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Social media has revolutionized how individuals, including nutrition and dietetics practitioners, communicate and transmit information. Although not everyone uses or has access to social media, the influence of this medium has grown over the years. Benefits include rapid communication, growing ones' practice, increased visibility, shared expertise, ability to connect anytime, reach larger audiences, create original content, self and client/patient education, and building of relationships. With the advantages come potential professional and ethical pitfalls, however, particularly for healthcare professionals held to a higher standard by society due to their credentials and training. With billions of users and the frequent emergence of new social media platforms, it is not surprising that nutrition and dietetics practitioners are increasingly gravitating to these communication channels, both personally and professionally. Of course, nutrition and dietetics practitioners must follow applicable laws and regulations (for instance, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA). By membership or credential, practitioners agree to abide by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (Academy)/the Commission on Dietetic Registration (CDR) Code of Ethics for the Nutrition and Dietetics Profession. Practitioners should adhere to social media best practices by following standards of civility and professionalism.

With the advancements of cloud services, sharing of information has never ever been easier, and intelligent prediction of shared information provides a slew of advantages also to individuals and society. When sharing data with a huge group of people, several factors must be considered, which include effectiveness, authentication, and the confidentiality of the cloud provider. A viable target for constructing an unidentified and genuine interoperability system is ring signature. It enables an owner to privately configure the data that can then be stored or analyzed in the cloud. However, in a conventional Public-Key-Infrastructure (PKI) setting, the expensive credential authentication becomes a limiting factor for this solution's scalability. Instead, an Identity based Ring Signature can be used, which eliminates the need for document verification. We enhance the safety of identity based ring signatures in this paper by adding forward protection: If a user's secret key is corrupted, all previously stored confirmations containing this user are still valid. The whole product is extremely crucial in any big information sharing system, because it is pointless to force all digital assets to conceptual metaphor their data if a single user's secret key is compromised. We demonstrate the practicality of our scheme by providing a tangible as well as efficient implementation and proving its security in good manner.

The World Health Organization (WHO) designated 2020 as the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife. Part of the WHO campaign focuses on the fact that nurses and midwives comprise more than half of the shortfall in the global health workforce. In the United States, maternity care is critical because half of rural counties have no access to maternity providers and because the rate of maternal morbidity and mortality continues to climb, surpassing rates of countries with similar incomes. Midwives have a proven record for quality, safety, cost-savings, and high patient satisfaction, yet they attend only 10.2% of births in the United States. In many countries with better maternal mortality and morbidity outcomes, midwives attend 50% to 70% of births. This article reviews the history of professional midwifery in the United States, including the development of the certified midwife credential, outlines current challenges in regulation of the profession, and summarizes widely accepted recommendations to improve access to high quality maternal and child health through support of the midwifery workforce. It is intended to assist state boards of nursing in understanding how they might expand their authority to include the licensing and regulation of certified midwives.

Despite many academic studies in the last 15 years acknowledging the investigative value of physical memory due to the potential sensitive nature of data it may contain, it arguably remains rarely collected at-scene in most criminal investigations. Whilst this may be due to factors such as first responders lacking the technical skills to do this task, or simply that it is overlooked as an evidence source, this work seeks to emphasise the worth of this task by demonstrating the ability to recover plain-text login credentials from it. Through an examination of logins made to 15 popular online services carried out via the Chrome, Edge and Mozilla Firefox browsers, testing shows that plain-text credentials are present in RAM in every case. Here, a transparent test methodology is defined and the results of test cases are presented along with ‘string markers’ which allow a practitioner to search their RAM captures for the presence of unknown credential information for these services in future cases.

Password is commonly used to protect Bitcoin wallet, the most known application of blockchain. In this paper, we investigate a subtle issue when forgetting password: The account owner uses guessed passwords during the authentication with a service provider. This is different from password guessing by cyber attackers, because passwords guessed by the account owner are (most likely) his/her passwords (or their minor variations) registered with other service providers. Thus, the confidentiality of incorrect passwords in unsuccessful authentication needs protection. To capture this security requirement, we define two security goals: Indistinguishability of Incorrect Passwords (IND-PW) and Unextractablility of Incorrect Passwords (UNE-PW). Our analysis shows that: (1) IND-PW is NOT achievable if password is the only authentication credential of the client, and (2) Two common authentication methods in online services, Basic and Digest Access Authentication (in conjunction with SSL), CANNOT provide UNE-PW.

Objective To explore the level of quality management system (QMS) implementation across hospital accreditation status. Method Sixteen hospitals in three districts in East Java, agreed to participate in this study. This study involved nurses who were asked to give their responses in five scales for each component of QMS. A cross-tabulation was created to describe the QMS maturity across hospital accreditation status. Results Regardless of accreditation status, documentation, and credential mechanism were the QMS components that mostly perceived were already at a mature level. The accredited hospitals still have problem in continuous measure and use professional opinion for continuous quality improvement; while, non-accredited hospitals do not have approves quality improvement plans. Even in hospitals with full accreditation stage, not all QMS components have been in mature levels. Conclusion The accreditation program has induced the QMS implementation but still limited in planning and procedural documentation.

