Applying a framework for IT governance in South African higher education institutions
- Authors: Viljoen, Stephen
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: Computer security , Universities and colleges -- Computer networks -- Security measures -- South Africa , Data protection
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MTech
- Identifier: vital:9739 , http://hdl.handle.net/10948/416 , Computer security , Universities and colleges -- Computer networks -- Security measures -- South Africa , Data protection
- Description: Background: Higher Education (HE), through HE Institutions, plays a very important role in society. There is thus a need for this sector to be well managed, especially with regards to planning, organising, and controlling. Corporate Governance has received a lot of attention in recent times, especially to engender trust on the part of the stakeholders. There are many similarities, but also significant differences in the governance of HE institutions and public companies. Information Technology (IT) plays an extremely important role in the modern organisation, creating huge opportunities, but also increasing the risk to the organisation. Therefore, effective governance of IT in HE Institutions is of great importance.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
- Authors: Viljoen, Stephen
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: Computer security , Universities and colleges -- Computer networks -- Security measures -- South Africa , Data protection
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MTech
- Identifier: vital:9739 , http://hdl.handle.net/10948/416 , Computer security , Universities and colleges -- Computer networks -- Security measures -- South Africa , Data protection
- Description: Background: Higher Education (HE), through HE Institutions, plays a very important role in society. There is thus a need for this sector to be well managed, especially with regards to planning, organising, and controlling. Corporate Governance has received a lot of attention in recent times, especially to engender trust on the part of the stakeholders. There are many similarities, but also significant differences in the governance of HE institutions and public companies. Information Technology (IT) plays an extremely important role in the modern organisation, creating huge opportunities, but also increasing the risk to the organisation. Therefore, effective governance of IT in HE Institutions is of great importance.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
Establishing an information security culture in organizations : an outcomes based education approach
- Van Niekerk, Johannes Frederick
- Authors: Van Niekerk, Johannes Frederick
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: Computer security , Management information systems -- Security measures , Competency-based education
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MTech
- Identifier: vital:9742 , http://hdl.handle.net/10948/164 , Computer security , Management information systems -- Security measures , Competency-based education
- Description: Information security is crucial to the continuous well-being of modern orga- nizations. Humans play a signfiicant role in the processes needed to secure an organization's information resources. Without an adequate level of user co-operation and knowledge, many security techniques are liable to be misused or misinterpreted by users. This may result in an adequate security measure becoming inadequate. It is therefor necessary to educate the orga- nization's employees regarding information security and also to establish a corporate sub-culture of information security in the organization, which will ensure that the employees have the correct attitude towards their security responsibilities. Current information security education programs fails to pay su±cient attention to the behavioral sciences. There also exist a lack of knowledge regarding the principles, and processes, that would be needed for the establishment of an corporate sub-culture, specific to information security. Without both the necessary knowledge, and the desired attitude amongst the employee, it will be impossible to guarantee that the organi- zation's information resources are secure. It would therefor make sense to address both these dimensions to the human factor in information security, using a single integrated, holistic approach. This dissertation presents such an approach, which is based on an integration of sound behavioral theories.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
Establishing an information security culture in organizations : an outcomes based education approach
- Authors: Van Niekerk, Johannes Frederick
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: Computer security , Management information systems -- Security measures , Competency-based education
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MTech
- Identifier: vital:9742 , http://hdl.handle.net/10948/164 , Computer security , Management information systems -- Security measures , Competency-based education
- Description: Information security is crucial to the continuous well-being of modern orga- nizations. Humans play a signfiicant role in the processes needed to secure an organization's information resources. Without an adequate level of user co-operation and knowledge, many security techniques are liable to be misused or misinterpreted by users. This may result in an adequate security measure becoming inadequate. It is therefor necessary to educate the orga- nization's employees regarding information security and also to establish a corporate sub-culture of information security in the organization, which will ensure that the employees have the correct attitude towards their security responsibilities. Current information security education programs fails to pay su±cient attention to the behavioral sciences. There also exist a lack of knowledge regarding the principles, and processes, that would be needed for the establishment of an corporate sub-culture, specific to information security. Without both the necessary knowledge, and the desired attitude amongst the employee, it will be impossible to guarantee that the organi- zation's information resources are secure. It would therefor make sense to address both these dimensions to the human factor in information security, using a single integrated, holistic approach. This dissertation presents such an approach, which is based on an integration of sound behavioral theories.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
