Nalin Asanka Gamagedara Arachchilage

A game design framework for avoiding phishing attacks

Game based education is becoming more and more popular. This is because game based education provides an opportunity for learning in a natural environment. Phishing is an online identity theft, which attempts to steal sensitive information such as username, password, and online banking details from its victims. To prevent this, phishing awareness needs to be considered. This research aims to develop a game design framework, which enhances user avoidance behaviour through motivation to protect users from phishing attacks. In order to do this, a theoretical model derived from Technology Thread Avoidance Theory (TTAT) was developed and used in the game design framework (Liang & Xue, 2010). A survey study was undertaken with 150 regular computer users to elicit feedback through a questionnaire. The study findings revealed that perceived threat, safeguard effectiveness, safeguard cost, self-efficacy, perceived severity, and perceived susceptibility elements should be addressed in the game design framework for computer users to avoid phishing attacks. Furthermore, we argue that this game design framework can be used not only for preventing phishing attacks but also for preventing other malicious IT attacks such as viruses, malware, botnets and spyware.

Defending against phishing attacks: taxonomy of methods, current issues and future directions

Internet technology is so pervasive today, for example, from online social networking to online banking, it has made people’s lives more comfortable. Due the growth of Internet technology, security threats to systems and networks are relentlessly inventive. One such a serious threat is “phishing”, in which, attackers attempt to steal the user’s credentials using fake emails or websites or both. It is true that both industry and academia are working hard to develop solutions to combat against phishing threats. It is therefore very important that organisations to pay attention to end-user awareness in phishing threat prevention. Therefore, aim of our paper is twofold. First, we will discuss the history of phishing attacks and the attackers’ motivation in details. Then, we will provide taxonomy of various types of phishing attacks. Second, we will provide taxonomy of various solutions proposed in literature to protect users from phishing based on the attacks identified in our taxonomy. Moreover, we have also discussed impact of phishing attacks in Internet of Things (IoTs). We conclude our paper discussing various issues and challenges that still exist in the literature, which are important to fight against with phishing threats.

A taxonomy for securely sharing information among others in a trust domain

In any given collaboration, information needs to flow from one participant to another. While participants may be interested in sharing information with one another, it is often necessary for them to establish the impact of sharing certain kinds of information. This is because certain information could have detrimental effects when it ends up in wrong hands. For this reason, any would-be participant in a collaboration may need to establish the guarantees that the collaboration provides, in terms of protecting sensitive information, before joining the collaboration as well as evaluating the impact of sharing a given piece of information with a given set of entities. The concept of a trust domains aims at managing trust-related issues in information sharing. It is essential for enabling efficient collaborations. Therefore, this research attempts to develop a taxonomy for trust domains with measurable trust characteristics, which provides security-enhanced, distributed containers for the next generation of composite electronic services for supporting collaboration and data exchange within and across multiple organisations. Then the developed taxonomy is applied to a possible scenario, in which the concept of trust domains could be useful.

A Generic Cognitive Dimensions Questionnaire to Evaluate the Usability of Security APIs

Programmers use security APIs to embed security into the applications they develop. Security vulnerabilities get introduced into those applications, due to the usability issues that exist in the security APIs. Improving usability of security APIs would contribute to improve the security of applications that programmers develop. However, currently there is no methodology to evaluate the usability of security APIs. In this study, we attempt to improve the Cognitive Dimensions framework based API usability evaluation methodology, to evaluate the usability of security APIs.

