Computing and Information Technology

The need for fool proof authentication procedures away from traditional authentication mechanisms like passwords, security PINS has led to the advent of biometric authentication in information systems. Biometric data extracted from physiological features of a person including but not limited to fingerprints, palm prints, face or retina for purpose of verification & identification is saved as biometric templates. The inception of biometrics in access control systems has not been without its own hitches & like other systems it has its fair share of challenges. Biometric fingerprints being the most mature of all biometric spheres are the most widely adopted biometric authentication systems. Biometric systems effectiveness lies on how secure they are at preventing inadvertent disclosure of biometric templates in an information system’s archive. This however has not been the case as biometric templates have been fraudulently accessed to gain unauthorized access in identification and verification systems. In order to achieve strong and secure biometric systems, biometric systems developers need to build biometric systems that properly secure biometric templates. Several biometric template protection schemes and approaches have been proposed and used to safeguard stored biometric templates. Despite there being various biometric template protection schemes and approaches in existence, none of them has provided the most authentic, reliable, efficient and deterrent means to totally secure biometric fingerprint templates. This research sought to establish status of the current biometric template protection techniques and methods by conducting a survey and analyzing data gathered from a sample of seventy-eight (78) respondents. We will report these results and give our conclusion based on findings of the survey in this paper.

In this paper, we base our research on biometric systems security. We begin by introducing biometrics after which we will describe how a biometric system works before we later define what a biometric template is.  Thereafter, we will explore attacks on biometric systems and lay more emphasis on biometric template attacks and explore attacks targeting biometric templates in a biometric system database. These attacks motivated us to study the existing biometric template protection schemes and techniques currently in use to determine their strengths and weaknesses. In the end, we summarize this study in the conclusion section of the paper.

In this study, we reviewed biometric template protection schemes in subsisting literature and established that there is no reliable, efficacious and foolproof technique that assures diversity, revocability, security and optimal performance as is required of an ideal biometric template security scheme. This status of affairs motivated us to contrivance an approach that derives biometric encryption keys from biometric fingerprint templates. The technique we proposed involves a two-step enrollment and authentication of fingerprints while encrypting fingerprint templates with encryption keys derived from other biometric fingerprint templates before archiving them to a database. The system was implemented using Java, developed on Netbeans 8.0 IDE, MySQL RDBMS was used for back-end database and utilized Source AFIS java library framework for fingerprint verification and identification. Test results were carried out to determine the system’s efficacy.

Healthcare facilities have at their disposal vast amounts of cancer patients' data. Medical practitioners require more efficient techniques to extract relevant knowledge from this data for accurate decision-making. However the challenge is how to extract and act upon it in a timely manner. If well engineered, the huge data can aid in developing expert systems for decision support that can assist physicians in diagnosing and predicting some debilitating life threatening diseases such as cancer. Expert systems for decision support can reduce the cost, the waiting time, and liberate medical practitioners for more research, as well as reduce errors and mistakes that can be made by humans due to fatigue and tiredness. The process of utilizing health data effectively however, involves many challenges such as the problem of missing feature values, the curse of dimensionality due to a large number of attributes, and how to go about determining the features that can lead to more accurate diagnosis. Effective data mining tools can assist in early detection of diseases such as cancer. In this paper, we bring forth a new approach for constructing missing features values based on iterative nearest neighbours and distance metrics.

The use of mobile phones in African has seen a formidable growth. The use of mobile phones to perform business and financial transactions seems to be on the increase as well. The rise in use of mobile phones to perform financial transactions also increases the risks associated with such transactions and especially man in the middle attacks. These compounded with lack of awareness among users means that they (the users) are highly exposed to such attacks. Due to the popular use of mobile banking in Kenya and the third world in particular, securing communication between the mobile device and the back end server has become a fundamental issue. This is due to the fact that hackers have the ability to steal banking information using various techniques, particularly the duping of mobile phone users to believe that they are communicating with a genuine program from their bank while in reality a user is simple giving away sensitive information to the hacker. This paper aims to investigate the level of awareness among users of mobile banking transactions in regards to man in the middle attacks and whether the awareness or lack of it can increase or deter such attacks Key words: mobile phones, Mobile banking services, Security, man in the middle attack,

Mobile banking, sometimes referred to as M-Banking, Mbanking or SMS Banking, is a term used for performing balance checks, account transactions, payments, credit applications and other banking transactions through a mobile device such as a mobile phone or Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). Mobile banking has until recently most often been performed via SMS or the Mobile Web. Apple's initial success with iPhone and the rapid growth of phones based on Google's Android (operating system) have led to increasing use of special client programs, called apps, downloaded to the mobile device hence increasing the number of banking applications that can be made available on mobile phones . This in turn has increased the popularity of mobile device use in regards to personal banking activities.

Mobile banking, sometimes referred to as M-Banking, Mbanking or SMS Banking, is a term used for performing balance checks, account transactions, payments, credit applications and other banking transactions through a mobile device such as a mobile phone or Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). Mobile banking has until recently most often been performed via SMS or the Mobile Web. Apple's initial success with iPhone and the rapid growth of phones based on Google's Android (operating system) have led to increasing use of special client programs, called apps, downloaded to the mobile device hence increasing the number of banking applications that can be made available on mobile phones . This in turn has increased the popularity of mobile device use in regards to personal banking activities.

