Public Channel Research Articles

How Public Service Media Disinformation Shapes Hungarian Public Discourse

The structure of the illiberal Hungarian media system is well documented. Fewer publications address the question of how disinformation is reshaping public discourse in Hungary. The most important feature of disinformation in Hungary is that it is often generated and disseminated by the pro-government media. This is certainly unusual, as in other EU countries it is typically the fringe media which are responsible for spreading disinformation. The Russian war against Ukraine illustrates how the disinformation ecosystem works in Hungary, and it also reveals its devastating impact on democratic public discourse. Public service media play a prominent role in spreading disinformation. We were able to identify several false narratives in the period of the first year since the start of the war. In the first few months of the war, a key element of disinformation that was being spread in Hungary suggested that Ukraine had provoked the armed conflict. Later, the prevailing message was that only Hungary wanted peace, while the Western powers were interested in a continuation of the war. During autumn, the focus of the disinformation campaign increasingly shifted to the EU, disseminating an anti-EU message that was more concerned with the sanctions than the war. The pro-government media constantly told news consumers that the economic difficulties and the rise in energy prices had not been caused by the war launched by Russia but by the sanctions that the EU had imposed in response to the aggression. Public opinion research clearly shows the impact of these narratives on the perceptions of the Hungarian public. The polls readily capture how the Hungarian public’s opinion has changed over time. This study is primarily based on a content analysis of the relevant shows of the M1 public television channel, but we have also relied on some insights from public opinion polls to inform our analysis.

The drama of dialogue action in distinct discourse spaces

Abstract The article addresses the issue of intracultural dialogue between two strong political mindsets, liberal and conservative. This polarization is typical of contemporary cultural divides and emerges in the public sphere through mass media, often finding its outlet through humour, which may be treated as a mediating factor. It will be discussed on the example of a popular Polish humorous talk show broadcast on the public TV channel as compared to one broadcast on commercial television. The central finding of the study, seemingly replicable for other languages and television cultures, is the discovery of the central item on the discursive agenda, i.e., a worldview hiding in the conservative epistemic stance that assumes the authority of the journalists running the show.

Certificateless Anonymous Signcryption Scheme With Provable Security in the Standard Model Suitable for Healthcare Wireless Sensor Networks

In healthcare wireless sensor networks(HWSNs), wireless sensors are placed on the patient, which collect the patient’s vital signs parameters and various environmental information, and send these data to the doctor, so that the doctor is able to perform real-time remote monitoring for the patient. The patient’s vital signs parameters contain a lot of private information. It is very likely to cause the leakage of patient’s private information if these parameters are transmitted through the public channel. In addition, many patients don’t want doctors to know their true identity. We designed a certificateless anonymous signcryption (CL-ASC) scheme for HWSNs in this paper. It encrypts the patient’s vital signs parameters, authenticates the legitimacy of the sensor, and realizes the anonymity of the sensor. We then showed the security proofs of new scheme in the standard model. Finally, we compared the performance of the six schemes. Since only three pairing operations are used, the new scheme enjoys higher computation efficiency and is suitable for HWSNs.

SUSIC: A Secure User Access Control Mechanism for SDN-Enabled IIoT and Cyber–Physical Systems

The integration of thriving Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) has spawned several innovative applications such as remote healthcare, smart and intelligent transportation, smart logistics, smart grids, public safety etc. An emerging Software Defined Networks (SDN) technology further enabled to optimize the communication among industrial IoT (IIoT) and CPS entities. Nonetheless, the communication on public channel among different IIoT entities in an SDN-enabled environment may be exposed to various security threats due to wireless and insecure communication channels. To counter these security challenges in the way of wider CPS or IIoT adoption, we propose a novel three-factor authenticated key exchange mechanism (SUSIC) for SDN-enabled IIoT ecosystem. The SUSIC enables a registered user to access real-time data from physical IIoT environment directly after having mutual authentication performed through SDN-enabled controller node. The scheme is proved to be secure under rigorous formal and informal security analysis. Moreover, the simulation results and performance evaluation signifies towards achieving better trade-off between security functionalities and computational overheads comparatively.

