Maha Faisal

Social network privacy and trust concerns

Social Network Sites (SNS) developed to provide means of interaction and/or data sharing between multiple users. The study of online SNS privacy and trust management has few empirical studies and needs to be examined in greater depth. This pilot study evaluates the privacy aspects, trust concerns, and attitudes of young Kuwaiti social network users as well as assesses how these behaviors map against privacy vulnerabilities inherent to social networking applications. This study employed a survey with 222 participants, examining five areas: social network usage, literacy, youth social behavior, and both privacy and trust concerns.

Security framework for RESTful mobile cloud computing Web services

Providing Web services from the mobile cloud is a current research topic. The mobile cloud provides the computing resources and infrastructure to support the seamless provision of Web services in a lightweight manner. Security has become a major concern with the emergence of mobile cloud Web services. In this paper, we investigate the security aspects of a system for complex mobile Web service provisioning. We characterize the security requirements of the individual components and present a security framework to provide authentication and confidentiality between clients and mobile hosts. Our solution is based on the use of existing security protocols between clients and the mobile hosts as well as a key management protocol between the individual mobile hosts implementing an out-of-band key exchange that is simple in practice, flexible and secure. We examine the performance of this approach by evaluating a prototype implementation of our security framework.

Mobile Cloud Computing for Providing Complex Mobile Web Services

Simple Web services can be provided directly from one mobile device acting as a server. However, complex services need a mobile cloud to provide computing resources and infrastructure to support seamless provision of its Web services in a light weight manner. Our approach focuses on the architecture of this mobile cloud, which consists of a set of collaborative mobile devices that relies on an Extended Mobile Host Complex Web service Framework (EMHCWF). The main building blocks of EMHCWF with their associated distributed mechanisms are defined and tested experimentally. Furthermore, the safety properties of mobile cloud infrastructure have been validated using formal methods that are based on process algebra.

Improving literacy for deaf Arab children using interactive storytelling

Initial contact with Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) for most deaf Arab children occurs in elementary school. These children face challenges in making a meaningful connection between ArSL and spoken and written Arabic, and this further affects their overall language development. This ongoing research addresses how an e-learning tool such as storytelling can be used as an instructional reading program in the classroom to enhance literacy learning and communication skills for deaf Arab children. Our aim is to create an effective storytelling tool with various interactive features that would provide deaf children with new opportunities to improve their literacy and communication skills. We believe that an informal learning method such as storytelling provides life experiences and promotes the use of vocabulary and communication skills. The proposed interactive storytelling program will enable teachers to help deaf children learn to create their own narratives and improve their essential skills and general knowledge.

Fault Detection for Message Passing Systems

Many crucial dependable and secure services including atomic commitment, consensus and group membership, and middleware services (such as replica, communication and transaction services) use fault detectors. Through the use of fault detectors, the overlying service can be exempted from failure treatment and synchronization requirements. Fault detection is essential for proving that the services carried out are correct. In this paper, we first identify the necessary conditions to detect faults in a message passing system where multiple disjoint paths exist between each pair of endpoints. We then present the first fault detection protocol capable of detecting message meta-data modification in the presence of various message interferences in addition to other faults including omission faults, message replay and spurious messages using disjoint paths, where paths with faults are not known a priori. In addition, it authenticates message origins allowing Sybil attacks to be detected, identifies faulty paths, and classifies faults in the presence of multiple messages sent by various system processes. We establish the completeness and soundness properties of the proposed algorithm, i.e., it detects each considered fault and each detected fault is an actual fault, respectively. We also show that our algorithm does not yield a significant packet size and delay overheads. The algorithm shows the viability of the use of disjoint paths in fault detection.

A direct method for measuring user experience in E-government portals (May 2016)

The transition from an informative to a service oriented interactive governmental portals has become a necessity due to the time and cost saving benefits for both governments and users. User experience is a key factor in maintaining these benefits. In this study we propose an E-government Portal Assessment Method (EGPAM), which is a direct method for measuring user experience in e-government portals. We present a case study assessing the portal of the Ministry of Public Works (MOW) in Kuwait. Results showed that having a direct measurement to user experience enabled easier identification of the current level of user satisfaction and provided a guidance on ways to improve user experience and addressing identified issues.