Research Summary

I Don’t Use Apple Pay Because It’s Less Secure …: Perception of Security and Usability in Mobile Tap-and-Pay

Apple Pay was launched more than 3 years ago to provide a “fast and secure” method of payment and quickly became very popular in the US. It was shortly followed by Android Pay which is also becoming popular.  However, not everyone uses these systems despite their claimed security, convenience and speed. Jun Ho Huh, Saurabh …

Online Sexual Violence, Child Pornography or Something Else Entirely? Police Responses to Non-Consensual Intimate Image Sharing among Youth

The sharing of intimate images by digital means is something that has created new issues for Canadians.  This is reflected in the creation of laws for non-consensual intimate image sharing or ‘revenge porn’ laws.  The issues get murkier when it comes to intimate images and youth as child pornography laws often also apply to the …

How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument

There is a considerable amount of evidence on the control and censorship of social media in China.  On top of this there has long been suspected that there is a system of astroturfing, or the posting of large numbers of comments from fake accounts to direct online conversation.  In China people hired to make these …

Leaking (a lot of) Data from Air-Gapped Computers via the (small) Hard Drive LED (LED-it-GO)

Highly secure systems are often ‘Air Gapped’, or removed from any internet connected network to make it more difficult to illegally or maliciously access them. Attacks in recent years have shown that it is possible and perhaps not even particularly complex to have users load malicious software onto an air gapped computer (e.g. with a …