Health and work: regional health reporting on employees in Germany

The vast majority of people work a large part of their live, therefore work inevitably has a major impact on health as well. In Germany, great efforts are made to improve health and well-being in the occupational context. To support this, the evaluation of health data especially from employees is one the main scopes in health reporting of the Federal Association of Company Health Insurance Funds (BKK Dachverband). These results are made available to the interested public via various publication channels, including interactive online diagrams. Data from the areas of incapacity to work, outpatient and inpatient care as well as drug prescriptions are applied. Due to the in large parts identically structured representations, comparisons across health care system sectors are also possible. The aim of this article is to describe the provided regional health care data of employees with focus on the interactive data provision, to show by example particularities in single sources and across sources. From this the impact of work as well as workplace health promotion on the health of employees and, in a broader sense, the quality of health care in Germany can be derived.

Building public trust and confidence in secondary use of health data for healthcare improvement and research: a qualitative study pre-protocol

Background Secondary use of health data provides opportunities to drive improvements in healthcare provision, personalised medicine, comparative effectiveness research, health services innovation, and policy and practice. However, secondary data use requires compliance with relevant legislation, implementation of technical safeguards, ethical data management, and respect for data sharers. Existing evidence suggests widespread support for secondary use of health data among the public, which co-exists with concerns about privacy, confidentiality and misuse of data. Balancing the protection of individuals’ rights against the use of their health data for societal benefits is of vital importance, and trust underpins this process. The study protocol explores how to build public trust and confidence in the secondary use of health data through all key stakeholder groups in Ireland, towards developing a culture that promotes a safe and trustworthy use of data. Methods This study will adopt a qualitative cross-sectional approach conducted in accordance with the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research COREQ guidelines. Participants in the study will include academics and researchers; healthcare professionals, data protection, ethics and privacy experts and data controllers; pharmaceutical industry and patients and public. Purposive and convenience sampling techniques will be utilised to recruit the participants, and data will be collected utilizing focus groups that may be supplemented with semi-structured interviews. Data will be coded by themes using reflexive thematic analysis (TA) and collective intelligence (CI) will be convened post-analysis to explore the preliminary findings with the participants. Ethics and Dissemination Ethical approval was obtained from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland Research Ethics Committee (REC202208013). Final data analysis and dissemination is expected by Q1 2024. Findings will be disseminated through peer-reviewed journal publications, presentations at relevant conferences, and other academic, public and policy channels. Lay summaries will be designed for Public and Patient Involvement (PPI) contributors and general public.

A Three-Factor-Based Authentication Scheme of 5G Wireless Sensor Networks for IoT System

Internet of Things (IoT) is an expanding technology that facilitate physical devices to inter-connect each other over a public channel. Moreover, the security of the next-generation wireless mobile communication technology, namely 5G with IoT, has been a field of much interest among researchers in the last several years. Previously, Sharif et al. had suggested an IoTbased lightweight three-party authentication scheme proclaiming a secured scheme against different threats. However, it was found that the scheme could not achieve user anonymity and guarantee session key security. Additionally, the scheme fails to provide proper authentication in the login phase, and it s unable to update a new password in the password change phase. Thus, we propose an improved three-factor-based data transmission authentication scheme (TDTAS) to address the weaknesses. The formal security analysis has been proved using the Real-or-Random (RoR) model. The informal security analysis demonstrates that the scheme is secure against several known attacks and achieves more security features. In addition, the comparison of the work with other related schemes demonstrates the proposed scheme has less communicational and storage costs.

МЕТОДОЛОГІЯ ПОБУДОВИ ЗАХИЩЕНИХ ІНФОКОМУНІКАЦІЙНИХ МЕРЕЖ СПЕЦІАЛЬНОГО ПРИЗНАЧЕННЯ НА БАЗІ КАНАЛІВ ЗАГАЛЬНОГО ДОСТУПУ

This article is devoted to the solution of a new topical scientific task regarding the formation of a methodology for the construction of prospective secure special purpose information communication networks. The construction architecture was analyzed and a new classification of information communication networks by functional decomposition was presented for the first time. The content of the structural components of the network at the level of "network", "system", "information communication networks" has been determined. A new functional description of the image of a promising network and its quality has been developed. Based on the analysis of international and special standards, the first proposed decomposition of the scope of application in information communication networks of special purpose networks is presented. New scientific approaches to the design of special-purpose protected information communication networks are proposed, which include functional-structural and structural-functional approaches. According to the proposed approaches, the work presents a list and description of models for building special-purpose information communication networks. Their content, application limitations, advantages and disadvantages of individual models are revealed. A new scientific task of designing a promising special purpose secure information communication network based on public access channels was formed and its general description was given.

