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Inflammation contributes to skeletal muscle atrophy via protein degradation induced by p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) phosphorylation. Meanwhile, pulsed ultrasound irradiation provides the mechanical stimulation to the target tissue, and has been reported to show anti-inflammatory effects. This study investigated the preventive effects of pulsed ultrasound irradiation on muscle atrophy induced by lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in C2C12 myotubes.C2C12 myotubes were used in this research. The pulsed ultrasound (a frequency of 3 MHz, duty cycle of 20%, intensity of 0.5 W/cmThe LPS increased phosphorylation of p38 MAPK and decreased the myofibril and myosin heavy chain protein (P 0.05), followed by atrophy in C2C12 myotubes. The pulsed ultrasound irradiation attenuated p38 MAPK phosphorylation and myotube atrophy induced by LPS (P 0.05).Pulsed ultrasound irradiation has the preventive effects on inflammation-induced muscle atrophy through inhibiting phosphorylation of p38 MAPK.

In the humid and semi-humid regions of China, tree-ring-width (TRW) chronologies offer limited moisture-related climatic information. To gather additional climatic information, it would be interesting to explore the potential of the intra-annul tree-ring-width indices (i.e., the earlywood width, EWW, and latewood width, LWW). To achieve this purpose, TRW, EWW, and LWW were measured from the tree-ring samples of Pinus tabuliformis originating from the semi-humid eastern Qinling Mountains, central China. Standard (STD) and signal-free (SSF) chronologies of all parameters were created using these detrending methods including (1) negative exponential functions combined with linear regression with negative (or zero) slope (NELR), (2) cubic smoothing splines with a 50 % frequency cutoff at 67 % of the series length (SP67), and (3) age-dependent splines with an initial stiffness of 50 years (SPA50). The results showed that EWW chronologies were significantly negatively correlated with temperature but positively correlated with precipitation and soil moisture conditions during the current early-growing season. By contrast, LWW and TRW chronologies had weaker relationships with these climatic factors. The strongest climatic signal was detected for the EWW STD chronology detrended with the NELR method, explaining 50 % of the variance in the May–July self-calibrated Palmer Drought Severity Index (MJJ scPDSI) during the instrumental period 1953–2005. Based on this relationship, the MJJ scPDSI was reconstructed back to 1868 using a linear regression function. The reconstruction was validated by comparison with other hydroclimatic reconstructions and historical document records from adjacent regions. Our results highlight the potential of intra-annual tree-ring indices for reconstructing seasonal hydroclimatic variations in humid and semi-humid regions of China. Furthermore, our reconstruction exhibits a strong in-phase relationship with a newly proposed East Asian summer monsoon index (EASMI) before the 1940s on the decadal and longer timescales, which may be due to the positive response of the local precipitation to EASMI. Nonetheless, the cause for the weakened relationship after the 1940s is complex, and cannot be solely attributed to the changing impacts of precipitation and temperature.

With changing climates globally, we see changes in not just average conditions, but also in extreme events, and such events require special attention due to their unpredictable yet significant impact on native biotas. One such event is the formation of a landscape scar at Zonag Lake caused by a climate change‐induced outburst flooding event that occurred on 15 September 2011. During the winter, the scar region became a new birthplace for sandstorms, and since the flooding, remote sensing monitoring shows that between 2011 and 2020, there were 285 sandstorm days (between November and March), relative to none prior. The outburst flooding event and consequential sandstorms threaten the key lambing area of the Tibetan antelope (Chiru), affect the water balance of the Zonag Lake and downstream lakes, and may even impact on the flow in the Yangtze River. Active human intervention may be needed to repair this new desert spit and reverse the slew of consequences which may otherwise lead to significant population declines in one of the major Chiru breeding grounds due to the progressive loss of vegetation productivity across their main breeding area.

