This paper contributes to research on gamified learning by providing lessons learned from a gamified, self-paced, digital distant learning environment on business information systems. It expands previous research by reporting on a second iteration of an educational design experiment in S/4 HANA. Design elements were composed into a playful layout and associations with a non-learning-context were included, in order to create a more relaxed learning experience. Mistakes were allowed, to keep the students’ attention high and to make achievements more rewarding. A mixed media approach was applied to enrich students’ learning experience and to avoid monotony. This paper contributes to the body of knowledge by providing lessons learned from a radical conversion of a traditional face-to-face course into a digital distant learning environment using elements of gamification, self-paced learning, and learning from mistakes.
Hashing to prime in zero-knowledge takes as input a committed secret $$a$$ -bit input x and outputs a committed secret $${(k+1)}$$ -bit prime number $$p_x$$ . In this work we are considering zero-knowledge arguments that establish that the corresponding computations are done correctly and that the resulting commitment is indeed on the prime number derived from x. Depending on the number of zero-knowledge argument rounds k and the number of primality bases t used to establish primality, we obtain a soundness error probability of at most $$2^{-k}+ 2^{-t}$$ . While the corresponding ZK arguments have already been established in earlier work [22], we explore the use of hash-to-prime ZK arguments to enable dynamic encodings for a selection of cryptographic schemes, namely prime-based accumulator [2, 10], attribute-based credential [7], and graph signature schemes [19, 21].
Teaching and research have been the core activities of universities since ages. Nowadays, the topic of transfer is increasingly coming into focus, as universities are no longer seen as “ivory towers” in which research is cut off from the rest of the society, but rather as establishments with a profound knowledge and technology transfer. However, transfer often still occurs in an uncoordinated manner without distinct processes or coordination. A digital transformation of transfer activities could support and make universities fit for the future of transfer. Therefore, this paper does not only propose a framework for digital transformation of transfer, but also points out the importance of platforms and collaboration of universities.
Protecting software from illegal reverse engineering and malicious hackers is often remedied through either legal or technical means. In the technical domain, software obfuscation provides less than perfect protection against such attacks since there is no perfect obfuscator for all classes of programs. However, semantic preserving transformations can attempt to make the cost of attacks prohibitive in either time or resources. Software-based hardware abstraction (SBHA) is a novel approach that transforms traditional software code segments into a digital logic form and thus virtualizes code into a hardware abstraction. SBHA can be used to protect embedded secrets in programs that are used to guard intellectual property (IP). Secrets such as passwords, PINs, and activation codes authorize legitimate end-users to install or activate software for use and are validated typically through point functions that check for the single unique input that is expected. In this study we extend initial analysis of SBHA against state-of-the-art dynamic symbolic execution (DSE) attacks in recovering embedded program secrets and consider the limits of an attacker that recovers the logic circuit netlist from an SBHA-protected program. We pose four approaches for hardened SBHA configurations and evaluate their effectiveness using typical analysis tools that cover synthesis, binary decision diagram recovery, and symbolic analysis. We show that such attacks can be mitigated by these countermeasures outright and discuss the trade-off in size and overhead relative to the relatively low-cost of SBHA point-functions stand alone. We conclude that for single use operations such as point function checks, the overhead is large but the execution runtime delta is negligible.
Given how common IoT devices that use constrained resources are becoming today, the need of the hour is communication protocols which can operate securely under such limitations. For a few years, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working to standardize EDHOC, an authenticated key establishment protocol for such constrained IoT devices. The first version of EDHOC was proposed in 2016. In 2018, Bruni et al. [3] used the ProVerif tool [2] to formally analyze an early version of EDHOC, which had only two key establishment methods. By 2021, the protocol had been fleshed out much more, with multiple new key establishment methods, and this version was formally analyzed using the Tamarin prover [15] in [17]. In this paper, we build on that work, by modifying the model, analyzing some new properties, and discussing some aspects of the latest EDHOC specification. In particular, we extend the modeling in [17] with trusted execution environments (TEEs), modify the way we model XOR encryption, and in addition to the properties verified in [17], we verify weak post-compromise security (PCS) as well as the secrecy and integrity of some additional data used as part of the protocol.
