Security Research Research Articles

Impact of Covid-19 Pandemic Circumstances on Cyber Hygiene of University Students

The covid-19 pandemic has motivated the cyber security research activities mainly at national and organizational level, but broader assessment of cyber security at individual level is undoubtedly lacking. Cyber security at individual level refers to humans and their personal cyber security practices that is called cyber hygiene. This study aims to evaluate the impact of the covid-19 pandemic circumstances on cyber hygiene outcomes, i.e., awareness, behavior, and knowledge. The intention was to estimate and compare the cyber hygiene of university students prior to and during the covid-19 pandemic. The results of the survey study indicate that covid-19 pandemic circumstances have caused the change of level of cyber hygiene awareness, behavior, and knowledge of university students. The covid-19 pandemic has improved all these cyber hygiene outcomes and that could be the consequence of intense use of digital space and mirroring of strict covid-19 pandemic protection measures. However, it is evident trend of cyber hygiene knowledge decline which coincides with covid-19 pandemic protection measures relaxation and less utilization of digital services. The findings of this study can be used to improve cyber hygiene worldwide and create a better extraordinary event response as digital space is expected to be increasingly used in future extraordinary circumstances.

A Review of Approaches for Detecting Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts within Web 3.0 Applications

Smart contracts, programs running on a blockchain, play a crucial role in driving Web 3.0 across a variety of domains, such as digital finance and future networks. However, they currently face significant security vulnerabilities that could result in potential risks and losses. This paper outlines the inherent vulnerabilities of smart contracts, both those typical of their applications and those unique to Web 3.0 applications. We then systematically classify the techniques based on their core approach to detecting vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Using these approaches, we conduct a comparative analysis of existing tools in terms of their vulnerability coverage, detection effectiveness, open-source availability, and integration capabilities. Finally, we present the Co-Governed Sovereignty Multi-Identifier Network (CoG-MIN) as a case study to demonstrate the significance of smart contract application security in establishing a community with a shared future in cyberspace during the Web 3.0 era and anticipate future research directions with challenges. To conclude, this study addresses the gap in integrating existing smart contract security research with the advancement of Web 3.0 development, while also providing recommendations for future research directions.

Involved Security Solution in Voice over IP Networks

In this paper, the work involves setting up a secure VoIP solution. At first, we presented some attacks scenarios affecting confidentiality, authenticity and integrity in the VoIP network. In the second part, we focused on VOIP security themes, so our work has focused on areas where enhancing VoIP security is essential. The convergence towards everything of IP is now a reality. The efforts made by infrastructure providers, whether fixed, mobile, and cabled or wireless. This is also evident in operators who now only design the services they offer in the context of everything IP. But with the increasing use of Voice over IP (VoIP) technology, services and protocols are becoming increasingly vulnerable. In this context work several organizations that promote the research and development of network security, warn users of the attacks risks that may affect the communications confidentiality. This work proposed to explore the security vulnerabilities associated with VoIP networks and to present some solutions to avoid and minimize these threats.

Ecological Security Assessment and Territory Spatial Restoration and Management of Inland River Basin—Based on the Perspective of Production–Living–Ecological Space

Ecological security evaluation and land space governance are effective ways to ensure regional ecological security and realize sustainable development. This study evaluated the ecological security status at the raster scale and conducted research on the restoration and governance of the national territory, with the aim of implementing accurate restoration, reducing ecological restoration costs, and increasing ecological restoration benefits. Taking the typical arid inland river Shule River Basin as an example, this study selected evaluation factors from production, living, and ecological perspectives, obtained the influencing factors of regional ecological security by spatial principal component analysis, and calculated the ecological security index on the grid scale of production, life and ecological space. The macro-scale national parks, ecological protection red line and other realistic constraints are combined with the grid-scale ecological security evaluation results to achieve accurate land space restoration and governance. The results show that the ecological space accounts for 79.23%, and the production space only accounts for 7.47%, which is similar to other inland river basins in arid areas. The study found that per capita GDP and distance to the road have a significant impact on the ecological security of the study area from the perspectives of production and life, while distance to the water, vegetation coverage, and land cover have a significant impact on ecological security from the ecological perspective. Moderate, moderate low and low ecological security zones account for 72.09% of the total area of the basin, indicating that the ecological security guarantee ability of the Shule River Basin is low. The ecological security level of the living space was the lowest, and the ecological security pattern of the basin area as a whole presented a “higher in the north and south and lower in the middle” characteristic. The land restoration and governance of the Shule River Basin area was divided into five types of ecological control, ecological conservation, ecological enhancement, ecological restoration and ecological management, of which the ecological control area accounted for as much as 35.86%, implying that ecological security in the Shule River Basin has attracted sufficient attention from the government. It is considered that the management of production and living space is more difficult, complex and important, and the proportion of space is relatively small, so it is necessary to focus on the comprehensive management project of ecological protection and restoration. However, the ecological endowment conditions of ecological space in the Shule River Basin are relatively poor, and the distribution area is vast, so natural restoration should be given priority, supplemented by artificial restoration. This study provides a reference for regional ecological security evaluation, ecological civilization construction, and national ecological security research and practice.

