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The Internet of Things (IoT) has widely expanded due to its advantages in enhancing the business, industrial, and social ecosystems. Nevertheless, IoT infrastructure is susceptible to several cyber-attacks due to the endpoint devices' restrictions in computation, storage, and communication capacity. As such, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks pose a serious threat to the security of the IoT. Attackers can easily utilize IoT devices as part of botnets to launch DDoS attacks by taking advantage of their flaws. This paper proposes an Ethereum blockchain model to detect and prevent DDoS attacks against IoT systems. Additionally, the proposed system can be used to resolve the single points of failure (dependencies on third parties) and privacy and security in IoT systems. First, we propose implementing a decentralized platform in place of current centralized system solutions to prevent DDoS attacks on IoT devices at the application layer by authenticating and verifying these devices. Second, we suggest tracing and recording the IP address of malicious devices inside the blockchain to prevent them from connecting and communicating with the IoT networks. The system performance has been evaluated by performing 100 experiments to evaluate the time taken by the authentication process. The proposed system highlights two messages with a time of 0.012 ms: the first is the request transmitted from the IoT follower device to join the blockchain, and the second is the blockchain response. The experimental evaluation demonstrated the superiority of our system because there are fewer I/O operations in the proposed system than in other related works, and thus it runs substantially faster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Pädagogik is the property of Julius Beltz GmbH & Co. KG Beltz Juventa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The collaboration among different organizations is considered one of the main benefits of moving applications and services to a cloud computing environment. Unfortunately, this collaboration raises many challenges such as the access of sensitive resources by unauthorized people. Usually, Role-Based Access-Control (RBAC) model is deployed in large organizations. This paper addresses the scalability problem of the online stored rules. This problem affects the performance of the access control system due to increasing number of shared resources and/or number of collaborating organizations in the same cloud environment. Therefore, this paper proposes replacing the cross-domain RBAC rules with Role-To-Role (RTR) mapping rules among all organizations. The RTR mapping rules are generated using a newly proposed Role-Mapping algorithm. A comparative study is performed to evaluate the proposed algorithm's performance with concerning the Rule-Store size and the authorization response time. According to the results, it is found that the proposed algorithm reduces the number of stored rules which minimizes the Rule-Store size and reduces the authorization response time. Additionally, this paper proposes applying a concurrent approach on the RTR mapping model using the proposed Role-Mapping algorithm to achieve more savings in the authorization response time. Therefore, it will be suitable in highly-collaborative cloud environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent years have garnered huge attention towards the Internet of Things (IoT) because it enables its consumers to improve their lifestyles and professionally keep up with the technological advancements in the cyber-physical world. The IoT edge devices are heterogeneous in terms of the technology they are built on and the storage file formats used. These devices require highly secure modes of mutual authentication to authenticate each other before actually sending the data. Mutual authentication is a very important aspect of peer-to-peer communication. Secure session keys enable these resource-constrained devices to authenticate each other. After successful authentication, a device can be authorized and can be granted access to shared resources. The need for validating a device requesting data transfer to avoid data privacy breaches that may compromise confidentiality and integrity. Blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) both are extensively being used as an integrated part of IoT networks for security enhancements. Blockchain provides a decentralized mechanism to store validated session keys that can be allotted to the network devices. Blockchain is also used to load balance the stressing edge devices during low battery levels. AI on the other hand provides better learning and adaptiveness towards IoT attacks. The integration of newer technologies in IoT key management yields enhanced security features. In this article, we systematically survey recent trending technologies from an IoT security point of view and discuss traditional key security mechanisms. This article delivers a comprehensive quality study for researchers on authentication and session keys, integrating IoT with blockchain and AI-based authentication in cybersecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Pedagogical Authority" discusses the role and significance of pedagogical authority in parent-child relationships and teacher-student relationships. Theodor W. Adorno is mentioned as an important thinker on this topic. It is emphasized that pedagogical authority can take on various forms and is effective in certain contexts. The article also deals with the characteristics and dimensions of pedagogical authority and emphasizes the importance of recognition and trust in this relationship. It is pointed out that pedagogical authority is closely linked to cultural legitimacy and education. The article concludes by noting the subtle effect of symbolic power and the role of education in the transmission of social power through symbols. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Visión Electrónica is the property of Fondo de Universidad Distrital Francisco Jose de Caldas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Summary: When organizations need to collaborate urgently, for example, in the case of an emergency situation, it is needed to deploy software components into the different domains in order to allow crucial data to be exchanged. The ad hoc aspect is important as it does not allow the participating organizations to negotiate entire workflows and/or contracts upfront. To enable these ad hoc cross‐organizational collaborations, a container orchestration platform, like Kubernetes, can be used to quickly deploy pods of containers in a cross‐organizational overlay network, even fully automated. Although this is technically feasible, there may be a trust issue from the perspective of a participating organization when an external organization is capable of deploying any software inside its network domain. This concern is examined and resolved in this article, by proposing an extension to the existing deployment scheme used in vanilla Kubernetes. It allows the participating organizations to assess whether a suggested deployment conforms to the goal of the project and to maintain an overview of all activities related to a single collaboration. This intermediate step prevents an honest organization against potentially malicious behaviour of external entities, either the orchestrator and/or the other organizations, solving the aforementioned trust issue. Evaluation of the implemented prototype shows that a secure collaboration, which requires at most tens of containers, can be attained with sub‐second deployment overheads per container, apart from the required manual interventions for trust management purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The flow of data across nodes has become the dominant feature of data sharing in distributed environments with increasingly blurred boundaries, where it is crucial to maintain data access dynamic, trusted, and efficient. However, traditional centralized access control models are not only difficult to apply in distributed environments but also ignore trusted verification of authorized entities. What’s worse, existing access control models rarely consider themselves security, lack independence, at a high risk of being bypassed or tampered with. Thus, we propose in this paper a distributed, dynamic, and trusted access control model, DDTAC-BSS, where the standard Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) architecture is modified and extended. To reduce the attack surface, we separate policy enforcement point (PEP) from other core components, they are located in the node system and access control system, respectively. Then, the access control entry point (ACEP) is added as the only interface for the node system to interact with the access control system. Subsequently, the model introduces the entity trusted assessment mechanism to improve the trustworthiness of access control services. Driven by the dynamic attributes, our model can achieve dynamic trusted authorization and fine-grained access control. Moreover, we implement a lightweight, independent, and distributed security subsystem to achieve unified management of policies and decision-making autonomy by message-driven. By considering the independence of the security subsystem, a trusted operating environment is built based on Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to ensure the security of the access control mechanism itself. The security of our model is proved rigorously based on the non-interference theory. Comprehensive experiments and comparisons have demonstrated the superior functionality, comparable performance, and strong security of our model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secure cloud search service allows resource-constrained clients to effectively search over encrypted cloud storage. Towards enabling owner-enforced search authorization, the notion of attribute-based keyword search (ABKS) has been introduced and widely deployed in practice. To enhance traditional security of ABKS, two state-of-the-art solutions are presented to address keyword guessing attacks or setup inconsistency for secret key. Nevertheless, they have not simultaneously considered the following threats to a data user: (i) inconsistent secret key/cipher-index caused by outside dishonest authority and/or data owner; (ii) algorithm substitution attacks (ASA) launched by inside adversarial eavesdropping. These attacks may unfortunately lead to cloud data breach and user information exposure. To tackle such outside and inside threats, we introduce subversion-resistance and consistency for secure and fine-grained cloud document search services. In particular, we propose a consistent ABKS system with cryptographic reverse firewalls (CRF). Technically, we refer to verifiable functional encryption and employ non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs of discrete logarithm equality to ensure strong input consistency for ABKS. In addition, we build a trusted CRF zone for sanitizing algorithm outputs against ASA attacks. Moreover, we formalize the security model and formally prove security of our system. To clarify practical performance, we implement state-of-the-art solutions and our system in real cloud environment based on Enron dataset. The results show that our system achieves more enhanced security properties without obviously sacrificing performance. In particular, our system achieves comparable time and storage cost for document-index encryption and document search, as compared to state-of-the-art solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metadata plays an essential role in facilitating data organizing, finding, and understanding, but it also contains lots of sensitive information about the data and the data users, e.g., the location where a picture was taken. In practice, when sensitive data is encrypted before being uploaded to untrusted public clouds, an oblivious dilemma comes: if the metadata is totally encrypted, and its functionalities no longer exist; otherwise, sensitive information may be leaked. Hence, a secure and flexible mechanism for processing different fields (marked private or public for different scenario needs) of metadata simultaneously is desirable. We searched the literature for methods of achieving such a goal, it turned out that this was not explicitly considered or reasonably solved before. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the problem of constructing privacy-enhancing metadata, namely, 1) flexible and tamper-resistant metadata setting, 2) owner-enabled secure search authorization with explicit metadata. Based on the concept of public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS), we propose a novel Authorized Keyword Search over Encrypted Data with Metadata scheme (MD-AKS), which firstly well addressed the above demands. We formalize the security model and prove the security of MD-AKS scheme. Our work maximizes the flexibility of metadata setting in two aspects: the associated metadata can be set as an arbitrary string and the costs of clients are independent of explicit metadata’s complexity. We implement MD-AKS, the theoretical comparison and experiment results further demonstrate the usability and scalability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Scientific Annals of the "Stefan cel Mare" Academy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Moldova / Revista Stiintifica a Academiei Stefan cel Mare is the property of Stefan cel Mare University, Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Moldova / Ministerul Afe and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

