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For the first time, we enable the execution of hybrid machine learning methods on real quantum computers with 100 data samples and real-device-based simulations with 5,000 data samples, thereby outperforming the current state of research of Suryotrisongko and Musashi from 2022 who were dealing with 1,000 data samples and quantum simulators (pure software-based emulators) only. Additionally, we beat their reported accuracy of $76.8\%$ by an average accuracy of $89.0\%$, all within a total execution time of 382 seconds. %They did not report their execution time. We achieve this significant progress through two-step strategy: Firstly, we establish a stable quantum architecture that enables us to execute HQML algorithms on real quantum devices. Secondly, we introduce new hybrid quantum binary classification algorithms based on Hoeffding decision tree algorithms. These algorithms speed up the process via batch-wise execution, reducing the number of shots required on real quantum devices compared to conventional loop-based optimizers. Their incremental nature serves the purpose of online large-scale data streaming for DGA botnet detection, and allows us to apply hybrid quantum machine learning to the field of cybersecurity analytics. We conduct our experiments using the Qiskit library with the Aer quantum simulator, and on three different real quantum devices from MS Azure Quantum: IonQ, Rigetti, and Quantinuum. This is the first time these tools are combined in this manner., 29 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables

Crypto-ransomware remains a significant threat to governments and companies alike, with high-profile cyber security incidents regularly making headlines. Many different detection systems have been proposed as solutions to the ever-changing dynamic landscape of ransomware detection. In the majority of cases, these described systems propose a method based on the result of a single test performed on either the executable code, the process under investigation, its behaviour, or its output. In a small subset of ransomware detection systems, the concept of a scorecard is employed where multiple tests are performed on various aspects of a process under investigation and their results are then analysed using machine learning. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new majority voting approach to ransomware detection by developing a method that uses a cumulative score derived from discrete tests based on calculations using algorithmic rather than heuristic techniques. The paper describes 23 candidate tests, as well as 9 Windows API tests which are validated to determine both their accuracy and viability for use within a ransomware detection system. Using a cumulative score calculation approach to ransomware detection has several benefits, such as the immunity to the occasional inaccuracy of individual tests when making its final classification. The system can also leverage multiple tests that can be both comprehensive and complimentary in an attempt to achieve a broader, deeper, and more robust analysis of the program under investigation. Additionally, the use of multiple collaborative tests also significantly hinders ransomware from masking or modifying its behaviour in an attempt to bypass detection., 17 pages

Since 2016, NIST has been assessing lightweight encryption methods, and, in 2022, NIST published the final 10: ASCON, Elephant, GIFT-COFB, Grain128-AEAD, ISAP, Photon-Beetle, Romulus, Sparkle, TinyJambu, and Xoodyak. At the time that the article was written, NISC announced ASCOn as the chosen method that will be published as NIST'S lightweight cryptography standard later in 2023. In this article, we provide a comparison between these methods in terms of energy efficiency, time for encryption, and time for hashing., Comment: 6 pages

In the past, citizen identity has been used within siloed data areas, and where government agencies have linked citizens across different services. Often these identifiers were simple alphanumeric strings, and which were assigned by government agencies. These identifiers are then linked in some way to the citizen, and where citizens often have to request access to documents that prove certain aspects of their citizenship. These systems, too, often use paper-based approaches and have little in the way of real digital trust. But, in an information age, we now have the ability to provide unique digital identifiers for each citizen, and then for them to claim access to their citizenship documents. This might be in the form of their academic qualifications, their tax status, or even their driver's licence. While, at one time, these documents were either held by the trusted issuers of the information, or in a paper form, we now have the opportunity for these documents to be linked to a citizen wallet. This would allow citizens the opportunity to request documents once, but use them many times. A core part of this is the unique private key associated with the citizen, and in the usage of digital signing by trusted entities. While many countries have struggled to implement a digital identity scheme, the EU Commission has the ambition to provide every EU citizen with a digital wallet, and thus moved towards improved freedom of movement and integration of the countries within the EU. The scale of this cannot be underestimated, and it could break down the barriers that have been created by legacy systems. In order to harmonise the integration of both citizens and trusted signers, the EU Commission proposes the usage of EBSI (European Blockchain Services Infrastructure).