Community colleges play an integral role in the prelicensure education of registered nurses in the United States, with nearly half of newly licensed registered nurses prepared for practice with the Associate Degree in Nursing (ADN); Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2015). Shorter program duration, lower tuition costs, closer proximity to home, and favorable admission policies make ADN programs highly attractive to students, specifically nontraditional students. In spite of this, a concerted effort toward baccalaureate preparation has occurred over the past several decades. Prominent nursing organizations have called for baccalaureate preparation in the nursing profession. The Institutes of Medicine (2010), called for expansion of Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) preparation by registered nurses to 80% by 2020. More recently in 2019, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) issued a position statement calling for the baccalaureate degree to serve as the minimum educational preparation for entry into professional nursing practice (AACN, 2019). A descriptive cross-sectional survey research design was chosen to examine the perceived barriers to BSN prelicensure nursing education by ADN students in the State of Illinois. This study is a quantitative follow-up to a qualitative focus group study by the researchers (Petges & Sabio, 2020; Sabio & Petges, 2020). Results indicate that multiple competing responsibilities, often associated with nontraditional student status, exert an appreciable influence in the choice of educational preparation toward the registered nurse credential.

Introduction The majority of hospitals in the United States employ hospitalists who provide clinical care to hospitalized patients; however, gaps in hiring, credentialing, and privileging nurse practitioners (NPs) as hospitalists caring for adult patients exist. Purpose To evaluate factors influencing hiring and credentialing of NPs as hospitalists working with adult patients. Methods A 26-item mixed-mode survey was distributed to a sample of members of the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM), National Association Medical Staff Services (NAMSS), and chief nurse officers (CNOs) with Magnet recognition (n = 1,902) with 592 (31%) responding. Respondents rated factors used in evaluating NPs as hospitalists. Mean comparisons analyzed differences based on respondent role in hiring or credentialing and characteristics including state practice authority. Results Overall, respondents viewed adult NPs (ANPs) as more favorable hires for hospitalists than acute care NPs (ACNPs). However, CNOs rated certification as an ACNP (p Conclusions Little familiarity with regulatory and legal factors could impact hiring and practice of NP hospitalists. Although preference for ACNP certification was expressed, this certification lacked preference beyond ANP certification. The Consensus Model, which focuses on appropriate licensing, accreditation, certification, and education of advanced practice registered nurses, should be further aligned with practice while engaging those who hire and credential as partners.

Background In 2015, the US Department of Agriculture set minimum education and training requirements (ie, professional standards) to ensure that school nutrition professionals have the knowledge and experience to operate school meal programs. No study to date has examined whether hiring requirements and qualifications of school food authority (SFA) directors have changed since 2015. Objective To assess changes in hiring requirements and qualifications of SFA directors since the US Department of Agriculture professional standards were established, overall and by district size. Design Cross-sectional analysis of nationally representative district-level data from the 2012 and 2016 cycles of the School Health Policies and Practices Study. Participants/setting In 2012, 660 sampled districts completed the School Health Policies and Practices Study Nutrition Services questionnaire. In 2016, 599 sampled districts completed the questionnaire. Main outcome measures Hiring requirements for newly hired SFA directors and reported qualifications of SFA directors. Statistical analyses performed Differences in prevalence estimates from 2012 to 2016 for all districts and by district size were assessed with χ2 tests. Results Significant increases were found for 3 hiring requirements: degree in nutrition or related field, registered dietitian credential, and food safety certification. Significant changes in 4 of the 5 reported qualifications were found including an increase in the percentage of district directors with a degree in nutrition or a related field and decreases in the percentage of directors with a School Nutrition Specialist credential from the School Nutrition Association, School Nutrition Association certifications, and certified dietary managers. Changes were found in small and medium districts, but not large districts. Conclusions District hiring requirements and SFA director qualifications have changed since the implementation of the US Department of Agriculture professional standards, including some differences by district size. Future research could identify challenges facing districts in hiring directors who have a degree in nutrition or related fields or who have specialized nutrition credentials or certificates (eg, registered dietitians).

Cloning user's identity is always a thorny problem for an information system, especially for an anonymous system. With the development of big data applications, clone behaviors sometimes even become attacks on these systems. But until now, there has been no very satisfactory anti-clone scheme in the anonymous system. After analyzing the problems in existing anti-clone schemes, without any assumptions about physical security, we provide a practical solution to the clone problem in anonymous authentication system. In our scheme, the authentication is not only related to user's private key, but also related to user's current state, which is constantly updated by the system. Therefore, the authentication trajectories of user and clone will inevitably overlap, and it results in information leakage so as to indentify clone behaviors and revoke clone user's credential. Meanwhile, we prove that honest users are truly anonymous and their login behaviors are unlinkable with complete security proofs. According to the analysis of the system function and the system efficiency, our scheme is much more efficient and has the best anti-clone properties comparing with the existing schemes.

Despite several efforts in the last years to make Identity Management Systems (IdMs) reliable, secured and privacy-respectful, identity-related cybercrimes are still continuously expanding. Current IdMs lack of proper security and privacy mechanisms that can holistically manage user’s privacy, strong authentication and ID-proofing mechanisms based on biometrics, usage of breeder documents, while maintaining usability for mobile, online or face-to-face scenarios. To fill this gap, the ARIES EU project aims to set up a reliable identity ecosystem, combining mature technologies for meet highest level of assurance, such as biometrics or use of secure elements, with innovative credential derivation mechanisms. ARIES has devised and implemented a privacy-preserving and user-centric Identity Management framework as well as associated management practices that ensure usability and flexibility for identity management processes. This paper presents ARIES results obtained after the successful development and validation of the ARIES IdM System in the associated use cases.

Many leaders consider engaging in formal leadership training that results in the award of a degree. Choosing from several options requires careful consideration given the cost, effort, and attention required for successful completion. Individuals should have a clear understanding as to motivation for pursuing an advanced degree and should be able to clearly articulate what they hope to gain. If the motivation is driven by desire for yet another credential, one is ill advised to enroll in a program. Graduate degrees in business, health administration, public administration, public health, medical management, and organizational leadership are described, and learning format options.

