In Canada, the non-recognition of foreign credentials remains a considerable policy issue as well as a challenge for skilled immigrants. Many studies have shed light on the difficulties that foreign professionals face when seeking a placement in the Canadian job market. This thesis focused on the experiences of professional women from Morocco on the basis of the premise that every racialized group’s immigration experience deserves a space in the literature to voice their realities and inspire policy considerations. As a result, this study focused on examining the experiences of Moroccan women in the Canadian job market and the impact thereof, on their socio-economic status, and as such, health and well-being. In order to effectively capture the experiences of this particular community, a fieldwork study was conducted in the form of semi-structured individual interviews with twelve women who immigrated to Canada from Morocco with professional qualifications. Based on the participants’ accounts, I described that systemic discrimination as manifested in Othering and racialization remain major obstacles to the realization of equal access in the Canadian labour market. All in all, this research provides valuable insight into the plight of skilled immigrants in Canada and thus, offers strong policy recommendations to facilitate a more effective integration process for this group into the Canadian Job market.

Σκοπός της παρούσας εργασίας είναι να μελετήσουμε τη συμπεριφορά των χρηστών νέων τεχνολογιών και τους παράγοντες που αλληλεπιδρούν στην οικοδόμηση της εμπιστοσύνης τους απέναντι σε αυτές. Παράλληλα, εξετάζουμε τη στάση των χρηστών απέναντι στα ABC διαπιστευτήρια με δυνατότητα ελάχιστης αποκάλυψης προσωπικών δεδομένων (minimal disclosure), ως λύση για την προστασία της ιδιωτικότητάς τους. / The purpose of this paper is to study the behavior of users of new technologies and the factors that interact to build their confidence against them. In addition, we examine the attitude of users towards ABC credentials with minimal disclosure of personal data, as a solution to protect their privacy.

In Canada, the non-recognition of foreign credentials remains a considerable policy issue as well as a challenge for skilled immigrants. Many studies have shed light on the difficulties that foreign professionals face when seeking a placement in the Canadian job market. This thesis focused on the experiences of professional women from Morocco on the basis of the premise that every racialized group’s immigration experience deserves a space in the literature to voice their realities and inspire policy considerations. As a result, this study focused on examining the experiences of Moroccan women in the Canadian job market and the impact thereof, on their socio-economic status, and as such, health and well-being. In order to effectively capture the experiences of this particular community, a fieldwork study was conducted in the form of semi-structured individual interviews with twelve women who immigrated to Canada from Morocco with professional qualifications. Based on the participants’ accounts, I described that systemic discrimination as manifested in Othering and racialization remain major obstacles to the realization of equal access in the Canadian labour market. All in all, this research provides valuable insight into the plight of skilled immigrants in Canada and thus, offers strong policy recommendations to facilitate a more effective integration process for this group into the Canadian Job market.

>Magister Scientiae - MSc / The recent years have seen an increase in the number of users accessing online services using communication devices such as computers, mobile phones and cards based credentials such as credit cards. This has prompted most governments and business organizations to change the way they do business and manage their identity information. The coming of the online services has however made most Internet users vulnerable to identity fraud and theft. This has resulted in a subsequent increase in the number of reported cases of identity theft and fraud, which is on the increase and costing the global industry excessive amounts. Today with more powerful and effective technologies such as artificial intelligence, wireless communication, mobile storage devices and biometrics, it should be possible to come up with a more effective multi-modal authentication system to help reduce the cases of identity fraud and theft. A multi-modal digital identity management system is proposed as a solution for managing digital identity information in an effort to reduce the cases of identity fraud and theft seen on most online services today. The proposed system thus uses technologies such as artificial intelligence and biometrics on the current unsecured networks to maintain the security and privacy of users and service providers in a transparent, reliable and efficient way. In order to be authenticated in the proposed multi-modal authentication system, a user is required to submit more than one credential attribute. An artificial intelligent technology is used to implement a technique of information fusion to combine the user’s credential attributes for optimum recognition. The information fusion engine is then used to implement the required multi-modal authentication system.

In Canada, the non-recognition of foreign credentials remains a considerable policy issue as well as a challenge for skilled immigrants. Many studies have shed light on the difficulties that foreign professionals face when seeking a placement in the Canadian job market. This thesis focused on the experiences of professional women from Morocco on the basis of the premise that every racialized group’s immigration experience deserves a space in the literature to voice their realities and inspire policy considerations. As a result, this study focused on examining the experiences of Moroccan women in the Canadian job market and the impact thereof, on their socio-economic status, and as such, health and well-being. In order to effectively capture the experiences of this particular community, a fieldwork study was conducted in the form of semi-structured individual interviews with twelve women who immigrated to Canada from Morocco with professional qualifications. Based on the participants’ accounts, I described that systemic discrimination as manifested in Othering and racialization remain major obstacles to the realization of equal access in the Canadian labour market. All in all, this research provides valuable insight into the plight of skilled immigrants in Canada and thus, offers strong policy recommendations to facilitate a more effective integration process for this group into the Canadian Job market.