Implementing the CoSaWoE models in a commercial workflow product
- Authors: Erwee, Carmen
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: Computers -- Access control , Workflow , Computer security , Data protection
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MTech
- Identifier: vital:9732 , http://hdl.handle.net/10948/169 , Computers -- Access control , Workflow , Computer security , Data protection
- Description: Workflow systems have gained popularity not only as a research topic, but also as a key component of Enterprize Resource Planning packages and e- business. Comprehensive workflow products that automate intra- as well inter-organizational information flow are now available for commercial use. Standardization efforts have centered mostly around the interoperability of these systems, however a standard access control model have yet to be adopted. The research community has developed several models for access control to be included as part of workflow functionality. Commercial systems, however, are still implementing access control functionality in a proprietary manner. This dissertation investigates whether a comprehensive model for gain- ing context-sensitive access control, namely CoSAWoE, can be purposefully implemented in a commercial workflow product. Using methods such as an exploratory prototype, various aspects of the model was implemented to gain an understanding of the di±culties developers face when attempting to map the model to existing proprietary software. Oracle Workflow was chosen as an example of a commercial workflow product. An investigtion of the features of this product, together with the prototype, revealed the ability to affect access control in a similar manner to the model: by specifying access control constraints during administration and design, and then enforcing those constraints dynamically during run-time. However, only certain components within these two aspects of the model directly effected the commercial workflow product. It was argued that the first two requirements of context-sensitive access control, order of events and strict least privilege, addressed by the object design, role engineering and session control components of the model, can be simulated if such capabilities are not pertinently available as part of the product. As such, guidelines were provided for how this can be achieved in Oracle Workflow. However, most of the implementation effort focussed on the last requirement of context-sensitive access control, namely separation of duties. The CoSAWoE model proposes SoD administration steps that includes expressing various business rules through a set of conflicting entities which are maintained outside the scope of the workflow system. This component was implemented easily enough through tables which were created with a relational database. Evaluating these conflicts during run-time to control worklist generation proved more di±cult. First, a thorough understanding of the way in which workflow history is maintained was necessary. A re-usable function was developed to prune user lists according to user involvement in previous tasks in the workflow and the conflicts specified for those users and tasks. However, due to the lack of a central access control service, this re- usable function must be included in the appropriate places in the workflow process model. Furthermore, the dissertation utilized a practical example to develop a prototype. This prototype served a dual purpose: firstly, to aid the author's understanding of the features and principles involved, and secondly, to illustrate and explore the implementation of the model as described in the previous paragraphs. In conclusion the dissertation summarized the CoSAWoE model's compo- nents which were found to be product agnostic, directly or indirectly imple- mentable, or not implemented in the chosen workflow product. The lessons learnt and issues surrounding the implementation effort were also discussed before further research in terms of XML documents as data containers for the workfow process were suggested.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
- Authors: Erwee, Carmen
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: Computers -- Access control , Workflow , Computer security , Data protection
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MTech
- Identifier: vital:9732 , http://hdl.handle.net/10948/169 , Computers -- Access control , Workflow , Computer security , Data protection
- Description: Workflow systems have gained popularity not only as a research topic, but also as a key component of Enterprize Resource Planning packages and e- business. Comprehensive workflow products that automate intra- as well inter-organizational information flow are now available for commercial use. Standardization efforts have centered mostly around the interoperability of these systems, however a standard access control model have yet to be adopted. The research community has developed several models for access control to be included as part of workflow functionality. Commercial systems, however, are still implementing access control functionality in a proprietary manner. This dissertation investigates whether a comprehensive model for gain- ing context-sensitive access control, namely CoSAWoE, can be purposefully implemented in a commercial workflow product. Using methods such as an exploratory prototype, various aspects of the model was implemented to gain an understanding of the di±culties developers face when attempting to map the model to existing proprietary software. Oracle Workflow was chosen as an example of a commercial workflow product. An investigtion of the features of this product, together with the prototype, revealed the ability to affect access control in a similar manner to the model: by specifying access control constraints during administration and design, and then enforcing those constraints dynamically during run-time. However, only certain components within these two aspects of the model directly effected the commercial workflow product. It was argued that the first two requirements of context-sensitive access control, order of events and strict least privilege, addressed by the object design, role engineering and session control components of the model, can be simulated if such capabilities are not pertinently