HotSoft

In May we had a visit from Rilla Khaled and Pippin Barr. They were once here doing post-doctoral work, and are now at the Digital Games Institute at the University of Malta. There were in Canada because Pippin was “Game Designer in Residence” at Concordia University in Montreal, and Rilla was working on grants and book chapters. In Ottawa, Pippin gave the keynote talk at the Interface 2013 conference on Digital Humanities, organized by Carleton graduate students.

Our ISSNet workshops have been annual events to update ourselves on work across our network, hear about new ideas from outside, and brainstorm future plans. This year we were in Victoria, British Columbia at perhaps the most inspiring location we’ve had, right beside the inner harbour. The 2013 workshop followed the typical plan, although with more talks from people outside the network, Corman Herley and Jaeyeon Jung from Microsoft Research, Joe Bonneau from Google, and Ed Rebane and Catherine Hart from Bell.

We should say more about…

• Conferences:
  • ICSE 2013, San Franciso
  • EICS 2013, London
  • DUI 2013, London
  • SOUPS 2013 in Newcastle

We should say more about…

• Graduations:
  • Alain Forget, PhD
  • Bruna Machado Freitas, MASc
• Research Network Events:
  • ISSNet 2012 Workshop, Kingston
  • GRAND 2012, Montreal
  • ISSNet 2012 Summer School, Halifax
  • SurfNet 2012 Workshop, Waterloo
• Conferences:
  • CSCW 2012, Seattle
  • SOUPS 2012, Washington
  • PST 2012, Paris
  • VLHCC 2012, Innsbruck
  • Splash/Onward 2012, Tucson
  • SecureTech 2012, Ottawa

We’ve recently returned from beautiful Vancouver for the 2nd Annual GRAND Conference. We are part of projects on “Usable Privacy and Security for New Media Environments” and “Digital Games for Learning and Training”. It was an oppportunity to discuss on-going projects, get feedback from others in different disciplines, talk about research priorities, and plan for the next year.

On May 6, we hosted grade 8-9 students from Ottawa in our lab for a session on user interaction technologies as part of Carleton’s Enrichment Mini-Courses.  Students learned about the technologies and got hands-on experience with multitouch tables, a haptic device, an eye tracker, a head-mounted display, and a digital pen.

We spent a week in Toronto for the ISSNet Annual Workshop. We heard updates on recent work on research projects in all three themes (Network-oriented Security, Software Systems-oriented Security, Human-oriented Security) and had plenty of opportunity to catch up and discuss research with members from other Universities and industry partners. Several students from our lab presented posters of their on-going research projects. Invited talks by Nart Villeneuve from Trend Micro and by N. Asokan and Valtteri Niemi from Nokia gave us interesting insight into current industry work.

We were pleased to learn that our survey of graphical passwords has been accepted for publication in ACM Computing Surveys. It will appear in issue 44(4).

Title: Graphical Passwords: Learning from the First Twelve Years
Abstract:
Starting around 1999, a great many graphical password schemes have been proposed as alternatives to text-based password authentication. We provide a comprehensive overview of published research in the area, covering both usability and security aspects, as well as system evaluation. The paper first catalogues existing approaches, highlighting novel features of selected schemes and identifying key usability or security advantages. We then review usability requirements for knowledge-based authentication as they apply to graphical passwords, identify security threats that such systems must address and review known attacks, discuss methodological issues related to empirical evaluation, and identify areas for further research and improved methodology.

Several Carleton security and usable security researchers attended Financial Cryptography ‘11 in St. Lucia.  We were pleasantly surprised to see that several of the papers addressed human factors and usable security. Our workshop on Authentication was well-attended and generated lots of questions and discussion between attendees and panelists.  The workshop included invited talks by Cormac Herley, Steven Bellovin, and Robert Biddle.