Green supply chain (GSC), one of the most vital sub-topics of sustainable development, indicates people provoking on the rationality of business practices and resource consumption patterns. Under the background of economy globalization, developing countries, especially China, severely affected by green barriers became the global focus. A systematic review of articles about GSC which published in leading journals of Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) and China Knowledge Resource Infrastructure (CNKI) is proposed for exploring publishing trends, the distribution of authors and journals, research topics, and hotspots and predicting frontiers by utilizing VOSviewer, Sci2, and CiteSpace. The results show that (1) there are differences in the attention of GSC between international and Chinese academia. (2) "Green" is referred to environmental friendly practices in international academia. Scholars advocate to promote management to strengthen cooperation among GSC members and boost technology investment to improve the comprehensive performance; however, specific practices such as "low-carbon," "emission reduction," "recycling," and "remanufacture" are referred to environmental friendly behaviors in Chinese academia. Scholars expect to avoid enterprises' short-term profit compression relying on government subsidies and make contracts to share environment protection cost equally out for ensuring GSC stable operation. (3) Exploring collaboration among GSC members using complex operation research and artificial intelligence will be international research frontier. Relevant papers are to provide Chinese research with merely innovation in methodology. Besides, the "government-enterprise-university-research institute-customer-economy" management mode proposed by development countries like China will enrich the international GSC research scope, leading international GSC knowledge structure to change. The contribution of this study is to afford reference for future research on GSC.

Thin liquid film evaporation is a prevailing cooling technique for thermal protection to the inner wall of a chamber with high-intensity combustion. A novel model is developed to investigate the flow and evaporation of liquid film in a rocket combustion chamber with high temperature and high shear force, in which shear stress at the interface between liquid film and high temperature combustion gas with high velocity, capillary pressure of liquid and disjoining pressure associated with liquid film evaporation are taken into account. A numerical algorithm of the backward solution is deliberately adopted to solve this model so as to eliminate the entrance effect caused by different inlet conditions of liquid film. For given temperature and hot gas rate in a chamber, a stably evolution regime of liquid film with the thickness from thick to thin is depicted corresponding to the total process of being sheared into film and being evaporated to dryness. Results indicate that the three forces mentioned above play critical parts in flowing and evaporating of liquid film during its different evolution regimes. It was shown that shear stress and capillary pressure have a positive effect on the flow and evaporation of film, as well as a negative effect from the disjoining pressure. The effects of these forces are different dependent on different initial average thickness of film, and the distribution profile of these forces are totally illustrated in detailed. The prediction of liquid film length, from being injected to being evaporated, by the proposed model is in a good agreement with available experimental data. All findings are expected to provide a fundamental guideline for the design and optimization of efficient thermal protect to the combustion chamber of space engine.

Environmental remediation by employing visible-light-active semiconductor heterostructures provides effective solutions for handling emerging contaminants by a much greener and lower cost approach compared with other methods. This report demonstrates that the in situ growth of nanosized single-crystal-like defective anatase TiO2-x mesocrystals (DTMCs) on g-C3 N4 nanosheets (NSs) can produce a 3D/2D DTMC/g-C3 N4 NS heterostructure with the two components held together by chemical bonds to form tight interfaces. This nanostructured heterostructure displayed remarkably improved photocatalytic activity toward the removal of the model pollutants Methyl Orange (MO) and CrVI under visible-light irradiation in comparison with the pristine DTMC and g-C3 N4 NS components, which suggests that both the oxidation and reduction abilities of the DTMC/g-C3 N4 NSs were simultaneously enhanced after fabrication. On the basis of the results of a systematic characterization, a reasonable mechanism for the photocatalytic activity based on a direct Z-scheme heterojunction is proposed and further verified by the measurement of . OH. This novel Z-scheme heterojunction endows the heterostructure with improved photogenerated electron/hole pair separation and a strong redox ability for the efficient degradation of wastewater pollutants. This work will be useful for the design and fabrication of direct Z-scheme heterostructured photocatalysts with novel architectures for applications in energy conversion and environmental remediation.

In this paper, we discuss a singularly perturbed convection diffusion problem, whose solution contains an interior layer caused by the discontinuity of the convection coefficient. For this kind of problem, uniform convergence of the finite element method has not been established. For this aim, after proving the minimum principle and stability result, we derive the asymptotic expansion of the solution and a priori estimates of its smooth and layer components. Then we construct a finite element method on Shishkin mesh, and prove uniform convergence of almost order k in the energy norm, where k is the order of piecewise polynomials.

We studied the influence of surface pinning on the domain structure and magnetization dynamics in permalloy stripe domain films. The effect of the pinning in the film was controlled by introducing the defects via the interface roughness of the silicon substrate. The results show that the pinning, induced by these defects, leads to the irregularity of the stripe domain and change of their local distributions. The irregular stripe domain pattern results in the weakening of magnetization resonant- frequency and intensity of the film. The results further were verified by micromagnetic simulation, confirming that the regularity and homogeneity of the stripe domain are important for the excitation of spin waves in stripe domain films. Our results show the important significance of the domain structure for the application of spin-wave propagation in magnetic films.