available as part of the product. As such, guidelines were provided for how this can be achieved in Oracle Workflow. However, most of the implementation effort focussed on the last requirement of context-sensitive access control, namely separation of duties. The CoSAWoE model proposes SoD administration steps that includes expressing various business rules through a set of conflicting entities which are maintained outside the scope of the workflow system. This component was implemented easily enough through tables which were created with a relational database. Evaluating these conflicts during run-time to control worklist generation proved more di±cult. First, a thorough understanding of the way in which workflow history is maintained was necessary. A re-usable function was developed to prune user lists according to user involvement in previous tasks in the workflow and the conflicts specified for those users and tasks. However, due to the lack of a central access control service, this re- usable function must be included in the appropriate places in the workflow process model. Furthermore, the dissertation utilized a practical example to develop a prototype. This prototype served a dual purpose: firstly, to aid the author's understanding of the features and principles involved, and secondly, to illustrate and explore the implementation of the model as described in the previous paragraphs. In conclusion the dissertation summarized the CoSAWoE model's compo- nents which were found to be product agnostic, directly or indirectly imple- mentable, or not implemented in the chosen workflow product. The lessons learnt and issues surrounding the implementation effort were also discussed before further research in terms of XML documents as data containers for the workfow process were suggested.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
Introducing hippocratic log files for personal privacy control
- Authors: Rutherford, Andrew
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: Computer security , Internet -- Security measures
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MTech
- Identifier: vital:9743 , http://hdl.handle.net/10948/171 , Computer security , Internet -- Security measures
- Description: The rapid growth of the Internet has served to intensify existing privacy concerns of the individual, to the point that privacy is the number one concern amongst Internet users today. Tools exist that can provide users with a choice of anonymity or pseudonymity. However, many Web transactions require the release of personally identifying information, thus rendering such tools infeasible in many instances. Since it is then a given that users are often required to release personal information, which could be recorded, it follows that they require a greater degree of control over the information they release. Hippocratic databases, designed by Agrawal, Kiernan, Srikant, and Xu (2002), aim to give users greater control over information stored in a data- base. Their design was inspired by the medical Hippocratic oath, and makes data privacy protection a fundamental responsibility of the database itself. To achieve the privacy of data, Hippocratic databases are governed by 10 key privacy principles. This dissertation argues, that asides from a few challenges, the 10 prin- ciples of Hippocratic databases can be applied to log ¯les. This argument is supported by presenting a high-level functional view of a Hippocratic log file architecture. This architecture focuses on issues that highlight the con- trol users gain over their personal information that is collected in log files. By presenting a layered view of the aforementioned architecture, it was, fur- thermore, possible to provide greater insight into the major processes that would be at work in a Hippocratic log file implementation. An exploratory prototype served to understand and demonstrate certain of the architectural components of Hippocratic log files. This dissertation, thus, makes a contribution to the ideal of providing users with greater control over their personal information, by proposing the use of Hippocratic logfiles.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
- Authors: Rutherford, Andrew
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: Computer security , Internet -- Security measures
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MTech
- Identifier: vital:9743 , http://hdl.handle.net/10948/171 , Computer security , Internet -- Security measures
- Description: The rapid growth of the Internet has served to intensify existing privacy concerns of the individual, to the point that privacy is the number one concern amongst Internet users today. Tools exist that can provide users with a choice of anonymity or pseudonymity. However, many Web transactions require the release of personally identifying information, thus rendering such tools infeasible in many instances. Since it is then a given that users are often required to release personal information, which could be recorded, it follows that they require a greater degree of control over the information they release. Hippocratic databases, designed by Agrawal, Kiernan, Srikant, and Xu (2002), aim to give users greater control over information stored in a data- base. Their design was inspired by the medical Hippocratic oath, and makes data privacy protection a fundamental responsibility of the database itself. To achieve the privacy of data, Hippocratic databases are governed by 10 key privacy principles. This dissertation argues, that asides from a few challenges, the 10 prin- ciples of Hippocratic databases can be applied to log ¯les. This argument is supported by presenting a high-level functional view of a Hippocratic log file architecture. This architecture focuses on issues that highlight the con- trol users gain over their personal information that is collected in log files. By presenting a layered view of the aforementioned architecture, it was, fur- thermore, possible to provide greater insight into the major processes that would be at work in a Hippocratic log file implementation. An exploratory prototype served to understand and demonstrate certain of the architectural components of Hippocratic log files. This dissertation, thus, makes a contribution to the ideal of providing users with greater control over their personal information, by proposing the use of Hippocratic logfiles.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
- «
- ‹
- 1
- ›
- »