An Efficient and Physically Secure Privacy-Preserving Key-Agreement Protocol for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network

The popularity of vehicles promotes the evolution of smart cities. This development makes vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) a widely used inter-vehicular communication to obtain information about road conditions, speed, vehicle location and traffic congestion. Such a public network is vulnerable to different security threats. Overall, the security of private data in VANET is a critical task. It has been observed that various authentication protocols have been devised for VANETs. However, most of the proposed protocols are not secure and reliable because of different security threats, including denial of service, replay, forgery and impersonation attacks, etc. Furthermore, the existing protocols used extra communication overhead and computational cost, so they become infeasible for resource-constrained environments. In this article, we design a lightweight and secure privacy-preserving key agreement protocol for VANETs using the hashing technique, which provides an efficient and secure data transmission mechanism over a public communication channel. Detailed security analysis shows that the proposed protocol is secure against various attacks. To evaluate the performance of the protocol, we simulate key cryptographic operations of vehicles, a roadside unit, and a trusted party agent on Arduino, low-end and high-end devices, respectively. The experimental results show that compared with the other related protocols, the computational cost and communication overhead of our protocol are reduced on average by <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$8.797\%$</tex-math> </inline-formula> and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$22.06 \%$</tex-math> </inline-formula> , respectively. Additionally, simulation results on NS3 show that our protocol consistently achieves a packet delivery ratio higher than <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$99.91 \%$</tex-math> </inline-formula> . Therefore, our protocol is secure and reliable for VANET environment.

Towards a Secure and Computational Framework for Internet of Drones Enabled Aerial Computing

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are deployed in various mission-critical applications to collect sensitive data and disseminate it to the server placed on the ground station. Users mostly require real-time data from the drones, instead of the information stored by the server, in specific applications to perform timely actions. However, performing real-time communication with a drone through the public communication channel, which exposed to different security risks mandates an authenticated key exchange between users and drones in the Internet of Drones (IoD) networks for enabling users to communicate securely with the drone through the public communication infrastructure. This paper proffers a resource-efficient authentication scheme for the IoD networks, called REAS-IoD. The proposed REAS-IoD utilizes the lightweight hash function and authenticated encryption primitive, known as ACE to accomplish the AKE process securely. In REAS-IoD, a user's authentication is performed, followed by establishing a secure session key (SK) between a specific drone and the user, for future encrypted communication. The SK's security is established utilizing a random oracle model. A comparative study demonstrates that REAS-IoD requires fewer resource, without compromising security and privacy features than related eminent security schemes.

Twitter Diplomacy and China's Strategic Narrative during the Early COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract: This article examines Chinese diplomats' use of Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Although Twitter is blocked in China, Chinese officials use the platform to experiment with new public diplomacy channels and directly communicate with foreign audiences. We argue that China's utilization of Twitter in 2020 functioned as a crisis management and public relations tool and as a mechanism for disseminating a strategic narrative (SN) that articulated foreign policy priorities. To illustrate this, we apply a qualitative content analysis to a selection of tweets from two China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) spokespersons and divided into three stages. In each stage, distinct narrative themes emerge and construct a cohesive SN across three dimensions: issues, role identity, and the international system. This study reveals that China's public diplomacy apparatus effectively reaches global audiences with well-structured narratives but also that this effectiveness remains very limited.

AP-CDE: Cost-Efficient Authentication Protocol for Cross-Domain Data Exchange in IIoT

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a new network paradigm emerging from the Internet of Things (IoT). It is primarily used in smart factories to promote smart manufacturing and increase productivity. Smart industrial devices collect real-time data from other domains (i.e., intelligent factories) that collaborate on the same transaction and transmit crucial data via a public internet channel. When applied to resource-constrained smart industrial communication devices, this process causes issues in communication security and privacy. Consequently, this study develops a cost-effective authentication protocol for cross-domain data exchange (AP-CDE) in IIoT. Anticollision hash functions, bitwise Exclusive- <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">or</small> operations, and Chebyshev polynomial operations are used in this protocol. AP-CDE security is achieved by using precise formal and nonmathematical (informal) analysis methods. The analysis results show that the developed protocol can withstand various well-known threatening attacks. Finally, a detailed comparative analysis between the AP-CDE and other interrelated protocols is used to verify that the AP-CDE outperforms other protocols in terms of security and functional characteristics, communication overheads, and computational costs.