FeCoB films with different B doping contents and different thicknesses were deposited by composition gradient sputtering. The results show that in-plane anisotropy fields and exchange constants change with the increasing B contents and increasing thickness, respectively. Both results of the composition-gradient films and the thickness-dependent films and the micromagnetic simulation indicate that multiple order spin-wave resonances are easy to obtain in the films with the large in-plane anisotropy field. We observed four resonance peaks including three perpendicular standing spin waves. The hysteresis loop and magnetic domain results indicate that such films also have good magnetic softness and an in-plane homogeneous domain structure.

Extremely cold temperatures are a significant threat to agriculture and transportation in winter in southeastern China. However, due to the shortness of instrumental records and the scarcity of long-term temperature reconstructions, more high-quality temperature reconstructions are still needed to fully examine their spatial-temporal variability over the past several centuries. In this study, we built an earlywood width (EWW) chronology, a latewood width (LWW) chronology, and a tree-ring width (TRW) chronology using tree-ring samples of Pinus taiwanensis Hayata from the western Tianmu Mountains and the Xianyu Mountains in southeastern China. The tree growth-climate relationships were analyzed, and we found the strongest correlation between December and March mean temperature and the EWW chronology. The December-March mean temperature history was then reconstructed over the period of 1871-2016 using a linear regression model, which is the first EWW-based temperature reconstruction in southeastern China. With a higher explained variance (47.0%) than that (31.7%) of a previous reconstruction using a TRW chronology, the quality of the model has largely improved. This reconstruction was also comparable with other nearby records, further demonstrating the reliability of our new model. Furthermore, our reconstruction exhibits a significantly negative relationship with the East Asian winter monsoon index (EAWMI) since the 1920s, which may be attributed to the obviously enhanced EAWMI thereafter.

Identifying influential spreaders in complex networks is crucial in understanding, controlling and accelerating spreading processes for diseases, information, innovations, behaviors, and so on. Inspired by the gravity law, we propose a gravity model that utilizes both neighborhood information and path information to measure a node’s importance in spreading dynamics. In order to reduce the accumulated errors caused by interactions at distance and to lower the computational complexity, a local version of the gravity model is further proposed by introducing a truncation radius. Empirical analyses of the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) spreading dynamics on fourteen real networks show that the gravity model and the local gravity model perform very competitively in comparison with well-known state-of-the-art methods. For the local gravity model, the empirical results suggest an approximately linear relation between the optimal truncation radius and the average distance of the network.

Background. Accurate classification for different non-Hodgkin lymphomas (NHL) is one of the main challenges in clinical pathological diagnosis due to its intrinsic complexity. Therefore, this paper proposes an effective classification model for three types of NHL pathological images, including mantle cell lymphoma (MCL), follicular lymphoma (FL), and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). Methods. There are three main parts with respect to our model. First, NHL pathological images stained by hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) are transferred into blue ratio (BR) and Lab spaces, respectively. Then specific patch-level textural and statistical features are extracted from BR images and color features are obtained from Lab images both using a hierarchical way, yielding a set of hand-crafted representations corresponding to different image spaces. A random forest classifier is subsequently trained for patch-level classification. Second, H&E images are cropped and fed into a pretrained google inception net (GoogLeNet) for learning high-level representations and a softmax classifier is used for patch-level classification. Finally, three image-level classification strategies based on patch-level results are discussed including a novel method for calculating the weighted sum of patch results. Different classification results are fused at both feature 1 and image levels to obtain a more satisfactory result. Results. The proposed model is evaluated on a public IICBU Malignant Lymphoma Dataset and achieves an improved overall accuracy of 0.991 and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.998. Conclusion. The experimentations demonstrate the significantly increased classification performance of the proposed model, indicating that it is a suitable classification approach for NHL pathological images.

