Search For Security Research Articles

Insecurity and the invisible: The challenge of spiritual (in)security

The search for security has become an almost permanent feature of the contemporary lived experience and what Brian Massumi has called an ‘operative logic’ for states across the globe. The modern study – and practice – of security has, nonetheless, been largely concerned with the protection, preservation and sustaining of the material, the tangible and the visible. For many people around the world, however, feelings of security also derive from understandings of an individual or community’s relationships with invisible and spiritual forces. Religious devotion and divine protection represent a central plank of security for many, just as fears of divine retribution, demonic possession or witchcraft feature as a central dimension of insecurity for many others. This remains, however, a significant blindspot in much of security studies – and, indeed, often eludes and challenges state authority as much as it intersects with and enhances it. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in northwestern Uganda, this study reflects critically on the provenance and implications of this blindspot and argues for an expanded understanding of what ‘counts’ as (in)security. In doing so, the article emphasizes the global character of spiritual (in)security and the challenges an understanding of (in)security that encompasses this pose to longstanding scholarly and practitioner associations of (in)security with state authority.

Turkey and Erdoğan’s rising “Lausanne Syndrome”

AbstractIn this article, I analyze the rise of the “Lausanne Syndrome” in Turkish politics during the twenty‐first century through the prism of ontological security theory. The arguments are presented through the examination of the legacy of the “Sèvres Syndrome”, the impact of the Turkish‐Israeli diplomatic break‐up during the 2010s on the Turkish self‐narrative, and the declaration of the second war of independence following the failed coup attempt of 2016. The “Lausanne Syndrome” serves both as a domestic and foreign policy tool, as it relates to Erdoğan’s search for ontological security and geopolitical strategy.

Experiences of a Little Cuban Town in Quarantine Because of Covid-19: Trade of Agricultural Products in the Search for Food Security

Abstract Food systems and trade of agricultural products have been affected by States measures in response to the evolution of the Covid-19 pandemic. Cuba, a Caribbean island, is equally hard hit by Coronavirus pandemic. Cuba’s reality becomes much more complex when it has to face the economic and financial blockade imposed as a unilateral coercive measure by the US government, causing the impossibility of buying raw materials abroad to produce first need products and food. This essay, framing the global problem of Covid-19, aims to understand how trade of agricultural products is regulated in Cuba in times of pandemic for quarantine areas, taking specific municipality experiences as a model. It is necessary to disseminate the good experiences following three main constitutional principles: right to adequate food, food safety and municipal autonomy. Main results are based on demonstrating if there is an appropriate articulation between local government, producers and trader’s direct benefits to strengthen the food security of population will be obtained.

Achieving Secure Search over Encrypted Data for e-Commerce

The advances of Internet technology has resulted in the rapid and pervasive development of e-commerce, which has not only changed the production and operation mode of many enterprises, but also affected the economic development mode of the whole society. This trend has incurred a strong need to store and process large amounts of sensitive data. The traditional data storage and search solutions cannot meet such requirements. To tackle this problem, in this article, we proposed Consortium Blockchain-based Distributed Secure Search (CBDSS) Scheme over encrypted data in e-Commerce environment. By integrating the blockchain and searchable encryption model, sensitive data can be effectively protected. The consortium blockchain can ensure that only authorized nodes can join the system. To fairly assign nodes for the search tasks, we developed an endorsement strategy in which two agent roles are set up to divide and match the search tasks with the virtual resources according to the load capacity of each node. The security analysis and experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme. The evaluation results have proved the reliability and security of our scheme over existing methods.