Why Johnny Can't Store Passwords Securely?: A Usability Evaluation of Bouncycastle Password Hashing

Lack of usability of security Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is one of the main reasons for mistakes that programmers make that result in security vulnerabilities in software applications they develop. Especially, APIs that provide cryptographic functionalities such as password hashing are sometimes too complex for programmers to learn and use. To improve the usability of these APIs to make them easy to learn and use, it is important to identify the usability issues exist on those APIs that make those harder to learn and use. In this work, we evaluated the usability of SCrypt password hashing functionality of Bouncycastle API to identify usability issues in it that persuade programmers to make mistakes while developing applications that would result in security vulnerabilities. We conducted a study with 10 programmers where each of them spent around 2 hours for the study and attempted to develop a secure password storage solution using Bouncycastle API. From data we collected, we identified 63 usability issues that exist in the SCrypt implementation of Bouncycastle API. Results of our study provided useful insights about how security/cryptographic APIs should be designed, developed and improved to provide a better experience for programmers who use them. Furthermore, we expect that this work will provide a guidance on how to conduct usability evaluations for security APIs to identify usability issues exist in them.

Why Johnny can’t develop a secure application? A usability analysis of Java Secure Socket Extension API

Abstract Lack of usability of security Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is one of the main reasons for mistakes that programmers make that result in security vulnerabilities in software applications they develop. Especially, APIs that provide Transport Layer Security (TLS) related functionalities are sometimes too complex for programmers to learn and use. Therefore, applications are often diagnosed with vulnerable TLS implementations due to mistakes made by programmers. In this work, we evaluated the usability of Java Secure Socket Extension (JSSE) API to identify usability issues in it that persuade programmers to make mistakes while developing applications that would result in security vulnerabilities. We conducted a study with 11 programmers where each of them spent around 2 hours and attempted to develop a secure programming solution using JSSE API. From data we collected, we identified 59 usability issues that exist in JSSE API. Then we divided those usability issues into 15 cognitive dimensions and analyzed how those issues affected the experience of participant programmers. Results of our study provided useful insights about how TLS APIs and similar security APIs should be designed, developed and improved to provide a better experience for programmers who use them.

Why developers cannot embed privacy into software systems?: An empirical investigation

Pervasive use of software applications continue to challenge user privacy when users interact with software systems. Even though privacy practices such as Privacy by Design (PbD), have clear instructions for software developers to embed privacy into software designs, those practices are yet to become a common practice among software developers. The difficulty of developing privacy preserving software systems highlights the importance of investigating software developers and the problems they face when they are asked to embed privacy into application designs. Software developers are the community who can put practices such as PbD into action. Therefore identifying the problems they face when embedding privacy into software applications and providing solutions to those problems are important to enable the development of privacy preserving software systems. This study investigates 36 software developers in a software design task with instructions to embed privacy in order to identify the problems they face. We derive recommendation guidelines to address the problems to enable the development of privacy preserving software systems.

Understanding user privacy expectations: A software developer’s perspective

Abstract Software developers are trained to develop and design software applications that provide services to users. However, software applications sometimes collect users’ data without their knowledge. When applications collect and use users’ data without transparency, this leads to user privacy invasions because users do not expect the application to collect and use these information. Therefore, it is important that software developers understand users’ privacy expectations when designing applications in order to handle user data transparently in software applications. However, due to the lack of systematic approaches to extract user privacy requirements, developers end up designing applications either based on their assumptions on user privacy expectations, or relating to their own expectations of privacy as a user. Nevertheless, how accurate these perceived privacy expectations are against actual user expectations is not currently known. This research focuses on investigating developers’ privacy expectations from a user point of view against users’ privacy expectations. We also investigate developers’ assumptions on user privacy expectations against actual user privacy expectations. Our findings revealed that developers’ assumptions on user privacy expectations are close to their own expectations of privacy from a user point of view and that developers’ privacy expectations from a user point of view are significantly different from actual user privacy expectations. With this understanding, we provide recommendations for software developers to understand and acknowledge user expectations on privacy when they design and develop applications.

Designing Privacy for You: A Practical Approach for User-Centric Privacy

Privacy directly concerns the user as the data owner (data-subject) and hence privacy in systems should be implemented in a manner which concerns the user (user-centered). There are many concepts and guidelines that support development of privacy and embedding privacy into systems. However, none of them approaches privacy in a user-centered manner. Through this research we propose a framework that would enable developers and designers to grasp privacy in a user-centered manner and implement it along with the software development life cycle.