Blacklistable anonymous credential systems provide service providers with a way to authenticate users according to their historical behaviors, while guaranteeing that all users can access services in an anonymous and unlinkable manner, thus are potentially useful in practice. Traditionally, to protect services from illegal access, the credential issuer, which completes the registration with users, must be trusted by the service provider. However, in practice, this trust assumption is usually unsatisfied. In this paper, we solve this problem and present the decentralized blacklistable anonymous credential system with reputation (DBLACR), which inherits nearly all features of the BLACR system presented in Au et al. (2012) but does not need a trusted party to register users.The new system also has extra advantages. In particular, it enables blacklist (historical behaviors) sharing among different service providers and is partially resilient to the blacklist gaming attack, where dishonest service providers attempt to compromise the privacy of users via generating blacklist maliciously. Technically, the main approach to achieve DBLACR system is a novel use of the blockchain technique, which serves as a public append-only ledger. The system can be instantiated from three different types of cryptographic systems, including the RSA system, the classical DL system, and the pairing based system. To demonstrate the practicability of our system, we also give a proof of concept implementation for the instantiation under the RSA system. The experiment results indicate that when authenticating with blacklists of reasonable size, our implementation can fulfill practical efficiency demands.

Objective The Registered Physician in Vascular Interpretation (RPVI) credential is a prerequisite for certification by the Vascular Surgery Board of the American Board of Surgery. Of concern, as more current trainees and recent program graduates take the Physician Vascular Interpretation (PVI) examination, vascular surgery trainee pass rates have decreased. Residents and fellows have a lower PVI examination pass rates than practicing vascular surgeons. The purpose of this study was to assess current vascular laboratory (VL) training for vascular surgery residents and fellows and to identify gaps that residency and fellowship programs might address. Methods Program directors (PDs) of Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education-accredited vascular surgery programs (107 fellowships, 53 integrated residency programs) were surveyed using a web-based tool. Responses were submitted anonymously. Data collected included information about the program, the PD, accreditation status of the VL, and the curriculum used to meet the PVI prerequisites. Concurrent data (June 2017) on the credentials of all PDs were obtained from the Alliance for Physician Certification and Advancement (APCA). Results Sixty-one of 117 PDs participated in the survey (52% response rate). Of these, 44 individuals (72% of responders) reported they held the RPVI and/or Registered Vascular Technologist credential. Records from APCA indicated that 51 of 117 PDs of accredited vascular surgery residencies and fellowships (44%) had an RPVI/Registered Vascular Technologist credential. Ninety-four percent reported that their VL was accredited. Practical VL experience for trainees was reported to be 20 hours or less by 62% of respondents. The use of a structured curriculum for practical experience was reported by only 15 programs. Programs with fellowships established for more than 10 years were more likely to have a structured program for didactic instruction (P = .03). Only 23 programs reported a dedicated VL rotation. Didactic instruction provided was 20 hours or less for 75% of the cohort. Conclusions In the absence of a standardized VL curriculum, there is variation in the VL instruction provided to trainees. Fellowship programs with longer histories have more structured instruction, but time allocated to VL education is substantially less than the 30 hours of didactic and 40 hours of practical experience recommended by the APCA. Programs and learners may benefit from the development of VL training guidelines and curriculum resources.

More than 18 million adults in the United States have no high school credential. The GED is a common remedy but has low returns. Full diplomas for adults might provide an alternative but are often discouraged by public policy. This paper estimates the labor market return to a high school diploma for adults who dropped out of traditional high school. We compare outcome trends for people who graduate from a network of adult high schools to those who apply but do not enroll. Over 5 years, earnings increase by 39% more for graduates, closing about half of the earnings gap between high school graduates and non-graduates. We address selection into graduation by conditioning on 5 years of pre-application earnings trends, comparing to enrolled students who exit due to positive shocks, and using variation in graduation from assignment to remedial coursework. Earnings gains occur alongside increased credentialing and switches from hospitality and temporary jobs to healthcare, which both suggest that human capital accumulation is an important mechanism.

Since the first RNs earned orthopaedic certification in 1988, over 12,000 nurses have proudly held the ONC credential. Today, nearly 7000 orthopaedic-certified nurses, nurse practitioners, and clinical nurse specialists demonstrate excellence in the care of persons with musculoskeletal health concerns. Why did they choose certification? A representative sample of over 300 orthopaedic-certified nurses responded to a survey from the Orthopaedic Nurses Certification Board (ONCB) to confirm why they value their credentials and maintain specialty certification. Their answers offer compelling reasons for nurses to get, and keep, orthopaedic nursing certification.

Discussion of legal and ethical risks facing health care professionals who knowingly offer services to patients who are using psychedelic substances. Gives examples of applicable laws and statutes that may apply, a range of public safety complaints a health care licensing board may receive, and the types of questions a licensee might expect to be asked by their licensing board. Encourages licensees to review current statutes and administrative rules governing their license and to work with their licensing board prior to offering services to this population.

Imaging is essential in successfully executing radiation therapy (RT) in oncology clinical trials. As technically sophisticated diagnostic imaging and RT were incorporated into trials, quality assurance in the National Clinical Trials Network groups entered a new era promoting image acquisition and review. Most trials involving RT require pre- and post-therapy imaging for target validation and outcome assessment. The increasing real-time (before and during therapy) imaging and RT object reviews are to ensure compliance with trial objectives. Objects easily transmit digitally for review from anywhere in the world. Physician interpretation of imaging and image application to RT treatment plans is essential for optimal trial execution. Imaging and RT data sets are used to credential RT sites to confirm investigator and institutional ability to meet trial target volume delineation and delivery requirements. Real-time imaging and RT object reviews can be performed multiple times during a trial to assess response to therapy and application of RT objects. This process has matured into an effective data management mechanism. When necessary, site and study investigators review objects together through web media technologies to ensure the patient is enrolled on the appropriate trial and the intended RT is planned and executed in a trial-compliant manner. Real-time imaging review makes sure: (1) the patient is entered and eligible for the trial, (2) the patient meets trial-specific adaptive therapy requirements, if applicable, and (3) the intended RT is according to trial guidelines. This review ensures the study population is uniform and the results are believable and can be applied to clinical practice.