Epilepsy is a common neurological disease in China and it can be detected and diagnosed by PET images. For automatic classification tasks, it is essential to obtain discriminable features from medical images. The features of the pretraining neural network have been widely used in some image fields. In this paper, we propose a novel fusion modal transfer learning framework by three kinds of two-dimensional convolution networks (ResNet, VGGNet, Inception-V3) pretrained on ImageNet databases and a 3D convolution network of SVGG-C3D pretrained on the lung nodules databases of the Kaggle competition. Weights in the convolutional layers of each network were frozen to serve as fixed feature extractors. The multi-modal transfer learning framework on epileptic PET images is trained to extract features with the frozen weights. Combining four model characteristics, the weights of classifier (top layers) are trained to predict the epileptic and the normal. The proposed algorithm can be used to detect epilepsy more effectively than the deep learning model.

Considerable advances have been made in use of tree-ring δ18O for climate reconstructions in Southeast China, the East Asian summer monsoon region. However, the relationships among tree-ring cellulose δ18O (δ18Ocell), local hydroclimate, precipitation δ18O (δ18Opre) and El Nino–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) have not yet been fully resolved. The usual interpretation has been that local hydroclimate influences δ18Ocell through both the “amount effect” on δ18Opre and evaporative enrichment, but it cannot fully explain the high inter-site correlation of δ18Ocell chronologies or their response pattern to ENSO. In this study, we use a newly-developed δ18Ocell chronology of Pinus massoniana from a water-stressed site in Zhejiang province, in combination with another three δ18Ocell chronologies in Southeast China, to investigate their climatic implications from a regional perspective. The results show that besides local hydroclimate, δ18Opre is also significantly correlated with δ18Ocell, but with different effects. Spatially homogeneous δ18Opre variation causes high spatial correlations among δ18Ocell from different sites. Analyses show that ENSO variations are responsible for the large-scale common signals in δ18Ocell by modulating δ18Opre. Therefore, combining δ18Ocell chronologies from different locations can enhance ENSO signals, which provides us new opportunities to reconstruct paleo-ENSO activities. Furthermore, eliminating the part of ENSO signal that is not related to the growing season hydroclimate from δ18Ocell can increase the explained variance of observed values. These findings provide a guide for future optimized ENSO and local paleoclimate reconstructions using δ18Ocell.

The moderate spatial resolution and high temporal resolution of the MODIS imagery make it an ideal resource for the time series surface water monitoring and mapping. We used MODIS MOD09Q1 surface reflectance archive images to create Inland Surface Water Dataset in China (ISWDC), which maps the water body larger than 0.0625 km2 in the terrestrial land of China for the period 2000–2016, in 8-day temporal and 250 m spatial resolution. We assessed the accuracy of the ISWDC by comparing with the national land cover derived surface water data and the Global Surface Water (GSW) data. The results show that the ISWDC is closely correlated with the national reference data with the determinant coefficients (R2) greater than 0.99 in 2000, 2005, and 2010, while the ISWDC has similar spatial patterns in different regions with the GSW data set in 2015 too. The ISWDC data set can be used for studies on the inter-annual and seasonal variation of the surface water systems. It can also be used as reference data for other surface water data set verification and as input parameter for regional and global hydro-climatic models. The ISWDC data are available at http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1463694.

Historical hydroclimate records derived from tree-ring parameters are scarce in the core region of East Asian Summer Monsoon (EASM) in China, limiting our understanding of the inter-decadal hydroclimate variability of this region and its possible connections with the EASM. In this study, standard chronologies of total tree-ring width (TRW), earlywood width (EWW), and latewood width (LWW) were created using tree-ring samples of Pinus tabulaeformis in the eastern Qinling Mountains, Central China. The strongest growth-climate relationship was found between EWW and May–July self-calibrated Palmer Drought Severity Index (MJJ scPDSI). Therefore, a linear regression model, which explained 50.3 % of the variance in MJJ scPDSI (1951–2005), was developed to estimate the past MJJ scPDSI variations using EWW. The time series of MJJ scPDSI was extended back to the year 1866, and validated by independent hydroclimate series from nearby regions. Before the mid-1950s, the variations of MJJ scPDSI were in-phase with those of EASM intensity on decadal and longer timescales, suggesting that wet conditions would occur in the eastern Qinling Mountains when EASM was strengthened. Since the mid-1950s, however, the relationship has been out-of-phase. This phase change may be associated with an intensified dipole pattern of EASM precipitation.

