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1. Demonstrate a comprehensive and critical familiarity with available enterprise application implementation options, and demonstrate the ability to make objective, rational decisions

Department of Electronics, Computing & Mathematics

Assignment Specification

Module Title: Information Security and Assurance                                                       

Assessment Title:

XaaS, Open Source and Shared Libraries:- Questions of Ethics, Trust, Governance, Security, Audit and Provenance

 

Weighting Towards Module Grade:  100%

Date Set:    8 Jan 2021

Hand-In Deadline Date: 

Report:

 

 

Penalty for Late Submission

Recognising that deadlines are an integral part of professional workplace practice, the University expects students to meet all agreed deadlines for submission of assessments. However, the University acknowledges that there may be circumstances which prevent students from meeting deadlines. There are now 3 distinct processes in place to deal with differing student circumstances:

Assessed Extended Deadline (AED) Students with disabilities or long term health issues are entitled to a Support Plan.

Exceptional Extenuating Circumstances (EEC) The EEC policy applies to situations where serious, unforeseen circumstances prevent the student from completing the assignment on time or to the normal standard.

Late Submission Requests for late submission will be made to the relevant Subject Manager in the School (or Head of Joint Honours for joint honours students) who can authorise an extension of up to a maximum of one week.

 

 

Level of Collaboration:

NONE

 

 

Learning Outcomes covered in this Assignment:

  1. Demonstrate a comprehensive and critical familiarity with available enterprise application implementation options, and demonstrate the ability to make objective, rational decisions – and defend them – about enterprise application development, implementation and operation.
  2. Be able to design and critically evaluate key features of enterprise applications from a strategic perspective.

Criteria for Assessment: See description attached

       

Context

The overall topic is XaaS, Open Source and Shared Libraries:- Questions of Ethics, Trust, Governance, Security, Audit and Provenance.

Background

The use of the full range of Anything as a Service (XaaS) such as Software as a Service etc., Open Source software and a wide range of shared libraries is strongly recommended by many, as a way of reducing the costs of accessing or creating high functionality software, often using Agile and DevOps.

However, a recent (23 Dec 2020) report by CISQ (the Consortium for Information & Software Quality) “The Cost of Poor Software Quality in the US: A 2020 Report” identifies poor software quality as wasting about $6Trillion dollars in 2020 against a Global spend on all aspects of IT development and use of approximately $5Trillion. See https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/synopsys-sponsored-cisq-research-estimates-cost-of-poor-software-quality-in-the-us-2-08-trillion-in-2020--301201822.html  for the report. It is important that you obtain a copy and read the report thoroughly. The world GDP for 2019 was estimated to be $87T.

The report provides a wide range of analytical frameworks that you can use to evaluate whether the use of such technologies is beneficial and risk free, or whether they require extreme care in deployment and operation.

Table 1 which starts on page 17 of the report provides a list of some of the most recent major failures.

Equifax was resulted from a vulnerability in an unpatched Apache Struts framework in a database.

In addition, we remember the BA accounts breach as a result of a vulnerability in a standard App library that they used which lead to an ICO GDPR penalty of £183.4M later reduced to £20M during negotiations between BA and the ICO. See https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-blogs/2019/07/ico-announces-intention-to-fine-british-airways/ for some of the details.

JP Morgan uses Python for its trading and risk management systems and needed to convert its software from Python 2 to Python 3, see https://www.techrepublic.com/article/jpmorgans-athena-has-35-million-lines-of-python-code-and-wont-be-updated-to-python-3-in-time/ . A compounding problem is that Python is based on libraries of libraries of libraries etc. This raises many significant issues of validating and verifying all of those subsidiary libraries for both Python 3 compliance and also correctness and lack of vulnerabilities.

In mid-December 2020, Reuters reported that a company called Solarwinds had suffered a major breach of its software supply chain that affected its Orion Suite. The company provided Orion as SaaS to a very wide range of organisations, including many US government agencies which were then hacked as a result of the vulnerabilities introduced by the hackers using signed certificates to validate the modified software. See https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/solarwinds-old-geeks-link-list-allen-woods/ for a range of links on this attack, how it  happened and its ramifications.

Your Challenge

Based on your personal interests and the questions in the assignment title, research in the academic and the business press to find a situation which you can use as your use case context for your assignment. You should aim to use two of the questions in the title in order to provide the tension in your critical analysis.

Overall Assessment Portfolio (weighting)

  • 5 Page report (100%) using Springer LNCS Template

Overall Objective

To identify some aspect related to the topic “XaaS, Open Source and Shared Libraries:- Questions of Ethics, Trust, Governance, Security, Audit and Provenance” that “Organisations do not know that they do not know” but which you can show is very important to them, by writing a 5 page Report (excluding title-sheet, table of contents and bibliography) in the Springer LNCS template to provide a critical analysis of the subject, with suitable conclusions and recommendations.

You will need to choose one use case and critically evaluate the use of the technologies in that situation.

You will choose two or more of the questions that form part of the title and then research, apply, critically evaluate and develop some important conclusions.

Assessment of Portfolio

The Report (100% - Tutor Assessed)

The report will be assessed in two mandatory stages:-

You will submit your final draft to the system on Saturday 24th April 2021.

