Quantum Computers - An Emerging Cybersecurity Threat

Quantum computational supremacy may potentially endanger the current cryptographic protection methods. Although quantum computers are still far from a practical implementation in information processing and storage, they should not be overlooked in the context of cybersecurity. Quantum computers operate with qubits - units of information that are governed by the fundamental principles of quantum physics, such as quantum superposition of states and quantum coherence. In order to address the new challenge that quantum computers pose to cybersecurity, the very principles of their operation have to be understood and are overviewed in this contribution.

American Privacy Perceptions in the COVID Pandemic

The on-going COVID-19 pandemic has brought surveillance and privacy concerns to the forefront, given that contact tracing has been seen as a very effective tool to prevent the spread of infectious disease and that public authorities and government officials hope to use it to contain the spread of COVID-19. On the other hand, the rejection of contact tracing tools has also been widely reported, partly due to privacy concerns. We conducted an online survey to identify participants’ privacy concerns and their risk perceptions during the on-going COVID-19 pandemic. Our results contradict media claims that people are more willing to share their private information in a public health crisis. We identified a significant difference depending on the information recipient, the type of device, the intended purpose, and thus concretize the claims rather than suggesting a fundamental difference. We note that participants’ privacy preferences are largely impacted by their perceived autonomy and the perceived severity of consequences related to privacy risks. Contrarily, even during an on-going COVID-19 pandemic, health risk perceptions had limited influence on participants’ privacy preference, given only the perceived newness of the risk could weakly increase their comfort level. Finally, our results show that participants’ computer expertise has a positive influence on their privacy preference while their knowledge to security make them less comfortable with sharing.

Overall Seismic Risk in Bosnia-Herzegovina/Dalmatia Region of Croatia and Elements of Perfect Crisis in an Earthquake Aftermath

Bosnia-Herzegovina and southern-coastal/hinterland-region of Dalmatia, Republic of Croatia are a part of the same seismo-tectonic province and share a considerable and real threat of high-magnitude earthquakes. Numerous Magnitude 6 (Richter) and above earthquakes have been recorded in the past 500 years and some of them have resulted in a considerable loss of life, material and even prestige or geopolitical significance (e.g. the demise of Ragusa in the earthquake of 1667). Given the propensity of the region for destructive earthquakes, complex geomorphological framework and challenging infrastructure, still recovering in parts from the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s., the region may yield a “perfect” crisis in the aftermath of a major earthquake event. Taking into consideration unchecked development of several metropolitan areas, lack of oversight and permitting, decaying infrastructure as well as unresolved political ambiguities and territorial disputes, a potential destructive earthquake may create several cascading crises, especially if it coincides with some other challenging events (e.g. winter storms). This study is taking into consideration several scenarios, their possible effects and resulting conditions upon which cascading crises may arise in the aftermath of a magnitude 7+ earthquake affecting several major urban areas in southern and central Bosnia-Herzegovina and the southern Dalmatian region of Croatia. These scenarios are intended to provide training aids and risk assessments in countering the destructive forces after the earthquake, expected to test the current crisis-management models.

Historical Perspectives and Legal Aspects of Cyber Warfare

Historical development of cyber warfare follows three major historical periods: first period follows the technological advances of information technology during the 1980s until the end of the Cold War in 1990, second period is from the end of the Cold War to the terrorist attacks in United States during 11-th september 2001 year and the third period is from the terrorist attacks in United States during 11-th september 2001 year onwards. Each of the mentioned historical periods follows a specific doctrine and strategy of dealing with the national security threats from cyberspace. The world super powers and the world states, introduce appropriate strategies and national policies to deal with the consequences of this kind of warfare. Expression of cyberspace is linked to a short story titled "Burning Chrome" in the 1982 year written by American author William Gibson. In the following years, this word turned out to be conspicuously related to online PC systems. According to NATO, people are part of cyberspace. According to this, NATO defines that cyberspace is more than just internet, including not only hardware, software and information systems, but also peoples and social interaction with these networks. The first cyber warfare weapon ever known in history was Stuxnet. Stuxnet's objective was to physically annihilate a military target. Stuxnet has contaminated more than 60,000 PCs around the world, mostly in Iran. While international cooperation is essential, each nation should in near future develop a National foundation, its own national cyber security strategy, authorities and capabilities. Every nation state, should require effective coordination and cooperation among governmental entities at the national and sub-national levels as well as the private sector and civil society. The main hypothesis of this paper is to present the historical development and perspectives of cyber warfare and accordingly propose the best legal concepts, national doctrines and strategies for dealing with this modern type of warfare.

An Overview of the Covid-19 Crisis Management in Cameroon: Decentralised Governance Response Needed

This article provides insights into Cameroon’s crisis management of the coronavirus pandemic via an exploratory and descriptive qualitative research. Thematic analysis of data was done using a framework approach; the Comprehensive Pandemic Risk Management System (CPRMS) underpins the research and provided structure, order, and clarity to the article. From the findings, one can deduce that the government is working hard to mitigate the potentially awful consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. The authorities implemented temporary containment and infection control measures to stem virus spread and have relied heavily on international and humanitarian organisations for financial/technical help to operationalise the pandemic response. Attempts to control the spread of the virus, however, have been challenging. Deficiencies abound in many areas including slowness to institute containment measures after the first infected cases; Cameroon’s fragile/weak health infrastructure; insufficient critical care units and health workers disproportionately distributed in the country; safety concerns with insufficient protective equipment for health workers; overly centralised pandemic response at the national level to the detriment of the regions and lower administrative units; government politicising the response by refusing contributions/donations from opposition parties; high cost for COVID-19 treatment limiting access to healthcare and insufficient trust in health systems ability to deal with COVID-19. Recommendations are supplied on how to improve the coronavirus response as infections skyrocket. The recommendations also address enhancing later epidemics/pandemics and Cameroon’s health system.

