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Drawing on the key notions of style/styling and stance as positioning practices, this article analyzes the styling practices of fraudsters in institutional impersonation fraud (IIF), namely, how fraudsters style themselves and others (i.e., targets and opponents) through recurring stance-taking patterns to achieve their manipulative goals. We use the authentic data of 26 IIF cases as research objects. The analysis reveals that fraudsters style themselves through regular stance-taking acts that index professional authority, target avidity, and community integrity, while targets are styled through stances of being troublesome, being innocent, and needing help. Opponents that comprise culprits and obstacles to fraudulent success are consistently assigned negative stances. Additionally, three interactive patterns are found through the configurations of styling practices via stances, namely, the Antagonizing pattern, the Pseudo-allied pattern, and the Selective Stance-accentuation pattern. This study provides a linguistic perspective for understanding the IIF interactive process and sheds light on the ongoing anti-telefraud campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The underground environment and its components are susceptible to various attacks due to their role in monitoring environmental conditions and future predictions. Our review of existing literature reveals that most protocols are vulnerable to impersonation and Man-in-the-Middle attacks, which pose significant risks of data theft from sensors. Additionally, these protocols often impose high computational loads on the sensors. To address these challenges, this article presents an inter-mutual authentication scheme tailored for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). We propose a secure authentication and key agreement protocol using the elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC), which not only provides session key generation and authentication but also protects against several potential attacks. We conducted comprehensive security analyses, including both formal and informal methods, to validate the robustness of our protocol. The informal analysis, based on a threat model, demonstrates the protocol's effectiveness against various critical attacks. The Random Oracle (RoR) model further establishes that breaking the session key security is challenging. Simulations using Scyther confirm that private parameters remain secure during execution, while AVISPA simulations validate the protocol's resilience against replay attack and Man-in-the-Middle attacks. Furthermore, we assessed the security features, computational and communication costs, and overall performance of the proposed scheme, comparing it with existing studies. Our findings indicate that the protocol offers an average improvement of 36.47% and 48-bits for computation and communication overheads. Additionally, this work also offers enhanced security (secure from all possible attacks), making it an effective solution for securing sensitive data in WSNs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET), provides considerable real-time traffic information services that enhance safety and traffic effectiveness. However, as most of the VANET systems are centralized in nature prone to single-point failure, and vulnerable to attacks there will be reasonable delay in communication. In this paper, a lightweight privacy-preserving authentication scheme for peer-to-peer communication using blockchain (DLPA) while considering the resource-constrained nature of VANET is proposed. We have designed and deployed smart contracts using public blockchain to resist the vehicle impersonation attack, to identify illegal vehicle's identity and thereby non-repudiation will be achieved. Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) authentication and peer-to-peer communication are attained without the involvement of a Trusted Authority (TA) and to eliminate the trusted third party who is responsible for generating the key. Furthermore, DLPA has achieved handover authentication of vehicles so that vehicles need not be re-authenticated when they enter into a new Road Side Unit (RSU) limit. The proposed scheme is implemented in different Ethereum-powered test networks using Remix IDE to demonstrate the feasibility and to analyze the performance of the smart contract in terms of transaction cost and execution cost. In addition to that, security proof and analysis are performed to unveil that our proposed scheme preserves the privacy of the communicating parties, semantic security of the session key, and resistance against various known threats and attacks. Finally, the performance analysis of the scheme is done by calculating the communication and computation costs. The computation cost for our DLPA scheme for V2V authentication is 0.27461 ms and for V2RSU authentication is 0.15622 ms. The communication cost for both V2V and V2RSU authentication is 640 bits. While analyzing the result, the proposed protocol has a minimal cost when compared with other blockchain-based authentication schemes in VANET. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A cutting-edge idea known as the Internet of Things (IoT) connects different physical items with the online environment. IoT technology is expanding quickly and will soon have an important encounter on how we live our everyday lives. IoT applications use radio frequency identification (RFID) to automatically identify the linked devices. RFID-enabled technologies are becoming more common nowadays for protecting privacy in a variety of industries, including the smart grid, smart cities, and smart education. Healthcare is one of the prominent applications of RFID technology. Patients can receive quick and convenient care at home due to RFID-enabled healthcare solutions. However, there are instances of technology forgery, putting patients' medical information in danger. Utilizing an authentication protocol is extensively regarded as the most efficient way for RFID-enabled healthcare systems to prevent malicious attacks and the misuse of resources. Very recently, Shariq and Singh proposed a lightweight RFID-enabled protocol for healthcare using the properties of vector space. This article presents evidence that Shariq and Singh's protocol has some wrong steps and is also liable to tag anonymity and impersonation attacks. Moreover, we proposed a secured authentication protocol to overcome the flaws of Shariq and Singh's protocol using vector addition, scalar multiplication, and dot products. We analyze the formal security utilizing BAN logic and Scyther simulation tools. The proposed protocol performs better than related protocols regarding costs associated with computation, transmission, storage, and security measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Military impersonation, or stolen valor, is an understudied topic. Military impersonation can be committed by civilians and service members alike. Military service misrepresentation is adjudicated under civilian federal law (for civilians and veterans) or the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ; for service members). In the legal field, the main literature concerns the constitutionality of the Stolen Valor Act (SVA) of 2005. However, since the SVA of 2005, many developments have occurred. The same applies to the UCMJ, which underwent a large revision that went into effect in 2019. The scarcity of research has led to this legal study covering the federal statutes and state statutes that apply to military impersonation. Not only are financial motives found, mitigation of sentences in court cases is also a motive. Both demonstrate a need for military history verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Taiwan Law Review is the property of Angle Publishing Co., Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We present Transmission optimal protocol with active security (TOPAS ), the first key agreement protocol with optimal communication complexity (message size and number of rounds) that provides security against fully active adversaries. The size of the protocol messages and the computational costs to generate them are comparable to the basic Diffie-Hellman protocol over elliptic curves (which is well-known to only provide security against passive adversaries). Session keys are indistinguishable from random keys—even under reflection and key compromise impersonation attacks. What makes TOPAS stand out is that it also features a security proof of full perfect forward secrecy (PFS), where the attacker can actively modify messages sent to or from the test-session. The proof of full PFS relies on two new extraction-based security assumptions. It is well-known that existing implicitly-authenticated 2-message protocols like HMQV cannot achieve this strong form of (full) security against active attackers (Krawczyk, Crypto'05). This makes TOPAS the first key agreement protocol with full security against active attackers that works in prime-order groups while having optimal message size. We also present a variant of our protocol, TOPAS + , which, under the Strong Diffie-Hellman assumption, provides better computational efficiency in the key derivation phase. Finally, we present a third protocol termed FACTAS (for factoring-based protocol with active security) which has the same strong security properties as TOPAS and TOPAS + but whose security is solely based on the factoring assumption in groups of composite order (except for the proof of full PFS). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The security of online assessments is a major concern due to widespread cheating. One common form of cheating is impersonation, where students invite unauthorized persons to take assessments on their behalf. Several techniques exist to handle impersonation. Some researchers recommend use of integrity policy, but communicating the policy effectively to the students is a challenge. Others propose authentication methods like, password and fingerprint; they offer initial authentication but are vulnerable thereafter. Face recognition offers post-login authentication but necessitates additional hardware. Keystroke Dynamics (KD) has been used to provide post-login authentication without any additional hardware, but its use is limited to subjective assessment. In this work, we address impersonation in assessments with Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ). Our approach combines two key strategies: reinforcement of integrity policy for prevention, and keystroke-based random authentication for detection of impersonation. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first attempt to use keystroke dynamics for post-login authentication in the context of MCQ. We improve an online quiz tool for the data collection suited to our needs and use feature engineering to address the challenge of high-dimensional keystroke datasets. Using machine learning classifiers, we identify the best-performing model for authenticating the students. The results indicate that the highest accuracy (83%) is achieved by the Isolation Forest classifier. Furthermore, to validate the results, the approach is applied to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) benchmark dataset, thereby achieving an improved accuracy of 94%. Though we also used mouse dynamics for authentication, but its subpar performance leads us to not consider it for our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, the confidentiality and security of patient medical records is of great importance. This study proposes a scheme that aims to store, access, and share medical data without risking security vulnerabilities and attacks. In the proposed scheme, medical data are divided into sensitive and non-sensitive patient data. Three consensus mechanisms (Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), and Proof of Authority (PoA)) are implemented and compared to each other in terms of performance. The performance analysis of the proposed scheme shows that PoW provides approximately 21% and 9% better results than PoA and PoS for non-sensitive data in terms of block size, respectively. It also provides approximately 23% and 32% better results than PoA and PoS for sensitive data in terms of memory usage, respectively. The security analysis demonstrates that it has many security features and is strong against man-in-the-middle, impersonation, and modification attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay employs Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation used to make visible the lives of Black women in the archives and asks if it is possible that George Herbert, a white, Christian man, could engage in this methodology. I read Herbert's impersonation of an African woman in "Aethiopissa ambit Cestum Diversi Coloris Virum" ("Aethiopissa Courts Cestus, a Man of a Different Color") (written c. 1620), to argue that the poet ventriloquizes Aethiopissa through tropes of blackness to reveal his identification with her––creating a representation that lies outside of normative early modern depictions of blackness. This essay demonstrates how Herbert presents Aethiopissa as a strong and rhetorically skilled speaker who employs what I call the "spectrum of darkness," a strategy she uses to appeal to her white addressee's senses to naturalize her blackness via natural phenomena. Herbert, I argue, sympathizes with Aethiopissa's erotic complaint as it can present the poet's own relation to his patron, Sir Francis Bacon. I conclude by maintaining that Herbert's "Aethiopissa" could be added to the canon of texts productively studied and taught by scholars in premodern critical race studies. [W.L.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Featured Application: The work may find applications in secure coordination and self-management of groups of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). We consider authenticating multicast messages in the case of extremely narrow communication channels, such as underwater acoustic communication, with devices such as mobile sensors creating a self-organizing autonomous network. Channel characteristics in this scenario prevent the application of digital signatures (and asymmetric cryptography in general), as it would consume too much of the available bandwidth. As communication is relatively sparse, standard symmetric methods such as TESLA have limited application in this scenario as well. Driven by real-world requirements, we focus on tiny networks of only a few nodes. This paper discusses two issues: (a) strategies of key predistribution enabling flexible creation of multicast groups; (b) authenticating multicast messages in a way that prevents an attacker impersonating the sender by subverting one or more receiver nodes and learning the symmetric keys stored by these nodes. For tiny networks, we show that scalable and asymptotically efficient solutions might be useless, and that specially tailored combinatorial approaches may confer some advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Owing to the fast advancements of wireless communication, the telehealthcare platform makes it possible for patients to access healthcare services online. However, creating a secure and efficient authentication scheme for healthcare systems still presents a challenge. Several solutions have been introduced, but the majority of them are shortly found to be unable to meet some essential security standards. In this paper, we first revisit Dharminder et al.'s scheme and prove its failure to provide mutual authentication and pacient’s untraceability and its vulnerability to impersonation attacks. Furthermore, we suggest an improved RSA-based authentication scheme to mitigate the deficiencies observed in Dharminder et al.'s schema. The proposed scheme can provide mutual authentication, patients’ anonymity and untraceability and resist various types of attacks. Extensive evaluation on AVISPA proves the safeness of the proposed scheme against both passive and active attacks. Additionally, the proposed scheme is computationally and communicationally more efficient in comparison to other existing schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely acknowledged for their potential as a robust infrastructure for collecting, processing, and transmitting information. Rezaeipour & Barati proposed a hierarchical key management scheme that manages key creation, distribution, and maintenance to provide services like message confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity to wireless sensor networks. As per the assertions posited by the authors, their scheme purportedly exhibits resilience against a spectrum of potential threats. Nevertheless, upon subjecting their scheme to meticulous scrutiny, our analysis revealed vulnerabilities to manifold adversarial strategies, notably including man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks, impersonation attacks, and node capture attacks. This scheme fails to establish a secure session key agreement also. In response to these identified shortcomings, this research devised an "Improved Hierarchical Key Management" (IHKM) Scheme aimed