We estimate returns to diplomas and certificates awarded to adult students by public technology centers, a niche sector of higher education that elevates occupational and competency-based education over transferable credits and traditional degrees. Technology centers cater to nontraditional students, particularly adults seeking part-time training in specific skills. Sub-associate credentials arising from Tennessee Colleges of Applied Technology increase access to new industries, particularly health, and industrial mobility explains half of the employment returns to postsecondary diplomas and at least three-quarters of the earnings returns to certificates. TCAT diploma completers earn $707–1034 in additional quarterly earnings over non-completers, similar to the returns from community college diplomas. Benefits extend beyond the signal value of completion: students who leave without a credential fare significantly better than matched non-students with a similar history of earnings.

This study comparatively analyses inequalities in educational outcomes as well as education effects on the occupational status of prime-age workers across 21 countries. Considering two distinct aspects of educational outcomes—credentials and measured worker skills—the study’s main role is to assess their partial effects on occupational placement, contingent on social origin. Overall, parental education effects on educational achievement in terms of both credentials and skills are large. Likewise, occupational status is strongly associated with educational certificate attained. Labor market placement based on worker skills is significant as well, but to a lesser extent. The individual-level path dependencies of origin-education and education-destination vary considerably across countries. In part, this variation is associated with a country’s skills formation system in terms of vocational specialization and the degree of economic coordination as measured by bargaining coordination. In line with prior research, vocational specificity relates to increased educational inequality. In addition, the study finds that economic coordination mitigates educational inequality as it reduces the intergenerational transmission of certificates and skills. In systems in which vocational specificity is accompanied by a high degree of coordination, the detrimental inequality effect of vocational specificity tends to level off. Moreover, economic coordination facilitates occupational placement based on worker skills. A concise discussion of the policy implications concludes this paper.

US midwifery education is provided through graduate education for the CNM/CM and didactic education with apprenticeship for the CPM. Clinical practice varies throughout the country depending on the credential held and current state legislation. A lack of clinical sites for midwifery education is a significant challenge to all programs and a barrier to meeting the national maternity care provider shortage.

Summary The effective delivery of complex, acute, health care now requires a diverse team of professionals, each with their own technical specialization, practice credential, and span of control. Responsible practice, in this context, traditionally entails a code of ethical conduct. The problem is, there are now separate codes for each specialization, often tied to governmental licensure and more importantly, they demand different things of people operating in the same context on the same case. While bioethics has provided some principles for guiding the physician-patient relationship , there are no principles governing the relationships among the professions involved in delivering care. With multiple codes at issue and no overarching “meta-code” to resolve possible conflicts, professionals are left to resolve disputes through more arbitrary means, say, authority granted by the institution, political power, or more traditional sources of professional status. Under these circumstances, how do we determine the right thing to do? We propose to develop an inter-professional ethics that speaks to the conflicts and generates a protocol for resolving conflict. Our intent is to develop ways of deliberating over differences based on a contractualist approach to moral justification. The key assumption is that reasonable individuals can come to an agreement that is equally binding and builds on mutual respect and inter-professional understanding.

Due to the complexity and volume, memorizing static usernames and passwords is deemed to be one of the most cumbersome tasks for ordinary users. Nevertheless, verifying the access legitimacy of a user without using a verification table and securely granting permissions based on an access control policy assigned to the user are two critical challenges to build an authentication scheme which is practical and effective. Traditional approaches either completely ignore the importance of user-centric access control or rely on a single point of verification or a third party authority; but in practice, access control and distributed verifiers are important for enhancing security and dealing with the dynamics caused by the user online browsing activities. In this paper, we propose a threshold-based authentication system leveraging user computing devices and allowing users to designate various permissions. Various (t,n) physical or virtual devices can participate to run an authentication protocol and provide the user with a one-time credential to access an online banking system. Our evaluation and results show that the solution is not only practical, but it also minimizes the risks associated with traditional approaches.

All the citizens of a country avail e-Governance services through the Internet, where it inherently does not offer security services. Accessing these services securely and transparently is a significant concern for both the citizen and the government. The multi-server authentication scheme with user biometric and personal mobile devices is an efficient way to reduce security issues related to unauthorized access. It is difficult for a user to remember multiple credentials. If a user performs a login attempt with an incorrect credential, then she is denied access to the service. Therefore, one credential to access every server is a convenient option. Nowadays, most mobile devices are compatible with the biometric scanner; accordingly, it can quickly record the biometric features during the authentication process. This paper devises an elliptic curve-based secure multi-server authentication scheme with the user biometric, password, and mobile device. A user can access various e-Governance services from any location through a dedicated mobile app in our scheme. We perform some formal security analysis of our scheme in the random oracle model, BAN logic, and AVISPA tool. The performance evaluation shows that our scheme accomplishes the known security and functionality features concerning other comparable schemes. Thus, our scheme will be suitable for providing secure access to e-Governance services to every citizen through their mobile devices.