Environmental remediation by employing visible-light-active semiconductor heterostructures provides effective solutions for handling emerging contaminants by a much greener and lower cost approach compared with other methods. This report demonstrates that the in situ growth of nanosized single-crystal-like defective anatase TiO

The polycomb group (PcG) proteins are key epigenetic regulators in stem cell maintenance. PcG proteins have been thought to act through one of two polycomb repressive complexes (PRCs), but more recent biochemical analyses have challenged this model in the identification of noncanonical PRC1 (nc-PRC1) complexes characterized by the presence of Rybp or Yaf2 in place of the canonical Chromobox proteins. However, the biological significance of these nc-PRC1s and the potential mechanisms by which they mediate gene repression are largely unknown. Here, we explore the functional consequences of Yaf2 disruption on stem cell regulation. We show that deletion of Yaf2 results in compromised proliferation and abnormal differentiation of mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs). Genome-wide profiling indicates Yaf2 functions primarily as a transcriptional repressor, particularly impacting genes associated with ectoderm cell fate in a manner distinct from Rybp. We confirm that Yaf2 assembles into a noncanonical PRC complex, with deletion analysis identifying the region encompassing amino acid residues 102-150 as required for this assembly. Furthermore, we identified serine 166 as a Yaf2 phosphorylation site, and we demonstrate that mutation of this site to alanine (S166A) compromises Ring1B-mediated H2A monoubiquitination and in turn its ability to repress target gene expression. We therefore propose that Yaf2 and its phosphorylation status serve as dual regulators to maintain the pluripotent state in mESCs.

A novel method is proposed to establish the pancreatic cancer classifier. Firstly, the concept of quantum and fruit fly optimal algorithm (FOA) are introduced, respectively. Then FOA is improved by quantum coding and quantum operation, and a new smell concentration determination function is defined. Finally, the improved FOA is used to optimize the parameters of support vector machine (SVM) and the classifier is established by optimized SVM. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, SVM and other classification methods have been chosen as the comparing methods. The experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the classifier performance and cost less time.

Intrusion detection systems offer monolithic way to detect attacks through monitoring, searching for abnormal characteristics, and malicious behavior in network communications. Cyber-attack is performed through using covert channel which currently is one of the most sophisticated challenges facing network security systems. Covert channel is used to ex/infiltrate classified information from legitimate targets; consequently, this manipulation violates network security policy and privacy. The New Generation Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) has certain security vulnerabilities and need to be addressed using further advanced techniques. Fuzzy rule is implemented to classify different network attacks as an advanced machine learning technique, meanwhile, Genetic algorithm is considered as an optimization technique to obtain the ideal fuzzy rule. This paper suggests a novel hybrid covert channel detection system implementing two Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, Fuzzy Logic and Genetic Algorithm (FLGA), to gain sufficient and optimal detection rule against covert channel. Our approach counters sophisticated network unknown attacks through an advanced analysis of deep packet inspection. Results of our suggested system offer high detection rate of 97.7 % and a better performance in comparison to previous tested techniques.

An alternative theoretical model called circular partially coherent flattened Gaussian beam (FGB) is developed to describe a circular partially coherent beam with a flat-topped spatial profile. Explicit expression for the propagation factor of a circular partially coherent FGB is derived. We drive the analytical formulae for the cross-spectral density and mean-squared beam width of a circular partially coherent FGB propagating through a paraxial ABCD optical system based on the generalized Collins formula. The intensity, spreading and directionality properties of a circular partially coherent FGB propagating in free space are studied as numerical examples. The propagation properties of a circular partially coherent FGB agree well with those of a partially coherent flat-topped beam reported in the literature. Thus, our model provides an alternative but reliable model for describing a circular partially coherent beam with flat-topped profile.

Investigations into the characteristics of hemodynamics will provide a better understanding of the pathology of cerebral aneurysms for clinicians. In this work, a steady state discontinuous-growth model of the cerebral aneurysms was proposed. With the assumption of the fluid-structure interaction between the wall of blood vessel and blood, a fluid-structure coupling numerical simulation for this model was built using software ANSYS and CFX. The simulation results showed that as the aneurysm volume increased, a blood flow vortex came forth, the vortex region became asymptotically larger, and eddy density became gradually stronger in it. After the emergence of the vortex region, the blood flow in the vicinity of the downstream in the aneurysms volume turned into bifurcated flow, and the location of the flow bifurcated point was shifted with the aneurysm volume growing while directions of the shear stress applied to two sides of the bifurcated point were opposite. The Von Mises stress distribution along the wall of aneurysm volume decreased in the prior period and increased gradually in the later period. The maximum stress was in the neck of the volume and the minimum was on the distal end in the whole process of growth. It was shown that as the aneurysm increased the maximum deformation location of the aneurysm, vertical to the streamline, was transferred from the distal end of the aneurysm to its neck, then back to its distal end of the aneurysm again.