Privacy-Preserving and Efficient Public Key Encryption with Keyword Search Based on CP-ABE in Cloud

In the area of searchable encryption, public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) has been a critically important and promising technique which provides secure search over encrypted data in cloud computing. PEKS can protect user data privacy without affecting the usage of the data stored in the untrusted cloud server environment. However, most of the existing PEKS schemes concentrate on data users’ rich search functionalities, regardless of their search permission. Attribute-based encryption technology is a good method to solve the security issues, which provides fine-grained access control to the encrypted data. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving and efficient public key encryption with keyword search scheme by using the ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) technique to support both fine-grained access control and keyword search over encrypted data simultaneously. We formalize the security definition, and prove that our scheme achieves selective indistinguishability security against an adaptive chosen keyword attack. Finally, we present the performance analysis in terms of theoretical analysis and experimental analysis, and demonstrate the efficiency of our scheme.

Research on Searchable Symmetric Encryption

Cloud computing, as a new computing paradigm, offers dynamically scalable and seemly unbounded storage and computation resources in a pay-as-you-go manner. In order to enjoy superior data services and reduce the local maintenance cost, more and more resource-constrained users prefer to outsource their data to the cloud server. However, outsourcing data to the remote server suffers from data security concerns, because the server may try to learn the information of the outsourced data as much as possible for commercial purpose. The traditional encryption technique can protect the confidentiality of users’ data, however, it leads to the loss of search ability over the encrypted data. Fortunately, searchable encryption, as a promising solution, enables the server to perform keyword-based search over encrypted data. Recently, the design of searchable encryption scheme is becoming more and more diversified, aiming to improve the practicability of the scheme. This paper focuses on the current research for searchable encryption scheme in four aspects, including single keyword search, multi-modal search, forward/ backward secure search and verifiable search. This paper mainly introduces and analyzes the representative research results, summarizes the latest research progress and key technical difficulties, and finally prospects the future research direction.

A secure blockchain-based e-health records storage and sharing scheme

Due to the expeditious evolution of wearable technology and wireless mobile networks, the tele-medicine and mobile medications have turned up into the Telecare Medicine Information System (TMIS). The efficient management of the patient’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) plays a vital role for the telecare of patients that include medication for the chronic patients, long-term telecare for the special patients, analysis of patients infected with certain disease etc. The sharing and distribution of EHRs with medical practitioners can enhance accuracy of the diagnosis; however, privacy and security preservation of patients’ record are the detracting issues of this system. Recently, due to the property of immutability, blockchain technology has been introduced to be as an auspicious solution for achieving EHR sharing with privacy and security preservation. This work puts forward a novel blockchain-based privacy and security preserving EHR sharing protocol for improved diagnosis and efficient treatments in TMIS. Firstly, two types of blockchains, named as private blockchain and the consortium blockchain, are constructed by formulating their consensus, data structures and mechanisms. Private blockchain is in-charge of maintaining EHRs, while consortium blockchain stores EHRs’ secure indexes. In order to attain data security, secure search, access control and privacy preservation, all the EHRs are public-key encrypted with appropriate searchable keyword. Security analysis of our protocol validates that our protocol achieves all the security goals by exempting several security attacks. For achieving efficient computational results, the user and server sides of our scheme are implemented separately. Furthermore, performance analysis of our protocol with other existing protocols reveals that our protocol is relatively better in terms of the communication and computation overhead by providing notable level of the security.

Achieving Universal Assured Fine-Grained Query Result Verification for Secure Search Scheme over Encrypted Cloud Data

Secure pursuit strategies over encoded cloud information enable an approved client to inquiry information documents of enthusiasm by submitting scrambled question catchphrases to the cloud server in a protection safeguarding way. In any case, practically speaking, the returned question might be mistaken or deficient in the exploitative cloud condition. For instance, the cloud server may deliberately preclude some qualified outcomes to spare computational assets and correspondence overhead. In this manner, a well-working secure inquiry framework need to provide a question comes about check system that permits the knowledge client to verify comes about. In this paper we outline a protected, efficiently included, and fine-grained question comes about corroboration instrument, by which, given an prearranged inquiry comes about set, the query client not wholly can check the rightness of every in order record in the set yet in addition can as well check what number of or which qualified information documents are not returned if the set is inadequate before unscrambling. The check plot is free coupling to concrete secure inquiry procedures and may be effectively coordinated into any safe question conspire. We accomplish the target by building secure check question for scrambled cloud information. Moreover, a short mark strategy with greatly little stockpiling cost is proposed to ensure the credibility of confirmation protest and a check question ask for method is introduced to enable the inquiry client to safely get the coveted check protest. Execution assessment demonstrates that the proposed plans are down to earth and proficient.