Blockchain and Deep Learning for Secure Communication in Digital Twin Empowered Industrial IoT Network

The rapid expansion of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) necessitates the digitization of industrial processes in order to increase network efficiency. The integration of Digital Twin (DT) with IIoT digitizes physical objects into virtual representations to improve data analytics performance. Nevertheless, DT empowered IIoT generates a massive amount of data that is mostly sent to the cloud or edge servers for real-time analysis. However, unreliable public communication channels and lack of trust among participating entities causes various types of threats and attacks on the ongoing communication. Motivated from the aforementioned discussion, we present a blockchain and Deep Learning (DL) integrated framework for delivering decentralized data processing and learning in IIoT network. The framework first present a new DT model that facilitates construction of a virtual environment to simulate and replicate security-critical processes of IIoT. Second, we propose a blockchain-based data transmission scheme that uses smart contracts to ensure integrity and authenticity of data. Finally, the DL scheme is designed to apply the Intrusion Detection System (IDS) against valid data retrieved from blockchain. In DL scheme, a Long Short Term Memory-Sparse AutoEncoder (LSTMSAE) technique is proposed to learn the spatial-temporal representation. The extracted characteristics are further used by the proposed Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA)-based Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) algorithm to learn long-distance features and accurately detect attacks. The practical implementation of our proposed framework proves considerable enhancement of communication security and data privacy in DT empowered IIoT network.

The glocalization of The Daily Show

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the domestic success and international growth of The Daily Show (TDS) targeting specifically the Jon Stewart period (Comedy Central, 1999–2015), It then focuses on the glocalization of the program resulting in an official Dutch version The Daily Show: Nederlandse Editie that appeared on Dutch Comedy Central in 2011 and two contrasting unofficial versions, Al Bernameg (Arabic: البرنامج‎) broadcast on CBC/OnTV Egypt, 2011–2013 and then MBC MASR in 2014, and the Heute Show that has been on ZDF since 2009. This article concludes that the glocalization of TDS allowed a faux news satire show with universal appeal to take advantage of an emerging global media environment shaped by cross-cultural exchanges between the global and the local. By comparing and contrasting the three foreign versions, a blueprint for a sustainable glocalized TDS franchise emerges: a stable political environment, local relevance and the protection of a public channel.

A Symmetric Key and Elliptic Curve Cryptography-Based Protocol for Message Encryption in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned aerial vehicles have found applications in fields such as environmental monitoring and the military. Although the collected data in some of these application domains are sensitive, public channels are deployed during the communication process. Therefore, many protocols have been presented to preserve the confidentiality and integrity of the exchanged messages. However, numerous security and performance challenges have been noted in the majority of these protocols. In this paper, an elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and symmetric key-based protocol is presented. The choice of ECC was informed by its relatively shorter key sizes compared to other asymmetric encryption algorithms such as the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithm. Security analysis showed that this protocol provides mutual authentication, session key agreement, untraceability, anonymity, forward key secrecy, backward key secrecy, and biometric privacy. In addition, it is robust against smart card loss, password guessing, known secret session temporary information (KSSTI), privileged insider, side-channeling, impersonation, denial-of-service (DoS), and man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. The comparative performance evaluation showed that it has relatively low computation, storage, and communication complexities.

AMAKAS: Anonymous Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for securing multi-server environments

The rapid growth of Internet users was the motivation of the emerge appearance of new computing models such as cloud computing, fog computing and edge computing. For this reason, the multi-server’s architecture has been introduced to extend scalability and accessibility. To ensure that these servers can only be accessed by the authorized users, many authentication and key agreement schemes have been introduced for multi–server environments. In this paper, we propose an anonymous mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for multi-server architecture based on elliptic curve cryptography to achieve the required security services and resist the well-known security attacks. Furthermore, formal and informal security analysis is conducted to prove the security of the proposed scheme. Moreover, we provide a performance comparison with related work in terms of computational cost, communication cost and the number of messages transferred on the public channel. This performance comparison clearly shows that the proposed scheme is highly efficient in terms of computation, communication cost and security analysis as compared to other related schemes which makes the proposed scheme more suitable and practical for multi-server environments than other related schemes.