As interactions between individuals and services increase, requests are more frequent and policy sets are larger. The evaluation performance of PDP (Policy Decision Point) plays a key role in the operation of a system. In order to solve bottlenecks of improving the PDP evaluation performance for large-scale policy sets, we propose an evaluation engine based on artificial neural networks, namely ANNPDP. We transform rules in a large-scale policy set described in the XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) into numerical rules. Evaluation networks are established and trained by the numerical rules. In order to ensure the accuracy, a misjudgment set is constructed for error corrections and stored by hash indexes. By simulating the arrival of requests, ANNPDP is compared with the Sun PDP, HPEngine, XEngine, and SBA-XACML. The experiment results show that ANNPDP has: 1) high performance: if the number of requests reaches 10,000, the evaluation time of ANNPDP on the large-scale policy set with 100,000 rules is approximately 0.46, 0.93, 0.71, and 1.43 percent of that of the Sun PDP, HPEngine, XEngine, and SBA-XACML, respectively, and 2) stability: as the size of the large-scale policy set and the number of requests increase, the evaluation time of ANNPDP grows linearly. ANNPDP can satisfy the requirements of an authorization system with large-scale policy sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the class action proceeding in Quebec, seeking to expose its main characteristics. The article initially explores the Canadian legal system and provincial legislative peculiarities. In addition to that, the paper explores the three major objectives of class actions: (i) judicial economy; (ii) maximizing access to justice; (iii) deter actual and potential wrongdoers from inflicting damage, especially small amounts of damage on a larger number of people (preventative objective). In sequence, such article specifies how the two-step class action procedure works, starting with the application for authorization, which is a preliminary request and a unique step in the province of Quebec that is meant to filter frivolous demands. Only once the authorization is granted may the case be heard collectively on the merits. The second step of the two-step procedure is an originating application that must be filed if the class action is authorized. Furthermore, this study deals with many relevant matters regarding the class actions in Canada (particularly Quebec), such as: (i) Right of Appeal; (ii) Res Judicata Effect – on absent members; (iii) Monetary Distributions and Types of Collective Recovery; (iv) Class Action Financing; (v) Possible Settlements; (vi) Multi-Provincial Class Proceedings and National Classes.

It this paper it is proposed a new access control model – Hybrid Role and Attribute Based Access Control (HRABAC). It is an extension of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). HRABAC is designed for information systems and enterprise software and combines the advantages of RBAC and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC). HRABAC is easy configurable, fine-grained and supports role hierarchies. The proposed model HRABAC describes the access control scheme in Laravel package laravelroles/rolespermissions, which is developed by the author of the paper, as an answer to the requirements of practice of fine-grained and easy configurable access control solution. Laravel is chosen, because it is the most popular and the most widely used PHP framework. The package laravelroles/rolespermissions is developed on Laravel so that maximum number of programmers could use it. This package contains working and tested functionalities for managing users, roles and permissions, and it is applied in accounting information system.

In many situations, the enforcement procedure implies that in order to meet the purpose consisting in the concrete satisfaction of the rights included in the executory title, other social values must be defeated. With reference to the protection of the residence inviolability, the article analyzes the guarantees provided by the current regulations of the Civil Procedure Code in connection with the penetration of the bailiff in the domicile, residence or headquarters of a person, in order to gain access to the debtor's assets or to identify them. The scope of the provisions laid down in art. 680 and 681 of the Civil Procedure Code is being evaluated, by taking into consideration the distinction between the situation in which enforcement is initiated under an enforceable title represented by a court decision, respectively that in which the title is a non jurisdictional one, as well as between the case where the space in which the access must be made belongs to the debtor or is the domicile, residence or headquarters or place of work of another person.

The article discusses amendment options (no significant change, lowering of administrative burdens or exemption of certain products from the legislation) for the European Union (EU) authorization procedures of New Genomic Techniques’ (NGT) products and their consequences for the sector and research institutions, particularly in the context of internal functioning, placing products on the market and international trade. A reform of the EU regulatory system requires a change in the procedures for the authorization of NGT products, otherwise EU researchers and investors may still be at a competitive disadvantage (as compared to Argentina, Brazil, Canada, United States or the United Kingdom) due to the inefficiency of the current system and the committee procedure for authorization. New legislation, currently being adopted in the United Kingdom is also presented for comparison.

The article is devoted to the development of a software controller for automation of access to tools and object model of the multifunctional graphic editor Adobe Photoshop. The work of the graphic editor is initiated in the form of a COM object, which contains methods available to the software controller through the COM interface, which allows the software to use the functionality of the editor. To restrict unauthorized access, a software authorization control protocol is proposed, which is based on the use of binding to the computer hardware and encryption by a 128-bit MD5 public key hashing algorithm.