Comment on “Achieving Secure, Universal, and Fine-Grained Query Results Verification for Secure Search Scheme Over Encrypted Cloud Data”

Recently in IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (TCC), Yin <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">et al.</i> <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[5]</xref> designed a fine-grained query verification mechanism where a novel certificateless short signature scheme is proposed for validating the data of encrypted query results. Despite the authors alleged that their scheme achieves the existential unforgeability to ensure the authenticity of verification objects, we found that this scheme fails to resist the forgery attack. Specifically, through launching the concrete attacks, a malicious adversary can forge a signature on any verification object without being detected.

Arms Proliferation and Militancy in Rivers State, Nigeria: A Comparative Study of Amaechi and Wike’s Administrations

This research examined the nature of arms proliferation and militancy in the administrations of Governors Chibiuke Rotimi Amaechi and Ezenwo Nyesom Wike in Rivers State, Nigeria. The objectives were to determine the nature of arms proliferation and militancy in Rivers State in the two administrations. This research became necessary owing to the increasing rate of insecurity in Rivers State. The inability of security agencies to mitigate the security challenges confronting the State and the politicisation of the security of the State makes this research inevitable. Two key areas of concerns were discernable. First, the proliferation of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) in the State has led to militancy of destructive proportion. Second, arms proliferation and militancy have undermined socio-economic and political development of the people of the State. The security challenges arising, therefore, have created an inhabitable state triggered by fear, intimidation, armed robbery, assassinations, cultism, kidnapping for ransom, arms smuggling, political thuggery, electoral violence, intimidation and destruction of lives and property across the 23 local government areas of the State. The Frustration-Aggression theory and the Realist Theory were used to establish a correlation between arms proliferation and militancy, on one hand, and deprivation, marginalisation, environmental degradation and lack of physical and human capital development for sustainable livelihood of the people of Rivers State which triggered arms proliferation and militancy in the state, on the other hand. This study used descriptive research design to examine the nature and justification, through psychological approach of comparison, of arms proliferation and militancy in both Amaechi and Wike’s administrations. A trend analysis, through historical investigation, was also used to determine the nature of arms proliferation and militancy prior to Amaechi’s administration in 2007. Secondary data were mostly used. Through content analysis and review of relevant literature, this research observed that the upsurge of arms proliferation and militancy in Rivers State started as part of the agitation for resource control and self-determination of the Niger Delta people. Redistribution of arms to political thugs and cultists after the 2009 Federal Government’s Amnesty which has made elections in Rivers State nasty, bloody and brutal, and lives useless and short, instigated the new waves of arms proliferation and militancy in Rivers State under Amaechi and Wike’s administrations. This research concluded that unless there are conscious efforts by the State Actors to comprehensively mop-up of arms and ammunition in Rivers State and bring pepertrators of these heinous crimes to book, the search for peace, stability, and security of lives and property of Rivers State people and residents alike would be too far to realise.