It was found when reviewing the ransomware detection research literature that almost no proposal provided enough detail on how the test data set was created, or sufficient description of its actual content, to allow it to be recreated by other researchers interested in reconstructing their environment and validating the research results. A modern cybersecurity mixed file data set called NapierOne is presented, primarily aimed at, but not limited to, ransomware detection and forensic analysis research. NapierOne was designed to address this deficiency in reproducibility and improve consistency by facilitating research replication and repeatability. The methodology used in the creation of this data set is also described in detail. The data set was inspired by the Govdocs1 data set and it is intended that NapierOne be used as a complement to this original data set.An investigation was performed with the goal of determining the common files types currently in use. No specific research was found that explicitly provided this information, so an alternative consensus approach was employed. This involved combining the findings from multiple sources of file type usage into an overall ranked list. After which 5000 real-world example files were gathered, and a specific data subset created, for each of the common file types identified. In some circumstances, multiple data subsets were created for a specific file type, each subset representing a specific characteristic for that file type. For example, there are multiple data subsets for the ZIP file type with each subset containing examples of a specific compression method. Ransomware execution tends to produce files that have high entropy, so examples of file types that naturally have this attribute are also present. The resulting entire data set comprises of nearly 100 separate data subsets divided between 44 distinct file types, resulting in almost 500,000 unique files in total. A description of the techniques used to gather the files for each file type is provided together with the actions that were performed on the files to confirm that they were of the highest quality and provided an accurate representation of their specific file type. Details are also provided on the content of the entire data set as well as instructions on how researchers can gain free and unlimited access to the final data set.While the data set was initially created to aid research in ransomware detection, it is sufficiently broad and diverse enough to allow for its application in many other areas of research that require a varied mixture of common real-world file examples. The NapierOne data set is an ongoing project and researchers are strongly encouraged to leverage this data set in their own research.

Threat information sharing is considered as one of the proactive defensive approaches for enhancing the overall security of trusted partners. Trusted partner organizations can provide access to past and current cybersecurity threats for reducing the risk of a potential cyberattack - the requirements for threat information sharing range from simplistic sharing of documents to threat intelligence sharing. Therefore, the storage and sharing of highly sensitive threat information raises considerable concerns regarding constructing a secure, trusted threat information exchange infrastructure. Establishing a trusted ecosystem for threat sharing will promote the validity, security, anonymity, scalability, latency efficiency, and traceability of the stored information that protects it from unauthorized disclosure. This paper proposes a system that ensures the security principles mentioned above by utilizing a distributed ledger technology that provides secure decentralized operations through smart contracts and provides a privacy-preserving ecosystem for threat information storage and sharing regarding the MITRE ATT\&CK framework.

The spread of COVID-19 has highlighted the need for a robust contact tracing infrastructure that enables infected individuals to have their contacts traced, and followed up with a test. The key entities involved within a contact tracing infrastructure may include the Citizen, a Testing Centre (TC), a Health Authority (HA), and a Government Authority (GA). Typically, these different domains need to communicate with each other about an individual. A common approach is when a citizen discloses his personally identifiable information to both the HA a TC, if the test result comes positive, the information is used by the TC to alert the HA. Along with this, there can be other trusted entities that have other key elements of data related to the citizen. However, the existing approaches comprise severe flaws in terms of privacy and security. Additionally, the aforementioned approaches are not transparent and often being questioned for the efficacy of the implementations. In order to overcome the challenges, this paper outlines the PAN-DOMAIN infrastructure that allows for citizen identifiers to be matched amongst the TA, the HA and the GA. PAN-DOMAIN ensures that the citizen can keep control of the mapping between the trusted entities using a trusted converter, and has access to an audit log.

Digital vaccine passports are one of the main solutions which would allow the restart of travel in a post COVID-19 world. Trust, scalability and security are all key challenges one must overcome in implementing a vaccine passport. Initial approaches attempt to solve this problem by using centralised systems with trusted authorities. However, sharing vaccine passport data between different organisations, regions and countries has become a major challenge. This paper designs a new platform architecture for creating, storing and verifying digital COVID-19 vaccine certifications. The platform makes use of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to guarantee there is no single point of failure and allow data to be securely distributed globally. Blockchain and smart contracts are also integrated into the platform to define policies and log access rights to vaccine passport data while ensuring all actions are audited and verifiably immutable. Our proposed platform realises General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements in terms of user consent, data encryption, data erasure and accountability obligations. We assess the scalability and performance of the platform using IPFS and Blockchain test networks.