Retracted: Security Research in Personnel Electronic File Management Based on Blockchain Technology

Retracted: Security Research in Personnel Electronic File Management Based on Blockchain Technology

Opportunities and challenges in Asian bee research and conservation

The challenges of bee research in Asia are unique and severe, reflecting different cultures, landscapes, and faunas. Strategies and frameworks developed in North America or Europe may not prove applicable. Virtually none of these species have been assessed by the IUCN and there is a paucity of public data on even the basics of bee distribution. If we do not know the species present, their distribution and threats, we cannot protect them, but our knowledge base is vanishingly small in Asia compared to the rest of the world. To better understand and meet these challenges, this perspective conveys the ideas accumulated over hundreds of years of cumulative study of Asian bees by the authors, including academic, governmental, and other researchers from 13 Asian countries and beyond. We outline the special circumstances of Asian bee research and the current state of affairs, highlight the importance of highly social species as flagships for the lesser-known solitary bees, the dire need for further research for food security, and identify target research areas in need of further study. Finally, we outline a framework via which we will catalyze future research in the region, especially via governmental and other partnerships necessary to effectively conserve species.

The Critical Role of NIDSNIPS in Protecting Internet Infrastructure

With the rapid development and wide application of the Internet, network security has become an important issue in modern society. Network attacks such as network worms, botnets and computer viruses are constantly emerging, bringing serious threats and economic losses to the Internet infrastructure. In this context, Network Intrusion Detection/Prevention System (NIDS/NIPS) plays a key role in protecting the Internet infrastructure. By monitoring network traffic in real time, NIDS/NIPS is able to detect and identify internal and external security intrusions in a timely manner and take appropriate measures for defense. Ensuring the high performance of NIDS/NIPS is an important topic in network security research, because the increase of Internet traffic and the variety of attacks make it face great challenges. In this paper, we will explore the fundamentals and functions of NIDS/NIPS and their key role in protecting the Internet infrastructure. We will also discuss key techniques to improve the performance of NIDS/NIPS and look at future directions in this area. An in-depth understanding and study of the theory and technology of NIDS/NIPS is an important reference for professionals in the field of network security.

Effective dashboards for urban water security monitoring and evaluation

This paper reviews the factors affecting effective dashboards for urban water security monitoring and evaluation. Urban water security is a constantly evolving field influenced by several factors, including changes in climate, ecosystems, socio-economic status, and human beings. Although urban water security has been discussed in some parts of the literature, there has been minimal literature review that focused on the factors of urban water security and the effective dashboards for monitoring and evaluation. Using systematic literature review (SLR) and preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis (PRISMA), this paper reviewed 143 articles. The result shows growth in the environmental informatics landscape since the last ten years when the first article on the urban water management dashboard was published. The visual design was the most frequently discussed factor for dashboards, followed by user customization. It also shows that this topic can go deeper to integrate both factors and design an effective environmental dashboard. The discussion identified three potential opportunities for future research in water security and informatics: i) exploring other dimensions of effective dashboards, ii) considering more research on the environmental dashboard, and iii) investigating the real-life application of dashboards in urban water security.

Nurse Information Security Policy Compliance, Information Competence, and Information Security Attitudes Predict Information Security Behavior.