This paper presents a Petri net (PN) approach to modelling, simulating, and analysing the new protocol we have proposed. This new protocol is an enhanced authentication scheme based on a biometric verification mechanism and identity based cryptography. A formal approach like Petri nets allows one to represent cryptographic protocols. For the sake of simplicity, a complex PN model will not be discussed in this paper until all attacks are demonstrated and the model proved to be secure. This paper shows how Petri nets are used to model, analyse and detect flaws in our new protocol. First, our proposed protocol is modelled without an adversary, and then a generic adversary model is added to examine all possible adversary behaviours. Finally we demonstrate how Petri nets can be used to analyse security threats such as man-in-the-middle attack, reflection attack, and parallel session attack on this protocol.

This paper demonstrates a comprehensive analysis method using formal methods such as finite-state machine. First, we describe the modified version of our new protocol and briefly explain the encrypt-then-authenticate mechanism, which is regarded as more a secure mechanism than the one used in our protocol. Then, we use a finite-state verification to study the behaviour of each machine created for each phase of the protocol and examine their behaviour s together. Modelling with finite-state machines shows that the modified protocol can function correctly and behave properly even with invalid input or time delay.

This paper describes the formal verification of the Merchant Registration phase of the Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) protocol, a realistic electronic transaction security protocol which is used to protect the secrecy of online purchases. A number of concepts, notations, functions, predicates, assumptions and rules are introduced. We describe the knowledge of all legal participants, and a malicious spy, to assess the security of the sub-protocol. Avoiding search in a large state space, the method converges very quickly. We implemented our method in the Isabelle/Isar automated reasoning environment, therefore the whole verification process can be executed mechanically and efficiently.

Government information is a vital asset that must be kept in a trusted environment and efficiently managed by authorised parties. Even though e-Government provides a number of advantages, it also introduces a range of new security risks. Sharing confidential and top-secret information in a secure manner among government sectors tend to be the main element that government agencies look for. Thus, developing an effective methodology is essential and it is a key factor for e-Government success. The proposed e-Government scheme in this paper is a combination of identity-based encryption and biometric technology. This new scheme can effectively improve the security in authentication systems, which provides a reliable identity with a high degree of assurance. In addition, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of using Finite-state machines as a formal method to analyse the proposed protocols.

Based on the analysis of the hard roofs movement law in the a mine short wall stope, a kind of caving technology combining the deep hole blasting and the shallow hole blasting is put forward. The advantage of this technology is to set deep hole blastholes in connection drifts so that the blasting down coal gangues fill completely the goaf under blastholes and isolate the working face from the goaf. For cutting fractures on roofs, shallow hole blastholes are set in the slices intraocular of sections, which changes the mechanical structures of roofs, reduces the limit hanging distances of the original roofs and makes roofs acaving under the mining pressure. This technology realized the roofs safety caving of the short wall stope and good filling of goafs, which can provide reference for similar working face mining.

Government information is a vital asset that must be kept in a trusted environment and efficiently managed by authorised parties. Even though e-Government provides a number of advantages, it also introduces a range of new security risks. Sharing confidential and top-secret information in a secure manner among government sectors tends to be the main element that government agencies look for. Thus, developing an effective methodology is essential and it is a key factor for e-Government success. The proposed e-Government scheme in this paper is a combination of identity-based encryption and biometric technology. This new scheme can effectively improve the security in authentication systems, which provides a reliable identity with a high degree of assurance. This paper also demonstrates the feasibility of using finite-state machines as a formal method to analyse the proposed protocols. Finally we showed how Petri Nets could be used to simulate the communication patterns between the server and client as well as to validate the protocol functionality.