TRADITIONAL GOVERNANCE SYSTEM AND THE CONTROL OF INSURGENCY IN BADE EMIRATE, YOBE STATE

Insecurity has remained one of the daunting problems in human organizations since time immemorial. Human beings are in constant search for security to ensure self-sustenance and societal development. The traditional governance system plays an important role in the formation, growth, and development of society. These roles such as maintenance of peace, provision of leadership roles, proprietary to culture and custom of the people and above all ensuring the transitions of the values of the society from one generation to another. In Yobe State the threat of insecurity posed by the rise of the Boko Haram insurgency could be traced to governance issues where governance is defined as the way and manner, including all the institutional arrangements through which a country pursue its internal policies and external relations with ‘development’ at its core. Therefore, given the character of the traditional institutions in Yobe state and Bade emirate in particular in uniting the community to ensure proper security of lives and property. This paper thus intends to interrogate the security challenges in contemporary Bade emirate with emphasis on the role of the traditional governance system in promoting security. The paper adopted the primary and secondary method of data collection anchored on the Mass Society theory. The major findings of the paper reveal that insecurity in Yobe state and Nigeria, in general, can no longer be interrogated from the militarists’ perspective alone, but rather a re-thinking on the traditional governance system to check the persistence of the violations of the traditional political, economic and social relations among citizens that breeds suspicion and distrusts. The paper recommends amongst other things that, the government should as a matter of urgency put in place, policies, and programs that will strengthen the traditional institutions throughout the country so that they can perform their traditional roles as custodians of the values of the society.

Can Brazil produce enough rice to meet demand in 2028?

The objectives of the study were estimate the additional yield that may be achieved by reducing the yield gap in actual rice area, evaluate if irrigated rice production meet future demand for rice without increase area and determine sowing date that allows maximum yield potential. The yield gap (Yg) was determined by the difference between yield potential (Yp) and actual yield (Ya). The Ya was obtained from surveys applied to the rice producers. The Ya was 51% of Yp, and the Yg was 49%. In a scenario of high demand, if the yields follow the historical rate of gain, the production should not be sufficient to meet projected demand without 6% expansion of the currently cultivated area, whereas for a scenario of low demand it should be sufficient. Moreover, for the low and high demand scenarios, if the national average yield reaches 80% of the rice Yp, a reduction until 29% in the current irrigated rice area can occur. Sowing between September and mid-November is a way of making it possible to obtain yields close to 80% of Yp without increasing production costs. This study can be used as an aid in the search for world food security.

Seeking stability: a preliminary exploration of Canadian young adults’ financial goals

ABSTRACT Young people’s financial lives have undergone change, with delays and struggles attaining stable employment, home ownership, and financial independence. Despite such change, research on the future thinking of young adults suggests the persistent significance of such financial milestones. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 36 young adults aged 18–32 in a mid-sized, prosperous Canadian city, inquiring into their goals and perceptions of their future financial lives in light of their current situations. Findings revealed young adults’ overarching desire for financial security, notably through goals of a steady job, debt reduction, and home ownership. These findings affirm that during this transitional time of life, many young adults are involved in a search for security, hoping to attain financial independence and stability in a conventionally linear and upward fashion. This search for security and stability manifests differently across sociodemographic positions (namely age, gender, birthplace, and socioeconomic status), reflecting differing experiences of precarity, cultural representations of the life course, and positions along financial trajectories. Participants’ visions of their financial futures also appear to connect to factors in the local context, including its relative prosperity, persistence of traditional gender roles, and a relatively modest cost of living compared to other urban centres in Canada.

An Efficient Attribute-Based Multi-Keyword Search Scheme in Encrypted Keyword Generation

With the growing popularity of cloud computing in recent years, data owners (DOs) now prefer to outsource their data to cloud servers and allow the specific data users (DUs) to retrieve the data. Searchable encryption is an important tool to provide secure search over the encrypted cloud data without infringing data confidentiality and data privacy. In this work, we consider a secure search service providing fine-grained and search functionality, called attribute-based multiple keyword search (ABMKS), which can be seen as an extension of searchable encryption. In the existing ABMKS schemes, the computation operations in the encrypted keyword index generation are time-consuming modular exponentiation, and the number of which is linearly growing with the factor $m$ . Here $m$ is the number of keywords embedded in a file. To reduce the computation overhead, in this paper, we propose an ABMKS with only multiplication operations in encrypted keyword index generation. As a result, the computation cost of the encrypted keyword index generation is more efficient than the existing schemes. In addition, the encrypted keyword indexes are aggregated into one item, which is regardless of the number of underlying keywords in a file data. Finally, the security and the performance analysis demonstrate that our scheme is both efficient and secure.