Nurses' attitudes toward information security can influence the hospital's information resources management and development. This study investigated the relationships between nurses' information security policy compliance, information competence, and information security attitudes, which are factors that influence information security behavior. Data were collected during September 2020. The participants were 200 clinical nurses from a general hospital in Korea. The self-reported questionnaire included questions on nurses' general characteristics, information security policy compliance, information competence, and information security attitudes. Information security policy compliance (r = 0.554, P < .001) and information competence (r = 0.614, P < .001) were positively associated with information security attitudes. Predictors of nurses' information security attitudes were information competence (β = .439), information security policy compliance (β = .343), prior information security-related education (β = .113), and job position (nurse manager; β = .101). Implications for practice include the need for strategies to develop information security policy compliance and information competence to improve information security behavior, including different approaches tailored to nurses' job positions and previous information security education.

Delineation of the distinct inflammatory signaling roles of TAK1 and JAK1/3 in the CIA model of rheumatoid arthritis.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a complex autoimmune disease characterized by hyperactive immune cells within the joints, which leads to inflammation, bone degeneration, and chronic pain. For several decades, frontline immunomodulators such as the anti-tumor necrosis factor (TNF) biologics adalimumab (Humira), etanercept (Enbrel), and infliximab (Remicade) have successfully managed disease progression for many patients. However, over time, patients become refractory to these treatments requiring chronic disease to be managed with conventional and more problematic disease modifying antirheumatic drugs such as methotrexate and hydroxychloroquine, and corticosteroids. Due to the large proportion of patients who continue to fail on frontline biologic therapies, there remains an unmet need to derive novel alternative targets with improved efficacy and safety profiles to treat RA. Recent advances in the field have defined novel targets that play important roles in RA pathology, including the Janus activated kinase (JAK) and transforming growth factor beta activated kinase-1 (TAK1). Although three inhibitors of the JAK signaling pathway have been approved for the treatment of moderately to severely active RA in patients who failed on one or more anti-TNFs, at present, no FDA approved TAK1 treatments exist. Our recent discovery of a highly potent and selective, orally bioavailable TAK1 inhibitor has provided insight into the therapeutic potential of this protein kinase as a novel target for RA. Here, we show the distinct cytokine signaling of tofacitnib (Xeljanz; JAK1/3 inhibitor) compared to HS-276 (TAK1 inhibitor) in lipopolysaccharide (LPS) challenged THP-1 cells. Furthermore, in the collagen induced arthritis pre-clinical mouse model of RA, both tofacintib and HS-276 attenuated disease activity score and inflammatory cytokines in the serum. Overall, our results delineate the distinct cytokine signaling of JAK1/3 and TAK1 targeted therapies in vitro and in vivo and suggest that selective TAK1 inhibitors may provide superior therapeutic relief in RA with fewer adverse events.

Predicting Compliance of Security Policies: Norms and Sanctions

ABSTRACT This paper is motivated by the need to find reasons for the divergent findings reported in many studies that assessed the effects of social norms on IS security policy compliance, and answers multiple calls for additional research on this subject. In doing so, this paper contributes to the existing information security literature by presenting an integrated model that draws from the General Deterrence Theory, the Social Norms, and the Normality perspective. Specifically, this study investigates the effect of formal sanctions on information security policies compliance mediated by subjective, descriptive, and moral norms. The data were collected from the employees of five organizations in the Southern United States using the survey method. Quantitative analysis of the sampled data was conducted by using PLS to assess the various hypotheses. This study shows that descriptive and moral norms mediate the relationships between formal sanctions and information security compliance. The paper highlights the influence of moral norms on how IT users respond to IS security policies.