The IEEE 802.11i standard has been designed to enhance security in wireless networks. The EAP-TLS handshake aims to provide mutual authentication between supplicant and authentication server, and then derive the Pairwise Master Key (PMK). In the 4 -way handshake the supplicant and the authenticator use PMK to derive a fresh pairwise transient key (PTK). The PMK is not used directly for security while assuming the supplicant and authenticator have the same PMK before running 4- way handshake. In this paper, the EAP-TLS handshake and the 4-way handshake phases have been analysed with a proposed framework using Isabelle tool. In the analysis, we have found a new Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack in the 4-way handshake. The attack prevents the authenticator from receiving message 4 after the supplicant sends it out. This attack forces the authenticator to re-send the message 3 until time out and subsequently to de-authenticate supplicant. This paper has proposed improvements to the 4-way handshake to avoid the Denial-of-Service attack.

The IEEE 802.11i standard has been designed to enhance security in wireless networks. In the 4-way handshake the supplicant and the authenticator use the pairwise master key (PMK) to derive a fresh pairwise transient key (PTK). The PMK is not used directly for security while assuming the supplicant and authenticator have the same PMK before running 4-way handshake. In this paper, the 4-way handshake phase has been analysed using Isabelle tool to identify a new Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack. The attack prevents the authenticator from receiving message 4 after the supplicant sends it out. This attack forces the authenticator to re-send the message 3 until time out and subsequently to de-authenticate supplicant. This paper has proposed improvements to the 4-way handshake to avoid the Denial-of-Service attack.

In cloud computing environment, security becomes a more and more critical issue as users are sharing computing resources remotely. It is important to analyse the potential security challenges and risks clouds may face. In this paper, a number of security challenges, concerns and issues are discussed, including three major aspects of security, namely confidentiality, integrity and availability.

Real data used in research projects give rise to conflicts of protecting privacy and providing more functions: functionality requires trying to make use of maximum amount of data, while privacy requirements try to protect such information from being leaked. In this paper, a new model is proposed to capture relationships between database attributes and to record users’ knowledge about database so as to prevent them from getting sensitive information by combining results returned from multiple queries, aiming to protect database privacy. This new model successfully solves the deductive access control problem in databases.

Information security is playing an increasingly important role in modern society, driven especially by the uptake of the Internet for information transfer. Large amount of information is transmitted everyday through the Internet, which is often the target of malicious attacks. In certain areas, this issue is vital. For example, military departments of governments often transmit a great amount of top-secret data, which, if divulged, could become a huge threat to the public and to national security. Even in our daily life, it is also necessary to protect information. Consider e-commerce systems as an example. No one is willing to purchase anything over the Internet before being assured that all their personal and financial information will always be kept secure and will never be leaked to any unauthorised person or organisation.

We describe a framework for the secure sharing and aggregation of legacy data. The framework, \emph{sif} (for service-oriented interoperability framework), has two key principles at its core: that it should be possible to expose data from any legacy data source, irrespective of the underlying technologies or data models, and that data owners should be afforded the opportunity for expressive access control policies. sif abstracts issues such as secure transport and heterogeneous federation from application developers via a Java API. Our particular focus in this paper is sif's plug-in mechanism, which gives rise to a simple and elegant means of facilitating interoperability.

We report upon the development of sif (for service-oriented interoperability framework), a platform that has been developed to support the secure aggregation of medical data from disparate sources. By taking a data-agnostic approach to data access and transfer, sif provides a generic interface to data sources, which allows the current version to expose data from any relational database and any file system in a secure fashion. Application developers may then access and utilise such data via a simple API. sif is being developed within the GIMI (Generic Infrastructure for Medical Informatics) project; as such, we discuss its various applications within that context.

This paper describes a new interactive method to analyse knowledge of participants involved in security protocols and further to verify the correctness of the protocols. The method can detect attacks and flaws involving interleaving sessions besides normal attacks. The implementation of the method in a generic theorem proving environment, namely Isabelle, makes the verification of protocols mechanical and efficient; it can verify a medium-sized security protocol in less than ten seconds. As an example, the paper finds the flaw in the Needham-Schroeder public key authentication protocol and proves the secure properties and guarantees of the protocol with Lowe's fix to show the effectiveness of this method.

A new distributed spam filter system based on mobile agent is proposed in this paper. We introduce the application of mobile agent technology to the spam filter system. The system architecture, the work process, the pivotal technology of the distributed spam filter system based on mobile agent, and the Naive Bayesian filter method are described in detail. The experiment results indicate that the system can prevent spam emails effectively.