Case for Geospatial Border Surveillance on the Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia Border in Response to the Migrant Crisis and Hybrid Warfare

Bosnia-Herzegovina and Republic of Croatia share 931km of border (494km land and 425km riverine), which has been contentious for the greater part of the modern European history and represented one of the hardest and most-militarized border demarcating the frontiers of the major empires. Nowadays, it is in the process of becoming another hard-border between the Schengen-Zone EU and non-EU Western Balkans. In this study we are considering several strategic elements required for planning of effective and constructive border security, while countering variety of pseudo-hybrid warfare operations as well as tactical considerations when responding to crisis, communications and overall control of the fluid frontier. Strategic elements taken into consideration are: a) overall contiguity of the border, b) communications network / trafficability at border-crossing and c) geospatial support in the intelligence preparation of the area. Tactical elements considered are a) real-time geospatial support during operations b) alternative communications and vetting of alternative communications c) defensive operations (e.g. drone defense, jamming defense, incursion prevention). We are considering lessons-learned from the hostilities and frozen-conflicts in Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yemen and potential future conflagrations in Trans-Dnistria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo* and the Baltics. We are using several criteria in understanding the required geospatial preparations required to undertake or defend against mass-migrations and potential hybrid threats such as unresolved territorial issues, population density information, infrastructure condition, land-use and overall completeness and availability of geospatial data. * Designation without prejudice to positions on status, and is in line with UNSCR 1244 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo Declaration of Independence

Security in Quantum Computing

Quantum key distribution will bring more confidentiality and privacy of communication in the future ICT world and will solve the eavesdropping issue. Domains regarded are e-government, e-commerce, e-health, transmission of biometric data, intelligent transport systems and more. So far, quantum researches focus on using properties of the qubit to bring improvements in technologies from our days. The purpose of this paper is to describe the quantum encryption methods. These methods can bring more efficiency of security in existing communications. In this matter, many encryption architectures have been proposed. As an example, the QKD architecture is presented in this paper.

The Model for Assessing the Security Level of Instant Messaging Information Systems

The analysis of existing information systems for transmitting multimedia messages is carried out, a generalized conceptual definition for describing the architectures of such systems is proposed. The classification of messaging systems and their architectures is given. The key threats that should be considered when developing messaging systems in various application domains are identified. Based on the analysis of threats, a set of criteria has been determined for assessing the architectures of information systems for transmitting messages. A model which allows to make an assessment of parameters affecting the security of instant messaging information systems based on the characteristics of its elements is proposed.

Improving Image Transmission by Using Polar Codes and Successive Cancellation List Decoding

This paper investigates the transmission of grey scale images encoded with polar codes and de-coded with successive cancellation list (SCL) decoders in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise. Po-lar codes seem a natural choice for this application be-cause of their error-correction efficiency combined with fast decoding. Computer simulations are carried out for evaluating the influence of different code block lengths in the quality of the decoded images. At the encoder a default polar code construction is used in combination with binary phase shift keying modulation. The results are compared with those obtained by using the clas-sic successive cancellation (SC) decoding introduced by Arikan. The quality of the reconstructed images is assessed by using peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and the structural similarity (SSIM) index. Curves of PSNR and SSIM versus code block length are presented il-lustrating the improvement in performance of SCL in comparison with SC.

Cyber-physical Threat Detection Platform Designed for Healthcare Systems

Hospitals are responsible for delivering healthcare services to patients in need. These services are large and complex and get affected by multiple interacting actors, such as doctors, nurses, patients, citizens, medical suppliers, health insurance providers. Lately, hospitals around the world are one of the main targets when it comes to terrorist attacks, the cyber realm being the principal source. The healthcare sector is particularly vulnerable due to heavy involvement in patient personal and health information, time constraints, and complex day-to-day operations. In addition to cyber-threats, physical threats are increasingly growing and even healthcare facilities are not immune to them. Malicious intended people created cyber threatening attacks with the purpose to systematically collect evidence against the healthcare system, to advocate for the end of such attacks, and to endanger people's lives or to use the stolen personal data for bad intended actions. Henceforth it is necessary to build a platform that will get alerts and incidents at a fast pace in real-time to prevent any casualties at low cost. SAFECARE project aims to offer protection to hospitals and increase the compliance for the European regulations and security regarding ethics and privacy for health services. This paper presents a solution that will enhance security in hospitals. The primary platform will be built based on a BTMS (Building Threat Monitoring System) where events, incidents, and alerts will be transmitted by sensors from hospital rooms in real-time. Several scenarios were thought to simulate different types of attacks against hospitals and according to the scenarios, various prototypes will be built for assuring the security of the personal and patients from various hospitals.