In this paper, a framework for authorization and personal image protection that applies user accounts, passwords, and personal I-vectors as the keys for ciphering the image content was developed and connected. There were two main systems in this framework. The first involved a speaker verification system, wherein the user entered their account information and password to log into the system and provided a short voice sample for identification, and then the algorithm transferred the user’s voice (biometric) features, along with their account and password details, to a second image encryption system. For the image encryption process, the account name and password presented by the user were applied to produce the initial conditions for hyper-chaotic systems to generate private keys for image-shuffling and ciphering. In the final stage, the biometric features were also applied to protect the content of the image, so the encryption technology would be more robust. The final results of the encryption system were acceptable, as a lower correlation was obtained in the cipher images. The voice database we applied was the Pitch Tracking Database from the Graz University of Technology (PTDB-TUG), which provided the microphone and laryngoscope signals of 20 native English speakers. For image processing, four standard testing images from the University of Southern California–Signal and Image Processing Institute (USC-SIPI), including Lena, F-16, Mandrill, and Peppers, were presented to further demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the smart image encryption algorithm.

The Internet of things (IoT) accommodates lightweight sensor/actuator devices with limited resources; hence, more efficient methods for known challenges are sought after. Message queue telemetry transport (MQTT) is a publish/subscribe-based protocol that allows resource-efficient communication among clients, so-called brokers, and servers. However, it lacks viable security features beyond username/password checks, yet transport-layer security (TLS/HTTPS) is not efficient for constrained devices. MQTT also lacks mutual authentication among clients and brokers. To address the issue, we developed a mutual authentication and role-based authorization scheme for lightweight Internet of things applications (MARAS). It brings mutual authentication and authorization to the network via dynamic access tokens, hash-based message authentication code (HMAC)-based one-time passwords (HOTP), advanced encryption standard (AES), hash chains, and a trusted server running OAuth2.0 along with MQTT. MARAS merely modifies “publish” and “connect” messages among 14 message types of MQTT. Its overhead to “publish” messages is 49 bytes, and to “connect” messages is 127 bytes. Our proof-of-concept showed that the overall data traffic with MARAS remains lower than double the traffic without it, because “publish” messages are the most common. Nevertheless, tests showed that round-trip times for a “connect” message (and its “ack”) are delayed less than a percentile of a millisecond; for a “publish” message, the delays depend on the size and frequency of published information, but we can safely say that the delay is upper bounded by 163% of the network defaults. So, the scheme’s overhead to the network is tolerable. Our comparison with similar works shows that while our communication overhead is similar, MARAS offers better computational performance as it offloads computationally intensive operations to the broker side.

The rapid growth of the web has transformed our daily lives and the need for secure user authentication and authorization has become a crucial aspect of web-based services. JSON Web Tokens (JWT), based on RFC 7519, are widely used as a standard for user authentication and authorization. However, these tokens do not store information about the user’s behavior history. To address this issue, this paper presents a solution to enhance the trustworthiness of user authentication in web applications based on their behavior history. The solution considers factors such as the number of password attempts, IP address consistency, and user agent type and assigns a weight or percentage to each. These weights are summed up and stored in the user’s account, and updated after each transaction. The proposed approach was implemented using the .NET framework, C# programming language, and PostgreSQL database. The results show that the proposed solution effectively increases the level of trust in user authentication. The paper concludes by highlighting the strengths and limitations of the proposed solution.

In this study, an overview of the regulations in force in some extra-EU states belonging to different geoeconomic areas is provided, starting from the current EU legislation on cosmetic products. We focused on their legislative frameworks and the location of the relevant regulatory documentation. Furthermore, for each state considered, our analysis examined the notification/authorization processes, approaches to animal testing, and allowed/prohibited ingredient lists, as these aspects are considered to be among the primary restrictions hindering the cosmetic market. It can be observed that many states are working towards standardising their regulations to promote greater international trade. However, it is essential to recognize that different countries belonging to distinct geoeconomic areas may have unique requirements, and harmonization may not necessarily be the best solution. It is crucial to consider different needs and preferences when approaching the global regulation of the cosmetic industry.