at rectifying the deficiencies of Rezaeipour and Barati's scheme (RB scheme). This work proposed an enhanced key management scheme that utilizes a blend of symmetric and asymmetric key cryptography to enhance the security parameters of Hierarchical WSNs. A comprehensive security analysis of the proposed work shows that the IHKM scheme is secure against impersonation attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks node capture attacks, Denial-of-Service attacks, and base station bypassing attacks while establishing the mutual key agreement between the area managers and sensor nodes. Moreover, a comparative analysis of the IHKM scheme exhibits notable reductions in energy consumption (62.27% and 49.15%) and memory utilization (39.28%, 23.36%) when compared with the RB scheme and HISCOM schemes respectively. Simultaneously, IHKM contributes to the extension of the network's overall lifespan by 48.78% as compared to HISCOM scheme and 32.63% as compared to compared with the RB scheme, thereby enhancing the efficiency and longevity of the WSN infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things faces significant security challenges, particularly in device authentication. Traditional methods of PUF-based authentication protocols do not fully address IoT's unique security needs and resource constraints. Existing solutions like Identity-Based Encryption with Physically Unclonable Functions enhance security but still struggle with protecting data during transmission. We show a new protocol that leverages PUFs for device authentication by utilizing Paillier homomorphic encryption or the plaintext equality test to enhance security. Our approach involves encrypting both the challenge–response pairs (CRPs) using Paillier homomorphic encryption scheme or ElGamal encryption for plaintext equality testing scheme. The verifier does not need access to the plaintext CRPs to ensure that sensitive data remain encrypted at all times and our approach reduces the computational load on IoT devices. The encryption ensures that neither the challenge nor the response can be deciphered by potential adversaries who obtain them during the transmission. The homomorphic property of the Paillier scheme or plaintext equality testing scheme allows a verifier to verify device authenticity without decrypting the CRPs, preserving privacy and reducing the computational load on IoT devices. Such an approach to encrypting both elements of the CRP provides resistance against CRP disclosure, machine learning attacks, and impersonation attacks. We validate the scheme through security analysis against various attacks and evaluate its performance by analyzing the computational overhead and the communication overhead. Comparison of average computational and communication time demonstrates Paillier scheme achieves approximately 99% reduction while the plaintext equality test achieves approximately 94% reduction between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In present times, Radio‐Frequency Identification (RFID) systems have seen a significant rise in their usage. There has been an increasing interest in developing even lighter RFID protocols suitable for resource‐constrained environments. Ensuring security and privacy remain critical challenges in RFID‐based systems. Recently proposed lightweight authentication schemes, namely LRSAS+ and LRARP+, are ideally suited for constrained devices. However, this article investigates these schemes and reveals certain vulnerabilities: LRSAS+ is susceptible to tag impersonation, desynchronization, and traceability attacks, while LRARP+ can fall prey to traceability and secret disclosure attacks. An enhanced version of these authentication systems is proposed that tackles their inherent weaknesses by leveraging the χper$\chi per$ function. To verify the security of the proposed scheme, a formal analysis is conducted using Gong–Needham–Yahalom logic (GNY logic) and an automated security protocol verification tool, ProVerif. The improved scheme's effectiveness is also compared with multiple contemporary lightweight systems. The results indicate that the enhanced scheme not only meets the security requirements for lightweight authentication schemes but also achieves this with minimal computational overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid advancement of internet technology has raised attention to the importance of electronic voting in maintaining democracy and fairness in elections. E-voting refers to the use of electronic technology to facilitate the casting and counting of votes in elections. The need for designated verification arises from concerns about voter privacy, auditability, and the prevention of manipulation. Traditional e-voting systems use cryptographic techniques for security but lack verifiable proof of integrity. Integrating e-voting with a quantum designated verifier could address these challenges by leveraging the principles of quantum mechanics to enhance security and trustworthiness. In light of this, we propose a quantum e-voting scheme that uses a designated verifier signature. To ensure the confidentiality and authenticity of the voting process, the scheme uses quantum features like the no-cloning theorem and quantum key distribution. The proposed scheme has security properties like source hiding, non-transferability, and message anonymity. The proposed scheme is resistant to many quantum attacks, such as eavesdropping and impersonation. Due to designated verification, the scheme minimizes the risk of tempering. This paper provides a detailed description of the proposed scheme and analyzes its security properties. Therefore, the proposed scheme is efficient, practical, and secure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a