„Kontrola osobista i przeglądanie zawartości bagażu” (art. 15 ust. 1 pkt 5 ustawy o Policji) a ochrona konstytucyjnych praw człowieka

The paper is devoted to the activity defined as ‘personal search and luggage security search’ carried out as part of non-trial operation of law enforcement authorities (on the basis of Article 15(1)(5) of the Police Act). The author discusses the evolution of this activity, which was introduced into the Polish legal system in 1983, mainly to facilitate the fight against democratic opposition. This procedure, which in essence did not differ much from the search activities carried out under the Code of Criminal Procedure, obviously infringed civil rights and freedoms, because it was not accompanied by the provisions containing guarantees, which the Code did contain. The law changed considerably only after amendments to legislative instruments relating to the police, introduced on 14 December 2018. The author believes that the existing regulations provide adequate human rights protection, but are too detailed, which may in practice make the operation of law enforcement agencies less efficient. The author points out to the need for maintaining a balance between guaranteeing civil rights and enabling the law enforcement agencies to discharge their statutory duties connected with ensuring public security and order.

Multi-Keyword Certificateless Searchable Public Key Authenticated Encryption Scheme Based on Blockchain

As a quite attractive secure search mechanism in cloud environments, searchable encryption allows encrypted files to be searched by keyword and does not reveal any information about original data files. However, most existing searchable encryption schemes only support single keyword ciphertext retrieval, and they cannot resist against inside keyword guessing attacks. Besides, the previous schemes rarely focus on integrity verification and fair transactions without any third party. Focusing on these problems, we propose a multi-keyword certificateless searchable public key authenticated encryption scheme based on blockchain. We use certificateless cryptosystem to encrypt keywords, which avoids the problems of certificate management in traditional cryptosystem and key escrow in identity-based cryptosystem. Our scheme also supports multi-keyword search, which locates encrypted files precisely and returns the desired files. Moreover, we upload the real encrypted files to the cloud server, while the encrypted indexes are put in blockchain, which ensures the anti-tampering, integrity and traceability of the encrypted indexes. The anti-tampering of blockchain also ensures that users can receive accurate search results without any third party verification. Furthermore, we utilize smart contract to track monetary rewards, which enables fair transactions between data owners and users without any trusted third party. We prove that the proposed scheme is secure against inside keyword guessing attacks in the random oracle model. Finally, our performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme has higher computational performance than other related schemes.

O-Net: Dangerous Goods Detection in Aviation Security Based on U-Net

Aviation security X-ray equipment currently searches objects through primary screening, in which the screener has to re-search a baggage/person to detect the target object from overlapping objects. The advancements of computer vision and deep learning technology can be applied to improve the accuracy of identifying the most dangerous goods, guns and knives, from X-ray images of baggage. Artificial intelligence-based aviation security X-rays can facilitate the high-speed detection of target objects while reducing the overall security search duration and load on the screener. Moreover, the overlapping phenomenon was improved by using raw RGB images from X-rays and simultaneously converting the images into grayscale for input. An O-Net structure was designed through various learning rates and dense/depth-wise experiments as an improvement based on U-Net. Two encoders and two decoders were used to incorporate various types of images in processing and maximize the output performance of the neural network, respectively. In addition, we proposed U-Net segmentation to detect target objects more clearly than the You Only Look Once (YOLO) of Bounding-box (Bbox) type through the concept of a “confidence score”. Consequently, the comparative analysis of basic segmentation models such as Fully Convolutional Networks (FCN), U-Net, and Segmentation-networks (SegNet) based on the major performance indicators of segmentation-pixel accuracy and mean-intersection over union (m-IoU)-revealed that O-Net improved the average pixel accuracy by 5.8%, 2.26%, and 5.01% and the m-IoU was improved by 43.1%, 9.84%, and 23.31%, respectively. Moreover, the accuracy of O-Net was 6.56% higher than that of U-Net, indicating the superiority of the O-Net architecture.

