Search

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the mechanisms for managing coordinated benchmarking projects and the outcomes achieved from such coordination. While there have been many independent benchmarking studies comparing the practices and performance of public sector organisations, there has been little research on initiatives that involve coordinating multiple benchmarking projects within public sector organisations or report on the practices implemented and results from benchmarking projects. This research will be of interest to centralised authorities wishing to encourage and assist multiple organisations in undertaking benchmarking projects. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts a case study methodology. Data were collected on the coordinating mechanisms and the experiences of the individual organisations over a one-year period. Findings The findings show successful results (financial and non-financial) across all 13 benchmarking projects, thus indicating the success of a coordinated approach to managing multiple projects. The study concluded by recommending a six-stage process for coordinating multiple benchmarking projects. Originality/value This research gives new insights into the application and benefits from benchmarking because of the open access the research team had to the “Dubai We Learn” initiative. To the authors’ knowledge the research was unique in being able to report accurately on the outcome of 13 benchmarking projects with all projects using the TRADE benchmarking methodology.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate a benchmarking project carried out by the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) as part of a structured benchmarking initiative. The project was based on the TRADE benchmarking methodology and this paper examines the tools, activities and outcomes that relate to each stage of the adopted methodology. Design/methodology/approach This study is based on case study methodology. Data were collected from various sources including analysis of project reports written by DEWA’s benchmarking team reporting on their activities during the project. Data were also collected from four project presentations given at different stages of the project. In addition, the research team held three meetings with the DEWA benchmarking team at different stages of the benchmarking project. Findings The results show the key challenges and successes faced during each stage of the benchmarking project. It indicates the actions taken to overcome the challenges and the role played by internal and external stakeholders in facilitating the success of the benchmarking project. Practical implications The study presents information that would guide organisations that wish to carry out a benchmarking project – and particularly those implementing benchmarking for the first time. The study provides a summary of the key lessons learnt by DEWA’s benchmarking team as a guide for other organisations. Originality/value Academic research has not adequately examined and analysed the stage-by-stage elements of a benchmarking project from the perspective of the implementing organisation. This study addresses this gap by detailing and analysing the experiences of a benchmarking project by tracking the stage-by-stage activities of the benchmarking team.

Authenticated key exchange protocols are a fundamental cryptography building block for establishing a secret shared key among participating parties over an open network model. Mohamed et al. proposed a tightly-secure authenticated key exchange without NAXOS approach based on decision linear problem in order to solve an open problem for designing an authenticated key exchange protocol without using NAXOS trick. Mohamed et al.'s protocol has tight security proof in the eCK model under the random oracle problem and its security claims verified by using the games sequence tool. However, we show that Mohamed et al.’s protocol cannot withstand the key compromise impersonation attacks and man in the middle attacks. Furthermore, Mohamed et al.'s protocol cannot provide an implicit entity authentication property since it is a basic security property for an authenticated key exchange protocol. Therefore, the protocol is not secure in the eCK model.

The MQV is an authenticated key agreement protocol which does not use any one-way hash functions in its block design, and it is standardized in (IEEE, ANSI, and ISO). However, its two-pass form cannot withstand an unknown key share attack. Krawczyk proposed a hashed version of MQV (HMQV) to overcome the attack on MQV, but HMQV is vulnerable to small subgroup attacks. LaMacchia et al presented a strong security definition for authenticated key exchange protocol as extended Canetti-Krawczyk (eCK) to catch new attacks from a strong adversary. Ustaoglu proposed a hashed ephemeral private key with static private key of HMQV (CMQV) to have a security proof in eCK. Sarr et al showed key compromise impersonation and man-in-the-middle attacks on HMQV under revealing a signature of Diffie-Hellman of public keys and proposed fully HMQV (FHMQV) and strengthen MQV (SMQV) to overcome those attacks. In this study, we show the known key security attack on the MQV protocol and its variants (MQV, HMQV, CMQV, FHMQV, eFHMQV and SMQV) protocols, if both ephemeral private keys and the ephemeral session key equation are revealed by an extremely adversary; the extremely adversary is able to obtain the shared static key between two-party participants. As consequence, we show the shared static-key compromise impersonation attack on the MQV protocol and its evolutions protocols. Moreover, we show that the MTI/A(0) key agreement protocol cannot withstand key compromise impersonation attacks against stronger adversary revelation attacks.

Researchers have presented new ideas to effectively handle the traffic jams on the roads and junctions throughout the world, which are expected to increase manifold in the upcoming decades. They have come up with the useful mechanisms, through which, traffic signals can be controlled through active traffic management aiming to bring efficiency in flow of traffic besides enhancing road capacity. The vehicle waiting time and traffic congestion can be curtailed through the smart traffic lights. Hence, gas emissions and fuel consumption can also be reduced. This work discovers the proposed techniques to reduce traffic congestion and optimize road traffic.