set of locally indistinguishable orthogonal product (LIOP) states, a quantum designated multi-verifier signature scheme (LIOP-QDMVS) is proposed. In this scheme, each verifier can independently verify partial signature without exchanging information with other verifiers. The protocol can address the issue of excessive power from individual verifiers, as the signature is accepted as valid only when all verifiers confirm its validity. Additionally, all designated verifiers can collaborate to simulate signatures from the signer, that achieve the non-transferability and source hiding of the protocol. Furthermore, the scheme does not require any third-party involvement, and no entangled states need to be prepared during signature generation. It is proven that the LIOP-QDMVS owns unforgeability, correctness, theoretical information security, and designated verifier properties, as well as it is resistant to replay attacks and impersonation attacks. Therefore, LIOP-QDMVS offers better security and efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote data backup technology avoids the risk of data loss and tampering, and has higher security compared to local data backup solutions. However, the data transmission channel for remote data backup is not secure, and the backup server cannot be fully trusted, so users usually encrypt the data before uploading it to the remote server. As a result, how to protect this encryption key is crucial. We design a User-Centric Design (UCD) data backup scheme based on multi-factor authentication to protect this encryption key. Our scheme utilizes a secret sharing scheme to divide the encryption key into three parts, which are stored in the laptop, the smart card, and the server. The encryption key can be easily reconstructed from any two parts with user's private information password, identity and biometrics. As long as the biometrics has enough entropy, our scheme can resist replay attacks, impersonation user attacks, impersonation server attacks, malicious servers and offline password guessing attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the seminal work of feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler, this article compares the practice of gender impersonation in the South Indian dance form of Kuchipudi with American drag performance. While impersonation in Kuchipudi and American drag performance arise from radically distinct gendered, cultural, and religious contexts, the juxtaposition of these two seemingly disparate spheres generates a useful framework for comparison that illuminates new ways of interpreting gender and caste in contemporary South India. Focusing on the Kuchipudi dancer Vedantam Satyanarayana Sarma and the drag ball performer Venus Xtravaganza, this article analyzes the gender and caste norms of Kuchipudi dance in Telugu-speaking South India while outlining the limitations of Butler's theory of gender performativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audio impersonation attacks offer a substantial risk to voice-based authentication systems and various speech recognition applications. Hence, there is a requirement for robust detection methods to assure system security and dependability. The work in this paper discusses a new approach to improve front-end feature extraction of an audio imitation attack detection system, notably in the context of the Hindi language. The proposed model is implemented in three main steps. Firstly, Gammatone spectrogram, Mel spectrogram, and Acoustic Ternary Pattern Audio Features (TPAF)spectrogram are generated from the recorded audio samples. Secondly, an optimized Residual Network (ResNet27) is employed to capture distinctive characteristics from these spectrograms. Lastly, four different binary classifier algorithms; eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGboost), Random Forest (RF), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), and Naïve Bayes (NB) are individually applied to the aforementioned three different feature combinations, resulting in a total of twelve distinct systems. All these systems have been evaluated using own created dataset named as Voice Impersonation Corpus in Hindi Language (VIHL) for audio impersonation attack. Also, the evaluation of the proposed models have been carried using ASVspoof 2019 and ASVspoof 2021 datasets for spoof, impersonation, replay and deepfake attacks. The results obtained from the proposed work show that Gammatone spectrogram-ResNet27 combination with XGboost classifier achieved 0.9% Equal Error Rate (EER) for impersonation attack, which surpasses existing techniques in accurately identifying such attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Moroccan higher education, the integrity of examinations is paramount, yet it faces the persistent challenge of identity impersonation. This form of academic dishonesty not only undermines the credibility of educational institutions but also contributes to the graduation of incompetent students. In an era where artificial intelligence is revolutionizing various sectors, its application to upholding academic integrity is both timely and essential. This paper proposes an advanced deep learning-driven fingerprint verification model specifically designed to combat impersonation in university examinations. Unlike traditional methods, our model leverages the power of Siamese neural networks (SNN), renowned for their effectiveness in learning distinct features and similarities. The model, trained, validated, and tested using the SOCOFing dataset, demonstrated high accuracy and effectiveness in fingerprint identification, crucial for verifying identities in educational exam settings. It achieved an accuracy of 99.29%, and an F1 score of 99.27%, surpassing other systems and significantly contributing to examination integrity in Moroccan higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The three party authenticated key agreement protocol assists two parties in affirming one another and agreeing on a shared session key with the assistance of a trusted server. Chaos-based cryptography has seen considerable progress due to the sound characteristics of chaotic systems. Nowadays, many researchers are actively working in this direction and have proposed various three party authenticated key agreement protocols based on chaotic maps. In this paper, we analysed the Zheng et al. 