In this paper, enhanced security of online banking transactions against man in the middle is presented basing on two factor authentications by use of one time password and single password. Online banking is a system allowing individuals to perform banking activities at home via the internet. Online banking through traditional banks enable customers to perform all routine transactions, such as account transfers, balance inquiries, bill payments, Account information can be accessed anytime, day or night, and can be done from anywhere. Online transactions are considered most sensitive. Doing such online transactions via a public network consequently introduces new challenges for security and trustworthiness, They are two types of common attacks in online banking which are offline credential stealing attacks and online channel breaking attacks. This paper provide a solution to the problem encountered in online channel-breaking attacks. The intruder unnoticeably interrupts messages between the client PC and the banking server by masquerading as the server to the client and vice versa. This kind of attack is used to anonymously perform some operations on the user's account. For this purpose the current paper proposed a new approach of two factor authentication with one time password generated on two sided which are client side and server side. Qualitative methods are used for data collection. The qualitative methods can be classified in three broad categories: in-depth interview, observation methods, document review. Finally, the paper discuss and analyze how two factor authentication will enhance security of online banking services against man in the middle and provide recommendations for further security. Keywords: Internet banking , man in the middle attack, factor authentication, one time password.

The purpose of this study is to understand the extent of the effectiveness of intelligence-led policing on drugtrafficking prevention in Nyeri County. This endeavor resulted from realization of increased cases of drug-trafficking that were detected. Police officers continue to use intelligence-led policing as a proactive policing strategy but its success remains wavering. Nonetheless the study is important as it brought out crucial findings that explained the state of affairs with regard to the variables in question. The study also made possible recommendations to the police strategic leadership and security policy makers on the best way forward. Regarding the thesis structure, the thesis has five chapters additional to the preliminaries: chapters one to five, in that order. Chapter one dealt with the general introduction of the thesis. It specifically addressed the background to the study, statement of the problem, research objectives and research questions. The rational, significance and finally scope of the study were also addressed. Chapter two addressed the literature review where key themes such as overview of drugtrafficking, intelligence sharing, informants" management and undercover operations were discussed. Also discussed are the nexus between intelligence-led policing and drug trafficking and the theoretical framework used in the study. Chapter three discussed the research methodology. Specifically its addresses the following: research design, target population, sampling method, data collection methods, ethical issues as well as limitation of the study. Chapter four addressed the Abstract: This study endeavored to gain an understanding of the extent of the effectiveness of intelligence-led policing in the prevention of drug-trafficking in Nyeri County, Kenya. The objectives of the study were: to find out how effective intelligence-led policing is in the prevention of drug-trafficking in Nyeri County; to find out the challenges that affect intelligence-led policing and drug trafficking prevention and lastly, to make suggestions on possible strategies and way forward. The study is qualitative in nature. The respondents comprised of police detectives from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations. Primary data was collected through semi-structured interviews and mixed questionnaires while secondary data was collected through review of relevant content. The data was then analyzed by coding and presented by use of narratives, pie-charts and tables. The results show that whereas intelligence-led policing is more effective in the prevention of drug-trafficking into or through the county from other parts of the country, it is less effective in preventing drug trafficking from within the county. Additionally, the study established that there are various challenges that affect drug-trafficking prevention. Among them is the presence of an international highway traversing the county and limited police capacity to effectively curtail drug-trafficking. Finally, the study established that police commanders at various levels can adopt various strategies that would address these challenges. Accordingly, the implication of the findings is that the police strategic commanders at all levels should be aware of these dynamics and take remedial measures to ensure smoother and more effective intelligence-led policing which will ultimately lead to prevention or reduction of crimes such as drug trafficking. The study also enriches academic and professional knowledge in the fields of intelligence-led policing and drug-trafficking.

Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) is a form of active learning, often used in STEM education to promote conceptual learning and to acquire scientific investigation skills. This paper reports on a study in which teachers in Kenya, Nigeria and the Republic of Benin implemented IBL embedded in online and offline Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILS) in their classes using the Go-Lab platform (https://www.golabs.eu). After a brief description of the IBL methodology, of lab work and in particular virtual labs for STEM education, of the process of preparing teachers to use IBL in class, and of the context of this study, we highlight the methodology used, and finally report our results. These show that the introduction and class enactment of a digital inquiry based learning platform such as Go-Lab in Africa (i) is possible, although challenging, (ii) does lead to student learning, (iii) for this to take place teacher training is necessary, (iv) the digital infrastructure is present in the schools thoug...

Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) is a form of active learning, often used in STEM education to promote conceptual learning and to acquire scientific investigation skills. This paper reports on a study in which teachers in Kenya, Nigeria and the Republic of Benin implemented IBL embedded in online and offline Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILS) in their classes using the Go-Lab platform (https://www.golabs.eu). After a brief description of the IBL methodology, of lab work and in particular virtual labs for STEM education, of the process of preparing teachers to use IBL in class, and of the context of this study, we highlight the methodology used, and finally report our results. These show that the introduction and class enactment of a digital inquiry based learning platform such as Go-Lab in Africa (i) is possible, although challenging, (ii) does lead to student learning, (iii) for this to take place teacher training is necessary, (iv) the digital infrastructure is present in the schools thoug...