Deliverables

A five page (+0 and -10 lines) (excluding front sheet and bibliography), business style report is required that meets the normal academic conventions of structure, full referencing (Harvard system) and bibliography, meeting these conventions is mandatory. It will be based on the Springer LNCS template, which is provided on the Springer website in the Guidance to Authors. It is vital that you use this template and do not change any of the formatting of the template, because meeting these standards is worth 20% of your overall grade for this module (see marking criteria) as an evaluation of your ability to comply with presentational standards in your future employment.

There will be suitable title section, abstract, table of contents, introduction and conclusion / recommendation sections and Bibliography (which only contains sources that you have cited in your report).

You are recommended to use appropriate chapter headings and sub-headings to provide the structure to your report which will form the four main sections, as follows:-

  1. Context
  2. Justification of Analytical Framework
  3. Critical Analysis of the use case
  4. Conclusions and recommendations

Formatting Requirements

You must adhere to the LNCS formatting conventions with only two exceptions which are that you must use the Harvard citing and referencing standards and you must use UK English spelling. You can find a Zip file containing the latest guidelines, Windows and Mac templates on the Springer LNCS web site in the Guide for Authors page. See also this video on how to use the Springer LNCS template https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVOF9bAp5XQ

Please note that all assignments will be checked for plagiarism using computer software as part of the submission process.

Submission of your work to Turnitin

The University has now implemented a general policy of anonymous marking and all the Turnitin Submission system will hide your name from your tutors, until after moderation. This module has an exemption due to the face-to-face nature of the formative reviews during workshops, as a result for the formal formative review and final marking, you MUST ensure that you include your student number in the submission title of all your work.

Grading

The standard University U/G grading scale will be used as reflected in the following Rubric.

Your grade will reflect both the level and accuracy of the application of your understanding of the issues displayed and the quality, breadth, depth and persuasiveness of the arguments used in your evaluation and analysis. Account will also be taken of the quality of your sources and strength of citations.

Grading Criteria

Marking will be based on the criteria shown below in the rubric.

You will be able to use the rubric as a means to help you to identify how to achieve the very highest possible mark for your assignment as you draft.

Use the criteria below to self-assess your work before you submit it as part of your review of the Fitness to Submit criteria.

Please note that Employability and Presentation accounts for 20% of the article grade. If your article does NOT FULLY COMPLY with the template provided you will lose a fifth of your mark.

Quotations Are Prohibited

You are not permitted to use any quotations in your five pages of the report because they distract the reader from your analysis. In addition, your reader is wanting to understand your analysis and thinking rather than learning that you are able to find resources and then copy and paste the words into your report. Even if the words are worth quoting, you still need to write your own justification of how the quotation contributes to your analysis. As a result, you must write your analysis with appropriate citations to the sources of the ideas that you would otherwise have copied and pasted, thus saving words.

There is a penalty of 50% of the Employability and Presentation mark if there are any quotations in the body of your report.

Tables, Figures, Illustrations etc. must be in the Appendices

All tables of data, illustrations, graphs etc. will be placed in relevant appendices which are cross-referenced in the body of the text.

There is a penalty of 50% of the Employability and Presentation mark if there are any Tables, etc. in the body of your report.

Employability and Presentation

Criteria

Argument

Topic

(20%)

Weighting

(40%)

(40%)

Perfect adherence to the Springer LNCS template is worth 100%

Your mark will be reduced for each type of error from the following list by the specified amount

Errors on each line of the Title and Affiliation section –5% each (maximum 30% deduction)

Formatting errors with the Heading styles -5% each broken style level (maximum 15% deduction)

Proofreading errors (spelling, punctuation and grammar errors) – 10% to 20%

Failure to use a consistent Harvard standard for citations –20%

Too few citations-10%

Failure to use a consistent Harvard formatting of the References –20%

Too few references -10%

Failure to use the body-text style -15%

Failing to meet the specified five page (+0 / -10 lines) length requirement, taking account of quotations, tables, etc. -50%

Failure to use the template -100% deduction

Including quotations in the 5 pages of your report -50%

Placing Tables of Data, illustrations, graphs etc. in the 5 pages of your report –50%

1st (95%)

Exceptionally lucid argument, with logical and  novel conclusions, thorough critical evaluation

Novel topic that has been clearly articulated and also grounded in the existing literature. Publishable in an international workshop

1st (85%)

Lucid argument, with logical and  novel conclusions, thorough critical evaluation

Novel topic that has been clearly articulated and also grounded in the existing literature. Publishable in a national workshop

1st (75%)

A coherent argument with logical conclusions drawn and justified by thorough, critical evaluation

Very clear focus to the article, in an emerging topic area that contributes to the research literature

2:1(65%)

A coherent argument with logical conclusions drawn and justified

Good focus to the article, in an emerging topic area that contributes to the research literature

2:2 (55%)

Logical progression, elements of an argument

Appropriate topic that is at the correct level. Good exploration

3rd (45%)

Some structure is evident

Topic has scope, but is explored only to a limited extent

Fail (37%)

Article lacks structure and/or argument

Topic is inappropriate, non-existent, confused or too broad / narrow

 


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