Estrategias educativas para generar seguridad a los desplazados en España

Displaced populations are made up of emigrants, immigrants, asylees, refugees and stateless persons. Each of these people leaves their country and their vital attachments for different reasons. The aim they share is the search for security, either vital, legal or economic security. The objective pursued is not always achieved. This clash between expectation and reality adds up to a permanent uncertainty to a large number of the displaced people. The most vulnerable can develop a specific immigrant syndrome with chronic and multiple stress (Ulysses Syndrome). This psychosocial mismatch, since 1985, is tackled interdisciplinarily from medicine, psychology, education and social work. In this discursive-informative article some results of two investigations that combine quantitative and qualitative methodology are transferred. Objective 4 of Research CSO2016-77549-P (National R&amp;D Plan, AEI / FEDER, EU) and the prospective research Literacy for social integration of immigrants and adult refugees in Spain (Europe-Research Assistance Program. UNED-Banco Santander, 2017/2019). The results of these investigations in the field of education, sociology and social education indicate some of the educational and socio-community strategies that can help displaced people arriving in Spain to lower their level of uncertainty and increase their sense of security. They are strategies that put into practice will avoid medicalizing people who do not need drugs. People who suffer from a psychosocial imbalance that needs emotional support, psychoeducational therapy, legal advice and empathic treatment by the society of the host country. The execution of these strategies will help to emotionally strengthen each one of the displaced people, being able to redirect the behavioral, cognitive and psychophysiological expression of the response system given to the perceived negative emotions.

Practical Attribute-Based Conjunctive Keyword Search Scheme

Abstract To date cloud computing may provide considerable storage and computational power for cloud-based applications to support cryptographic operations. Due to this benefit, attribute-based keyword search (ABKS) is able to be implemented in cloud context in order to protect the search privacy of data owner/user. ABKS is a cryptographic primitive that can provide secure search services for users but also realize fine-grained access control over data. However, there have been two potential problems that prevent the scalability of ABKS applications. First of all, most of the existing ABKS schemes suffer from the outside keyword guessing attack (KGA). Second, match privacy should be considered while supporting multi-keyword search. In this paper, we design an efficient method to combine the keyword search process in ABKS with inner product encryption and deploy several proposed techniques to ensure the flexibility of retrieval mode, the security and efficiency of our scheme. We later put forward an attribute-based conjunctive keyword search scheme against outside KGA to solve the aforementioned problems. We provide security notions for two types of adversaries and our construction is proved secure against chosen keyword attack and outside KGA. Finally, all-side simulation with real-world data set is implemented for the proposed scheme, and the results of the simulation show that our scheme achieves stronger security without yielding significant cost of storage and computation.

Uma educação crítica para um consumo consciente: garantia do direito à saúde e à segurança alimentar

O artigo tem como objetivo analisar a importância de uma educação crítica destinada a crianças e adolescentes, visando à concretização do direito à saúde e à segurança alimentar, a partir de um consumo consciente, principalmente em relação aos alimentos transgênicos. Justifica-se a pesquisa, considerando-se a difusão de alimentos geneticamente modificados e questões relativas à garantia dos direitos fundamentais dos indivíduos, entre os quais o direito à saúde e à segurança alimentar. Com caráter bibliográfico e documental, fundamenta-se nos estudos de Freire (1979), Diniz (2001), Efing (2011), entre outros. Discute-se o posicionamento de uma pedagogia crítica, analisam-se os organismos geneticamente modificados e sua direta interferência na busca pela plena segurança alimentar e, por fim, correlacionam-se os aspectos relativos ao desenvolvimento de uma educação mais crítica, enquanto promotora de hábitos alimentares mais saudáveis e criteriosos quanto à origem e constituição do alimento, visando promover a saúde a segurança alimentar. Os resultados apontam no sentido da inclusão de propostas pedagógicas que privilegiem o aumento do nível de consciência e criticidade dos indivíduos.