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm aims to enhance human society and living standards with the vast deployment of smart and autonomous devices, which requires seamless collaboration. The number of connected devices increases daily, introducing identity management requirements for edge IoT devices. Due to IoT devices’ heterogeneity and resource-constrained configuration, traditional identity management systems are not feasible. As a result, identity management for IoT devices is still an open issue. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and blockchain-based security solutions are becoming popular in different application domains. This paper presents a novel DLT-based distributed identity management architecture for edge IoT devices. The model can be adapted with any IoT solution for secure and trustworthy communication between devices. We have comprehensively reviewed popular consensus mechanisms used in DLT implementations and their connection to IoT research, specifically identity management for Edge IoT devices. Our proposed location-based identity management model is generic, distributed, and decentralized. The proposed model is verified using the Scyther formal verification tool for security performance measurement. SPIN model checker is employed for different state verification of our proposed model. The open-source simulation tool FobSim is used for fog and edge/user layer DTL deployment performance analysis. The results and discussion section represents how our proposed decentralized identity management solution should enhance user data privacy and secure and trustworthy communication in IoT.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is made up of intelligent devices that interact with each other. It allows information to be gathered and shared by these devices. In addition, IoT now has a wide range of life applications such as business, logistics, health monitoring, smart ecosystem, and information concerning individuals, social and private environments. Security-related issues involved in such a communication network are drastically increasing day by day. Therefore, existing authentication and authorization concepts must grow along with technological evolution. This paper presents an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted Bio-inspired algorithm for secure IoT communication networks (AI-BIAS) to improve future communication. The proposed framework is categorized into two sections: First, the Bio-inspired algorithm-assisted blockchain technology for authentication and authorization in the IoT communication network is presented. Further, the Artificial Intelligence algorithm monitors the proposed IoT communication network. The experimental results show that the proposed model enhances the accuracy ratio of 98.3%, average latency of 26 ms, average cost of 25.7%, authentication time 0.04 ms, multistep prediction's MAPE, and RMSE values are 0.7645 and 0.9878 when compared to other popular methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fingerprints, faces, and also irises are Biometrics, which are extensively utilized in several recognition applications comprising door access control, automatic teller machines, personal authentication for computers, Internet banking, along with border-crossing controls with recent augments in security necessities. The unique patterns of finger veins (FV) are utilized by Finger vein recognition (FVR) for detecting individuals at a high-level accuracy. However, on account of the existence of artifacts, irregular shading, distortions, etc., precise FV detection is a difficult task. A framework for identifying FV is created by the work to offer a precise biometric authorization utilizing Enhanced Sigmoid Reweighted based Convolutional Neural Network (ESRwCNN). The image is initially pre-processed by the framework via executing rotation, cropping, resizing, and normalization for avoiding unwilling distortions. Utilizing Trapezoid Membership Function-Based Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (TMF-CLAHE), the preprocessed image is followed with contrast enhancement (CE) that intensifies the image by evading irregular shading and vein posture deformation along with upgrades the accuracy rate. After that, utilizing the Local 12 direction texture pattern (L12DTP) and Canny Edge method, knowledgeable textural and edge features (EF) are extracted. For attaining the most informative features, an Adaptive Weight Mutated Whale Optimization Algorithm (AWM-WOA) technique is formed by the work that enhances the model's accuracy and decreases the computational complexity (CC). Finally, for identifying the authorized person, the chosen features are presented to ESRwCNN. The work attains a low information loss by achieving a 0.971 correlation betwixt the pre-processed image and the original image (OI), as shown by the experimental analysis. Classification accuracy (CA) of 97.05% is attained by the framework. It avoids misclassification by acquiring a 3.53% False Positive Rate (FPR) and 2.35% False Rejection Rate (FRR). It continues to be comparatively efficient analogized to the existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collaboration among different organizations is considered one of the main benefits of moving applications and services to a cloud computing environment. Unfortunately, this collaboration raises many challenges such as the access of sensitive resources by unauthorized people. Usually, role based access-control (RBAC) Model is deployed in large organizations. The work in this paper is mainly considering the authorization scalability problem, which comes out due to the increase of shared resources and/or the number of collaborating organizations in the same cloud environment. Therefore, this paper proposes replacing the cross-domain RBAC rules with role-to-role (RTR) mapping rules among all organizations. The RTR mapping rules are generated using a newly proposed role-mapping algorithm. A comparative study has been performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm with concerning the rule-store size and the authorization response time. According to the results, it is found that the proposed algorithm achieves more saving in the number of stored role-mapping rules which minimizes the rule-store size and reduces the authorization response time. Additionally, the RTR model using the proposed algorithm has been implemented by applying a concurrent approach to achieve more saving in the authorization response time. Therefore, it would be suitable in highly-collaborative cloud environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, peer-to-peer (P2P) network has reached popularity in file sharing as it is a distributed and decentralized network architecture. As there is no centralized authority, there arise various attacks, which lead to insecurity in the network. Thus, the security issues of the P2P networks are to be considered with more care. This paper proposes an authentication and authorization approach, named fuzzy enabled advanced encryption standard (AES)-based multi-level authentication and authorization to offer security against various kinds of attacks that occur in the P2P networks. Here, the authentication is carried out with the security factors, namely location profile, one-time password, spatial information, session password, a hashing function, and so on. Initially, the user and the server are registered in the authentication process, and then, hashing functions and AES are used to perform multi-level authorization and authentication processes. Thus, the proposed scheme improves the security of the P2P network. Using the proposed system, the hit ratio obtained is 0.9, and the success rate is 0.7666. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of the Cloud computing has been constantly on the rise. The flexible billing model coupled with elastic resource provisioning make the Cloud appealing to consumers. However there are still many challenges associated with the Cloud limiting its adoption, such as vendor lock-in and security concerns. One way to address some of these challenges is to use services from more than one Cloud providers. This may help in avoiding the case of vendor lock-in and will also allow for the use of multiple resources available at multiple Clouds. The use of multi-cloud environments can also assist in the case of Cloud bursting where a workload in a private cloud bursts into a public cloud when the need arises. However, the security concerns in such an environment are amplified when compared to a single Cloud. In this paper we address the specification and consistency management of authorization policies in Multi-Cloud environments. The problem being address is significant as an erroneous authorization policy can have severe consequences on the security of the system being protected. In a Multi-Cloud environment, it is difficult to ensure consistency with different Clouds having authorization models, different implementations of the same authorization model and different access control policies. To this end, we have proposed a formal Event-Calculus based model to model the aggregated authorization policies from multiple Cloud providers. The translated Event-Calculus models are then reasoned upon to identify the policy conflicts. We have applied our approach on authorization policies from AWS, GCP and Microsoft Azure. Further, we have provided tool support to automate the complete verification process and provided detailed performance evaluation results to justify the practicality and scalability of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial companies can use blockchain to assist them in resolving their trust and security issues. In this research, we provide a fully distributed blockchain-based architecture for industrial IoT, relying on trust management and reputation to enhance nodes' trustworthiness. The purpose of this contribution is to introduce our system architecture to show how to secure network access for users with dynamic authorization management. All decisions in the system are made by trustful nodes' consensus and are fully distributed. The remarkable feature of this system architecture is that the influence of the nodes' power is lowered depending on their Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS), and the nodes' significance and authority is determined by their behavior in the network. This impact is based on game theory and an incentive mechanism for reputation between nodes. This system design can be used on legacy machines, which means that security and distributed systems can be put in place at a low cost on industrial systems. While there are no numerical results yet, this work, based on the open questions regarding the majority problem and the proposed solutions based on a game-theoretic mechanism and a trust management system, points to what and how industrial IoT and existing blockchain frameworks that are focusing only on the power of PoW and PoS can be secured more effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), there is a demand for computation at network edges because of the limited processing capacity of IoT devices. Fog computing is a middle layer that has appeared to address the latency issues between the Internet of things (IoT) and the cloud. Fog computing is becoming more important as companies face increasing challenges in collecting and sending data from IoT devices to the cloud. However, this has led to new security and privacy issues as a result of the large number of sensors in IoT environments as well as the massive amount of data that must be analyzed in real time. To overcome the security challenges between the IoT layer and fog layer and, thus, meet the security requirements, this paper proposes a fine-grained data access control model based on the attribute-based encryption of the IoT–Fog–Cloud architecture to limit the access to sensor data and meet the authorization requirements. In addition, this paper proposes a blockchain-based certificate model for the IoT–Fog–Cloud architecture to authenticate IoT devices to fog devices and meet the authentication requirements. We evaluated the performance of the two proposed security models to determine their efficiency in real-life experiments of the IoT–Fog–Cloud architecture. The results demonstrate that the performance of the IoT–Fog–Cloud architecture with and without the blockchain-based certificate model was the same when using one, two, or three IoT devices. However, the performance of the IoT–Fog–Cloud architecture without the access control model was slightly better than that of the architecture with the model when using one, two, or three IoT devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As data of COVID-19 patients is increasing, the new framework is required to secure the data collected from various Internet of Things (IoT) devices and predict the trend of disease to reduce its spreading. This article proposes security- and privacy-based lightweight framework called iFaaSBus, which uses the concept of IoT, machine learning (ML), and function as a service (FaaS) or serverless computing to diagnose the COVID-19 disease and manages resources automatically to enable dynamic scalability. iFaaSBus offers OAuth-2.0 Authorization protocol-based privacy and JSON Web Token & Transport Layer Socket protocol-based security to secure the patient's health data. iFaaSBus outperforms response time compared to nonserverless computing while responding to up to 1100 concurrent requests. Further, the performance of various ML models is evaluated based on accuracy, precision, recall, F-score, and area under the curve (AUC) values, and the K-nearest neighbor model gives the highest