The continuously advancing digitization has provided answers to the bureaucratic problems faced by eGovernance services. This innovation led them to an era of automation it has broadened the attack surface and made them a popular target for cyber attacks. eGovernance services utilize internet, which is currently a location addressed system where whoever controls the location controls not only the content itself, but the integrity of that content, and the access to that content. We propose GLASS, a decentralised solution which combines the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) with Distributed Ledger technology and Smart Contracts to secure EGovernance services. We also create a testbed environment where we measure the IPFS performance., Comment: To be published in the proceedings of the 7th Workshop On The Security Of Industrial Control Systems & Of Cyber-Physical Systems (CyberICPS 2021). In Conjunction With ESORICS 2021

A large number of smart devices in Internet of Things (IoT) environments communicate via different messaging protocols. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is a widely used publish–subscribe-based protocol for the communication of sensor or event data. The publish–subscribe strategy makes it more attractive for intruders and thus increases the number of possible attacks over MQTT. In this paper, we proposed a Deep Neural Network (DNN) for intrusion detection in the MQTT-based protocol and also compared its performance with other traditional machine learning (ML) algorithms, such as a Naive Bayes (NB), Random Forest (RF), k-Nearest Neighbour (kNN), Decision Tree (DT), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs). The performance is proved using two different publicly available datasets, including (1) MQTT-IoT-IDS2020 and (2) a dataset with three different types of attacks, such as Man in the Middle (MitM), Intrusion in the network, and Denial of Services (DoS). The MQTT-IoT-IDS2020 contains three abstract-level features, including Uni-Flow, Bi-Flow, and Packet-Flow. The results for the first dataset and binary classification show that the DNN-based model achieved 99.92%, 99.75%, and 94.94% accuracies for Uni-flow, Bi-flow, and Packet-flow, respectively. However, in the case of multi-label classification, these accuracies reduced to 97.08%, 98.12%, and 90.79%, respectively. On the other hand, the proposed DNN model attains the highest accuracy of 97.13% against LSTM and GRUs for the second dataset.

The COVID-19 pandemic has recently emerged as a worldwide health emergency that necessitates coordinated international measures. To contain the virus's spread, governments and health organisations raced to develop vaccines that would lower Covid-19 morbidity, relieve pressure on healthcare systems, and allow economies to open. As a way forward after the COVID-19 vaccination, the Vaccination certificate has been adopted to help the authorities formulate policies by controlling cross-border travelling. To resolve significant privacy concerns and remove the need for relying on third parties to maintain trust and control the user's data, in this paper, we leverage blockchain technologies in developing a secure and verifiable vaccination certificate. Our approach has the advantage of utilising a hybrid architecture that implements different advanced technologies, such as smart contracts, interPlanetary File System (IPFS), and Self-sovereign Identity (SSI). We will rely on verifiable credentials paired with smart contracts to implement on-chain access control decisions and provide on-chain verification and validation of the user and issuer DIDs. The usability of this approach was further analysed, particularly concerning performance and security. Our analysis proved that our approach satisfies vaccination certificate security requirements.

When training a machine learning model, it is standard procedure for the researcher to have full knowledge of both the data and model. However, this engenders a lack of trust between data owners and data scientists. Data owners are justifiably reluctant to relinquish control of private information to third parties. Privacy-preserving techniques distribute computation in order to ensure that data remains in the control of the owner while learning takes place. However, architectures distributed amongst multiple agents introduce an entirely new set of security and trust complications. These include data poisoning and model theft. This paper outlines a distributed infrastructure which is used to facilitate peer-to-peer trust between distributed agents; collaboratively performing a privacy-preserving workflow. Our outlined prototype sets industry gatekeepers and governance bodies as credential issuers. Before participating in the distributed learning workflow, malicious actors must first negotiate valid credentials. We detail a proof of concept using Hyperledger Aries, Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) to establish a distributed trust architecture during a privacy-preserving machine learning experiment. Specifically, we utilise secure and authenticated DID communication channels in order to facilitate a federated learning workflow related to mental health care data., Comment: To be published in the proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Digital Business - TrustBus2020

The growing trend of sharing news/contents, through social media platforms and the World Wide Web has been seen to impact our perception of the truth, altering our views about politics, economics, relationships, needs and wants. This is because of the growing spread of misinformation and disinformation intentionally or unintentionally by individuals and organizations. This trend has grave political, social, ethical, and privacy implications for society due to 1) the rapid developments in the field of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) algorithms in creating realistic-looking yet fake digital content (such as text, images, and videos), 2) the ability to customize the content feeds and to create a polarized so-called "filter-bubbles" leveraging the availability of the big-data. Therefore, there is an ethical need to combat the flow of fake content. This paper attempts to resolve some of the aspects of this combat by presenting a high-level overview of TRUSTD, a blockchain and collective signature-based ecosystem to help content creators in getting their content backed by the community, and to help users judge on the credibility and correctness of these contents., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1812.00315, arXiv:1807.06346, arXiv:1904.05386 by other authors

The fast probabilistic consensus (FPC) is a voting consensus protocol that is robust and efficient in Byzantine infrastructure. We propose an adaption of the FPC to a setting where the voting power is proportional to the nodes reputations. We model the reputation using a Zipf law and show using simulations that the performance of the protocol in Byzantine infrastructure increases with the Zipf exponent. Moreover, we propose several improvements of the FPC that decrease the failure rates significantly and allow the protocol to withstand adversaries with higher weight. We distinguish between cautious and berserk strategies of the adversaries and propose an efficient method to detect the more harmful berserk strategies. Our study refers at several points to a specific implementation of the IOTA protocol, but the principal results hold for general implementations of reputation models.

