scholarly journals On Secure E-Voting over Blockchain

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Patrick Mccorry ◽  
Maryam Mehrnezhad ◽  
Ehsan Toreini ◽  
Siamak F. Shahandashti ◽  
Feng Hao

This article discusses secure methods to conduct e-voting over a blockchain in three different settings: decentralized voting, centralized remote voting, and centralized polling station voting. These settings cover almost all voting scenarios that occur in practice. A proof-of-concept implementation for decentralized voting over Ethereum’s blockchain is presented. This work demonstrates the suitable use of a blockchain not just as a public bulletin board but, more importantly, as a trustworthy computing platform that enforces the correct execution of the voting protocol in a publicly verifiable manner. We also discuss scaling up a blockchain-based voting application for national elections. We show that for national-scale elections the major verifiability problems can be addressed without having to depend on any blockchain. However, a blockchain remains a viable option to realize a public bulletin board, which has the advantage of being a “preventive” measure to stop retrospective changes on previously published records as opposed to a “detective” measure like the use of mirror websites. CCS Concepts: •  Security and privacy ;

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Itay Bar-Or ◽  
Victoria Indenbaum ◽  
Merav Weil ◽  
Michal Elul ◽  
Nofar Levi ◽  
...  

In this report, we describe a national-scale monitoring of the SARS-COV-2 (SC-2) variant dynamics in Israel, using multiple-time sampling of twelve wastewater treatment plants. We used a combination of inclusive and selective quantitative PCR assays that specifically identify variants A19 or B.1.1.7 and tested each sample for the presence and relative viral RNA load of each variant. We show that between December-2020 and March-2021, a complete shift in the SC-2 variant circulation was observed, where the B.1.1.7 replaced the A19 in all examined test points. We further show that the normalized viral load (NVL) values and the average new cases per week reached a peak in January 2021, and then decreased gradually in almost all test points, in parallel with the progression of the national vaccination campaign, during February-March 2021. This study demonstrates the importance of monitoring SC-2 variant dynamics on a national scale through wastewater sampling. It also provides a proof-of-concept methodology for continuous surveillance by using a combination of inclusive and selective PCR tests, which is far more amendable for high throughput monitoring compared with sequencing. This approach may be useful for real-time dynamics surveillance of current and future variants, such as the Omicron (BA.1) variant.


Molecules ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 262
Author(s):  
Camilla Marasca ◽  
Maria Encarnacion Blanco Arana ◽  
Michele Protti ◽  
Andrea Cavalli ◽  
Laura Mercolini ◽  
...  

In the present, proof-of-concept paper, we explore the potential of one common solid support for blood microsampling (dried blood spot, DBS) and a device (volumetric absorptive microsampling, VAMS) developed for the untargeted lipidomic profiling of human whole blood, performed by high-resolution LC-MS/MS. Dried blood microsamples obtained by means of DBS and VAMS were extracted with different solvent compositions and compared with fluid blood to evaluate their efficiency in profiling the lipid chemical space in the most broad way. Although more effort is needed to better characterize this approach, our results indicate that VAMS is a viable option for untargeted studies and its use will bring all the corresponding known advantages in the field of lipidomics, such as haematocrit independence.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayan Chatterjee ◽  
Andreas Prinz

UNSTRUCTURED The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) combines medical devices and applications connected to healthcare information technology systems using network technologies. With the flourishing adaptation rate of Internet-enabled medical devices in healthcare applications, we need to guarantee the security and privacy of electronic health records (EHRs) and communications among these IoMT devices, exposed web services, and the underlying infrastructure. This research is a proof-of-concept (PoC) study for implementing an integrated security solution with Spring Security and KeyCloak open-access platform (SSK) to safeguard microservice architecture application programming interfaces (APIs). Subsequently, we extended the security solution with a virtual private network (VPN), Bcrypt hash, API key, network firewall, and secure socket layer (SSL) to build up a digital infrastructure following the Norwegian data protection policies and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In this study, we have not proposed any new security solution; however, we have focused on accomplishing a hybrid security solution based on the established frameworks (e.g., Spring Security) and open-access software product (e.g., Keycloak) to protect microservice APIs for a health eCoach system as a PoC study. This study describes the methodological, technical, and practical considerations to protect REST interfaces only and ensuring the privacy of data in the system. We validate our SSK security implementation by theoretical evaluation and experimental testing. In addition, we compare the test results with related studies qualitatively to determine the effectiveness of the hybrid security solution (SSK).


