Thesis (M.A.)--Liberty University, 2007. / Access restricted for one year per author's request.

Magister Artium (Child and Family Studies) - MA(CFS) / Today the mobile phone plays a vital role in social life across the globe. For many teenagers and young adults in particular, this device forms an integral part of their daily communication, with text messaging being one of their preferred modes of social interaction. Researchers across the globe have studied various facets of this phenomenon but he main focus has been on this mode of communication in peer relationships. From a family systems perspective, the current qualitative study intended to explore how parents experience their teenagers’ text messaging in terms of communication and relationships with their teenagers, and how parents regulate this pervasive practice. To this end, data were collected by means of one-on-one interviews among eleven parents (eight mothers and three fathers) in Cape Town, South Africa, using a semi-structured interview schedule. With the participants’ permission, the sessions were tape-recorded; data were transcribed, content analysed, and patterns and themes identified according to Creswell’s (2009) steps. Participants expressed a range of experiences, from positive to negative, not only of text messaging, but of their teenagers’ use of mobile phones in general. Among the positives, it was the sense of security the devices gave parents, and the possibility of communicating easily, quickly and at affordable cost and at the same time monitoring their children at a distance. The negatives were mainly related to the misuse/and overuse of the mobile phones. The study suggests that parents were aware of some of the dangers associated with mobile phones, such as bullying, sexting, texting while driving, overuse at the expense of family, studying and sleeping times, and home chores. It also reveals that girls were more at risk, especially when it came to mobile bullying and sexting. Some parents came up with suggestions on dealing with mobile phones and text messaging-related problems. Furthermore, the study is indicative of a predominantly authoritative parenting style whereby parents successfully limited these dangers by regulating the use of their teenagers’ mobile phones. However, for some, finding the balance, especially between parental control and teenagers’ privacy, proved to be a challenge. Moreover, while expressing the need for mobile internet, especially for teenagers’ school work, the majority of participants showed concern about having it under control. The study concludes that text messaging can be used to enhance communication and relationships between parents and their teenagers. It recommends educating the latter about the dangers of mobile phones and the former to monitor their use, while at the same time negotiating teenagers’ freedom.

Magister Scientiae - MSc / A semi-synchronous environment consists of a combination of synchronous and asynchronous transport media used to transport messages from source to destination. This thesis explores an empirical solution for guaranteeing the delivery of messages in a multimodal semi-synchronous environment for a Deaf Telephony application. SoftBridge for Instant Messaging Bridging Application (SIMBA), is a communication platform that make use of a semi-synchronous framework to allow a hearing and Deaf person to communicate inside a single uniform space. SIMBA was modified to provide reliability for both synchronous and asynchronous transport media. In the process of modification, SIMBA was renamed to NaradaBrokering integrated in SIMBA (NIMBA). Within the literature various systems are analyzed and successes and failures are distilled to help formulate a good solution for the thesis question. To guarantee asynchronous messages sent, the Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) paradigm was used with Forward Error Correction (FEC) used to guarantee the delivery of synchronous messages sent. The work forms part of a social study conducted at the Deaf Community of Cape Town (DCCT) community centre. Ethnography was used to identify the requirements for a Deaf Telephony application. Thus, this thesis is based on a socio- technical environment where the system is developed in a laboratory and tested in an actual community. Results show that these solutions are cceptable for a semi-synchronous communication environment. However, interviews conducted with a select group of Deaf participants showed that cell phones are currently too popular to be replaced by NIMBA as a primary communication device and service. This is due to the immense popularity of Short Message Service (SMS) among the Deaf and cell phone devices mobile capabilities. The overall goal of the thesis is to guarantee delivery for a semisynchronous environment with broader implications of showing how multimodal semi-synchronous services like Deaf Telephony can be made attractive to service providers concerned with reliability in the new Internet Protocol (IP) world of telecommunications. / South Africa