Despite the latest efforts to foster the adoption of privacy-enhancing Attribute-Based Credential (p-ABC) systems in electronic services, those systems are not yet broadly adopted. The main reasons behind this are performance efficiency issues, lack of interoperability with standards, and the centralized architectural scheme that relies on a unique Identity Provider (IdP) for credential issuance. To cope with these limitations, this paper describes the first implementation of the Pointcheval–Sanders Multi-Signatures (PS-MS) crypto scheme proposed by Camenisch et al. and its integration in a distributed and privacy-preserving identity management system proposed in OLYMPUS H2020 European research project. Our efficient implementation provides remarkable privacy-preservation features for identity management in online transactions leveraging p-ABC systems, including unforgeability, minimal disclosure of personal data through zero-knowledge proofs, unlinkability in online transactions and fully distributed credential issuance across different IdPs, thereby removing the IdP as a unique point of failure. The performance of the implementation has been exhaustively analyzed and evaluated with different curves, signers and number of attributes, and compared against Identity Mixer, the best known p-ABC system, outperforming significantly the credential issuance and zero-knowledge proving and verification processes (2–4 times less execution time).

The latest report by Kaspersky on email Spam and targeted Phishing attacks, by percentage, highlights the need of an urgent solution. Attachment-driven Spear-phishing struggles to succeed against many email providers’ malware-filtration systems, which proactively check emails for malicious software. In this paper, we provided a solution that can detect targeted Spear-phishing attacks based on required similarities in the specific domain which it has been targeted. The strategy is to figure out whether the domain is genuine or a forgery, which is to be evaluated by multi novel grading algorithms. Therefore, this research addresses targeted attacks on specific organisations by presenting a new enterprise solution. This detection system focuses on domain names, which tend to be registered domain names trusted by the victims. The results from this investigation show that this detection system has proven its ability to reduce email phishing attacks significantly.

In IT-ecosystems, access to unauthorized parties is prevented with credential-based access control techniques (locks, RFID cards, biometrics, etc.). Some of these methods are ineffective against malicious users who lend their credentials to other users. To obtain non-transferability, Adams proposed a combination of biometrics encapsulated in Pedersen commitment with Brands digital credential. However, Adams’ work does not consider the Zero Knowledge Proof-of Knowledge (ZKPoK) system for Double Discrete Logarithm Representation of the credential. Besides, biometrics is used directly, without employing any biometric cryptosystem to guarantee biometric privacy, thus Adams’ work cannot be GDPR-compliant. In this paper, we construct the missing ZKPoK protocol for Adam’s work and show its inefficiency. To overcome this limitation, we present a new biometric-based non-transferable credential scheme that maintains the efficiency of the underlying Brands credential. Secondly, we show the insecurity of the first biometric-based anonymous credential scheme designed by Blanton et al.. In this context, we present a brute-force attack against Blanton’s biometric key generation algorithm implemented for fuzzy vault. Next, we integrate an Oblivious PRF (OPRF) protocol to solve the open problem in Blanton’s work and improve its efficiency by replacing the underlying signature scheme with PS-signatures. Finally, we evaluate application scenarios for non-transferable digital/anonymous credentials in the context of Blockchain-based Identity Management (BBIM). We show that our modified constructions preserve biometric privacy and efficiency, and can easily be integrated into current BBIM systems built upon efficient Brands and PS-credentials.

Vehicle to Everything (V2X) is the enabling technique for future connected cars. Security is essential to the V2X technology, and privacy is an integral element of V2X security. It has been recognized that privacy preserving/anonymous authentication is a fundamental step towards achieving privacy protection in V2X. We are thus motivated to study anonymous authentication, as a case study of V2X security. Specifically we propose two lightweight anonymous credential schemes for anonymous authentication in V2X: one is under the rationale of “witness update outsourcing”, and is applicable to V2V; the other is suitable for V2I, with the characteristic that a vehicular OBU is enabled to operate entirely on the compact bilinear group. We conduct performance analysis both analytically and empirically, and get promising results.

Authentication in service oriented computing is vulnerable to various security concerns. The core concept of authentication is dependent on credentials offered at the present moment without verifying how or when the credential was obtained by the subject. Secure authentication techniques with multi-factor and cross-platform technologies are adopted by service providers. Unfortunately, such systems require a complex integration procedure of the security frameworks. Moreover, the trend of rapid service development via service composition architectures are impeded due to the diverse models of authentication factors. Hence, the adoptability of newer authentication models are limited and constrained by the feature specifications of the external cross-platform and decentralized authentication and access control frameworks. In general, authentication models are generally based on binary successes and failures, regardless of the level of access required for a given request. The combined outcome of the above complexities results in rigid policies and complex management.Our work in this paper is characterized by notions of real-life social authentication based on the nature, quality, and length of previous encounters. We delineate the fundamental similarity of authentication factors using previous interactions. We introduce the concept of interaction provenance as a unified representation model for all existing authentication factors. We present a standardized representation model for secure interaction provenance based on the W3C Provenance Working Group (PROV) model. We illustrate the practical feasibility of creating interaction provenance graphs for various interactive events in service oriented computing. The paper also presents formal security propositions toward defining secure interaction provenance schemes. We demonstrate how interaction provenance can utilize the causal relationship of past events to leverage service composition, cross-platform integration, and timeline authentication. We posit that our generic interaction provenance model also allows easier adoption of newer authentication and access control schemes. Hence, we apply fuzzy control logic for interaction provenance records to create a novel authentication and threshold based access control model. The paper presents an interaction provenance recording and authentication protocol and a proof-of-concept implementation. We demonstrate the suitability of fuzzy rules to create innovative and flexible security frameworks using linguistic policies and visualization of contour maps. We also performed extensive experiments and comparative evaluation of various provenance preservation schemes to justify the applicability for different service models.