Author(s):  
Rajalakshmi Krishnamurthi ◽  
Mukta Goyal

The internet of things (IoT) is a fast-growing paradigm gaining position in the modern scenario of communication. It targets to provide interconnection among different objects at any time, and anywhere on the earth, under the leverage of internet. IoT has exhibited the promising enhancement in almost all dimensions of the everyday human life scenarios. The IoT applications are smart energy systems, manufacturing services, industrial automation, healthcare, education, smart city, transportation, and security and surveillance. However, there are several issues associated with IoT objectives such as data traffic, security and privacy, data analytics, device localization, and scalability. In addition to this, the IoT objects are resource constrained in terms of memory, computing power, energy, storage, and networking capability. Hence, IoT systems need enabling technologies to overcome these challenges by means of cloud computing, big data, cyber physical systems, and block chain. This chapter discusses how these enabling technologies can be integrated with IoT and its challenges.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (22) ◽  
pp. 4905 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rongxu Xu ◽  
Wenquan Jin ◽  
Dohyeun Kim

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are embedded with software, electronics, and sensors, and feature connectivity with constrained resources. They require the edge computing paradigm, with modular characteristics relying on microservices, to provide an extensible and lightweight computing framework at the edge of the network. Edge computing can relieve the burden of centralized cloud computing by performing certain operations, such as data storage and task computation, at the edge of the network. Despite the benefits of edge computing, it can lead to many challenges in terms of security and privacy issues. Thus, services that protect privacy and secure data are essential functions in edge computing. For example, the end user’s ownership and privacy information and control are separated, which can easily lead to data leakage, unauthorized data manipulation, and other data security concerns. Thus, the confidentiality and integrity of the data cannot be guaranteed and, so, more secure authentication and access mechanisms are required to ensure that the microservices are exposed only to authorized users. In this paper, we propose a microservice security agent to integrate the edge computing platform with the API gateway technology for presenting a secure authentication mechanism. The aim of this platform is to afford edge computing clients a practical application which provides user authentication and allows JSON Web Token (JWT)-based secure access to the services of edge computing. To integrate the edge computing platform with the API gateway, we implement a microservice security agent based on the open-source Kong in the EdgeX Foundry framework. Also to provide an easy-to-use approach with Kong, we implement REST APIs for generating new consumers, registering services, configuring access controls. Finally, the usability of the proposed approach is demonstrated by evaluating the round trip time (RTT). The results demonstrate the efficiency of the system and its suitability for real-world applications.


Internet of Things (IoT) would touch upon almost all aspects of everyday life, as a consequence of which, everything (i.e. living and non-living things) will have a counterpart virtual identities on the internet which would be readable, addressable and locatable. Although it would empower its users with 24×7 connectivity around the global world, unknowingly they would also provide it permission to peep into user’s personal world, which can generate a huge risk on the usability of IoT by users. Thus analyzing the framework of IOT from the perspective of user data protection is a very crucial self-test which is required for IoT implementation. Often the term security and privacy are used interchangeably, but in the IoT environment, both these concept would play a crucial but differentiating role. In this paper, we have scanned the IoT environment with the perspective of privacy requirements, possible threats and the mitigating solutions which are currently in use.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Yoshimichi Nakatsuka ◽  
Andrew Paverd ◽  
Gene Tsudik