PyDentity lowers the entry barrier for parties interested in experimenting with the Hyperledger’s verifiable information exchange platform. It enables educators, developers and researchers to configure and initialise a set of actors easily as associated Hyperledger Aries agents. This allows them to focus on writing domain-specific business logic within a Jupyter notebook interface for each actor. Through this, actors can be customised to determine their connections with others, the messages they send, and how they respond to messages they received. This simple architecture allows for fast iteration and detailed exploration of the possible interactions and use cases that this platform supports. Additionally, notebooks can easily be made self-documenting and easily replicated by multiple parties. PyDentity has already been used in several research and education projects.

Advances in quantum computing make Shor's algorithm for factorising numbers ever more tractable. This threatens the security of any cryptographic system which often relies on the difficulty of factorisation. It also threatens methods based on discrete logarithms, such as with the Diffie-Hellman key exchange method. For a cryptographic system to remain secure against a quantum adversary, we need to build methods based on a hard mathematical problem, which are not susceptible to Shor's algorithm and which create Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC). While high-powered computing devices may be able to run these new methods, we need to investigate how well these methods run on limited powered devices. This paper outlines an evaluation framework for PQC within constrained devices, and contributes to the area by providing benchmarks of the front-running algorithms on a popular single-board low-power device.

In this paper we present an open source, fully asynchronous, leaderless algorithm for reaching consensus in the presence of Byzantine faults in an asynchronous network. We prove the algorithm's correctness provided that less than a third of participating nodes are faulty. We also present a way of applying the algorithm to a network with dynamic membership, i.e. a network in which nodes can join and leave at will. The core contribution of this paper is an optimal model in the definition of an asynchronous BFT protocol, and which is resilient to 1/3 byzantine nodes. This model matches an agreement with probability one (unlike some probabilistic methods), and where a common coin is used as a source of randomization so that it respects the FLP impossibility result.

Malware writers frequently try to hide the activities of their agents within tunnelled traffic. Within the Kill Chain model the infection time is often measured in seconds, and if the infection is not detected and blocked, the malware agent, such as a bot, will often then set up a secret channel to communicate with its controller. In the case of ransomware the communicated payload may include the encryption key used for the infected host to register its infection. As a malware infection can spread across a network in seconds, it is often important to detect its activities on the air, in memory and at-rest. Malware increasingly uses encrypted channels for communicating with their controllers. This paper presents a new approach to discovering the cryptographic artefacts of real malware clients that use cryptographic libraries of the Microsoft Windows operating system. This enables malware secret communications to be discovered without any prior malware knowledge.

Long-term conditions in Scotland account for 80%of all GP consultations; they also account for 60% of all deaths inScotland. Asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease(COPD) are common long-term respiratory diseases [1]. Asthma is a heterogeneous disease, usually characterized by chronic airway inflammation. It is defined by the history of respiratory symptoms such as wheeze, shortness of breath, chest tightness and cough that vary over time and in intensity, together with variable expiratory airflow limitation [2]. So far, we know that there are many different things – such as viruses, allergens, and pollution – that cause asthma or trigger attacks but not why or how they do it. This paper outlines how an open source dataset can be used to estimate asthma hospitalisation rates and uses machine learning to predict these rates, within±7.5%, and for an 86.67% success rate.

One major problem with cyberbullying research is the lack of data, since researchers are traditionally forced to rely on survey data where victims and perpetrators self-report their impressions. In this paper, an automatic data collection system is presented that continuously collects in-game chat data from one of the most popular online multi-player games: World of Tanks. The data was collected and combined with other information about the players from available online data services. It presents a scoring scheme to enable identification of cyberbullying based on current research. Classification of the collected data was carried out using simple feature detection with SQL database queries and compared to classification from AI-based sentiment text analysis services that have recently become available and further against manually classified data using a custom-built classificationclient built for this paper. The simple SQL classification proved to be quite useful at identifying some features of toxic chat such as the use of bad language or racist sentiments, however the classification by the more sophisticated online sentiment analysis services proved to be disappointing. The results were then examined for insights into cyberbullying within this game and it was shown that it should be possible to reduce cyberbullying within the World of Tanks game by a significant factor by simply freezing the player’s ability to communicate through the in-game chat function for a short period after the player is killed within a match. It was also shown that very new players are much less likely to engage in cyberbullying, suggesting that it may be a learned behaviour from other players.

