Regular Pen Research Articles

Penetration testing framework for smart contract Blockchain

Smart contracts powered by blockchain ensure transaction processes are effective, secure and efficient as compared to conventional contacts. Smart contracts facilitate trustless process, time efficiency, cost effectiveness and transparency without any intervention by third party intermediaries like lawyers. While blockchain can counter traditional cybersecurity attacks on smart contract applications, cyberattacks keep evolving in the form of new threats and attack vectors that influence blockchain similar to other web and application based systems. Effective blockchain testing help organizations to build and utilize the technology securely withe connected infrastructure. However, during the course of our research, the authors detected that Blockchain technology comes with security considerations like irreversible transactions, insufficient access, and non-competent strategies. Attack vectors, like these are not found on web portals and other applications. This research presents a new Penetration Testing framework for smart contracts and decentralized apps. The authors compared results from the proposed penetration-testing framework with automated penetration test Scanners. The results detected missing vulnerability that were not reported during regular pen test process.

English

This paper presents an evaluation of experimental results of a prototype assistive device in suppressing hand tremor during sitting and standing conditions. The handheld instrument is capable of sensing and suppressing hand tremor or other unpredicted movement during writing. The assistive device incorporates an accelerometer, allowing the movement of the hand to be captured and computed. The tremor suppressing instrument design is carried out by placing two springs between a handheld casing and pen-point at one end of the device. Decomposition of acceleration was analyzed using power spectral analysis to compare the data captured by attaching an accelerometer to a regular pen. The findings show that the proposed assistive device is able to improve the legibility of the handwriting of all the tested subjects by more than 16%.

Writing Orthotic Device for the Management of Writer’s Cramp

Background: Oral therapies and chemodenervation procedures are often unrewarding in the treatment of focal, task-specific hand disorders such as writer’s cramp or primary writing tremor (PWT).Methods: A portable writing orthotic device (WOD) was evaluated on 15 consecutively recruited writer’s cramp and PWT subjects. We measured overall impairment at baseline and after 2 weeks of at-home use with the Writer’s Cramp Rating Scale (range = 0–8, higher is worse) and writing quality and comfort with a visual analog scale (range = 0–10).Results: Compared to regular pen, the WOD improved the Writer’s Cramp Rating Scale scores at first-test (p = 0.001) and re-test (p = 0.005) as well as writing quality and device comfort in writer’s cramp subjects. Benefits were sustained at 2 weeks. PWT subjects demonstrated no improvements.Conclusion: WODs exploiting a muscle-substitution strategy may yield immediate benefits in patients with writer’s cramp.

Motor imagery of tool use: relationship to actual use and adherence to Fitts’ law across tasks

A Fitts’ task was used to investigate how tools are incorporated into the internal representations that underlie pointing movements, and whether such knowledge can be generalized across tasks. We measured the speed-accuracy trade-offs that occurred as target width was varied for both real and imagined movements. The dynamics of the pointing tool used in the task were manipulated--regular pen, top-heavy tool, and bottom-heavy tool--to test the fidelity of internal representations of movements involving the use of novel tools. To test if such representations can be generalized, the orientation of the pointing task was also manipulated (horizontal vs. vertical). In all conditions, both real and imagined performances conformed to the speed-accuracy relationship described by Fitts’ law. We found significant differences in imagined MTs for the two weighted tools compared to the regular pen, but not between the weighted tools. By contrast, real movement durations differed between all tools. These results indicate that even relatively brief experience using novel tools is sufficient to influence the internal representation of the dynamics of the tool-limb system. However, in the absence of feedback, these representations do not make explicit differences in performances resulting from the unique dynamics of these weighted tools.