Usability

group_project

Visible to the public EDU: Development and Analysis of a Spiral Theory-based Cybersecurity Curriculum

Submitted by Vinod Lohani on Wed, 10/11/2017 - 12:49am

In this SaTC-EDU project at Virginia Tech, faculty members and graduate students in the Engineering Education, Computer Science (CS), Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) and the Hume Center for National Security and Technology in College of Engineering are collaborating to develop and implement a unique curriculum delivery model in cybersecurity into the CS and ECE curricula using Jerome Bruner's spiral theory approach.

group_project

Visible to the public EDU: Developing Open Authentic Case Studies for a MS in Cybersecurity Capstone Course

Submitted by Grandon Gill on Wed, 10/11/2017 - 12:36am

The project will develop a case method capstone course for a new multidisciplinary Master's degree program in Cybersecurity at the University of South Florida (USF). It extends a project that focused on developing a capstone course for an undergraduate program employing the case method pedagogy. That study demonstrated the feasibility of building a course entirely around discussions of local case studies and demonstrated positive learning outcomes using a variety of instruments.

group_project

Visible to the public TWC SBE: Medium: Collaborative: User-Centric Risk Communication and Control on Mobile Devices

Submitted by ninghui on Tue, 10/10/2017 - 1:05pm

Risk communication is an important part of many cyber security mechanisms. Android's current risk communication mechanism is based on security warnings and has been demonstrated to be ineffective because users become habituated to ignore such warnings and tend to consent to all prompts. This multi-disciplinary research project aims at developing holistic solutions to usable risk communication and control for the Android platform.

group_project

Visible to the public EDU: Collaborative: Integrating Embedded Systems Security into Computer Engineering and Science Curricula

Submitted by Ning Weng on Tue, 10/10/2017 - 11:42am

With the advancement of technologies, networked devices become ubiquitous in the society. Such devices are not limited to traditional computers and smart phones, but are increasingly extended to cover a wide variety of embedded systems (ES), such as sensors monitoring bridges, electronics controlling the operation of automobiles and industrial equipment, home medicine devices that are constantly reporting patient health information to doctors.

group_project

Visible to the public TTP: Small: Network-Level Security Posture Assessment and Predictive Analytics: From Theory to Practice

Submitted by Mingyan Liu on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 3:30pm

This project addresses the following two key questions in cyber security: (1) how is the security condition of a network assessed, and (2) to what extent can we predict data breaches or other cyber security incidents for an organization. The ability to answer both questions has far-reaching social and economic impact. Recent data breaches such as those at Target, JP Morgan, Home Depot, Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and Anthem Healthcare, to name just a few, highlight the increasing social and economic impact of such cyber security incidents.

group_project

Visible to the public EDU: Automated Platform for Cyber Security Learning and Experimentation (AutoCUE)

Submitted by Vassil Roussev on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 1:54pm

One of the main obstacles in providing extensive hands-on experience in cybersecurity classes is the substantial amount of manual work involved in creating and grading the exercise. Combined with the frequent need to update the exercises, this obstacle effectively limits that amount of hands-on work that gets incorporated into cybersecurity education. This project seeks to eliminate such barriers, and to greatly improve the efficiency of the educational process by automating the most time-consuming tasks.

group_project

Visible to the public EAGER: Protecting Election Integrity Via Automated Ballot Usability Evaluation

Submitted by Michael Byrne on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 9:40am

Anything that causes the vote tally to differ from the intent of the voters is a threat to election integrity. While most threats to election integrity have concerned security, there is another critical threat to election integrity: usability. When voters are unable to successfully communicate their intent due to poor ballot design, this threatens the integrity of the election, no matter what the level of security is.

group_project

Visible to the public EAGER: By the People, For the People: Community Ratings for App Privacy

Submitted by Shriram Krishnamu... on Fri, 10/06/2017 - 2:18pm

Application stores use sophisticated user interfaces to help users understand the permissions sought by applications. Unfortunately, these interfaces are complex and may fail to address their goal of helping users give informed consent. As a result, users may inadvertently surrender private information or open themselves up to security attacks.

Outcomes Report URL: 
https://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/desktop?_nfpb=true&_win...
group_project

Visible to the public TWC: Small: Collaborative: Towards Agile and Privacy-Preserving Cloud Computing

Submitted by Meng Yu on Fri, 10/06/2017 - 1:49pm

Cloud computing offers many benefits to users, including increased availability and flexibility of resources, and efficiency of equipment. However, privacy concerns are becoming a major barrier to users transitioning to cloud computing. The privilege design of existing cloud platforms creates great challenges in ensuring the trustworthiness of cloud by granting too much power to the cloud administrators, who could launch serious insider attacks by abusing the administrative privileges.