BACKGROUND: Pregnancy causes major changes in maternal physiology and metabolism, which may lead to increased susceptibility to oral infection. AIM: Aim of this study is to assess the awareness of dental interns regarding the management of the dental needs of pregnant patients. METHODS: A cross-sectional questionnaire survey was conducted among 188 interns of a private dental college in Saudi Arabia. The questionnaire comprised of 14 knowledge-based questions regarding their training, awareness and practice management of the pregnant patient in dental clinics. Four questions to record and evaluate their training, the number of pregnant patients treated by them and their confidence level in the dental management of the pregnant patient. Excel spreadsheet was used for mathematical calculations. RESULTS: Almost 62% of our participants never treated a pregnant female during their training. About 65% of the interns knew using antibiotics, almost 55% have a clear idea of the safest NSAIDS, and 43% regarded local anaesthesia to be safe when used among pregnant females. Conversely, about 50% of the participants had no clear knowledge of the FDA category of drugs. Only 24% considered dental radiographs to be safe in pregnant patients. 57% thought to postpone the dental treatment in an acute active dental infection in expecting mothers. Results also showed a lack of confidence among interns to provide dental care to gestating female. CONCLUSION: On analysing the results, we found that there is a need to improve the knowledge, awareness and confidence levels among the interns who are the future dentists treating these patients.

Internet of Things (IoT) is defined as an inanimate object which is designed with built-in wireless connectivity, and monitored, controlled and linked over the internet. As any new technology, IoT is confusing for the normal consumer especially as debates swirl around standardization, security and privacy. This paper presents the IoT applications such as home automation, healthcare, smart grid, smart city and smart car and focuses on how to secure the generated data by IoT devices from an unauthorized access. The IoT consists of devices which are constrained in their computational capability, network bandwidth, packet size and memory such as sensor nodes. This paper demonstrates that a lightweight and mutual authentication protocols are a fundamental building block for providing the mutual authentication between user and devices in the IoT applications. Furthermore, this paper surveys some of authenticated key agreement protocols for securing IoT and presents a comparison between them in terms of security and performance.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a contemporary concept for connecting the existing things in our environment with the Internet for a sake of making the objects information are accessible from anywhere and anytime to support a modern life style based on the Internet. With the rapid development of the IoT technologies and widely spreading in most of the fields such as buildings, health, education, transportation and agriculture. Thus, the IoT applications require increasing data collection from the IoT devices to send these data to the applications or servers which collect or analyze the data, so it is a very important to secure the data and ensure that do not reach a malicious adversary. This paper reviews some attacks in the IoT applications and the security weaknesses in the IoT environment. In addition, this study presents the challenges of IoT in terms of hardware, network and software. Moreover, this paper summarizes and points to some attacks on the smart car, smart home, smart campus, smart farm and healthcare.

nowadays, the success of many online applications relays on keeping the data sent through the global network secure and far away from hackers. To carry out this task, the two communicating parties must exchange keys during their session. Some of the key exchange protocols are called key agreement protocols. The Elliptic Curve-Diffie Hellman (ECDH) is one of the most efficient algoiithms for securing data. The ECDH is more efficient than other traditional techniques such as Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) in terms of key size, computation and network bandwidth. The Authenticated Key Agreement (AKA) protocol is used for establishing a common session key between the two communicating parties. The common session key is used for subsequent cryptography goals. Most of the key agreement protocols (e.g. Menezes-Qu-Vanstone(MQV) family) generate one key per session therefore increasing the opportunities for guessing the session key. In this paper, we focus on developing an enhanced multiple sessions key which is based on ECDH. We propose an efficient and secure AKA protocol which is based on the ideas of the hashed MQV (HMQV), the YAK protocol as a robust key agreement based on public key authentication and multiple session keys. The proposed protocol generates multiple common keys per a session, where the generated common key depends on the static and ephemeral keys. Furthermore, the proposed protocol overcomes the attacks on the HMQV and YAK protocols and provides desirable security properties as compared with the relatedworks in this paper.

