A crowd-resourcing virtual laboratory is a virtual laboratory in which some of the resources are obtained from the crowd. The virtual laboratory is for IT Security e-Learning, where a trainee needs an isolated laboratory environment to do the practical exercises. The isolated laboratory environment, which is called as a Team, consists of virtual machines (VMs) or containers and virtual network devices. The crowd contributes their resources such as virtual machines or physical machines, to the virtual laboratory. The virtual laboratory automatically occupies the contributed resources and uses them to create a Team. The team that consists of containers, will be run in a VM. Since there could be a lot of VMs available, the system needs to select the best VM to run a Team. We present CTPlace, an approach for Team Placement in crowd-resourcing virtual laboratory. CTPlace groups the VMs into tree hierarchical clusters based on the Geo-location of the VMs. CTPlace has two steps in the Team placement. First, it selects a nearest cluster to the trainee location to get the highest throughput. Second, it selects a VM inside the selected cluster. To select a VM inside a public cloud cluster, it uses Most-Full-First algorithm to reduce service cost by reducing the number of running VMs. To select a VM inside a private cloud or within contributed resources, it uses Least-Full-First and Tag-Pack to balance the load and try to place the same type of Teams on the same VM. We compare the CTPlace with three other placement algorithms in a simulated environment, to evaluate the performance of the CTPlace.

We have addressed the problems of independent e-lecture learning with an approach involving collaborative learning with lecture recordings. In order to make this type of learning possible, we have prototypically enhanced the video player of a lecture video platform with functionality that allows simultaneous viewing of a lecture on two or more computers. While watching the video, synchronization of the playback and every click event, such as play, pause, seek, and playback speed adjustment can be carried out. We have also added the option of annotating slides. With this approach, it is possible for learners to watch a lecture together, even though they are in different places. In this way, the benefits of collaborative learning can also be used when learning online. Now, it is more likely that learners stay focused on the lecture for a longer time (as the collaboration creates an additional obligation not to leave early and desert a friend). Furthermore, the learning outcome is higher because learners can ask their friends questions and explain things to each other as well as mark important points in the lecture video.

The authors give a detailed summary about the fundamentals and the historical background of digital communication. This includes an overview of the encoding principles and algorithms of textual information, audio information, as well as images, graphics, and video in the Internet. Furthermore the fundamentals of computer networking, digital security and cryptography are covered. Thus, the book provides a well-founded access to communication technology of computer networks, the internet and the WWW. Numerous pictures and images, a subject-index and a detailed list of historical personalities including a glossary for each chapter increase the practical benefit of this book that is well suited as well as for undergraduate students as for working practitioners.

Tele-Lab is a platform for e-learning in Internet security with a special focus on teaching by means of handson experience. A virtual laboratory is implemented for the provision of training environments for practical exercises. Tele-Lab uses virtual machine (VM) technology and virtual network devices. A VM is used to represent a physical computer in an exercise scenario. While every VM needs a specific resource allocation, availability and scalability of Tele-lab become an issue. Scaling out Tele-Lab to a public cloud is one alternative to making it more available and scalable. Public clouds are very flexible in providing resources since customers can add or reduce resources whenever needed. A second alternative is the reduction of resources needed for a single training environment, e.g. by replacing the virtualization technology in Tele-Lab with the one that uses fewer resources than full-fledged virtual machines. A container uses far fewer resources than a virtual machine. The paper at hand elaborates on the use of containers (i.e. Docker) in the training environment of a man in the middle (MITM) attack and Firewall learning units, designed to replace VMs. This work is part of the continuous improvement on Tele-Lab to make it more reliable and more scalable. 

Virtual Laboratory is needed for practical, hands-on exercises in e-learning courses. The E-learning system needs to provide a specific laboratory environment for a specific learning unit. A Virtual laboratory system with a high requirements learning units, is struggling in serving a large number of users, because the available hardware resources are limited and the budget to provide more resources is low. The number of e-Learning users that simultaneously access the virtual laboratory is varied. In this paper, we propose an architecture of a virtual laboratory system for a large number of users. A person or a company can contribute in providing hardware resources in crowdsourcing manner. This system uses Hybrid cloud platform to be able to scale out and scale in rapidly. The architecture is able to expand by receiving more hardware resources from a person or a company that is willing to contribute. The resources can be anywhere but must be connected to the Internet. For example, if a user has a Virtual Machine (VM) in the cloud or in his own bare metal system connected to the Internet, he can integrate his VM into the Virtual laboratory system. Because the e-learning system is a non-profit system, we assumed that some users and companies are willing to contribute.We use Tele-lab architecture as a based to create the proposed architecture. The Tele-lab is a virtual laboratory for Internet Security e-learning. The Tele-lab uses a private cloud (openNebula) to provide VMs and Containers that are used to represent hosts in a Virtual laboratory. In our architecture as also in the Tele-Lab, there is a frontend and a backend. The frontend is providing an interface to the users. In our architecture, we focus on the backend to be able to provide a virtual laboratory that can serve a large number of users. In the architecture, we use a middleware to provide a communication between a private cloud and a public cloud and also communication between the Virtual laboratory system and the resources that belong to the crowd.This work is part of the continuous improvement on Tele-Lab to make it more reliable and more scalable. We are heading toward using Tele-Lab in the implementation of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC).

