Serious games for health are designed with specific health objectives and are increasingly being used in mental health interventions. Leveraging sensor equipped handheld devices such as smartphones and smartwatches, these games can provide accessible and engaging therapeutic environments. This study introduces a heart rate (HR) controlled game to aid players manage stress by adjusting gameplay according to their biometric feedback. We aimed to determine how HR-based controls influence their experience and if it can be used to reduce stress. Findings from a controlled experiment revealed that HR controlled gameplay reduced negative and increased positive emotions. Also, players exhibited relatively less cardiac reactivity in HR adaptive target based gameplay. This highlights the promise of biometric feedback based gamified digital environments in supporting accessible mental health support.

Smartphones are equipped with a wide variety of sensors, which can pose significant security and privacy risks if not properly protected. To assess the privacy and security risks of smartphone sensors, we first systematically reviewed 55 research papers. Driven by the findings of the systematic review, we carried out a follow-up questionnaire-based survey on 23 human end-users. The results reflect that the participants have a varying level of familiarity with smartphone sensors, and there is a noticeable dearth of awareness about the potential threats and preventive measures associated with these sensors. The findings from this study will inform the development of effective solutions for addressing security and privacy in mobile devices and beyond.

Bug fixing is a very important activity of software maintenance. Given the recent highlight on security and privacy, one may expect that the software vendors would give security bugs a higher priority in their bug fixing process. In this paper, we present an exploratory study of different categories (i.e., security, performance, and other) of bugs in the maintenance of the Chromium browser. In particular, we study the phenomena such as how much time is spent in bug triage, how fast different types of bugs are fixed, variations of developers' experiences who fix those bugs, and show often those fixed bugs are reopened. We find that the performance bugs are triaged and fixed faster. Security bugs, for fixing, are assigned to more experienced developers. All categories of bugs are almost equally reopened once closed.

Passwords are a ubiquitous element of our digital age, and the need for secure passwords is indispensable. However, traditionally secure passwords tends to be very difficult to remember, leading users to frustration in having to remake them or even abandoning secure ones for the sake of memorability. On the other hand, passwords that are considered memorable have a tendency to be less secure. Despite many studies on passwords, the process of the users' perceiving password memorability is still abstract. This security and memorability trade-off brings out the need to find a middle ground leaving the research question on the ground whether finding passwords that are both memorable and secure is a possibility or not. In this paper, we address this very question by conducting a survey and a user-study of memorability for certain categories of popular password styles. Next, we take the most memorable of these passwords and determine their security via a bits of entropy calculation commonly used to determine a password's strength against a traditional brute force attack. Finally, we find the best performers of both memorability and security to find the middle ground of password security and memorability. Our findings present a collection of both memorable and secure styles of passwords including an infrequent but effective tactic for password remembrance.

This study compares security focused static code analyzers for Android applications. Android operated hand-held devices (e.g., smart phones, tablets) are used in the modern computing world for nearly every need. Banking, email, health care, and other sensitive dealings are completed through the Android applications. Hence, Android application security must be held to the same level of scrutiny as traditional application security. This study compares two open-source security analyzers, MobSF and MARA, against two benchmark datasets and 20 live Android applications. We highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each analyzer and reveal security vulnerabilities found in the Android applications.

WordPress, possibly world's the most popular Content Management System (CMS), which supports around 455 million websites and claims 60.3% of all content management systems in use. The WordPress core is known to be relatively secure, but its plugin ecosystem is not. 92% of vulnerabilities found in WordPress powered websites are attributed to third-party plugins that those websites depend on.This paper presents an empirical study, where we examine the efficacy of 11 WordPress security scanner plugins in the detection of known vulnerabilities in another set of 51 insecure plugins. The results are mixed, with some security scanner plugins failing entirely and even the most effective plugins failing to identify significant vulnerabilities. The findings are derived based on both a quantitative analysis and a deeper qualitative analysis.