Security and privacy of the Internet Domain Name System (DNS) have been longstanding concerns. Recently, there is a trend to protect DNS traffic using Transport Layer Security (TLS). However, at least two major issues remain: (1) How do clients authenticate DNS-over-TLS endpoints in a scalable and extensible manner? and (2) How can clients trust endpoints to behave as expected? In this article, we propose a novel Private DNS-over-TLS (PDoT) architecture. PDoT includes a DNS Recursive Resolver (RecRes) that operates within a Trusted Execution Environment. Using Remote Attestation , DNS clients can authenticate and receive strong assurance of trustworthiness of PDoT RecRes. We provide an open source proof-of-concept implementation of PDoT and experimentally demonstrate that its latency and throughput match that of the popular Unbound DNS-over-TLS resolver.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mélanie Legrand ◽  
Sophie Bachellier-Bassi ◽  
Keunsook K. Lee ◽  
Yogesh Chaudhari ◽  
Hélène Tournu ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTThe advent of the genomic era has made elucidating gene function at large scale a pressing challenge. ORFeome collections, whereby almost all ORFs of a given species are cloned and can be subsequently leveraged in multiple functional genomic approaches, represent valuable resources towards this endeavor. Here we provide novel, genome-scale tools for the study of Candida albicans, a commensal yeast that is also responsible for frequent superficial and disseminated infections in humans. We have generated an ORFeome collection composed of 5,102 ORFs cloned in a Gateway™ donor vector, representing 83% of the currently annotated coding sequences of C. albicans. Sequencing data of the cloned ORFs are available in the CandidaOrfDB database at http://candidaorfeome.eu. We also engineered 49 expression vectors with a choice of promoters, tags, and selection markers and demonstrated their applicability to the study of target ORFs transferred from the C. albicans ORFeome. In addition, the use of the ORFeome in the detection of protein-protein interaction was demonstrated. Mating-compatible strains as well as Gateway™-compatible two-hybrid vectors were engineered, validated and used in a proof of concept experiment. These unique and valuable resources should greatly facilitate future functional studies in C. albicans and the elucidation of mechanisms that underlie its pathogenicity.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 441-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan K. Kummerfeld ◽  
Dan Klein

General treebank analyses are graph structured, but parsers are typically restricted to tree structures for efficiency and modeling reasons. We propose a new representation and algorithm for a class of graph structures that is flexible enough to cover almost all treebank structures, while still admitting efficient learning and inference. In particular, we consider directed, acyclic, one-endpoint-crossing graph structures, which cover most long-distance dislocation, shared argumentation, and similar tree-violating linguistic phenomena. We describe how to convert phrase structure parses, including traces, to our new representation in a reversible manner. Our dynamic program uniquely decomposes structures, is sound and complete, and covers 97.3% of the Penn English Treebank. We also implement a proof-of-concept parser that recovers a range of null elements and trace types.


Author(s):  
J. S. Simon ◽  
L. Valavani ◽  
A. H. Epstein ◽  
E. M. Greitzer

Recent work has shown that compression systems can be actively stabilized against the instability known as surge, thereby realizing a significant gain in system mass flow range. Ideally, this surge stabilization requires only a single sensor and a single actuator connected by a suitable control law. Almost all research to date has been aimed at proof of concept studies of this technique, using various actuators and sensor combinations. In contrast, the work reported herein can be regarded as a step towards developing active control into a practical technique. In this context, the paper presents the first systematic definition of the influence of sensor and actuator selection on increasing the range of stabilized compressor performance. The results show that proper choice of sensor as well as actuator crucially affects the ability to stabilize these systems, and that, overall, those actuators which are most closely coupled to the compressor (as opposed to the plenum or throttle) appear most effective. In addition, the source of the disturbances driving the system (for example, unsteady compressor pressure rise or unsteady combustor heat release) has a strong influence on control effectiveness, as would be expected for a controls problem of this type. This paper both delineates general methodologies for the evaluation of active compressor stabilization strategies and quantifies the performance of several approaches which might be implemented in gas turbine engines.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document