The paper introduces an approach to privacy enhancing technologies that sees privacy not merely as an individual right, but as a public good. This understanding of privacy has recently gained ground in the debate on appropriate legal protection for privacy in an online environment. The jurisprudential idea that privacy is a public good and prerequisite for a functioning democracy also entails that its protection should not be left exclusively to the individual whose privacy is infringed. This idea finds its correspondence in our approach to privacy protection through obfuscation, where everybody in a group takes a small privacy risk to protect the anonymity of fellow group members. We show how these ideas can be computationally realised in an Investigative Data Acquisition Platform (IDAP). IDAP is an efficient symmetric Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocol optimised for the specific purpose of facilitating public authorities’ enquiries for evidence.

This paper proposes a new identity, and its underlying meta-data, model. The approach enables secure spanning of identity meta-data across many boundaries such as health-care, financial and educational institutions, including all others that store and process sensitive personal data. It introduces the new concepts of Compound Personal Record (CPR) and Compound Identifiable Data (CID) ontology, which aim to move toward own your own data model. The CID model ensures: authenticity of identity meta-data; high availability via unified Cloud-hosted XML data structure; and privacy through encryption, obfuscation and anonymity applied to Ontology-based XML distributed content. Additionally CID via XML ontologies is enabled for identity federation. The paper also proposes that access over sensitive data is strictly governed through an access control model with granular policy enforcement on the service side. This includes the involvement of relevant access control model entities which are enabled to authorize an ad-hoc break-glass data access which should give high accountability for data access attempts.

Investigators define invasion of privacy during their operations as collateral damage. Inquiries that require gathering data about potential suspects from third parties, such as banks, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or employers are likely to impact the relation between the data subject and the data controller. In this research a novel privacy-preserving approach to mitigating collateral damage during the acquisition process is presented and Investigative Data Acquisition Platform (IDAP) is defined. IDAP is an efficient symmetric Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocol optimised for the specific purpose of facilitating public authorities’ enquiries for evidence. This research introduces a semi-trusted proxy into the PIR process in order to gain the acceptance of the general public for the trap-door based privacy-preserving techniques. Then the dilution factor is defined as a level of anonymity required in a given investigation. Defining this factor allows restricting the number of records processed, and therefore, minimising the processing time while maintaining an appropriate level of privacy. Finally, the technique allowing retrieval of records matching multiple selection criteria is described.

The aim of this paper is to provide profiles for crimes which can be used to model the context for information sharing between the police and community partner organisations. This context can then be integrated with information-sharing syntax used by Single Point of Contact (SPoC) agents to process information sharing requests [1]. The questionnaires attempt to clas-sify crimes into categories, with identify profiles of crime-types, according to the level of in-formation sharing they necessitate between community partner organisations. Crimes are sepa-rated into classifications, which are based on the perceived level of necessary information-exchange among police and community partners. The aim of the questionnaire is to gather academic responses to identify the level of risk in order that it can be defined as risk assess-ment level, which is key to enhancing the public?s reassurance in the police.

