No Arabic abstract
Gamification and Serious Games are progressively being used over a host of fields, particularly to support education. Such games provide a new way to engage students with content and can complement more traditional approaches to learning. This article proposes SherLOCKED, a new serious game created in the style of a 2D top-down puzzle adventure. The game is situated in the context of an undergraduate cyber security course, and is used to consolidate students knowledge of foundational security concepts (e.g. the CIA triad, security threats and attacks and risk management). SherLOCKED was built based on a review of existing serious games and a study of common gamification principles. It was subsequently implemented within an undergraduate course, and evaluated with 112 students. We found the game to be an effective, attractive and fun solution for allowing further engagement with content that students were introduced to during lectures. This research lends additional evidence to the use of serious games in supporting learning about cyber security.
Serious games are beneficial for education in various computer science areas. Numerous works have reported the experiences of using games (not only playing but also development) in teaching and learning. Considering it could be difficult for teachers/students to prepare/develop a game from scratch during one semester, assistant educational materials would be crucial in the corresponding courses. Unfortunately, the literature shows that not many materials from educational game projects are shared. To help different educators identify suitable courseware and help students implement game development, it is worth further investigating and accumulating the educational resources from individual game projects. Following such an idea, this paper proposes a game development project of an object-oriented Sokoban solver, and exposes relevant educational materials. The documented system design can be viewed as a ready-to-use resource for education in object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD), while the Sokoban solver itself may be used as an assignment platform for teaching artificial intelligence (AI). Further documentation, platform, and APIs will be realized and shared in the future to facilitate others educational activities. Overall, this work is supposed to inspire and encourage other researchers and educators to post available materials of more game projects for the purpose of sharing and reuse.
Mixed reality (MR) technology development is now gaining momentum due to advances in computer vision, sensor fusion, and realistic display technologies. With most of the research and development focused on delivering the promise of MR, there is only barely a few working on the privacy and security implications of this technology. This survey paper aims to put in to light these risks, and to look into the latest security and privacy work on MR. Specifically, we list and review the different protection approaches that have been proposed to ensure user and data security and privacy in MR. We extend the scope to include work on related technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and human-computer interaction (HCI) as crucial components, if not the origins, of MR, as well as numerous related work from the larger area of mobile devices, wearables, and Internet-of-Things (IoT). We highlight the lack of investigation, implementation, and evaluation of data protection approaches in MR. Further challenges and directions on MR security and privacy are also discussed.
In this study, we examine the ways in which user attitudes towards privacy and security relating to mobile devices and the data stored thereon may impact the strength of unlock authentication, focusing on Androids graphical unlock patterns. We conducted an online study with Amazon Mechanical Turk ($N=750$) using self-reported unlock authentication choices, as well as Likert scale agreement/disagreement responses to a set of seven privacy/security prompts. We then analyzed the responses in multiple dimensions, including a straight average of the Likert responses as well as using Principle Component Analysis to expose latent factors. We found that responses to two of the seven questions proved relevant and significant. These two questions considered attitudes towards general concern for data stored on mobile devices, and attitudes towards concerns for unauthorized access by known actors. Unfortunately, larger conclusions cannot be drawn on the efficacy of the broader set of questions for exposing connections between unlock authentication strength (Pearson Rank $r=-0.08$, $p<0.1$). However, both of our factor solutions exposed differences in responses for demographics groups, including age, gender, and residence type. The findings of this study suggests that there is likely a link between perceptions of privacy/security on mobile devices and the perceived threats therein, but more research is needed, particularly on developing better survey and measurement techniques of privacy/security attitudes that relate to mobile devices specifically.
The various types of communication technologies and mobility features in Internet of Things (IoT) on the one hand enable fruitful and attractive applications, but on the other hand facilitates malware propagation, thereby raising new challenges on handling IoT-empowered malware for cyber security. Comparing with the malware propagation control scheme in traditional wireless networks where nodes can be directly repaired and secured, in IoT, compromised end devices are difficult to be patched. Alternatively, blocking malware via patching intermediate nodes turns out to be a more feasible and practical solution. Specifically, patching intermediate nodes can effectively prevent the proliferation of malware propagation by securing infrastructure links and limiting malware propagation to local device-to-device dissemination. This article proposes a novel traffic-aware patching scheme to select important intermediate nodes to patch, which applies to the IoT system with limited patching resources and response time constraint. Experiments on real-world trace datasets in IoT networks are conducted to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed traffic-aware patching scheme in alleviating malware propagation.
Defending computer networks from cyber attack requires coordinating actions across multiple nodes based on imperfect indicators of compromise while minimizing disruptions to network operations. Advanced attacks can progress with few observable signals over several months before execution. The resulting sequential decision problem has large observation and action spaces and a long time-horizon, making it difficult to solve with existing methods. In this work, we present techniques to scale deep reinforcement learning to solve the cyber security orchestration problem for large industrial control networks. We propose a novel attention-based neural architecture with size complexity that is invariant to the size of the network under protection. A pre-training curriculum is presented to overcome early exploration difficulty. Experiments show in that the proposed approaches greatly improve both the learning sample complexity and converged policy performance over baseline methods in simulation.