An internationally recognised body of knowledge is both possible and necessary for the future success and professionalisation of public relations. Through extensive content analysis of 31 credential schemes, education frameworks, and scholarly articles produced across six continents, the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communications Management has developed a foundational list of knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviours (KSABs), which entry and mid/senior-level practitioners across the world should possess. This study and list of KSABs is laying the foundation for development of an internationally accepted framework which professional associations and academic institutions across the world will be able to use to benchmark professional credentials and curriculum outcomes.

Purpose External dosimetry audits give confidence in the safe and accurate delivery of radiotherapy. The RTTQA group have performed an on-site audit programme for trial recruiting centres, who have recently implemented static or rotational IMRT, and those with major changes to planning or delivery systems. Methods Measurements of reference beam output were performed by the host centre, and by the auditor using independent equipment. Verification of clinical plans was performed using the ArcCheck helical diode array. Results A total of 54 measurement sessions were performed between May 2014 and June 2016 at 28 UK institutions, reflecting the different combinations of planning and delivery systems used at each institution. Average ratio of measured output between auditor and host was 1.002 ± 0.006. Average point dose agreement for clinical plans was −0.3 ± 1.8%. Average (and 95% lower confidence intervals) of gamma pass rates at 2%/2 mm, 3%/2 mm and 3%/3 mm respectively were: 92% (80%), 96% (90%) and 98% (94%). Moderately significant differences were seen between fixed gantry angle and rotational IMRT, and between combination of planning systems and linac manufacturer, but not between anatomical treatment site or beam energy. Conclusion An external audit programme has been implemented for universal and efficient credentialing of IMRT treatments in clinical trials. Good agreement was found between measured and expected doses, with few outliers, leading to a simple table of optimal and mandatory tolerances for approval of dosimetry audit results. Feedback was given to some centres leading to improved clinical practice.

In 2019, or 2020, it will be one hundred years since the Registration of Natives Ordinance (No. 19 of 1920) came into effect in Kenya and the first ’kipande’ was issued (there is some uncertainty about the actual launch year). This year (2019) Kenya’s people over six years of age have to get registered again, for a citizen service number — ‘huduma namba’. Notwithstanding the connotation of the control of the movement of males for employment purposes, Kenyans have stuck to using the name 'kipande' for their national ID, which is now being replaced by a credential issued by the Huduma Namba (service number') program.

In the era of Internet Banking, most of the people may hear the term called “Phishing”, it is related to fraudulent over the Internet as well as Social Engineering. It is commonly done by sending an e-mail to target user with an embedded hyperlink to steal their user-name, password, transaction password, etc. Moreover, Phishers used to gain the access in personal credentials of targeted user for stealing cash from user’s bank account. Phishing can be done by using several other ways like sending text messages (called “Smishing” for SMS-Phishing), or via Phone Calls (often called “Vishing” for Voice-Phishing) or sometimes via social-media itself including sending an e-mail to user or organization. Phishing has several types in terms of the used medium as well as in terms of victim. Spear Phishing is a prevalent method of phishing and comes under the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) category. The term “Spear Phishing” mainly defines that stealing the credential of a specific user or a specific company at a time by sending e-mail. This paper deals with Spear Phishing Emails that mainly organizations, companies and most of the time common people used to get by Phishers. This paper proposes an approach to detect the Spear Phishing e-mails with the help of Deep Packet Inspection and Deep Flow Inspection using Packet Filtering and Network Traffic Identification technique.

Decentralized Anonymous Credential (DAC) has posed enormous potential in smart grids for protecting user privacy (e.g. preventing user’s daily life from being sketched out). However, the existing DAC protocols still compromise user privacy for a full list of attributes are disclosed during showing credentials. In this paper, to construct a privacy-enhancing decentralized anonymous credential (PEDAC) protocol, we first design a more efficient range proof to hide user’s attributes. Specifically, we are inspired by Camenisch et al. (ASIACRYPT 2008), but replace their adopted Boneh-Boyen signature scheme with the Chinese standard SM2 signature scheme (incorporated in the ISO/IEC 14888-3) to propose pairing-free set membership and range proof protocols. These protocols can be executed non-interactively upon the Fiat-Shamir heuristic (INDOCRYPT 2012), and then be used to construct our PEDAC protocol. By compared with the protocols of Camenisch et al. (ASIACRYPT 2008) and Poelstra et al. (FC 2018), our proposed range proofs are with less communication and computation costs and hence more practical for constructing PEDAC protocols in smart grids.

In this work, we propose a new Blockchain-based Identity Management system for smart industry. First, we describe an efficient biometric-based anonymous credential scheme, which supports selective disclosure, suspension/thaw and revocation of credentials/entities. Our system provides non-transferability through a freshly computed hidden biometric attribute, which is generated using a secure fuzzy extractor during each authentication. This mechanism combined with offchain storage guarantees GDPR compliance, which is required for protecting user’s data. We define blinded (Brands) DLRep scheme to provide multi-show unlinkability, which is a lacking feature in Brands’ credential based systems. For larger organizations, we re-design the system by replacing the Merkle Tree with an accumulator to improve scalability. The new system enables auditing by adapting the standard Industrial IoT (IIoT) Identity Management Lifecycle to Blockchain. Finally, we show that the new proposal outperforms BASS, i.e. the most recent blockchain-based anonymous credential scheme designed for smart industry. The computational cost at the user-side (can be a weak IoT device) of our scheme is 8-times less than that of BASS. Thus, our system is more suitable for IIoT.