Matching what industry wants with what applicants want is a major problem for any IT academic department is matching what the jobs market requires to the types of courses which appeal to applicants. At the current time there is massive demand in the industry for software and embedded engineers, but IT academic departments have generally struggled to recruit candidates to these types of courses. At present courses focused on gaming, computer security, digital forensics, cybercrime, and digital design, are seeing a fast growth in applications. These hotspots, though, can create considerable problems for departments, especially as popular courses are often initially starved in terms teaching resources, because the staff cannot, or do not want to, move quickly enough into the new areas. Overall this tends to be the problem for the head of school who must judge whether something is a short-term ‘flash in the pan’ or a long-term trend. A few good examples of courses which had a peak and then settled down well to good amounts of long-term recruitment have been in software engineering, computer networking, and multimedia, all of which had a significant peak, and then have encountered glitches in recruitment, but have generally settled down to providing solid student recruitment. A major problem is thus in creating courses which are appealing to applicants and any existing student base, but which might not match to the requirements of industry. The way that academia often deals with this is to focus a great deal of attention on the programme title, so that it is attractive to candidates, while also being useful in defining the scope of the programme to recruiters. Buried within the programme, though, are the areas of study which are the key things that industry actually needs. This is why many IT programmes often do not mention the words software development, business studies, project management, and ethics within the programme title, but still teach them. Useful within the title would be things such as media design, digital forensics, and gaming, as these are likely to attract candidates. Employers thus often need to avoid looking at the programme title, and look in more detail at the actual modules which are used in the programme, to see the scope of any software development and business integration. Within many programmes in IT there can be a marginalisation of the subject area due to the demands of students currently on these courses. This has been seen with computer networks, where programmes were created with a wide range of modules, in areas such as business studies and software development, which generally enrich the scope of the programme. Over the year, though, students often demand more modules in their focus, which can be to their disadvantage when they join the jobs market. The push of the major vendors In the IT industry one of the major moves over the last few years has been from vendors such as Cisco Systems, Microsoft and Juniper, providing a wide range of professional certification, intended to match training to the actual needs of industry. Academia then has a difficulty in whether to adopt and integrate the professional certification into their programmes, or to continue to focus on core academic skills development. Applicants, though, are now becoming generally savvy in spotting where this type of infrastructure has been created, which makes programmes which integrate the material more attractive in future job potentials. Thus many programmes now highlight the integration with Microsoft and Cisco Systems, in providing relevant professional skills. A major worry for many though is that academic programmes are far too focused on material produced by the major vendors, which limits the scope of knowledge that students can gain. While there has been a reduction in the focus of vendor derived material on their own product range, there still seems to be a lack of strong academic underpinning in much vendor-produced material. A good academic department will understand the importance of following parts of the vendor certification, but giving a wide coverage of the key academic principles behind any topic. Along with this it is important that academic departments encourage their students into continual professional study, to gain advantage in the jobs market. Differing departmental profiles One thing for sure is that every IT academic department has a different profile in terms of its focus, and it is often this focus which can define how innovative a department is, and how much they need to be. In traditional research areas, there are many distinguished seats of learning, which have long track records for excellence and innovation in research and teaching. Medical and Business Schools, for example, have generally built up their expertise over many decades, and continue to be known for their lead in their domain. Computing and IT, though, is ever-changing, and each department has the opportunity to gain a lead over others by gaining a first-mover advantage. Over the past few decades this has happened with digital electronics, signal processing, microprocessor design, and so on. Each new technology brings opportunities to move and gain an advantage. Often this movement can fit into various profiles: • Old School, Slow Mover. Often a traditional learning institution, which does not require to adopt to new teaching environments and subjects, as it can easily recruit without showing new innovations. Over time it will generally adopt new subject areas depending on their factors such as their research profile. • New School, Fast Mover. This is a department which bases its growth on identifying new and exciting areas, and has key innovators who can move quickly and change their environments and subjects to match. If they move fast enough they can gain a significant lead on the rest of academia, and gain a significant reputation, especially if they can support the development of a research infrastructure with the development of the newly developed teaching area. This profile can be further split into ones which pick the right things, and then move in resources to expand the area, and ones which fail to sustain the investment, and lose out in the long term as the resources do not follow the initial lead. Some new subject areas can be slow burners, where a significant growth in applications is not seen for a year or two, while other can sparkle for a short time, and then fail in the medium term. • Old School, Late Mover. This is a department which generally does not innovate, but watches how other departments are performing in terms of recruitment, and adopts ideas that have been proven to be successful. There is generally less risk, but it can suffer from general down-turns in recruitment in the short-term, as there are no programmes giving a recruitment spike to overcome the general downturn. IT has been shown to be ever-changing, with new technologies springing up on a regular basis. This often leaves great opportunities for first movers, which could prove a winner in gaining a reputation in certain technological areas. The University of Abertay with Computer Games, and the University of Glamorgan with Computer Forensics, are good examples of how leadership can be gained with departments which move quickly and focus their resources into appealing areas. Without a sustained investment in research and knowledge transfer the first mover advantage can often lead to very little overall advantage, but the benefits can be great, in terms of the long-term sustainability of the whole department. Often, subjects which do not recruit well need the new areas to be able to justify their long-term base. Any department needs bright sparks, the people who are willing to move into new areas and take risks. Thus it is likely that new blood needs to be brought in on a regular basis, as departments can often stagnate around their existing expertise, leading to a long-term decline. Generally it is unusual to see new programmes filled with completely new modules. The most common is to see one or two new modules, often in the later years of courses, which start to show some appeal to existing students or to industry. This appeal is then often used to justify the development of a programme of study, in which the department needs to decide whether it can be sustained, given a few years to prove itself. Academia in the UK has often seen the creation of programmes which have failed due to a lack of market demand. A major problem is that it is often difficult to get real-life market assessments, and most departments will typically try an idea, and see if it attracts students. If it does, the resources will generally follow. Cloud-based Teaching A major problem in academia is to try and keep up-to-date with subjects and technologies, so that it often lags industry. The use of virtualised and cloud-based environments, though, provides an excellent opportunity to enhance learning and to provide students with skills which exactly match the requirements of industry, along with integrating with professional certification. At Edinburgh Napier University, a VMware vCenter Cloud infrastructure has been created to teach computer security and digital forensics, where students can learn on an enhanced infrastructure which would not have been possible before the extensive development of virtualised and cloud-based infrastructures. For enhanced methods used within computer security, a private cloud can be used, and for more general teaching, such as in databases and operating systems, a public cloud can be used to support this. This then provides exposure to a wide range of environments which are pre-build, or which are built-up throughout the module, and thus supports the students within a safe environment in which they can learn without any danger, and where errors can be easily undone. The environments can thus be created to use industry-standard tools and infrastructure, and these can be joined together to create collaborative work, along with the continuation of work after the practical lab work has been done. In fact virtualisation offers academia the opportunity to create infrastructures that would be difficult within a real-world, and also match-up with the requirements of professional certification, as illustrated in Figure 1. http://content.yudu.com/Library/A1toxn/VitALMagazineSeptemb/resources/index.htm?referrerUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yudu.com%2Fitem%2Fdetails%2F394350%2FVitAL-Magazine-September-2011

