Biblio

Smart contracts are an attractive aspect of blockchain technology. A smart contract is a piece of executable code that runs on top of the blockchain and is used to facilitate, execute, and enforce agreements between untrustworthy parties without the need for a third party. This paper offers a review of the literature on smart contract applications in intellectual property management. The goal is to look at technology advancements and smart contract deployment in this area. The theoretical foundation of many papers published in recent years is used as a source of theoretical and implementation research for this purpose. According to the literature review we conducted, smart contracts function automatically, control, or document legally significant events and activities in line with the contract agreement's terms. This is a relatively new technology that is projected to deliver solutions for trust, security, and transparency across a variety of areas. An exploratory strategy was used to perform this literature review.

This paper discusses the outcome of combining insider threat agent taxonomies with the aim of enhancing insider threat detection. The objectives sought to explore taxonomy combinations and investigate threat sophistication from the taxonomy combinations. Investigations revealed the plausibility of combining the various taxonomy categories to derive a new taxonomy. An observation on category combinations yielded the introduction of the concept of a threat path. The proposed taxonomy tree consisted of more than a million threat-paths obtained using a formula from combinatorics analysis. The taxonomy category combinations thus increase the insider threat landscape and hence the gap between insider threat agent sophistication and countermeasures. On the defensive side, knowledge of insider threat agent taxonomy category combinations has the potential to enhance defensive countermeasure tactics, techniques and procedures, thus increasing the chances of insider threat detection.

Web evolution and Web 2.0 social media tools facilitate communication and support the online economy. On the other hand, these tools are actively used by extremist, terrorist and criminal groups. These malicious groups use these new communication channels, such as forums, blogs and social networks, to spread their ideologies, recruit new members, market their malicious goods and raise their funds. They rely on anonymous communication methods that are provided by the new Web. This malicious part of the web is called the “dark web”. Dark web analysis became an active research area in the last few decades, and multiple research studies were conducted in order to understand our enemy and plan for counteract. We have conducted a systematic literature review to identify the state-of-art and open research areas in dark web analysis. We have filtered the available research papers in order to obtain the most relevant work. This filtration yielded 28 studies out of 370. Our systematic review is based on four main factors: the research trends used to analyze dark web, the employed analysis techniques, the analyzed artifacts, and the accuracy and confidence of the available work. Our review results have shown that most of the dark web research relies on content analysis. Also, the results have shown that forum threads are the most analyzed artifacts. Also, the most significant observation is the lack of applying any accuracy metrics or validation techniques by most of the relevant studies. As a result, researchers are advised to consider using acceptance metrics and validation techniques in their future work in order to guarantee the confidence of their study results. In addition, our review has identified some open research areas in dark web analysis which can be considered for future research work.

Over the past two decades, several forms of non-intrusive technology have been deployed in cooperation with medical specialists in order to aid patients diagnosed with some form of mental, cognitive or psychological condition. Along with the availability and accessibility to applications offered by mobile devices, as well as the advancements in the field of Artificial Intelligence applications and Natural Language Processing, Conversational Agents have been developed with the objective of aiding medical specialists detecting those conditions in their early stages and monitoring their symptoms and effects on the cognitive state of the patient, as well as supporting the patient in their effort of mitigating those symptoms. Coupled with the recent advances in the the scientific field of machine and deep learning, we aim to explore the grade of applicability of such technologies into cognitive health support Conversational Agents, and their impact on the acceptability of such applications bytheir end users. Therefore, we conduct a systematic literature review, following a transparent and thorough process in order to search and analyze the bibliography of the past five years, focused on the implementation of Conversational Agents, supported by Artificial Intelligence technologies and in service of patients diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment and its variants.