The authors present snapshots of board certification in 1916, the year that the American Board of Ophthalmology was founded, 60 years later in 1976 as periodic recertification emerged, and speculation about what certification might look like in 2036. The concept of board certification and continuous certification in the medical specialties took shape at the beginning of the 20th century with the convergence of a new system of assessment, the emergence of certifying boards, and the creation of the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS). The importance of self-regulation is emphasized as are the principles underlying board certification and the standards that guide it to support its continued relevance as a valued credential and symbol of the highest standard in the practice of medicine.

This study examined the relationship between school mobility for Colorado students in foster care and educational attainment outcomes, specifically earning high school diploma, a high school equivalency diploma (e.g., through examination such as a GED), or exiting the K-12 system without a credential. Multinomial logistic regression was utilized to analyze the predictive role of school mobility related to high school educational attainment within a statewide sample of four cohorts of students who experienced out-of-home placements during high school. Results indicated that students in the foster care cohorts changed public schools an average of 3.46 times during their first four years of high school. As the average number of school changes increased, the odds of earning a high school diploma decreased and the odds of earning an equivalency diploma (e.g., GED) or exiting without a credential increased. Grade level analysis suggests that educational stability in ninth and twelfth grades may be particularly important to closing the high school graduation gap for students in foster care. A more comprehensive child welfare profile that includes frequency of residential moves, types of placements, and mental or behavioral health indicators was not included in analyses, and this limitation must be considered when using the results of this study to inform policy or practice.

Wireless, mobile, and context-awareness applications are considered to be the epitome of pervasive computing, but they bring with them the inherent security challenges of mobile ad-hoc networking. Mobile ad-hoc networks are mainly formed by mobile users, which can belong to different trust domains, in order to leverage the wealth of pervasive resources and available capabilities. The use of digital certificates is suitable for pervasive networking because of its decentralized and dynamic nature. Nevertheless, the validation of such certificates can become a more complex and costly process than it is in fixed-infrastructure networks. This is because pervasive networks face challenges such as environments that change with a certain degree of randomness, ad-hoc interactions with foreign devices, temporal disconnections that make it difficult to access updated and required information, and limited devices running costly processes. For these reasons, we propose a user-centric architecture that extends the validation of digital certificates in an adaptive way. The main contribution consists of a decision engine that takes advantage of the specific local and external resources in an opportunistic fashion. The solution preserves the security level required for each application and the resource consumption of the user device.

We model a decentralised security credential revocation and replacement scheme.We utilise leverage of common friends trust concepts for trust transferral on keys.We propose a revocation scheme to provide entity confidence and trust transferral.We compare similar schemes on key and certificate removal and replacement metrics.Proposal distributes credentials 35% faster, slowed spoofed credentials by 50%. A Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) is a dynamic, fragmented, and ephemeral network formed by a large number of highly mobile nodes. DTNs are ephemeral networks with highly mobile autonomous nodes. This requires distributed and self-organised approaches to trust management. Revocation and replacement of security credentials under adversarial influence by preserving the trust on the entity is still an open problem. Existing methods are mostly limited to detection and removal of malicious nodes. This paper makes use of the mobility property to provide a distributed, self-organising, and scalable revocation and replacement scheme. The proposed scheme effectively utilises the Leverage of Common Friends (LCF) trust system concepts to revoke compromised security credentials, replace them with new ones, whilst preserving the trust on them. The level of achieved entity confidence is thereby preserved. Security and performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using an experimental data set in comparison with other schemes based around the LCF concept. Our extensive experimental results show that the proposed scheme distributes replacement credentials up to 35% faster and spreads spoofed credentials of strong collaborating adversaries up to 50% slower without causing any significant increase on the communication and storage overheads, when compared to other LCF based schemes.

I estimate the impact of community college credits and credentials on the labor market outcomes of several cohorts of current and former welfare recipients. Using an individual fixed effects approach, I find that women who attend college after entering welfare experience large and significant earnings gains. These returns are driven by credential receipt and when sub-associate’ s degree credentials are unobservable, positive earnings gains will be inappropriately attributed to college attendance alone.

Teacher quality is an important factor in improving student achievement. As such, policymakers have constructed a number of different credentials to identify high quality teachers. Unfortunately, few of the credentials used in developing countries have been validated (in terms of whether teachers holding such credentials actually improve student achievement). In this study, we employ a student-fixed effects model to estimate the impact of teacher credentials on student achievement in the context of the biggest education system in the world: China. We find that having a teacher with the highest rank (a credential based on annual assessments by local administrators) has positive impacts on student achievement relative to having a teacher who has not achieved the highest rank. We further find that teacher rank has heterogeneous impacts, benefiting economically poor students more than non-poor students. However, whether a teacher attends college or holds teaching awards does not appear to provide additional information on teacher quality (in terms of improving student achievement).

The majority of today’s pub/sub brokers only focus on data content when deciding where to distribute data. In this paper, we introduce the GeoBroker pub/sub broker software that additionally considers the geo-context associated with data producers and consumers. As a result, data consumers only receive relevant messages which preserves bandwidth and compute power while data producers can use the geo-context of clients to control data distribution, e.g., for enhanced privacy or as an alternative to credential-based authentication.