's scheme (IEEE Access 8:66150–66162, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2979251) and found that it is vulnerable to various attacks like verification table theft attack, impersonation attacks and also it does not provide anonymity to users. Zheng et al.'s scheme also has flaw in registration phase and uses timestamps for key freshness. In this article, we proposed a three party chaotic based authenticated key agreement protocol which is secured against aforementioned attacks. Authors are also compared the proposed scheme with other comparable and existing schemes in terms of security features, computation cost, and communication cost. The comparison analysis shows that the proposed scheme has more security features at a lower cost in computing and communication. We have also demonstrated the security of the proposed protocol within the framework of the random oracle model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an innovation in technology. Continuous advancements based on the IoT cloud have revolutionized the lives of humans, and remote health monitoring of patients is no exception. The Telecare Medicine Information System (TMIS) allows physicians, other health care providers and patients to observe the medical data electronically. Therefore, security in remote medicine has always been a serious challenge. Recently, to make a secure communication system, biometrics-based schemes have played a crucial role in IoT, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), etc. are gaining popularity due to their authenticity and high security properties. Many key agreement schemes have been presented in this literature. These schemes are only for authorized access to medical services and initiate a session to negotiate a shared essential between users and servers. Recently, Xiong et al. and Mehmood et al. presented key exchange methods for healthcare applications that claimed these schemes provide greater privacy. However, we show that these schemes suffer from privacy issues and key compromise impersonation attacks. In this paper, to remove such restrictions, a novel scheme (ECKCI) based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) with KCI resistance property was proposed. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the ECKCI not only overcomes problems such as key compromise impersonation attacks in previous protocols, but also resists all specific attacks. Finally, a suitable equilibrium between the performance and security of ECKCI in comparison with recently proposed protocols was obtained. Also, the simulation results with the Scyther and ProVerif tools show that the ECKCI is safe [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cookies are considered a fundamental means of web application services for authenticating various Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests and maintains the states of clients' information over the Internet. HTTP cookies are exploited to carry client patterns observed by a website. These client patterns facilitate the particular client's future visit to the corresponding website. However, security and privacy are the primary concerns owing to the value of information over public channels and the storage of client information on the browser. Several protocols have been introduced that maintain HTTP cookies, but many of those fail to achieve the required security, or require a lot of resource overheads. In this article, we have introduced a lightweight Elliptic Curve Cryptographic (ECC) based protocol for authenticating client and server transactions to maintain the privacy and security of HTTP cookies. Our proposed protocol uses a secret key embedded within a cookie. The proposed protocol is more efficient and lightweight than related protocols because of its reduced computation, storage, and communication costs. Moreover, the analysis presented in this paper confirms that proposed protocol resists various known attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federated learning is an important distributed model training technique in Internet of Things (IoT), in which participant selection is a key component that plays a role in improving training efficiency and model accuracy. This module enables a central server to select a subset of participants to perform model training based on data and device information. By doing so, selected participants are rewarded and actively perform model training, while participants that are detrimental to training efficiency and model accuracy are excluded. However, in practice, participants may suspect that the central server may have miscalculated and thus not made the selection honestly. This lack of trustworthiness problem, which can demotivate participants, has received little attention. Another problem that has received little attention is the leakage of participants' private information during the selection process. We will therefore propose a federated learning framework with auditable participant selection. It supports smart contracts in selecting a set of suitable participants based on their training loss