This paper focuses on the integration of virtualised environments within the teaching of computer security and digital forensics, and includes three case studies. The first case study involves assessing student perception on the usage of VMware Workstation and AWS (Amazon Web Services) for security and digital forensics labs, while the other two present a performance and reflective evaluation of a Cloud-based infrastructure using VMware ESXi. The evaluation for the first case study shows the results of a questionnaire for the integration of VMware Workstation and AWS, and highlights that the virtualised environment seems to engage students more than traditional desktop ones, along with identifying the key areas which seem to be useful, such as for network forensics and in running instances within a sand-boxed environment. The other two case studies show an evaluation of the performance impact of security and digital forensics students using a Cloud-based infrastructure for their labs, and that the developed infrastructure copes well with both scheduled lab-based classes, remote access, and a virtualised environment for courseworks.

Coding for Success was published in 2007 and described how bar coding and similar technologies can be used to improve patient safety, reduce costs and improve efficiency. This review aims to outline progress made since 2007, and was recommended by the Health Select Committee in its 2009 report on Patient Safety.

This paper outlines the usage of AES in Microsoft .NET. It provides a basic overview of the AES method, along with a review of other popular encryption methods and some sample code which can be used to implement AES.

The introduction of Information Governance throughout the NHS in Great Britain from 2004 onwards, saw Pri-mary Care Medicine subject to a regulatory regime aligning current practice with codes, ethics, legislation and standards. However the Information Commissioners Office, as regulator of Healthcare Data Controllers, has issued statu-tory Undertakings to stem the tide of continued leakage of sensitive health data. Drawing on research from America, the issue of IT Security Risk is presented as problematic given the limitations of surveys indentifying industry trends and is viewed beyond the traditional Threat Value Asset Matrix towards a framework incorporating the reasonable man –taking all due care and diligence as is reasonably practicable in the circumstances. Following the identification of major problems across 10% of English general practices in comply-ing with both Confidentiality and Data Protection Assurance, and Information Security Assurance, a national survey of GP Practices was undertaken to investigate security incidents and risk. Contemporaneous to this, information on reported unto-ward security incidents was obtained from the regulator and all Health Boards across Scotland. Together, these results identified actual risk to securing patient data and concerns voiced from within the sector. This may be of relevance to practitioners, managers as well as policy makers particularly where changes to the structure of the NHS are proposed.

This paper outlines the usage of 3DES in Microsoft .NET. It provides a basic overview of the 3-DES method, along with a review of other popular encryption methods and some sample code which can be used to implement 3DES.

This paper argues that despite the wide adoption of Internet technologies in destination marketing, information is still disseminated through printed brochures that have largely remained unchanged and unaffected by the trend towards greater personalisation of service. We argue that innovations in IT such as digital printing, allow for the replacement of the inflexible brochures of the past with dynamic, customised brochures. Such changes allow the Destination Marketing Organisations (DMOs) and other tourism providers to significantly improve the element of personalisation of their products, gain valuable marketing and intelligence data about their customers and substantially reduce their printing and posting costs.

Przyst?pny i praktyczny poradnik dotycz?cy u?ytkowania komputerów, obejmuj?cy szeroki zakres zagadnie? zwi?zanych z przetwarzaniem informacji i transmisj? danych oraz ich kompresj?, przechowywaniem, szyfrowaniem i bezpiecze?stwem, zawieraj?cy tak?e opis protokó?u internetowego, sieci WWW, poczty elektronicznej i multimediów. Samodzielne rozwi?zanie zamieszczonych ?wicze? testowych u?atwi zrozumienie i utrwalenie tre?ci poszczególnych rozdzia?ów.