Retrospective analysis and preliminary laboratory validation of treatment efficacy and blood lipid levels in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

Rheumatoid arthritis is a systemic disease characterized by progressive chronic inflammation resulting in destruction of synovial joints. In addition to joint involvement, abnormal blood lipid indexes have also been found in RA patients. The correlation between various blood lipid indexes and the treatment effects were assessed in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, for the purposes to find a better medication strategy for RA. One hundred nineteen rheumatoid arthritis patients were recruited and divided into two groups, 45 patients with significant drug treatment effect and 45 patients with insignificant drug treatment effect through the nearest neighbor matching method in propensity score. The correlation between various blood lipid indexes and drug treatment effect of rheumatoid arthritis patients was analyzed. A mouse model of rheumatoid arthritis was constructed in the laboratory; methotrexate was treated as a positive drug. We observe and record the onset of rheumatoid arthritis in mice, as well as the proportion of immune cells, the expression of inflammatory factors, and the changes in blood lipid profiles was done. The levels of total cholesterol (TC), triglyceride (TG), high density lipoprotein (HDL-C), low density lipoprotein (LDL-C), and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) in rheumatoid arthritis patients were significantly different between the two groups (P < 0.05). There was no significant difference in other indexes between the two groups (P > 0.05). Methotrexate had a good therapeutic effect on CIA model mice, and the levels of TC and HDL-C in the treatment group were higher than those in the model group. There is a high correlation between the levels of TC and HDL-C in rheumatoid arthritis patients and the effect of drug treatment. In the clinical treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, we should focus on improving the blood lipid indexes such as TC and HDL-C, and explore more targeted individualized administration, so as to achieve better and faster treatment effect in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Key Points •In this research, we found that the TC and HDL-C level in RA patients' blood is highly related with the therapeutic effect, and a lower level of TC and HDL-C is better for therapeutic effect of RA.

Demonstration of new attacks on three healthcare network protocols in a lab environment

Healthcare delivery organizations such as hospitals are complex infrastructures comprising a broad range of networked devices. They include connected medical devices which can deliver health care, support hospitals’ operations, and can exchange patients’ data over healthcare network protocols. Previous research has pointed out weaknesses in the implementations of some of these protocols, and demonstrated how they could be abused by malicious actors in hospitals. There are still other healthcare network protocols for which we have limited knowledge, and no security analysis can be found in the literature. This can represent an issue, as these technologies may also have vulnerabilities which could, if exploited, impact hospitals’ operations and patients’ data. For this reason, we investigate in this paper three healthcare protocols found in hospital networks: the POCT1-A and LIS02-A standards used by some point-of-care and laboratory devices, and the proprietary protocol Data Export used by some Philips patient monitors. We explain how to build a test lab to perform security research on medical devices, in which we demonstrate four attacks highlighting how the selected protocols can be abused. This research provides greater knowledge of threats relevant to healthcare delivery organizations, and helps to enhance network security monitoring capabilities such as intrusion detection systems. More specifically, signatures can be created to detect attacks on these protocols and datasets can be assembled to assist the development and testing of hospital-specific intrusion detection systems.

Extraction of Phrase-based Concepts in Vulnerability Descriptions through Unsupervised Labeling

Software vulnerabilities, once disclosed, can be documented in vulnerability databases, which have great potential to advance vulnerability analysis and security research. People describe the key characteristics of software vulnerabilities in natural language mixed with domain-specific names and concepts. This textual nature poses a significant challenge for the automatic analysis of vulnerability knowledge embedded in text. Automatic extraction of key vulnerability aspects is highly desirable but demands significant effort to manually label data for model training. In this article, we propose unsupervised methods to label and extract important vulnerability concepts in textual vulnerability descriptions (TVDs). We focus on six types of phrase-based vulnerability concepts (vulnerability type, vulnerable component, root cause, attacker type, impact, and attack vector) as they are much more difficult to label and extract than name- or number-based entities (i.e., vendor, product, and version). Our approach is based on a key observation that the same-type of phrases, no matter how they differ in sentence structures and phrase expressions, usually share syntactically similar paths in the sentence parsing trees. Specifically, we present a source-target neural architecture that learns the Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging to identify a token’s functional role within TVDs, where the source neural model is trained to capture common features found in the TVD corpus, and the target model is trained to identify linguistically malformed words specific to the security domain. Our evaluation confirms that the proposed tagger outperforms (4.45%–5.98%) the taggers designed on natural language notions and identifies a broad set of TVDs and natural language contents. Then, based on the key observations, we propose two path representations (absolute paths and relative paths) and use an auto-encoder to encode such syntactic similarities. To address the discrete nature of our paths, we enhance the traditional Variational Auto-encoder (VAE) with Gumble-Max trick for categorical data distribution and thus create a Categorical VAE (CaVAE). In the latent space of absolute and relative paths, we further apply unsupervised clustering techniques to generate clusters of the same-type of concepts. Our evaluation confirms the effectiveness of our CaVAE, which achieves a small (85.85) log-likelihood for encoding path representations and the accuracy (83%–89%) of vulnerability concepts in the resulting clusters. The resulting clusters accurately label six types of vulnerability concepts from a TVD corpus in an unsupervised way. Furthermore, these labeled vulnerability concepts can be mapped back to the corresponding phrases in the original TVDs, which produce labels of six types of vulnerability concepts. The resulting labeled TVDs can be used to train concept extraction models for other TVD corpora. In this work, we present two concept extraction methods (concept classification and sequence labeling model) to demonstrate the utility of the unsupervisedly labeled concepts. Our study shows that models trained with our unsupervisedly labeled vulnerability concepts outperform (3.9%–5.14%) those trained with the two manually labeled TVD datasets from previous work due to the consistent boundary and typing by our unsupervised labeling method.