without compromising the privacy. Considering the possibility of malicious campaigning and impersonation of participants, the framework employs commitment schemes and zero-knowledge proofs to counteract these malicious behaviors. Finally, we analyze the security of the framework and conduct a series of experiments to demonstrate that the framework can effectively improve the efficiency of federated learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online research offers advantages including recruitment cost, diminished equity-related participation barriers, and convenience; however, there are growing concerns regarding fraudulent participation. Guidance to navigate these challenges exists for online research generally (e.g. surveys), but remains sparse for the specific challenge of fraudulent participation within virtual synchronous interviews. No work has explored this topic within an explicit, detailed ethical framework. Reflecting on our experiences navigating fraudulent participation in virtual synchronous research, we address this gap using the Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists as a guiding framework to describe challenges, explore ethical considerations, and identify potential solutions and research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the rhetorical strategies of "digital anti-vaccination churches." We argue that these groups adopt the appearance of a religious institution to gain access to vaccine exemptions, through a process we call "religious masking." Religious masking involves the impersonation of religious style and substance to "pass" convincingly as a religious institution under legal requirements. Simultaneously, the performance of masking also signals to audiences that the church functions as an anti-vaccine exemption resource. Anti-vaccination churches effectively speak to multiple audiences by drawing upon rhetorical strategies of style, consubstantiality, and agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The utilization of IoT is expanding across various domains, including telecare, intelligent home systems, and transportation networks. In these environments, IoT devices generate data gathered on remote servers, requiring external users to authenticate themselves to access the data. However, existing authentication protocols for IoT must meet the crucial requirements of speed, security against multiple attacks, and ensuring user anonymity and un-traceability. The main objective of this work is to find lightweight symmetric cryptography-based user authentication protocol tailored for IoT-based applications, focusing on MIM (Manin-the-Middle) attack prevention, enhanced anonymity, and secure communication between IoT nodes and remote servers via IoT gateways. Existing protocols often lack sufficient defenses against MIM attacks and do not adequately address the need for enhanced user anonymity and secure communication channels within the IoT framework. Our research has identified that authentication techniques based on pairing are susceptible to attacks targeting temporary session-specific data, impersonation, privileged insiders, and offline password guessing. Furthermore, using bilinear pairing in these techniques requires significant computational and communication resources to address the security as mentioned above concerns. A new authentication mechanism must be proposed and designed explicitly for IoT scenarios. The proposed approach exclusively utilizes hash and exclusive-or operations to ensure suitability within the IoT context; thoroughly evaluated the recommended protocol against existing authentication protocols, employing both informal and formal analytical routines like BAN logic, ROR model, and AVISPA simulation. Our findings suggest protocol not only enhances performance but also enhances security. The proposed approach is a tried-and-true strategy for improving security rules in practical Internet of Things (IoT) settings addressing the inherent challenges posed by authentication requirements in IoT environments. The accuracy 98.93%, and Node detection rate 46.57% were improved which is a better outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The metaverse, which amalgamates physical and virtual realms for diverse social activities, has been the focus of extensive application development by organizations, research institutes, and companies. However, these applications are often isolated, employing distinct authentication methods across platforms. Achieving interoperable authentication is crucial for when avatars traverse different metaverses to mitigate security concerns like impersonation, mutual authentication, replay, and server spoofing. To address these issues, we propose a blockchain-enabled secure and interoperable authentication scheme. This mechanism uniquely identifies users in the physical world as well as avatars, facilitating seamless navigation across verses. Our proposal is substantiated through informal security analyses, employing automated verification of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA), the real-or-random (ROR) model, and Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic and showcasing effectiveness against a broad spectrum of security threats. Comparative assessments against similar schemes demonstrate our solution's superiority in terms of communication costs, computation costs, and security features. Consequently, our blockchain-enabled, interoperable, and secure authentication scheme stands as a robust solution for ensuring security in metaverse environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista CES Derecho is the property of Universidad CES and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The study sought to