Context: The inclusion of grey literature (GL) is important to remove publication bias while gathering available evidence regarding a certain topic. The number of systematic literature reviews (SLRs) in Software Engineering (SE) is increasing but we do not know about the extent of GL usage in these SLRs. Moreover, Google Scholar is rapidly becoming a search engine of choice for many researchers but the extent to which it can find the primary studies is not known. Objective: This tertiary study is an attempt to i) measure the usage of GL in SLRs in SE. Furthermore this study proposes strategies for categorizing GL and a quality checklist to use for GL in future SLRs; ii) explore if it is feasible to use only Google Scholar for finding scholarly articles for academic research. Method: We have conducted a systematic mapping study to measure the extent of GL usage in SE SLRs as well as to measure the feasibility of finding primary studies using Google Scholar. Results and conclusions: a) Grey Literature: 76.09% SLRs (105 out of 138) in SE have included one or more GL studies as primary studies. Among total primary studies across all SLRs (6307), 582 are classified as GL, making the frequency of GL citing as 9.23%. The intensity of GL use indicate that each SLR contains 5 primary studies on average (total intensity of GL use being 5.54). The ranking of GL tells us that conference papers are the most used form 43.3% followed by technical reports 28.52%. Universities, research institutes, labs and scientific societies together make up 67.7% of GL used, indicating that these are useful sources for searching GL. We additionally propose strategies for categorizing GL and criteria for evaluating GL quality, which can become a basis for more detailed guidelines for including GL in future SLRs. b) Google Scholar Results: The results show that Google Scholar was able to retrieve 96% of primary studies of these SLRs. Most of the primary studies that were not found using Google Scholar were from grey sources.

Protecting people from cyber threats imposes great challenges, not only technically, but also socially. To achieve the intended level of awareness, software security principles need to be shown with concrete examples during security education. This study aims to design a serious game integrating software security knowledge and concepts into the processes to make it more engaging to learn while playing. In this paper, we have: (i) designed a serious game to compensate the deficiencies in the literature; (ii) performed empirical evaluations including survey, brainstorming and observation to the proposed game. Results: Our study shows that: (i) Cyber Security‐Requirements Awareness Game (CSRAG) has a positive effect on players security learning outcomes, level of engagement and participation; (ii) Game‐based learning can be an effective way of teaching security related scenarios.

Context: In the current era of digital technology, social engineers are using various tactics to undermine human weaknesses. Social Engineers target human psychology to achieve their target(s) which are in the form of data, account details, or IT devices etc. According to our research, one of the first methods social engineers used to target victims is Phishing/Spear Phishing. Objective: The objective of this study is to utilize serious game to: i) educate players regarding phishing and spear-phishing attacks; ii) make aware and educate players regarding dangers associated with excessive online information disclosure. Method: In order to address the objectives we have: i) performed an in-depth literature review to extract insights related to social engineering, phishing, game design, learning functions, human interaction, and game-based learning etc; ii) proposed and aligned the game design with social engineering ontology concepts; iii) performed an empirical evaluation to evaluate the effectiveness of the designed board game. Conclusion: From this research study, we conclude that: i) PhishI game is useful in educating players regarding excessive online information disclosure and phishing awareness; ii) game-based learning is an effective method for inculcating and general cyber-related awareness in players.

In today's online environment, people attend various kinds of activities, exhibit different digital presence, build personal digital reputations, issuing and receiving feedbacks from online communities being involved with. These diverse information sources once aggregated can provide a valuablefuture reference for personal online digital identity and credits check. The primary objective of this paper is to propose a systematic framework for aggregating online identity and reputation information, to provide a holistic approach to personal online behavioral ratings. Major contributions include: An identity aggregation mechanism based on social dependency network is proposed, a smart contract management framework referring to personal online ratings based on the aggregated digital identity, an experiment implementation based on blockchain technology, with illustrative examples and theoretical evaluations to the proposed approach.

The previous year has seen an enormous increase in the studies related to social engineering. This increase is partly due to increasing number of social engineering attacks and partly due to people's inability to identify the attack. Thus, it is of great importance to find solutions which are helpful for human to understand the social engineering attacks and scenarios. To address this, we have performed a literature review of studies (on social engineering) in top‐notch journals and conferences. In this paper, we have enlisted the types of attacks, and the persuasion techniques used by social engineers as listed in the literature. We also combined different theories which researchers tried to use to explain various activities of social engineers. Furthermore, we have mentioned that a better understanding of the social engineering attack scenarios can be done using thematic and game‐based analysis techniques. Preliminary empirical evaluation of the proposed game based method shows overall neutral results. Future extension and evaluation is needed for the proposed methods.