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Phishing campaigns continue to deceive users into revealing their credentials, despite advancing spam filters, browser and toolbar warnings, and educational efforts. Recently, researchers have begun investigating how fake credentials --- or honeytokens --- can be used to detect phishing sites and protect users. BogusBiter, one such work, creates sets of honeytokens based on users' real credentials and sends them alongside real user submissions to phishing sites. In this paper, we present Phish Feeder, an anti-phishing tool which extends the BogusBiter honeytoken generation algorithm in order to create more realistic and authentic-looking credentials. Phish Feeder also employs a ``honeytoken repository'' which stores generated credentials and provides a lookup service for legitimate sites that encounter invalid credentials. The Phish Feeder client is implemented as a Firefox extension and the repository is implemented as a Java web application. We compare the effectiveness of the Phish Feeder generation algorithm to that of the previous work and find that it is up to four times as effective at hiding real users' credentials within a set. Furthermore, we find that Phish Feeder introduces only negligible overhead during normal browsing, and a low overhead during credential creation and submission.

With an increase in performance, dependency and ubiquitousness, the necessity for secure mobile device functionality is rapidly increasing. Authentication of an individual's identity is the fundamental component of physical and logical access to secure facilities and information systems. Identity management within the Department of Defense relies on Public Key Infrastructure implemented through the use of X.509 certificates and private keys issued on smartcards called Common Access Cards (CAC). However, use of CAC credentials on smartphones is difficult due to the lack of effective smartcard reader integration with mobile devices. The creation of a mobile phone derived credential, a new X.509 certificate and key pair based off the credentials of the CAC certificates, would eliminate the need for CAC integration with mobile devices This thesis describes four architectures for securely and efficiently generating and delivering a derived credential to a mobile device for secure communications with mobile applications. Two architectures generate credentials through a software cryptographic module providing a LOA-3 credential. The other two architectures provide a LOA-4 credential by utilizing a hardware cryptographic module for the generation of the key pair. In two of the architectures, the Certificate Authority']s (CA) for the new derived credentials is the digital signature certificate from the CAC. The other two architectures utilize a newly created CA, which would reside on the DoD network and be used to approve and sign the derived credentials. Additionally, this thesis demonstrates the prototype implementations of the two software generated derived credential architectures using CAC authentication and outlines the implementation of the hardware cryptographic derived credential. / Master of Science

Blockchain technology has gained ground as a method of independently and securely verifying transaction receipts of educational credentials so they can connect directly to individual digital wallets. Challenges in this transformation include the risk of dilution of value in existing credentials and the risk of duplicating structures. Internationally, several studies and pilots are ongoing. The EU is currently actively working to promote the development of digital micro-credentials with both initiatives and standards recommendations. Nationally in Sweden, government initiatives aim to bring the entire national digital infrastructure together to improve support for lifelong professional learning. Industrial stakeholders, academic education and vocational educational organizations are documented having partly overlapping, partly different needs and requirements. The purpose of this master’s thesis research is to describe the potential use of a blockchain-based ICT system for digital micro-credentials in vocational education, and what would be the desired characteristics of providing such a system from the perspective of stakeholder decision-makers on the governmental, commercial, and educational level. For this, interpretive qualitative research has been conducted. The data was collected through documents review of governmental and policy documents from the EU and Sweden, and individual interviews with seven participants among key stakeholder organizations (vocational institutions, commercial organizations, and government agencies representatives). The collected data was analyzed thematically. The analysis of the collected data was thematically structured into five themes and discussed in the context of the research aim and research question, using the proposed theoretical framework, including structuration theory.  Findings showed that challenges on the macro-level perspective dominated the potential uses and desired characteristics, explicitly the need for a solution that can bridge the gap between industry needs and formal education. The need for a technical solution that can create interoperability between different forms of micro-credentials and credentials was highlighted. A solution with the individual in focus would be a major shift that could improve individuals’ potential to plan careers, enable employers to improve recruitment processes, and strengthen the Swedish government actors in skills and educational planning on the national and regional level. The key to these uses would be the ability to build trust between parties and connect such a technological solution to existing structures such as the European Qualification Framework’s Swedish implementation (SeQF). The research contributes theoretically by adding to the rather limited research on blockchain use for micro-credentials in education, and practically by presenting the context and landscape of the Swedish system of vocational education and training in relation to the potential use of digital micro-credentials.

The utilization of application-to-application (A2A) credentials within interpretive language scripts and application code has long been a security risk. The quandaries being how to protect and secure the credentials handled in the main body of code and avoid exploitation from rogue programmers, system administrators and other users with authorized high levels of privilege. Researchers report that A2A credentials cannot be protected and that there is no way to reduce the risk of the inevitable successful attack and subsequent exploit. Therefore, research efforts to date have primarily been focused on mitigating the impact of the attack rather than finding ways to reduce the attack surface. The work contained herein successfully addresses this serious cross-cutting concern and proves that it is in fact possible to significantly reduce the risk of attack. This reduction of risk was accomplished through implementing a method of credential obfuscation which applied advice with concerns utilizing a composition filter. The filter modified messages containing the credentials as they were sent from the interpretive language script to the remote data store. The modification extracted credentials from a secure password vault and inserted them into the message being sent to the remote data store. This modification moved the handling of the credentials from the main body of code to a secure library and out of the reach of attackers with authorized high levels of privilege. The relocation of the credential handling code lines significantly reduced the attack surface and the overall risk of attack.