Instant Messaging (IM) has grown tremendously over the last few years. Even though IM was originally developed as a social chat system, it has found a place in many companies, where it is being used as an essential business tool. However, many businesses rely on free IM and have not implemented a secure corporate IM solution. Most free IM clients were never intended for use in the workplace and, therefore, lack strong security features and administrative control. Consequently, free IM clients can provide attackers with an entry point for malicious code in an organization’s network that can ultimately lead to a company’s information assets being compromised. Therefore, even though free IM allows for better collaboration in the workplace, it comes at a cost, as the title of this dissertation suggests. This dissertation sets out to answer the question of how free IM can facilitate an attack on a company’s information assets. To answer the research question, the dissertation defines an IM attack model that models the ways in which an information system can be attacked when free IM is used within an organization. The IM attack model was created by categorising IM threats using the STRIDE threat classification scheme. The attacks that realize the categorised threats were then modelled using attack trees as the chosen attack modelling tool. Attack trees were chosen because of their ability to model the sequence of attacker actions during an attack. The author defined an enhanced graphical notation that was adopted for the attack trees used to create the IM attack model. The enhanced attack tree notation extends traditional attack trees to allow nodes in the trees to be of different classes and, therefore, allows attack trees to convey more information. During the process of defining the IM attack model, a number of experiments were conducted where IM vulnerabilities were exploited. Thereafter, a case study was constructed to document a simulated attack on an information system that involves the exploitation of IM vulnerabilities. The case study demonstrates how an attacker’s attack path relates to the IM attack model in a practical scenario. The IM attack model provides insight into how IM can facilitate an attack on a company’s information assets. The creation of the attack model for free IM lead to several realizations. The IM attack model revealed that even though the use of free IM clients may seem harmless, such IM clients can facilitate an attack on a company’s information assets. Furthermore, certain IM vulnerabilities may not pose a great risk by themselves, but when combined with the exploitation of other vulnerabilities, a much greater threat can be realized. These realizations hold true to what French playwright Jean Anouilh once said: “What you get free costs too much”.

Instant messaging applications noted significant grow especially in the last decade. In fact, the Internet communication is cheap and convenient way how to communicate with distant people. However, this grow of user communication and data exchange through the online world impacts user security and privacy, as it was also shown recently by WhatsApp privacy issues. Firstly this article evaluates security and privacy issues of current mobile messaging applications. Secondly, we design our basic open source solution with the focus on security, privacy, and user centric features. Furthermore, we provide proof-of-concept implementation of our system

Instant messaging (IM) applications are one of the most popular applications for smartphones. The IMs have the capability of sending messages or initiating voice calls via Internet which makes it almost cost free for the users to communicate with each other. Unfortunately, like any other type of applications, majority of these applications are vulnerable to malicious attacks and have privacy issues. The motivation for this thesis is the need to identifying security services of an IM application and to design a secure system for any mobile messaging application. This research proposes an E2EE (End-to-End Encryption) approach which provides a secure IM application design which protects its users with better integrity, confidentiality and privacy. To achieve this goal a research is conducted to investigate current security features of popular messaging applications in the mobile market. A list of requirements for good security is generated and based on those requirements an architecture is designed. A demo is also implemented and evaluated.

With the rise of cloud computing and the migration to web-based applications, scalable systems have become highly desirable. And while developing software is hard, designing a scalable system is even harder. The microservice architecture is an attempt to improve the scalability but may introduce additional challenges. In order to correctly implement the microservice architecture, it is important to understand how the different mechanisms used in the architecture affect the quality of the application. The purpose of this research is to show how to evaluate microservice applications and how much they can differentiate from each other. A literature study and an architectural analysis are performed by reviewing research related to web applications and microservices. Subsequently, the empirical data is collected by evaluating and comparing two different microservice applications based on their quality characteristics. The results of the literature study indicate that performance efficiency, compatibility, reliability, security, maintainability and portability are the most relevant quality characteristics of the microservice architecture. Furthermore, the architectural analysis describes how microservices affect these quality characteristics. Lastly, the evaluation showed that different approaches can significantly alter the strength of the different characteristics. For this specific comparison between the two selected applications, it was determined that the biggest differentiating factor is the asynchronous and synchronous messaging. To conclude, the results show it is possible to evaluate a microservice application by its qualities. Additionally, while microservice applications may use completely different technologies, the fundamental concept behind them remains the same. What differs is the approaches used and how they affect the quality characteristics.