LightBlocks: A trusted lightweight signcryption and consensus scheme for industrial IoT ecosystems

Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) plays a vital cog in Industry 4.0 design principles and has revolutionized the manufacturing process by shifting from traditional mechanical systems to smart automation. In IIoT, smart embedded sensors are placed strategically on machine parts, components, and devices. These sensors exchange data over open public channels (Internet), which poses high security and privacy risks to the operational processes, and could lead to machinery failure. The problem increases fourfold in distributed systems, where trust and security are crucial factors. Thus, recent schemes have combined blockchain (BC) with crypto-based primitives in IIoT, but less focus is placed on the resource requirements of such systems. Thus, this paper proposes a scheme named LightBlocks that combines lightweight crypto-primitives with scalable BC operations and presents a low-powered consensus approach, which is appropriate for IIoT ecosystems. The scheme allows the local sensor nodes (LSN) to identify a cluster head (CH), which forwards data to gateway nodes (GN). At GN, a low-powered signcryption scheme is proposed for sensor data. Once the data is signed and energy-efficient consensus Proof-of-Light (PoL) is proposed, block validations are done through selected verifier nodes in a defined consensus period only. Due to this, the transactional throughput improves significantly, and mining overheads are also reduced. We present the attacker model and propose a formal security model to evaluate the security strength of the scheme. The simulation compares the scheme against traditional IIoT frameworks for parameters like mining latency, node commits, signing latency, and energy dissipation. The improvements indicate the resilience of the scheme for practical IIoT setups.

A message recovery attack on multivariate polynomial trapdoor function.

Cybersecurity guarantees the exchange of information through a public channel in a secure way. That is the data must be protected from unauthorized parties and transmitted to the intended parties with confidentiality and integrity. In this work, we mount an attack on a cryptosystem based on multivariate polynomial trapdoor function over the field of rational numbers Q. The developers claim that the security of their proposed scheme depends on the fact that a polynomial system consisting of 2n (where n is a natural number) equations and 3n unknowns constructed by using quasigroup string transformations, has infinitely many solutions and finding exact solution is not possible. We explain that the proposed trapdoor function is vulnerable to a Gröbner basis attack. Selected polynomials in the corresponding Gröbner basis can be used to recover the plaintext against a given ciphertext without the knowledge of the secret key.

Enhancing the Security: A Lightweight Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Smart Medical Services in the IoHT

The Internet of Things (IoT) has witnessed significant growth with advancements in Internet and wireless technologies. In the medical field, the Internet of Health Things (IoHT) has emerged as an extension of the IoT, enabling the exchange of remote data and real-time monitoring of patients’ health conditions. Through the IoHT, doctors can promptly provide diagnoses and treatment for patients. As patient data are transmitted over public channels, security issues may arise, necessitating security mechanisms. Recently, Amintoosi et al. proposed an authentication protocol for smart medical services in the IoHT. However, their protocol exhibited security weaknesses, including vulnerabilities to privileged insider attacks. To address the security concerns, we propose an enhanced authentication and key agreement protocol. The security of our protocol is rigorously analyzed using the Real-Or-Random model, informal security analysis, and the AVISPA tool. Finally, the results of our analysis demonstrate that our proposed protocol ensures sufficient security while maintaining a performance level similar to existing protocols.

Eugen Sandow and eugenics

ABSTRACT Eugen Sandow gained renown in fin de siecle Britain as a strongman and bodybuilder and in the early twentieth century as a publicist, entrepreneur, and crusader for physical fitness on the international scene. Much less is known about his underlying zeal for eugenics, a movement that coincided with Social Darwinism as an evolutionary theory and practice that culminated during his most productive years. A pioneer in the burgeoning field of physical culture, Sandow sought to use his celebrity status to propagate his universal health doctrine as a means to address widespread public concerns about degeneration or suicide of the race. What made Sandow’s system unique was his neo-Lamarckian belief that acquired characteristics of health and fitness could be transmitted to the next generation of humanity by physical training. Fuelled by ongoing recruitment crises in the South African War and World War I, it was an ulterior agenda of environmental eugenics that Sandow promoted not only through public and official channels but to the four corners of the earth. Ultimately his utopian vision could not be sustained by the 1920s either through science, public opinion, or by political efforts to reconstruct a society fit for heroes.