stateof-the-art technologies in areas of digital and multimedia processing for DMC. We believe that this special issue will have a high citation in the areas of digital and multimedia convergence. The first paper, by Sudip et al., proposes a routing algorithm, named learning automata based fault-tolerant routing algorithm (LAFTRA), which is capable of routing

A Neural Network Based Security Tool for Analyzing Software

The need to secure software application in today’s hostile computer environment cannot be overlooked. The increase in attacks aimed at software directly in the last decade and the demand for more secure software applications has drawn the attention of the software industry into looking for better ways in which software can be developed more securely. To achieve this, it has been suggested that security needs to be integrated into every phase of software development lifecycle (SDLC). In line with this view, security tools are now used during SDLC to integrate security into software applications. Here, we propose a neural network based security tool for analyzing software design for security flaws. Our findings show that the trained neural network was able to match possible attack patterns to design scenarios presented to it. With the information on the attack pattern identified, developers can make informed decision in mitigating risks in their designs.