Background The complicated nature of cloud computing encompassing internet-based technologies and service models for delivering IT applications, processing capability, storage, and memory space brings along challenging problems. Some issues such as information security, privacy, and legal aspects of cloud computing may become challenging while cross passing with another complex domain like healthcare. Objectives The present study was conducted to report the results of a systematic literature review on the legal aspects of health cloud. Method The original English papers published in Pub Med, Scopus, Web of Science, and IEEE Digital Library databases were extracted, among which1582 were related to the legal aspects of health cloud environment and were selected using predefined search strings. Conclusion Through the review process, effective factors in relation to a health cloud legal framework were identified and accordingly, a proper design was developed for this domain. Next, the identified factors were confirmed and adjusted by mapping the contents of the selected papers to different categories and subcategories under the proposed framework. Five Main categories like the issues related to the compliance, data protection, Identity Credential Access Management (ICAM), ownership, and quality of service were selected as the basic pillars in the proposed framework. Finally, 22 papers were selected, among which 19 were mapped to the compliance issues, 18 the issues related to “Data protection” were addressed, and 14 “Identity Credential Access Management (ICAM)” was discussed. Fifteen Papers were mapped to “Data ownership” and “Quality of service” categories. Some papers were found to present some solutions in all the mentioned areas; however, most of them have addressed only a few issues.

Law student activists stand against applying to clerk for judges of certain ideological stripes. A law clerk disclosed sexual harassment inflicted by the judge she clerked for. The federal judiciary continues to struggle with work and hiring in the light of the novel coronavirus. In some ways, 2020 has not been a banner year to think about federal clerkships as the best jobs a law student will ever have. But a federal judicial clerkship remains a valued credential for employers, a coveted outcome for most students, and a window into the federal judiciary for outsiders, particularly first-generation law school graduates. And while some experiences can turn out poorly, the modal outcome seems to be one of high satisfaction, with a mentoring judge through a clerk’s early career and a network of clerk alumni who can support one another. And in the midst of these discussions, I offer this Federal Judicial Clerkship Report of Recent Graduates. This report is an opportunity to reflect on the present state of legal education and federal judicial clerkships. This Report offers an analysis of the overall hiring of recent law school graduates into federal judicial clerkships between 2017 and 2019 for each law school. It includes an overall hiring report, regional reports, overall hiring trends, an elite hiring report, and trends concerning judicial vacancies.

Do you want to teach at a top 25 law school? If so, you had better excel at something you will encounter years before you will even consider applying to be a law professor. Something that has no relationship at all to the skills academics need. You better score extremely high on the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) (or now at some schools the GRE). If you don’t score towards the very top, you will likely not be admitted to a top 10 ranked law school. And if you do not attend a top 10 ranked law school, no matter what you accomplish during the school you do attend (even a top 20 school) or afterwards, your chances of teaching at a top law school are virtually non-existent. The reality is that by far the most important credential one needs to teach at a top law school is to attend a top law school. The elite, teaching the elite, who will then teach more elites.

A mature body of research has examined the labor market returns to passing the GED, typically finding modest (or negligible) benefits for the individual. In this study, we use a regression discontinuity research design to estimate the impact of obtaining the GED on postsecondary outcomes for two self-selected groups of test-takers in Massachusetts: high school dropouts who do and do not enroll in publicly funded adult basic education (ABE) classes. In contrast with previous work, we find that earning a GED credential substantially increases enrollment and persistence in postsecondary education for ABE students who marginally pass the GED, but find no such effects for dropouts who do not participate in ABE. Specifically, our IV estimates indicate that earning a GED increases the likelihood that ABE participants ever enroll in college by 33.4-55.8 percentage points and increases enrollment for four or more quarters by 25.4-33.7 percentage points, depending on the specification. We hypothesize that although ABE students are negatively selected in terms of academic skills, they are positively selected on dimensions of non-cognitive skills and motivation relative to non-ABE test-takers. Our findings highlight a policy-relevant population of GED test-takers for whom earning a GED may be particularly beneficial and furthers our understanding of who does and does not benefit from this credential.

The significant growth of online banking frauds, fueled by the underground economy of malware, raised the need for effective fraud analysis systems. Unfortunately, almost all of the existing approaches adopt black box models and mechanisms that do not give any justifications to analysts. Also, the development of such methods is stifled by limited Internet banking data availability for the scientific community. In this paper we describe BankSealer , a decision support system for online banking fraud analysis and investigation. During a training phase, BankSealer builds easy-to-understand models for each customer's spending habits, based on past transactions. First, it quantifies the anomaly of each transaction with respect to the customer historical profile. Second, it finds global clusters of customers with similar spending habits. Third, it uses a temporal threshold system that measures the anomaly of the current spending pattern of each customer, with respect to his or her past spending behavior. With this threefold profiling approach, it mitigates the under-training due to the lack of historical data for building well-trained profiles, and the evolution of users' spending habits over time. At runtime, BankSealer supports analysts by ranking new transactions that deviate from the learned profiles, with an output that has an easily understandable, immediate statistical meaning. Our evaluation on real data, based on fraud scenarios built in collaboration with domain experts that replicate typical, real-world attacks (e.g., credential stealing, banking trojan activity, and frauds repeated over time), shows that our approach correctly ranks complex frauds. In particular, we measure the effectiveness, the computational resource requirements and the capabilities of BankSealer to mitigate the problem of users that performed a low number of transactions. Our system ranks frauds and anomalies with up to 98% detection rate and with a maximum daily computation time of 4 min. Given the good results, a leading Italian bank deployed a version of BankSealer in their environment to analyze frauds.

Consider a scenario where a user's credential is related to his/her DNA sequences. This credential can be used to construct a confidential message, which is decipherable by someone who is a relative of the encryptor, i.e. , the person who has enough close DNA sequences. We would like to have a system that provides privacy-preserving, in the sense that nobody will learn whether the encryptor is truly the ancestor of the recipient, except the fact whether the recipient can decrypt the given ciphertext or not. We present a system to realize this complex access control on encrypted data, such that the attributes used to describe a user's credential will determine a policy as to which recipient will be able to decrypt the provided ciphertext. We formalize the security model of our system against chosen ciphertext attacks and collusion attacks. Furthermore, we show an efficient and provably secure construction.