Over the past several years, the three major mobile platforms have seen
tremendous growth and success; as a result, the platforms have been the target
of many malicious attacks. These attacks often request certain permissions in
order to carry out the malicious activities, and uninformed users usually grant
them. One prevalent example of this type of malware is one that requests
permission  to  the  device’s  SMS  service,  and  once  obtained,  uses  the  SMS
service to accrue charges to the user. This type of attack is one of the most
prevalent on the Android application marketplace, and requires a long-term
solution. Replication of an attack is necessary to fully understand efficient
prevention methods, and due to the open-source nature of Android development,
to determine the likely mechanics of the attack as feasible.
This study uses the Hacker News application, an open source application
that is available for download through GitHub as a basis for creating a malware
application to study the SMS attack and explore prevention methods. From the
results and knowledge gained from both research and experimentation, a
proposition for a more secure operating system architecture was defined to
prevent and mitigate various attacks on mobile systems with a focus on SMS
attacks.

Due to its difficult nature, organic chemistry is receiving much research attention across the nation to develop more efficient and effective means to teach it. As part of that, Dr. Ian Gould at ASU is developing an online organic chemistry educational website that provides help to students, adapts to their responses, and collects data about their performance. This thesis creative project addresses the design and implementation of an input parser for organic chemistry reagent questions, to appear on his website. After students used the form to submit questions throughout the Spring 2013 semester in Dr. Gould's organic chemistry class, the data gathered from their usage was analyzed, and feedback was collected. The feedback obtained from students was positive, and suggested that the input parser accomplished the educational goals that it sought to meet.

The area of real-time baseball statistics presents several challenges that can be addressed using mobile devices. In order to accurately record real-time statistics, it is necessary to present the user with a concise interface that can be used to quickly record the necessary data during in-game events. In this project, we use a mobile application to address this by separating out the required input into pre-game and in-game inputs. We also explore the use of a mobile application to leverage crowd sourcing techniques, which address the challenge of accuracy and precision in subjective real-time statistics.

Over the course of computing history there have been many ways for humans to pass information to computers. These different input types, at first, tended to be used one or two at a time for the users interfacing with computers. As time has progressed towards the present, however, many devices are beginning to make use of multiple different input types, and will likely continue to do so. With this happening, users need to be able to interact with single applications through a variety of ways without having to change the design or suffer a loss of functionality. This is important because having only one user interface, UI, across all input types is makes it easier for the user to learn and keeps all interactions consistent across the application. Some of the main input types in use today are touch screens, mice, microphones, and keyboards; all seen in Figure 1 below. Current design methods tend to focus on how well the users are able to learn and use a computing system. It is good to focus on those aspects, but it is important to address the issues that come along with using different input types, or in this case, multiple input types. UI design for touch screens, mice, microphones, and keyboards each requires satisfying a different set of needs. Due to this trend in single devices being used in many different input configurations, a "fully functional" UI design will need to address the needs of multiple input configurations. In this work, clashing concerns are described for the primary input sources for computers and suggests methodologies and techniques for designing a single UI that is reasonable for all of the input configurations.

We discuss processes involved in user-centric security design, including the synthesis of goals based on security and usability tasks. We suggest the usage of implicit security and the facilitation of secureuser actions. We propose a process for evaluating usability flaws by treating them as security threats and adapting traditional HCI methods. We discuss how to correct these flaws once they are discovered. Finally, we discuss the Usable Security Development Model for developing usable secure systems.

Web-application development constantly changes \u2014 new programming languages, testing tools and programming methodologies are often proposed. The focus of this project is on the tool Selenium and the fairly new technique known as High Volume Automated Testing (HVAT). Both of these techniques were used to test the Just-in-Time Teaching and Learning Classroom Management System software. Selenium was used with a black-box testing technique and HVAT was employed in a white-box testing technique. Two of the major functionalities of this software were examined, which include the login and the professor functionality. The results of the black-box testing technique showed parts of the login component contain bugs, but the professor component is clean. HVAT white-box testing revealed error free implementation on the code level. We present an analysis on a new technique for HVAT testing with Selenium.

Smartphones have become increasingly common over the past few years, and mobile games continue to be the most common type of application (Apple, Inc., 2013). For many people, the social aspect of gaming is very important, and thus most mobile games include support for playing with multiple players. However, there is a lack of common knowledge about which implementation of this functionality is most favorable from a development standpoint. In this study, we evaluate three different types of multiplayer gameplay (pass-and-play, Bluetooth, and GameCenter) via development cost and user interviews. We find that pass-and-play, the most easily-implemented mode, is not favored by players due to its inconvenience. We also find that GameCenter is not as well favored as expected due to latency of GameCenter's servers, and that Bluetooth multiplayer is the most well favored for social play due to its similarity to real-life play. Despite there being a large overhead in developing and testing Bluetooth and GameCenter multiplayer due to Apple's development process, this is irrelevant since professional developers must enroll in this process anyway. Therefore, the most effective multiplayer mode to develop is mostly determined by whether Internet play is desirable: Bluetooth if not, GameCenter if so. Future studies involving more complete development work and more types of multiplayer modes could yield more promising results.