Lecture video archives offer a large variety of lecture recordings in different topics. Naturally, topics are described superficially, easily or detailed in different lectures. Users interested in certain topics have problems finding lectures describing a topic chronology from basic lectures to more detailed difficult lectures. The Lecture Butler is going to automatically offer e-learning students lectures for the topics of interest in chronological playlists. The approach is finding lecture information using title, description, OCR and ASR data. This data is indexed and searched by an in-memory database to fulfill the speed requirements for playlist creation. In the search results lectures are going to be ordered by lecture occurrence in the university semester time schedule or by given lecture level of difficulty. As a result students can automatically create playlists for their topic of interest in sequence of the lecture level. Hence, students are not overstrained by lectures when they start with basic lectures first. Basic lectures provide information to understand more complex lectures. The research shows that an automatic approach by adding the level of difficulty or university semester time table is going to show reasonable playlists to find topics of interest. This solves the main problem students encounter when they try to learn a topic step-by-step using recorded lectures. The approach will support and motivate students using e-learning opportunities.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been one of the major trend topics of the last years within the e-learning community. Many companies, such as Coursera, edX and Udacity, launched MOOCs offering a broad range of topics. In this paper, the authors will take a look at the mobile support of different MOOC providers. Use cases and benefits of mobile access to a MOOC platform—both online and offline—will be shown. Finally, openSAP’s solution to address this task will be demonstrated. In this context, key technical decisions, which can serve as a blueprint for other MOOC providers will be discussed.

There is a great demand for hands-on training in engineering education. In the context of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), assessing these experiments manually by teaching assistants is not possible owed to the high number of participants and the resulting workload for the teaching team. Systems for machine-based assessment of coding tasks are existing, but not necessarily available publicly, or not prepared to handle the massive amount of users in a MOOC. Definitely, they are not available “ad hoc”, but require a certain amount of effort to be integrated in the MOOC platform or to be made available for the students in another way. Time and money to provide the required effort is not always available. This work presents a lightweight solution for the assessment of practical programming exercises, based on third party online coding tools. The solution was introduced as a part of openHPI's Web-Technologies course. The basic idea is to prepare a task in an available online tool, along with a piece of code that is able to evaluate the participant's solution. In case of success the participant is provided with a password, which in return serves as the answer for a fill-in-the-gap question in a standard quiz as provided by the openHPI MOOC platform, and thus allows for automatic online assessment based on practical coding exercises.

The rapid development of digital communication technology in the areas of diversity and performance is ongoing—with no end in sight. The trend toward the integration of classic media continues. Verbal communication and data transmission have now become inseparable in modern mobile networks. The debut of digital technology has made it no longer necessary to distinguish between different types of media, such as text, graphic, audio or video. Encoded and in digital form, they all take the same shape of an extremely long series of zeros and ones and can be transferred indiscriminately via the same medium. In order to convert this stream of 0 s and 1 s back to its original media expression, methods and procedures of encoding and decoding are necessary. This task is taken on by powerful computers, which in the future will appear less in the form of a standard monitor and keyboard and more as an integrated system component of nearly all everyday devices. Today the computer is the window to the digital world and functions as an integrative communication medium. It allows multimedia data communication via the standard interface of the World Wide Web (WWW) with its simple and intuitive user interface—the browser. In the following chapters, we will take a closer look at the encoding of multimedia data. We will also examine the data formats developed for its transmission through the digital network and in the WWW. The most important media formats for audio, image and video data will be our focus.

Digital library. JM Reitz ODLIS: Online dictionary for Library and Information Science, 2014.

Risk management has become an essential mechanism for business and security analysts, since it enable the identification, evaluation and treatment of any threats, vulnerabilities, and risks to which organizations maybe be exposed. In this paper, we discuss the need to provide a standard representation of security countermeasures in order to automate the selection of countermeasures for business processes. The main contribution lies in the specification of security pattern as standard representation for countermeasures. Classical security pattern structure is extended to incorporate new features that enable the automatic selection of security patterns. Furthermore, a prototype has been developed which support the specification of security patterns in a graphical way.