Inconsistencies Between Information Security Policy Compliance and Shadow IT Usage

ABSTRACT This study investigates the effects of self-efficacy on intentions toward information security policy compliance and behaviors in shadow information technology, with self-efficacy being divided into information technology self-efficacy and information security self-efficacy. An experiment was conducted and a total of 83 valid subjects were recruited in this study. Data were collected on the subjects’ behaviors during the experiment, and quantitative data were also collected using a posttest questionnaire. The findings indicated that ITSE and ISSE positively correlated with information security policy (ISP) compliance, suggesting that improving self-efficacy in either aspect will improve ISP compliance intention. However, ISP compliance did not correlate significantly with shadow IT usage, as subjects with high ISP compliance still used shadow IT. Therefore, there was a discrepancy between intention and actual behavior. In practical terms, organizations can use training and education to improve their employees’ self-efficacy in the technically challenging or unfamiliar aspects of IT and ISP compliance, improve their ISP compliance intention, and reduce the possibility of ISP violations, such as shadow IT usage.

Effect of temporal distance and goal type on predictions of future information security: Focus on moderation of self-efficacy and social responsibility

We investigate how predictions of future information security vary according to temporal distance, goal type, and personal characteristics. A total of 368 participants rated the likelihood of achieving the two-goal types at present, and then one and ten years later. The future information security bias was found to be greater for a distant place than shortly, and it was found to be greater for private goal types than public goal types. Personal characteristics were classified into self-efficacy and social responsibility, and their effectiveness was verified. A self-efficacy test revealed that the information security bias for the two types of goals was higher when it was higher than the low self-efficacy group. In the case of social responsibility, the bias was found in the higher group than the lower group only in the public goal type, but not the private goal type. We conclude by presenting some implications for information security policy and suggestions for further research.

Analysis of Spatial and Temporal Evolution of Regional Water Resources Carrying Capacity and Influencing Factors—Anhui Province as an Example

The study of water resources carrying capacity is a crucial aspect of water resources ecological security research. To account for the interplay between regional natural conditions and economic and social factors, a natural–economic–social–environmental evaluation index system is established within the framework of water resources. The comprehensive index of water resources carrying capacity in Anhui Province is then calculated using the entropy weight method and CRITIC model. Spatial kernel density and Dagum analysis are employed to analyze the results. The findings indicate that (1) the overall water resources carrying capacity of Anhui Province has exhibited an upward trend from 2003 to 2021, with the overall index of water resources carrying capacity increasing from 0.34 to 0.49. (2) The presence of water resources carrying capacity polarization in Anhui Province is evident, although this trend has been diminishing in recent years. (3) The Gini coefficient of water resources carrying capacity in Anhui Province first increases and then decreases, with the Gini coefficient between groups being more pronounced than the Gini coefficient within groups. (4) Geospatial factors play a significant role in shaping the future spatial distribution of water resources carrying capacity in Anhui Province. Additionally, the interaction of water resources carrying capacity among neighboring areas contributes to the reduction of differences between water resources carrying capacity in different regions in the future.

Internet of things security evaluation mechanism based on meta attribute fluctuation.