Financial technology (Fintech) is an amalgamation of financial management using a technology system. Fintech has become a public concern because this service provides many service features to make it easier from the financial side, such as being used in cooperative financial institutions, banking and insurance. This paper will analyze the opportunities and challenges of Fintech sharia in Indonesia. By exploring the existing literature, this article will try to answer that question. This research is carried out using a literature review approach and comparative qualitative method which will determined the results of the SWOT analysis of sharia financial technology in indonesia. It is needed to mitigate risk of funding in a peer to peer method in overcoming the security of funds and data from investors, firstly companies can perform transparency on the clarity of investor funds. This is done as one of the facilities provided to investors in the Fintech application. In the future, it is hoped that in facing competition, sharia-based fintech companies must be able to provide targeted services through the socialization of sharia fintech to the public, both online and offline. Investors are expected to be more careful before investing in choosing Fintech Peer to Peer (P2P) Lending services by checking the list of Fintech lending and lending companies registered and found by the Financial Services Authority (OJK).

The increasing use of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in DevOps leads to benefits in speed and reliability of deployment operation, but extends to infrastructure challenges typical of software systems. IaC scripts can contain defects that result in security and reliability issues in the deployed infrastructure: techniques for detecting and preventing them are needed. We analyze and survey the current state of research in this respect by conducting a literature review on static analysis techniques for IaC. We describe analysis techniques, defect categories and platforms targeted by tools in the literature.

Edge computing is a prospective notion for expanding the potential of cloud computing. It is vital to maintaining a decent atmosphere free of all forms of security and breaches in order to continue utilizing computer services. The security concerns surrounding the edge computing environment has been impeded as a result of the security issues that surround the area. Many researchers have looked into edge computing security issues, however, not all have thoroughly studied the needs. Security requirements are the goals that specify the capabilities and operations that a process that is carried out by a system in order to eliminate various security flaws. The purpose of this study is to give a complete overview of the many different artificial intelligence technologies that are now being utilized for edge computing security with the intention of aiding research in the future in locating research potential. This article analyzed the most recent research and shed light on the following topics: state-of-the-art techniques used to combat security threats, technological trends used by the method, metrics utilize to assess the techniques' ability, and opportunities of research for future researchers in the area of artificial intelligence for edge computing security.

Over the years, human errors have been identified as one of the most critical factors impacting cybersecurity in an organization that has had a substantial impact. The research uses recent articles published on human resources and information cybersecurity. This research focuses on the vulnerabilities and the best solution to mitigate these threats based on literature review methodology. The study also focuses on identifying the human attitude and behavior towards cybersecurity and how that would impact the organization's financial impact. With the help of the Two-factor Taxonomy of the security behavior model developed in past research, the research aims to identify the best practices and compare the best practices with that of the attitude-behavior found and matched to the model. Finally, the study would compare the difference between best practices and the current practices from the model. This would help provide the organization with specific recommendations that would help change their attitude and behavior towards cybersecurity and ensure the organization is not fearful of the cyber threat of human error threat.

Employees' compliance with information security policies (ISP) which may minimize the information security threats has always been a major concern for organizations. Numerous research and theoretical models had been investigated in the related field of study to identify factors that influence ISP compliance behavior. The study presented in this paper is the first to apply the Theory of Interpersonal Behavior (TIB) for predicting ISP compliance, despite a few studies suggested its strong explanatory power. Taking on the prior results of the literature review, we adopt the TIB and aim to further the theoretical advancement in this field of study. Besides, previous studies had only focused on individuals as well as organizations in which the role of government, from the aspect of its effectiveness in enforcing data protection regulation, so far has not been tested on its influence on individuals' intention to comply with ISP. Hence, we propose an exploratory study to integrate government effectiveness with TIB to explain ISP compliance in a Malaysian context. Our results show a significant influence of government effectiveness in ISP compliance, and the TIB is a promising model as well as posing strong explanatory power in predicting ISP compliance.

Today we live in a hyper-connected world, where a large amount of applications and services are supported by ad hoc networks. They have a decentralized management, are flexible and versatile but their characteristics are in turn their main weaknesses. This work introduces a preliminary analysis of the evolution, trends and the state of the art in the context of the security in ad hoc networks. To this end, two different methodologies are applied: a bibliometric analysis and a Systematic Literature Review. Results show that security in MANETs and VANETs are still an appealing research field. In addition, we realized that there is no clear separation of solutions by line of defense. This is because they are sometimes misclassified by the authors or simply there is no line of defense that totally fit well with the proposed solution. Because of that, new taxonomies including novel definitions of lines of defense are needed. In this work, we propose the use of tolerant or survivable solutions which are the ones that preserve critical system or network services in presence of fault, malfunctions or attacks.