accuracy rate of 97.51%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The European Medicines Agency (EMA) aims to resolve uncertainties associated with conditionally approved drugs by imposing post-approval studies. Results from these studies may be relevant for health technology assessment (HTA) organizations. This study investigated the role of regulator-imposed post-approval studies within HTA. Methods: For all conditionally approved drugs up to December 2018, regulator-imposed post-approval studies were identified from EMA's public assessment reports. The availability for and inclusion of study results in relative effectiveness (re)assessments were analyzed for 4 European HTA organizations: NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, England/Wales), HAS (Haute Autorité de Santé, France), ZIN (Zorginstituut Nederland, the Netherlands) and the European Network for Health Technology Assessment (EUnetHTA, Europe). When study results became available between an HTA organization's initial assessment and reassessment, it was evaluated whether and how they affected the assessment and its outcome. Results: For 36 conditionally approved drugs, 98 post-approval studies were imposed. In total, 81 initial relative effectiveness assessments (REAs) and 13 reassessments were available, with numbers of drugs (re)assessed varying greatly between jurisdictions. Study results were available for 16 initial REAs (20%) and included in 14 (88%), and available for 10 reassessments (77%) and included in all (100%). Five reassessments had an outcome different from the initial REA, with 4 (2 positive and 2 negative changes) relating directly to the new study results. Reassessments often cited the inability of post-approval studies to resolve the concerns reported in the initial REA. Conclusion: Results from regulator-imposed post-approval studies for conditionally approved drugs were not often used in REAs by HTA organizations, because they were often not yet available at the time of initial assessment and because reassessments were scarce. When available, results from post-approval studies were almost always used within HTA, and they have led to changes in conclusions about drugs' relative effectiveness. Post-approval studies can be relevant within HTA but the current lack of alignment between regulators and HTA organizations limits their potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security has always been the main concern for the internet of things (IoT)-based systems. Blockchain, with its decentralized and distributed design, prevents the risks of the existing centralized methodologies. Conventional security and privacy architectures are inapplicable in the spectrum of IoT due to its resource constraints. To overcome this problem, this paper presents a Blockchain-based security mechanism that enables secure authorized access to smart city resources. The presented mechanism comprises the ACE (Authentication and Authorization for Constrained Environments) framework-based authorization Blockchain and the OSCAR (Object Security Architecture for the Internet of Things) object security model. The Blockchain lays out a flexible and trustless authorization mechanism, while OSCAR makes use of a public ledger to structure multicast groups for authorized clients. Moreover, a meteor-based application is developed to provide a user-friendly interface for heterogeneous technologies belonging to the smart city. The users would be able to interact with and control their smart city resources such as traffic lights, smart electric meters, surveillance cameras, etc., through this application. To evaluate the performance and feasibility of the proposed mechanism, the authorization Blockchain is implemented on top of the Ethereum network. The authentication mechanism is developed in the node.js server and a smart city is simulated with the help of Raspberry Pi B+. Furthermore, mocha and chai frameworks are used to assess the performance of the system. Experimental results reveal that the authentication response time is less than 100 ms even if the average hand-shaking time increases with the number of clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the significant benefits that the rise of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) can bring into citizens' quality of life by enabling IoMT-based healthcare monitoring systems, there is an urgent need for novel security mechanisms to address the pressing security challenges of IoMT edge networks in an effective and efficient manner before they gain the trust of all involved stakeholders and reach their full potential in the market of next generation IoMT-based healthcare monitoring systems. In this context, blockchain technology has been foreseen by the industry and research community as a disruptive technology that can be integrated into novel security solutions for IoMT edge networks, as it can play a significant role in securing IoMT devices and resisting unauthorized access during data transmission (i.e., tamper-proof transmission of medical data). However, despite the fact that several blockchain-based security mechanisms have already been proposed in the literature for different types of IoT edge networks, there is a lack of blockchain-based security mechanisms for IoMT edge networks, and thus more effort is required to be put on the design and development of security mechanisms relying on blockchain technology for such networks. Towards this direction, the first step is the comprehensive understanding of the following two types of blockchain-based security mechanisms: (a) the very few existing ones specifically designed for IoMT edge networks, and (b) those designed for other types of IoT networks but could be possibly adopted in IoMT edge networks due to similar capabilities and technical characteristics. Therefore, in this paper, we review the state-of-the-art of the above two types of blockchain-based security mechanisms in order to provide a foundation for organizing research efforts towards the design and development of reliable blockchain-based countermeasures, addressing the pressing security challenges of IoMT edge networks in an effective and efficient manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a request from the European Commission, EFSA was asked to deliver a scientific opinion on the safety and efficacy of Bacillus subtilis ATCC PTA‐6737 (Bacillus subtilis PB6) when used as a feed additive for turkeys for fattening, turkeys reared for breeding, laying hens, minor poultry species for laying, piglets (weaned), weaned minor porcine species and sows. With this application, the company requested the modification of the current authorisations as regards the strain taxonomy from B. subtilis ATCC PTA‐6737 to Bacillus velezensis ATCC PTA‐6737. The FEEDAP Panel concluded that the active agent of B. subtilis PB6 should