This is an Innovate Practice Full Paper. The Cloud has become a principal paradigm of computing in the last ten years, and Computer Science curricula must be updated to reflect that reality. This paper examines simple ways to accomplish curriculum cloudification using Amazon Web Services (AWS), for Computer Science and other disciplines such as Business, Communication and Mathematics.

Attribution, the ability to match events on the Internet to actors who caused them, is a difficult problem in Cybersecurity and Digital Forensics. The Internet was not designed to track behavior of users [1]; instead, it is a common open platform that is propitious to anonymity. Different actors take advantage of this anonymity, and if they break the law, it is up to law enforcement to track them, i.e., to attribute actions to actors in way that would stand up in court. In this paper we present a tool, called Voyager, based on the idea of a tracking pixel, which can help investigators with attribution.

In the public imagination Cybersecurity is very much about malware, even though malware constitutes only part of all the threats faced by Cybersecurity experts. However, malware is still one of the best methods to gain persistent access and control of a target system. Malware is often combined with a well socially-engineered phishing attack that deceives a user to gain a foothold on a system. Once the attakcer gains a beachhead in the victim’s network, it may be used to download additional payloads and exploit vulnerabilities, to gain more control and access within a network. Using malware as their foothold, attackers are able to to conduct reconnaissance, gather intelligence (e.g., exfiltration of intellectual property) or simply inflict damage or extortion (e.g., ransomware). All of this has to be done in a way that allows an attacker to retain access for as long as possible; the ability to do so is called persistence, and this paper examines the different techniques used by malware to accomplish persistence in an ever evolving landscape.

The threat of social engineering is one that affects not only the financial and reputational well-being of corporate entities but also the basic rights of individuals to privacy. Methods common to health campaigns used to disseminate information warning against social engineering have the potential for success. By providing potential scenarios and exact descriptions of threats, the recipients of the messages might become more aware of the dangers posed through the Internet. Case studies of effective health campaigns will be examined, as well as specific threats that could be avoided by more awareness on the part of the individual. Psychological effects of different techniques and the way that general knowledge can help to prevent social engineering attacks will also be examined.

As our world of digital devices continues to expand, the amount of digital evidence encountered by law enforcement during case investigation is ever increasing. Faced with a preponderance of high capacity digital media devices, forensic investigators must be able to review them quickly, and establish which devices merit further attention. Utilizing a small single-board computer called Raspberry Pi, this mobile digital forensics triage device provides fast, targeted feedback for immediate evidence assessment. A digital forensic device is presented in this paper. It is named SEAKER (Storage Evaluator and Knowledge Extraction Reader)[1] and it enables forensic investigators to perform triage on many digital devices very quickly. Developed for on-scene, time-sensitive investigations, its utility extends to preventing over-collection and large backlogs at digital forensics labs worldwide.

We propose parametrized families of algorithms for approximating inconsistent matrices with consistent ones. We present experimental results, and optimize distance versus performance.

This study has been inspired by numerous requests for clarification from researchers who often confuse Saaty’s Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) with the pairwise comparisons (PC) method, taking AHP as the only representation of PC. This study should be regarded as an interpretation and clarificatio n of past investigations of PC. In addition, this article is a reflection on general PC research at a higher level of abstraction: the philosophy of science. It delves into the foundations and implications of pairwise comparisons. Some results of this study are based on a recently published work by Koczkodaj and Szwarc. Finally, open problems have also been reported for future research.

We propose a research program for developing a formal framework for ranking procedures based on the Pairwise Comparisons method. We are interested in the case where relatively few items are to be ranked with a complex procedure and according to a large number of criteria. A typical example of this scenario is a competition where several companies bid for a contract, and where the selection of the winner is done with multiple criteria according to an intricate selection procedure. Several other applications are suggested.

Fair and transparent procurement procedures are a cornerstone of a well functioning free-market economy. In particular, bidding is a mechanism whereby companies compete for contracts; when functioning well, the process rewards both the quality of the proposal, and the “reasonableness” of the quote. This way, both the company and the public win. The bidding process requires a fair and transparent ranking procedure. Once the parameters of the competition are established, the company issuing the bid is required by law to abide by those parameters. Not surprisingly, opposing interests may try to “game the system.” The more complex the service, the harder it is to rank competing bids. Complex services require complex ranking, which in turn makes undue influence more difficult to uncover. In this paper we analyze the case of two companies, Reilly Security and Contemporary Security, bidding for the contract of providing security during the Pan American games ([1]) in Toronto 2015: The Pan Am Games are the world's third largest international multi-sport Games; they are only surpassed in size and scope by the Olympic Summer Games and the Asian Games. We argue that the ranking procedures did not reflect the quality of the bids, resulting in one of the companies submitting a substantially more expensive bid, and still winning the competition. The reader may gain information on this contentious matter by reading a number of newspaper articles: [2], [3], [4], [5]. Article [5] mentions the results presented in this paper. The author consulted for Executek International on this matter.

We investigate different variants of unambiguity in the context of computing multi-valued functions. We propose a modification to the standard computation models of Turing machines and configuration graphs, which allows for unambiguity-preserving composition. We define a notion of reductions (based on function composition), which allows nondeterminism but controls its level of ambiguity. In light of this framework we establish reductions between different variants of path counting problems. We obtain improvements of results related to inductive counting.

We introduce three formal theories of increasing strength for linear algebra in order to study the complexity of the concepts needed to prove the basic theorems of the subject. We give what is apparently the first feasible proofs of the Cayley-Hamilton theorem and other properties of the determinant, and study the propositional proof complexity of matrix identities.