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This paper details an experience report of two interventions which explored the use of a audience response system in summative assessment in two different ways within a con- version Masters degree programme. One course explored stu- dents understanding of topics and self-assessment of ability through small multiple-choice quizzes. The other course was based around cyber security and used the audience response system to ensure engagement with the pre-class reading material. Both interventions were designed in an attempt to encourage students to engage more effectively with the material. This paper aims to identify and contrast the ways in which the audience response system was used in assess- ment in higher education computing science with a view to suggesting key considerations for implementing such an intervention.

Plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty for computing science assessments is a well documented issue. A common mode of dealing with this is to apply plagiarism detector software to code submissions to check for suspected plagiarism based on how similar submissions are. However, it arguably is less well established how to design computing science specific assessments which aim to reduce the possibility of plagiarism, whilst not disadvantaging students who may struggle with some aspects of an assessment. This paper aims to report on the design and practice of such an assessment within a computer security course.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to identify to identify reasons for the lack of protest against dragnet surveillance in the UK. As part of this investigation, a study was carried out to gauge the understanding of “privacy” and “confidentiality” by the well-informed. Design/methodology/approach To perform a best-case study, the authors identified a group of well-informed participants in terms of security. To gain insights into their privacy-related mental models, they were asked first to define the three core terms and then to identify the scenarios. Then, the participants were provided with privacy-related scenarios and were asked to demonstrate their understanding by classifying the scenarios and identifying violations. Findings Although the participants were mostly able to identify privacy and confidentiality scenarios, they experienced difficulties in articulating the actual meaning of the terms privacy, confidentiality and security. Research limitations/implications There were a limited number of participants, yet the findings are interesting and justify further investigation. The implications, even of this initial study, are significant in that if citizens’ privacy rights are being violated and they did not seem to know how to protest this and if indeed they had the desire to do so. Practical implications Had the citizens understood the meaning of privacy, and their ancient right thereto, which is enshrined in law, their response to the Snowden revelations about ongoing wide-scale surveillance might well have been more strident and insistent. Originality/value People in the UK, where this study was carried out, do not seem to protest the privacy invasion effected by dragnet surveillance with any verve. The authors identify a number of possible reasons for this from the literature. One possible explanation is that people do not understand privacy. Thus, this study posits that privacy is unusual in that understanding does not seem to align with the ability to articulate the rights to privacy and their disapproval of such widespread surveillance. This seems to make protests unlikely.

There is no widely accepted way of measuringthe level of security of a recognition-based graphical password against guessing attacks. We aim to address this by examining the\ud influence of predictability of user choice on the guessability and proposing a new measure of guessability. Davis et al. showed that these biases exist for schemes using faces and stories, we support this result and show these biases exist in other recognition-based schemes. In addition, we construct an attack exploiting predictability, which we term “Semantic Ordered Guessing Attack” (SOGA). We then apply this attack to two schemes (the Doodles scheme and a standard recognition-based scheme using photographic images) and report the results. The results show that predictability when users select graphical passwords\ud influence the level of security to a varying degree (dependent on the distractor selection algorithm). The standard passimages scheme show an increase on guessability of up to 18 times more likely than the usual reported guessability, with a similar set up of nine images per screen and four screens, the doodles scheme shows a successful guessing attack is 3.3 times more likely than a\ud random guess. Finally, we present a method of calculating a more accurate guessability value, which we call the revised guessability of a recognition-based scheme. Our conclusion is that to maximise the security of a recognition-based graphical password scheme, we recommend disallowing user choice of images.