Recent developments in GIS mapping have shown there are significant overlaps between mining concessions and pre-existing forms of land tenure. Yet, there is limited research that analyses the impact of these overlaps on relevant developmental issues - particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. In an effort to remedy this situation, this article pieces together existing research on the sub-Saharan African region to argue that these overlaps can push pre-existing land users to the margins of land access, which when combined with the indirect forms of environmental degradation unleashed by overlapping land rights can spark community-company conflict in turn increasing risk for investors. Therefore, greater attention needs to be paid to exploring the social, economic and environmental transformation of land in the context of mining concessions, while concessionary contracts need to incorporate an improved understanding of pre-existing land use patterns through community-led mapping and discussion. Crown Copyright (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Patterns of human encounters, which are difficult to observe directly, are fundamental to the propagation of mobile malware aimed at infecting devices in spatial proximity. We investigate errors introduced by using scanners that detect the presence of devices on the assumption that device copresence at a scanner corresponds to a device encounter. We show in an ideal static model that only 59% of inferred encounters correspond to actual device copresence. To investigate the effects of mobility, we use a simulator to compare encounters between devices with those inferred by scanners. We show that the statistical properties of scanned encounters differ from actual device encounters in ways which impact malware propagation dynamics, a form of aggressive data dissemination. In addition to helping us understand the limitations of encounter data gathered by scanners in the field, our use of virtual scanners suggests a practical method for using these empirical datasets to better inform simulations of proximity malware outbreaks and similar data dissemination applications.

People’s perceptions of the security and bona fides of urban pervasive services, and their trust in them, do not necessarily match the reality of a given service. Taking WiFi hotspots as an example, this study investigated the effects on users’ perceptions of a service’s genuineness and security of allowing the user to choose the message used in the Physical Interlock device association protocol. Users were significantly more confident in the genuineness of the wireless network and the ability of PI to defend them against a Man-in-the-Middle attack if they contributed directly to the creation of the message. However, user creation of the entire message did not significantly affect user perceptions compared to user creation of half the message combined with system generation of the other half. Thus, messages that combine partial user generation with partial system generation may give people confidence in secure ad-hoc associations between their personal devices and urban pervasive services, while ensuring a known lower bound on message strength.

This paper concerns the problem of phishing attacks in ubiquitous computing environments. The embedding of ubiquitous services into our everyday environments may make fake services seem plausible but it also enables us to authenticate them with respect to those environments. We propose physical and virtual linkage as two types of authenticating evidence in ubiquitous environments and two protocols based on them. We describe an experiment to test hypotheses concerning user responses to physical and virtual linkage with respect to fake Wi-Fi hotspots. Based on our experience we derive an improved protocol for authenticating spontaneously accessed ubiquitous services.

Users of public Wi-Fi networks risk being tricked into connecting to `evil twin' access points set up by attackers to launch man-in-the-middle attacks. We present a system which employs post hoc validation of an anonymous Diffie-Hellman key exchange undertaken as part of an 802.1X/EAP-TTLS network association process. Our system utilises an additional secure auxilliary channel to run a modified version of the interlock protocol based on physical evidence in the network location. By using keying information generated during the network joining process, we allow spontaneous network users to detect man-in-the-middle attacks as well as avoiding the need for pre-shared keys. We report on implementations of our system which utilise physical evidence of authenticity in the alternative forms of public displays and 2D barcodes embedded in the environment and read by mobile phones.