Group chat facilitates remote collaboration and idea exchanges. With the widespread use of group chat for productive information exchanges, it becomes dicult for members of groups to keep up and stay grounded during the long stream of conversation that is generated. I conducted a need-finding study where I simulated group chat conversations in the context of collaboration to learn about issues and behaviors in a group chat when the size of the group chat is 5 or 10. The study participants also filled out a survey post the group chat, describing their challenges and issues with the group chat. A grounded theory approach analyses of the data collected, and the chat conversation gave us several themes. Our results show that participants generally felt that there were too many messages. A majority of the participants found it was hard to keep track of what was happening. Information overload is a significant challenge that creates several other challenges for the participants, such as missed messages, redundant messages, wasted e↵orts, and diculty in gathering consensus. I observed some behaviors such as broken utterances and other strategies employed by participants when overwhelmed with the high activity. I use this knowledge to motivate recommendations and suggestions for future redesigns and development of this indispensable tool of the workforce / Master of Science / Group chat facilitates remote collaboration, idea exchanges. It becomes dicult for members of groups to keep up and remain on the same page during long conversations. I conducted experiments where I simulated collaborative group chat conversations to learn about issues and behaviors in a group chat with 5 or 10 members. The experiment participants also filled out a survey after the group chat, describing their challenges and issues with the group chat. Qualitative analyses of the survey data, and the chat conversation gave us several insights. Our results show that participants generally felt that there were too many messages. A ma- jority of the participants found it was hard to keep track of what was happening. Information overload is a significant challenge that creates several other problems for the participants, such as missed messages, repeated messages, wasted e↵orts, and diculty in obtaining agree- ment. I observed some behaviors and strategies used by the participants when overwhelmed with too many messages. I use this knowledge to motivate recommendations and suggestions for future redesigns and development of this indispensable tool of the workforce.

<p> This work is an investigation of user acceptance of a prototype solution utilizing wireless text messaging (or SMS - i.e., short messaging service) to improve people's adherence. Insufficient adherence, also known as medical non-compliance, is a major cause of failure in self-management programs, causing significant losses to all healthcare stakeholders.</p> <p> Innovative mobile healthcare solutions, based on portable devices like cell phones, may address some non-adherence aspects by helping outpatients to follow treatments agreed with their health providers. Although this seems a win-win situation, a verdict on the overall usefulness of such an approach cannot be formulated before exploring outpatient acceptance, as this is a novel technology that targets a new area of implementation. Accordingly, this research investigates key factors that may influence the acceptance of a mobile healthcare solution based on SMS to support improved adherence to healthy behaviour, with special attention to motivation (the 'pro' factors) and perceived risk (the 'con' factors).</p> <p> As a means of investigation, a one-month longitudinal experiment with two groups of subjects (an intervention group and a control group) was utilized. Data were analyzed with quantitative and qualitative techniques: descriptive statistics, partial least squares modelling, and content analysis.</p> <p> Findings show that users are aware of the potential usefulness of such a pioneering application. However, enjoyment is the unique reason for adopting, and perceived financial and psychological risks the main obstacles against adopting, an SMS-based solution for improving adherence to healthy behaviour. Furthermore, a business analysis shows that users are concerned about usefulness features, even when asked about financial aspects.</p> <p> These results, together with encouraging findings about the effectiveness of the application, open the way for medical-led research to investigate if long-term mobile healthcare initiatives customized to patient needs are also beneficial for outpatient adherence and health outcomes.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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