Low power and lossy networks (LLNs) devices resource-constrained nature make it difficult to implement security mechanisms to defend against RPL routing attacks. RPLs inbuilt security functions are not efficient in preventing a wide majority of routing attacks. RPLs optional security schemes can defend against external attacks, but cannot mitigate internal attacks. Moreover, RPL does not have any mechanism to verify the integrity of control messages used to keep topology updated and route the traffic. All these factors play a major role in increasing the RPLs threat level against routing attacks. In this paper, a comparative literature review of various researchers suggesting security mechanisms to mitigate security attacks aimed at RPL has been performed and methods have been contrasted.

Multi-agent architectures have been successful in attaining considerable attention among computer security researchers. This is so, because of their demonstrated capabilities such as autonomy, embedded intelligence, learning and self-growing knowledge-base, high scalability, fault tolerance, and automatic parallelism. These characteristics have made this technology a de facto standard for developing ambient security systems to meet the open and dynamic nature of today's online communities. Although multi-agent architectures are increasingly studied in the area of computer security, there is still not enough empirical evidence on their performance in intrusions and attacks detection. The aim of this paper is to report the systematic literature review conducted in the context of specific research questions, to investigate multi-agent IDS architectures to highlight the issues that affect their performance in terms of detection accuracy and response time. We used pertinent keywords and terms to search and retrieve the most recent research studies, on multi-agent IDS architectures, from the major research databases and digital libraries such as SCOPUS, Springer, and IEEE Explore. The search processes resulted in a number of studies; among them, there were journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, dissertations, and theses. The obtained studies were assessed and filtered out, and finally, there were over 71 studies chosen to answer the research questions. The results of this study have shown that multi-agent architectures include several advantages that can help in the development of ambient IDS. However, it has been found that there are several issues in the current multi-agent IDS architectures that may degrade the accuracy and response time of intrusions and attacks detection. Based on our findings, the issues of multi-agent IDS architectures include limitations in the techniques, mechanisms, and schemes used for multi-agent IDS adaptation and learning, load balancing, scalability, fault-tolerance, and high communication overhead. It has also been found that new measurement metrics are required for evaluating multi-agent IDS architectures.

Machine learning (ML) techniques are changing both the offensive and defensive aspects of cybersecurity. The implications are especially strong for privacy, as ML approaches provide unprecedented opportunities to make use of collected data. Thus, education on cybersecurity and AI is needed. To investigate how AI and cybersecurity should be taught together, we look at previous studies on cybersecurity MOOCs by conducting a systematic literature review. The initial search resulted in 72 items and after screening for only peer-reviewed publications on cybersecurity online courses, 15 studies remained. Three of the studies concerned multiple cybersecurity MOOCs whereas 12 focused on individual courses. The number of published work evaluating specific cybersecurity MOOCs was found to be small compared to all available cybersecurity MOOCs. Analysis of the studies revealed that cybersecurity education is, in almost all cases, organised based on the topic instead of used tools, making it difficult for learners to find focused information on AI applications in cybersecurity. Furthermore, there is a gab in academic literature on how AI applications in cybersecurity should be taught in online courses.

Cybersecurity cannot be addressed by technology alone; the most intractable aspects are in fact sociotechnical. As a result, the 'human factor' has been recognised as being the weakest and most obscure link in creating safe and secure digital environments. This study examines the subjective and often complex nature of human factors in the cybersecurity context through a systematic literature review of 27 articles which span across technical, behavior and social sciences perspectives. Results from our study suggest that there is still a predominately a technical focus, which excludes the consideration of human factors in cybersecurity. Our literature review suggests that this is due to a lack of consolidation of the attributes pertaining to human factors; the application of theoretical frameworks; and a lack of in-depth qualitative studies. To ensure that these gaps are addressed, we propose that future studies take into consideration (a) consolidating the human factors; (b) examining cyber security from an interdisciplinary approach; (c) conducting additional qualitative research whilst investigating human factors in cybersecurity.

