In its role helping the nation's schools connect to the Internet and other telecommunications services, the "E-rate" has been among the most consistent of federal programs. Funding for the "education rate" program has held at about $2.25 billion a year since it was created under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and it covers…

Hands-on experiments are essential for computer network security education. Existing laboratory solutions usually require significant effort to build, configure, and maintain and often do not support reconfigurability, flexibility, and scalability. This paper presents a cloud-based virtual laboratory education platform called V-Lab that provides a…

The Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF) has achieved particular success in operationalizing the National Higher Education and Workforce Initiative (HEWI) in Maryland around cybersecurity. Leveraging its membership of corporate CEOs, university presidents, and government agency leaders, BHEF partnered with the University System of Maryland to…

With the success of applications spurring the tremendous increase in the volume of data transfer, efficient and reliable content distribution has become a key issue. Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has gained popularity as a promising approach to large-scale content distribution due to its benefits including self-organizing, load-balancing, and…

Almost everyone uses social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. Since Facebook is the most popular site in the history of the Internet, this article will focus on how one can protect his/her personal information and how that extends to protecting the private information of others.

Many factors influence education nowadays. Educational institutions are faced with budget cuttings, outdated IT, data security management and the willingness to integrate remote learning at home. Virtualization technologies provide innovative solutions to the problems. The paper presents an original educational infrastructure using virtualization…

With increasing demand of mobile devices and cloud computing, it becomes increasingly important to develop efficient mobile application and its secured backend, such as web applications and virtualization environment. This dissertation reports a systematic study of mobile application development and the security issues of its related backend. …

As the Internet moves towards a three-layer architecture consisting of overlay networks on top of the IP network layer on top of WDM-based physical networks, incorporating the interaction between and among network layers is crucial for efficient and effective implementation of survivability. This dissertation has four major foci as follows:…

This 16th annual report highlights up-to-date information on the programs supported through the Chancellor's Office Telecommunications and Technology Infrastructure Program (TTIP). To summarize 2012-13, one would describe it as a year of planning and preparation. The system-wide budget cuts of the past few years, reports of impacted classes, staff…

Organizations continue to rely on password-based authentication methods to control access to many Web-based systems. This research study developed a benchmarking instrument intended to assess authentication methods used in Web-based information systems (IS). It developed an Authentication Method System Index (AMSI) to analyze collected data from…

The sourcing of IT systems and services takes many shapes in higher education. Campus central IT organizations are increasingly responsible for the administration of enterprise systems and for the consolidation of operations into a single data center. Specialized academic and administrative systems may be run by local IT departments. In addition,…

"End-to-End (E2E)" voting systems provide cryptographic proof that the voter's intention is captured, cast, and tallied correctly. While E2E systems guarantee integrity independent of software, most E2E systems rely on software to provide confidentiality, availability, authentication, and access control; thus, end-to-end integrity is not…

It has been said that a computer lets a person make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila. Computers also make mistakes on their own, whether they're glitches, conflicts, bugs, crashes, or failures. Avoiding glitches is considerably less frustrating than trying to fix…

This dissertation research studied how different degrees of knowledge of online security risks affect B2C (business-to-consumer) e-commerce consumer decision making. Online information security risks, such as identity theft, have increasingly become a major factor inhibiting the potential growth of e-commerce. On the other hand, e-commerce…

Schools fear the predatory behavior that lurks around social networking sites, where the exchange of personal information can make users sitting ducks for hackers, thieves, cyberbullies, and scammers. So they're caught in what appears to be an all-or-nothing choice: take advantage of the academic opportunities that social networking sites can…