A huge amount of information about real-time events are being generated in every second in a running IT-Infrastructure and recorded by the system logs, application logs, as well as the output from the deployed security or management methods, e.g., IDS alerts, firewall logs, scanning reports, etc. To rapidly gather, process, correlate, and analyze the massive event information is a challenging task. High performance security analytics is proposed to address this challenge by which the real-time event information can be normalized, centralized, and correlated to help identify the current running state of the target environment. As an example of next generation Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platform, Security Analytics Lab (SAL) has been designed and implemented based on the newly emerged In-Memory data management technique, which makes it possible to efficiently organize, access, and process different types of event information through a consistent central storage and interface. In this paper, the multi-core architecture is introduced on the event correlation module of SAL platform by which the correlation tasks can be executed in parallel by different computing resources. The k-means algorithm is implemented as an example of possible event clustering and correlation algorithms. Several experiments are conducted and analyzed to show that the performance of analytics can be significantly improved by applying multi-core architecture in the event correlation procedure.

mLocal networks - so-called LANs (Local Area Networks) connect computers that are in close proximity to each other. The triumphant march of LANs remains unbroken, extending from a simple point-to-point connection between two computers in the same room, to company/campus networks linking several hundred or even thousands of computers all communicating with each other over a common transmission medium. In respect to their geographical scope and the number of computers that can be connected over them, LANs, however, do have technical limitations. Different operational criteria, such as cost, throughput rate, spatial expansion and arrangement have led to the development of widely varying LAN technologies. These all follow their own protocol mechanisms and are each suited for application in different scenarios whether stationary or mobile.For the manufacturer as well as for the user, the necessity of a standardization was an urgent matter. Under the umbrella of the organization IEEE, the IEEE 802 chapter has been formed with its respective working groups. This chapter has created standards for widespread LAN technologies such as Ethernet, token ring, or the indispensable WLAN, and continues to develop them further. We will look at the development of various technologies and describe standards in the area of the local network. The topics covered range from thematic classification in the TCP/IP reference model to protocol mechanisms, address management in the LAN, to a description of various LAN technologies. The focus of here will be on wired LAN technologies. Due to its growing importance, a separate chapter has been dedicated to wireless LAN.

Recently a new format of online education has emerged that combines video lectures, interactive quizzes and social learning into an event that aspires to attract a massive number of participants. This format, referred to as Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), has garnered considerable public attention, and has been invested with great hopes (and fears) of transforming higher education by opening up the walls of closed institutions to a world-wide audience. In this paper, we present two MOOCs that were hosted at the same platform, and have implemented the same learning design. Due to their difference in language, topic domain and difficulty, the communities that they brought into existence were very different. We start by describing the MOOC format in more detail, and the distinguishing features of openHPI. We then discuss the literature on communities of practice and cultures of participation. After some statistical data about the first openHPI course, we present our qualitative observations about both courses, and conclude by giving an outlook on an ongoing comparative analysis of the two courses.

Every output, transfer and reception of information takes place by way of a physical medium, meaning a carrier of this information. Also on the Internet, the transfer of information is conducted via a medium of physical communication. These range from traditional electric conductors, simple cables and fiber-optic cables (fiberglass cables) to conductor-independent forms, whereby electromagnetic waves in different frequencies serve as information carriers. But how does the information to be transferred, digitally coded as a series of "zeros" and "ones," actually arrive at the physical communications medium? Before taking a detailed look in this chapter at the different wired and wireless media of transfer, the theoretical foundation of physical data transfer will be explained, whereby so-called modulation procedures and multiplex procedures stand at the forefront of how this binary information is put into a physically transferable "form," thus enabling an efficient data transfer, also over shared media.

The days when access to the Internet was only possible from the home or office via a wired computer are long gone. For several years now, mobility has been the primary focus, whether it be using a laptop to access the company network while on the go or reading emails on a cell phone. This unlimited availability has been enabled by mobile communication technologies that make the normal LAN accessible anywhere. And all this without having to worry about bothersome cabling management. The wireless LAN (or WLAN) provides us today with a performance comparable to wired LAN technology But this new found freedom is not without its darker side. With wired network technologies, unauthorized intruders and attackers had been forced to first gain physical access to the foreign network before intrusion could be carried out. The WLAN of today does away with fixed structural borders and can be received barrier-free by everyone within its transmission radius. This has made security technologies and encryption techniques inseparable with wireless network technologies. The present chapter introduces the foundations of the WLAN technology and will also look at the necessary security standards and encryption methods that allow the secure implementation of wireless technology In addition to WLANs, close range networks, so-called Personal Area Networks (PANs), are gaining increasing importance. These have the capability of linking devices autonomously and wirelessly within the radius of only a few meters. Prominent examples of PAN technologies - Bluetooth and ZigBee - will be examined in detail.