be taxonomically designated as B. velezensis ATCC PTA‐6737. The Panel also concluded that Bacillus velezensis PB6 is presumed safe for the target species, consumers and the environment and is not a dermal/eye irritant or a skin sensitiser but should be considered a respiratory sensitiser. The Panel reiterated the previous conclusions reached on the efficacy of the additive when used with the target species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The corporate account of responsibility argues that incorporated groups are agents, yet begs this question: if states are corporate agents, then why should citizens be liable to pay for its past mistakes and injustices? Several theorists supplement the corporate account to argue that democratic citizens agree to take on the liabilities of the state through authorization or intentionality. I argue that this route is mistaken, that citizens are obliged to pay for many of the state's obligations without citizen agreement. Yet I also suggest that motivating citizens to pay for a state's past mistakes will often be hard to do, partly for reasons that Jeremy Waldron explains. Still, I argue that Waldron is too quick to suggest that the passage of time means that states do not have an obligation to repair any past injustices. I argue that states may have an obligation to redress historical injustices, but that there is often a motivational gap for doing so. Both states and citizens have a bias to the present and future, which is difficult, though not impossible, to overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security is one of the most important aspects of data transmission. To provide controlled access to the network, user authorization and authentication are often used with the help of an AAA server. RADIUS servers provide users with access to data, user authentication, and configuration information. When designing networks with such access control method implementation, it is necessary to understand how the characteristics of the communication channel affect the switching time of IP-TV channels, and therefore the overall quality of IPTV services. The principles of the main protocols for IP-TV using a RADIUS server are described. The main parameters of the communication channel were identified. The mathematical model and the graphs demonstrate how IP-TV service access time depends on telecommunication channel parameters. The results of a practical experiment are presented to prove the formed mathematical model. The results of a practical experiment and theoretical calculation are compared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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5G-enabled Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) deployment will bring more severe security and privacy challenges, which puts forward higher requirements for access control. Blockchain-based access control method has become a promising security technology, but it still faces high latency in consensus process and weak adaptability to dynamic changes in network environment. This article proposes a novel access control framework for 5G-enabled IIoT based on consortium blockchain. We design three types of chaincodes for the framework named policy management chaincode (PMC), access control chaincode (ACC), and credit evaluation chaincode (CEC). The PMC and ACC are deployed on the same data channel to implement the management of access control policies and the authorization of access. The CEC deployed on another channel is used to add behavior records collected from IIoT devices and calculate the credit value of IIoT domain. Specifically, we design a two-step credit-based Raft consensus mechanism, which can select the orderer nodes dynamically to achieve fast and reliable consensus based on historical behavior records stored in the ledger. Furthermore, we implement the proposed framework on a real-world testbed and compare it with the framework based on practical Byzantine fault tolerance consensus. The experiment results show that our proposed framework can maintain lower consensus cost time with 100 ms level and achieves four to five times throughput with lower hardware resource consumption and communication consumption. Besides, our design also improves the security and robustness of the access control process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a new extended network that enables to any object to be linked to the Internet in order to exchange data and to be controlled remotely. Nowadays, due to its multiple advantages, the IoT is useful in many areas like environment, water monitoring, industry, public security, medicine, and so on. For covering all spaces and operating correctly, the IoT benefits from advantages of other recent technologies, like radio frequency identification, wireless sensor networks, big data, and mobile network. However, despite of the integration of various things in one network and the exchange of data among heterogeneous sources, the security of user’s data is a central question. For this reason, the authentication of interconnected objects is received as an interested importance. In 2012, Ye et al. suggested a new authentication and key exchanging protocol for Internet of things devices. However, we have proved that their protocol cannot resist to various attacks. In this paper, we propose an enhanced authentication protocol for IoT. Furthermore, we present the comparative results between our proposed scheme and other related ones.

Abstract This article presents a guide to be followed by mining companies willing to open a dimension stone quarry in Brazilian territory. It highlights the main technical documents required by Federal legislation to obtain mining authorization. These documents and their singularities were compiled based on a study of Brazilian mining laws, other normative instruments and scientific literature. The Brazilian mining law describes five Federal authorizations, in which two could be obtained for the dimension stone mining purpose: authorization/concession and licensing regimes. To obtainment the main mining permission may extend for many years. However, it is possible to acquire a kind of provisional permission in much less time, so that the quarry activities can begin before the acquisition of the main permission, which has no deadline. In general, the required technical mining dossier shows a wide range of information. For these reasons, one of the best ways to reduce the time spent through legal procedures is based upon paying special attention at the quality and level of proper instruction of the documents delivered to National Mining Agency (ANM). The author’s experience reveals that knowledge of the technical documents provides legal safety for the company, in a context where the miner has to deal with economic, regulatory, environmental and occupational risks.