Nowadays, the rapid growth of Internet applications open the doors for people to communicate and do business around the world and thus saving time, efforts and money. However, the success of these applications is based on protecting the data from hackers. It is well known that preventing sensitive data from hackers while they are sent through the global network is a big challenge. There are many techniques used for securing data. Some of these techniques are based on encrypting a readable text into an unreadable text using mathematical operations, while other techniques are based on encrypting a readable text into an image (e.g., the Text-to-Image Encryption algorithm – TTIE) or into musical notes using an encryption key. The encryption key must be secure and should not be sent through the Internet.\ud \ud This paper proposes adding a new security level to the TTIE algorithm, and demonstrates how the encryption key produced by the TTIE algorithm is exchanged with the other party using the Diffie Hellman technique. Thus, this paper proposes a modified TTIE algorithm called the Diffie Hellman Text-to-Image Encryption algorithm (DHTTIE), and tests and analyses the proposed algorithm.

Routing protocols are the fundamental block of selecting the optimal path from a source node to a destination node in internetwork. Due to emerge the large networks in business aspect thus; they operate diverse routing protocols in their infrastructure. In order to keep a large network connected; the implementation of the route redistribution is needed in network routers. This paper creates the four scenarios on the same network topology by using Optimized Network Engineering Tools Modeler (OPNET 14.5) simulator in order to analyze the performance of the route redistribution among three routing protocols by configuring three protocols from a set of Routing Information Protocol (RIPv2), Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP), Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), and Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS) dynamic routing protocols on each scenario. The first scenario is EIGRP_OSPF_ISIS, the second scenario is EIGRP_OSPF_RIPv2, the third scenario is RIPv2_EIGRP_ISIS, and the fourth scenario is RIPv2_OSPF_ISIS. The simulation results showed that the RIPv2_EIGRP_ISIS scenario outperforms the other scenarios in terms of network convergence time, the hops number, jitter, packet delay variation, packet end to end delay; therefore, it fits real time applications such as voice and video conferencing. In contrast, the EIGRP_OSPF_ISIS scenario has better results compared with other scenarios in terms of response time in case of using web browsing, database query, and Email services.

Authenticated key agreement protocols are a foundation for delivering an authenticated session key between the intended two-party participants from a set of parties over an insecure network. Wang et al proposed protocol ECKE-1N to overcome KCI-R attacks in ECKE-1 as an implicit authenticated key agreement protocol based on Diffie-Hellman elliptic curve. In this paper, we show that ECKE-1N is vulnerable to both leakage of ephemeral private keys and KCI-R attacks. We present an enhanced protocol EECKE-1N, which can withstand KCI-R attacks and revelations both of ephemeral keys. Furthermore, EECKE-1N can provide desirable security proprieties.

Introduction Cardiovascular disease is a major health problem in Saudi Arabia, estimates on the prevalence of cardiovascular disease risk factors are important for monitoring their impact on the health. The objectives of this study are to estimate the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors and to assess the 10 years cardiovascular risk. Methods This was a cross sectional study. A proportionate to size random sample of the attendees to the primary health care center during 2012 was selected from two primary health care centers in Jeddah city. a sample of 400 participants aged ⩾30 years was selected. Questionnaire was developed for this purpose. After completion of a detailed demographic and medical questionnaire (gender, age, history of diabetes mellitus and hypertension, taking antihypertensive or hypoglycemic agents and history of smoking), all participants were subjected to anthropometric measurements include weight, height, waist circumference and hip circumference. In addition to blood lipid profile, blood glucose during the years 2012. Tests were considered significant at a p -value ⩽0.05. Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS version 20 software. Results A total of 400 participants with mean (SD) age of 46.9 (11.1) and 52.5% were males. Ninety percent of the participants were physically inactive, 26% had high LDL cholesterol levels, 48.4% had high blood pressure, 51.7 had low HDL level, 18% smoked, 78.7% had abdominal obesity, 46.9% obese, 35.2% overweigh and 33.7% diabetic. The estimated 10 years Cardiovascular risk prediction was >10% in (37.4%) of the diabetic patients compared to (7.6%) among non diabetics. The predictors of cardiovascular risk were systolic and blood pressure and cholesterol but not with glycemic control parameter.

In NRSC24, Elkamchouchi et al. proposed a new approach for key controlled agreement to provide key control in the Pour public key distribution system. In NRSC25, they further proposed an efficient and confirmed protocol for authenticated key agreement to provide forward secrecy in their previously proposed protocol. This paper, however, will show that Pour’s protocol and Elkamchouchi et al.’s two protocols cannot withstand key compromise impersonation resilience, and man-in-the-middle attacks, and do not have perfect forward secrecy resilience. To eliminate the pointed out security leaks, we further propose a new two-pass authenticated key agreement with a key confirmation protocol. The proposed protocol has the following properties: (i) it is proved to be secure against above attacks and stronger adversary attacks, and provides the desirable security properties as a three-pass authenticated key agreement protocol. (ii) It can provide entity authentication and assurance for key reception in an ind...