The second edition of the Handbook of Data Communications and Networks covers many of the key areas in modern communication systems. It is split into several sections, including: Data Communications, Interfaces, Networks, Network Protocols, Networking Elements, Session Protocols, Network Operating Systems.

This paper outlines research being undertaken as part of a Teaching Company Scheme programme based on the Isle of Skye. It examines the rationale for using an Educational Modelling Language, such as the one defined by the Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL), and evaluates its potential role in delivering effective electronic learning environ-ments for the teaching of minority languages. The uptake of EML as a practical solution to the needs of educational content developers is discussed, and some systems which offer different standards are summarised.

This book provides an introduction to the use of Delphi Version 3/4 in developing programs, full of real-life applications including serial communications, internet programming and system interfacing. The book also contains tutorial questions, many with template answers.

Computing is an area which continues to grow. This book covers the main areas of computing, including programming, computer hardware, operating systems, the Internet, data communications and networking. It uses practical examples to show basic concepts, is packed full of diagrams showing important principles, and contains multiple choice questions to test knowledge and understanding. The book uses a readable style, and is aimed at students studying for Advanced GNVQ, A level, HND and BSc courses.

The first book ever to give a complete picture of the workings of a PC! A comprehensive guide to the component systems of the PC, this book provides a foundation to the understanding of previous, current and future PC systems, and how the specification of each component of a PC affects the overall system performance. The book outlines each of the main PC processors and contrasts their performance. It also examines each of the main interface devices and shows how they integrate into the main systems. If you are an undergraduate or professional looking for a complete understanding of the internal architecture of the PC, and how it is changing, this book is for you. It explains how systems have evolved from the original PC, keeping its compatibility with previous systems, whilst increasing its power. It also provides an insight into how the PC will evolve in the future. Key chapters: * Motherboards - Analyses typical motherboards and shows how each of the components interfaces together, and how the architecture affects the system performance. * Memory - Shows how chache memory and DRAM memory interface to the system and the processor. * PCI bus - Discusses the fundamentals of the PCI bus and shows its importance in the architecture of modern PCs. * On-line multiple choice tests for students * On-line PowerPoint/HTML slides of all the graphics from the book.

This book provides the student with comprehensive coverage of both networks and system architecture. It aims to introduce the most widely used networking protocols and distributed systems, covering recent developments in distributed processing and the WWW, the use of Internet and Intranets, and the integration of networking into operating systems. The book will be supported by a website offering downloadable Java source code, on-line testing for students, and project-related WWW work.

Many computer networks are now a hybrid of different types, typically a mixture of two or more different operating systems. These systems must successfully integrate for the complete system to operate properly, whether it is in terms of its compatibility, its security or its ease of use. The main aim of this book is to cover the configuration, architecture and networking of the three of the most popular networking operating systems Microsoft Windows, Novell NetWare and UNIX.

author's successful Applied PC Interfacing, Graphics and Interrupts this book covers all the different aspects of computer systems from low-level hardware (such as processors and interface devices) to high-level software (such as Win32 programming). Clearly written with easy-to-understand examples and end-of chapter exercises PC Interfacing, Communications and Windows Programming is the book for you if you have every wondered:•How do I communicate using the serial port? •How do I communicate using the parallel port? •How do I write interrupt-driven software? •How do I communicate over a network? •How do I program in Microsoft Windows? •What is the best bus for connection to this peripheral (serial or parallel)? •How do I program using Win32? •How do I create a menu? •Which is better for my application, C++ or Visual Basic? •What devices does a PC use? Divided into 8 sections, Hardware, Interfaces, RS-232/Parallel port, Windows Programming, Windows Interfacing (Windows NT/95), Win32 Programming, Networking and Java, PC Interfacing, Communications and Windows Programming is shows why covers the intersection of hardware and software engineering.Key Features•Includes worked examples and case studies •State of the art software used when discussing software interfacing

This book provides an introduction to the Java programming language and also covers other related areas such as HTML, JavaScript, CGIscript and VRML. Most of the Java programs relate to practical examples, including:* Menus and forms* Graphics* Event-driven software, such as mouse and keyboard events* Networking* Interacting with other programs* AnimationIt also covers fundamental areas such as TCP/IP and the HTTP protocol.The Java compiler, source code, background information and source code is available from the author over the Internet.

This work provides an introduction to programming with Pascal and extends this to show how Borland Delphi is used to develop Microsoft Windows programs. It provides real life applications and splits into three main sections: Pascal programming, Pascal applications, and Delphi programming. Practical applications include: software interrupts, hardware interrupts, graphics, date and time, system commands, RS 232 and parallel ports. This work is intended for GNVQ, A Level, further and adult education, first year undergraduate students, and for professionals and computing enthusiasts.