In the field of Internet of Things (IoT), terminal security has always been an extremely important independent research topic. In the terminal security research, in addition to the security enhancement of terminal entities, the security status evaluation of terminal security has also become an independent subset of the security research in the IoT field. However, it should also be noted that the security attributes of IoT terminals can include many aspects, so judging the security of IoT terminals based on the overall security form is not enough for the security of terminal entities. This paper introduces the concept of volatility from the overall situation assessment to the meta attributes that constitute the overall security situation, and preliminarily realizes the construction of a concise model based on historical data to judge the meta attributes that may affect the overall security in the future. At the same time, a concise verification system is built based on the application scenario of the power IoT terminals currently under research to preliminarily realize trend prediction, further expand the trust evaluation of IoT terminals, and clarify the direction of further research.

Key environmental factors affecting perceptions of security of night-time walking in neighbourhood streets: A discussion based on fear heat maps

BackgroundWalking plays an important role in residents’ health. After experiencing rapid development, most cities in China have gradually entered the process of urban renewal. Therefore, improving the quality of neighbourhood streets in the old city has become an important issue. The sense of security at night has become an important part of street reconstruction. Therefore, finding out the key environmental factors that affect the security of night-time walking in the streets of the old city has become an important prerequisite for street reconstruction. MethodsFirstly, according to the theoretical explanation of security in the existing literature, the environmental variables that may affect the security of night-time walking are determined. Besides, we chose the typical neighbourhood streets in the old town that need to be improved urgently, and recruited 32 subjects in an on-site experiment to record. Through wearable devices, the galvanic skin response, (GPS), and panoramic video signals generated by the subject during the experiment. The high arousal environment nodes of the subjects were determined by Galvanic skin response GSR signal and GPS signal. According to the semi-structured interview of the subjects, we valenced these high-arousal environment nodes and established a map of each subject’s fear emotional environment nodes. Aggregated into a street walking fear map by kernel density estimation. Finally, we selected the environment nodes with different degrees of fear on the map, established the optimal regression model of night-time walking security through the optimal subset regression method, and finally identified the critical environmental factors. Results and conclusionThe key environmental influences are street transparency, illegal parking level, environmental cleanliness level, light-transmittance intensity form building, CCTV density, and crowd activity intensity. The above key factors suggest that theEyes on the Street (EoS) theory seems to occupy a more important position in the relevant theories of street night-time security research. It also suggests that the privacy of subjects needs to be considered when improving the security of the street at night.

Perception Of Women Participation In Digital Education Research For Sustainable Social Adjustment In Calabar Urban, Nigeria: Implication On Educational Peace And Security

The need for women to arise to the issues that affect their continuous existence, engagement and contribution to the economy of their nations and the world at large, has become critical particularly in this digital age. More than ever before, the role of women in education and research in particular, in building and sustaining security and peace of their communities as well as in social adjustment to lives in these communities is being hastily called for, particularly in the presence of “crisis” atmosphere under which these communities presently and consistently exist. The purpose of this study was to assess public perception of role of digital women in education research, sustainable security, peace building, and social adjustment among communities in Calabar, Nigeria in order to take decision and consolidate on their future role in these areas in Nigeria. This study became necessary in the face of the disturbing changing social, cultural and post-Covid-19 environment, characterized by insecurity. Eight (8) research questions guided the study, among which is what level of participations are being made by women group in Calabar to embark on meaningful /digitalized research in education matters, enhance security and foster social adjustment? Descriptive survey design was adopted for this study to make description of the current situation possible. Data collection was through questionnaire, observational techniques and interview from purposefully selected target group in the political wards of Calabar Municipality and Calabar South Local Government Areas that made up Calabar Urban. Well validated survey data obtained was analysed using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis. The study found that women participate in fostering education research, sustainable security and peace building in Calabar Metropolis, but the level of digitization remains low. The study concludes that the public perceives the digital role of women in education as critical in fostering good research in education, sustainable security and social adjustment. Given this, it is recommended that government and all stakeholders including international agencies, should proactively involve all women and girls with respect to empowering them with more digital skills and resources as well as offer more protection in the cyber space and with their relatively rising influence, will reduce the inequality gap.