Cybersecurity is a growing concern for private individuals and professional entities. Thereby, reports have shown that the majority of cybersecurity incidents occur because users fail to behave securely. Research on human cybersecurity (HCS) behavior suggests that time pressure is one of the important driving factors behind insecure HCS behavior. However, as our review reveals, studies on the role of time pressure in HCS are scant and there is no framework that can inform researchers and practitioners on this matter. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework consisting of contexts, psychological constructs, and boundary conditions pertaining to the role time pressure plays on HCS behavior. The framework is also validated and extended by findings from semi-structured interviews of different stakeholder groups comprising of cybersecurity experts, professionals, and general users. The framework will serve as a guideline for future studies exploring different aspects of time pressure in cybersecurity contexts and also to identify potential countermeasures for the detrimental impact of time pressure on HCS behavior.

In today's interconnected world, universities recognize the importance of protecting their information assets from internal and external threats. Being the possible insider threats to Information Security, employees are often coined as the weakest link. Both employees and organizations should be aware of this raising challenge. Understanding staff perception of compliance behaviour is critical for universities wanting to leverage their staff capabilities to mitigate Information Security risks. Therefore, this research seeks to get insights into staff perception based on factors adopted from several theories by using proposed constructs i.e. "perceived" practices/policies and "perceived" intention to comply. Drawing from the General Deterrence Theory, Protection Motivation Theory, Theory of Planned Behaviour and Information Reinforcement, within the context of Palestine universities, this paper integrates staff awareness of Information Security Policies (ISP) countermeasures as antecedents to ``perceived'' influencing factors (perceived sanctions, perceived rewards, perceived coping appraisal, and perceived information reinforcement). The empirical study is designed to follow a quantitative research approaches, use survey as a data collection method and questionnaires as the research instruments. Partial least squares structural equation modelling is used to inspect the reliability and validity of the measurement model and hypotheses testing for the structural model. The research covers ISP awareness among staff and seeks to assert that information security is the responsibility of all academic and administrative staff from all departments. Overall, our pilot study findings seem promising, and we found strong support for our theoretical model.

In Cloud Manufacturing trust is an important, under investigated issue. This paper proceeds the noncommittal phase of the grounded theory method approach by investigating the trust topic in several research streams, defining the problem domain. This novel approach fills a research gap and can be treated as a snapshot and blueprint of research. Findings were accomplished by a structured literature review and are able to help future researchers in pursuing the integrative phase in Grounded Theory by building on the preliminary result of this paper.

The aim of the study is to evaluate the consistency of supplier risk assessment performed during the supplier selection process. Existing literature indicates that current supplier selection processes yield inconsistent results. Consistent supplier selection cannot be accomplished without stable risk assessment performed during the process. A case study was conducted in a train manufacturer in South Africa, and document analysis, interviews and questionnaires were employed to source information and data. Triangulation and pattern matching enabled a comparative study between literature and practice from which findings were derived. The study suggests selection criteria that may be considered when performing supplier risk assessment during the selection process. The findings indicate that structured supplier risk assessment with predefined supplier selection criteria may eliminate inconsistencies in supplier assessment and selection.

Information on cyber incidents and threats are currently collected and processed with a strong technical focus. Threat and vulnerability information alone are not a solid base for effective, affordable or actionable security advice for decision makers. They need more than a small technical cut of a bigger situational picture to combat and not only to mitigate the cyber threat. We first give a short overview over the related work that can be found in the literature. We found that the approaches mostly analysed “what” has been done, instead of looking more generically beyond the technical aspects for the tactics, techniques and procedures to identify the “how” it was done, by whom and why. We examine then, what information categories and data already exist to answer the question for an adversary's capabilities and objectives. As traditional intelligence tries to serve a better understanding of adversaries' capabilities, actions, and intent, the same is feasible in the cyber space with cyber intelligence. Thus, we identify information sources in the military and civil environment, before we propose to link that traditional information with the technical data for a better situational picture. We give examples of information that can be collected from traditional intelligence for correlation with technical data. Thus, the same intelligence operational picture for the cyber sphere could be developed like the one that is traditionally fed from conventional intelligence disciplines. Finally we propose a way of including intelligence processing in cyber analysis. We finally outline requirements that are key for a successful exchange of information and intelligence between military/civil information providers.