investigate the prevalence of cyberbullying incidents among learners in institutions of higher learning in Gaborone, Botswana. The study explored the prevalence of cyberbullying, cyber stalking, impersonation and the use of technology. The mixed methods explanatory research design was adopted in this study. This design involved the use of qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis techniques to establish the extent of cyberbullying in institutions of higher learning in Gaborone. Questionnaires were distributed to 150 learners at the institutions of higher learning in Gaborone main campuses. Both institutions of learning were selected because of their intensive use of technology for teaching and learning. Of the 150 questionnaires that were distributed, 115 were completed and returned culminating in a 77% response rate. The research findings revealed the prevalence of cyberbullying in institutions of learning. The results also demonstrated that technological platforms through the use of the internet facilitated cyberbullying in learning institutions. The findings of the study are significant as they will enable the leaders of the institutions to promulgate effective policies that will help curb the prevalence cyberbullying incidences. To augment knowledge sharing in the education fraternity, the study makes a recommendation to the Ministry of Education, together with other institutions of learning, that a specific cyberbullying policy should be promulgated and implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crowdsensing systems use a group of people to collect and share sensor data for various tasks. One example is the crowdsensing-based healthcare system, which provides smart services to patients and elderly people using wearable sensors. However, such a system faces a significant security challenge: how to authenticate the sensor device (patient) and exchange medical data securely over a public channel. Although considerable research has been directed towards authentication protocols for healthcare systems, state-of-the-art approaches are vulnerable to a series of attacks, including impersonation and stolen verifier attacks, and do not ensure perfect forward secrecy. In this paper, first, we elaborate two of such approaches. Then, we propose a Robust and Efficient Authentication scheme for Crowdsensing-based Healthcare systems, called REACH. We prove that REACH supports perfect forward secrecy and anonymity and resists well-known attacks. We perform various formal and informal security analyses using the Real-OR-Random (ROR) Model, BAN logic, and the well-known Scyther tool. We also show that REACH outperforms the related methods in incurring the minimum computational overhead and comparable communication overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things (IoT) consists of millions of devices deployed over hundreds of thousands of different networks, providing an ever-expanding resource to improve our understanding of and interactions with the physical world. Global service discovery is key to realizing the opportunities of the IoT, spanning disparate networks and technologies to enable the sharing, discovery, and utilisation of services and data outside of the context in which they are deployed. In this paper, we present Decentralised Service Registries (DSRs), a novel trustworthy decentralised approach to global IoT service discovery and interaction, building on DSF-IoT to allow users to simply create and share public and private service registries, to register and query for relevant services, and to access both current and historical data published by the services they discover. In DSR, services are registered and discovered using signed objects that are cryptographically associated with the registry service, linked into a signature chain, and stored and queried for using a novel verifiable DHT overlay. In contrast to existing centralised and decentralised approaches, DSRs decouple registries from supporting infrastructure, provide privacy and multi-tenancy, and support the verification of registry entries and history, service information, and published data to mitigate risks of service impersonation or the alteration of data. This decentralised approach is demonstrated through the creation and use of a DSR to register and search for real-world IoT devices and their data as well as qualified using a scalable cluster-based testbench for the high-fidelity emulation of peer-to-peer applications. DSRs are evaluated against existing approaches, demonstrating the novelty and utility of DSR to address key IoT challenges and enable the sharing, discovery, and use of IoT services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is the first in‐depth study of the 'Deutsches Theater Liverpool', probably the most successful non‐English theatre ever on Australian soil, selling out daily performances and mounting a new production each week. The theatre's success was due in large part to its location inside the 'German Concentration Camp', the largest First World War (WWI) internment camp in Australia. In contrast to most WWI internment camps around the world, its almost six thousand 'enemy alien' internees were a mixture of civilians – most of whom called Australia home before the war – merchant sailors and naval personnel. For this diverse group of men, the theatre was more than entertainment; it was an important way to spend their time meaningfully. We argue that this meaning was strongly connected to the (re)negotiation of identity through theatre, allowing the internees to contribute to the war effort understood at the time in German public discourse as a 'Kulturkrieg', a battle for the survival of German culture. Theatre‐makers and audiences (re)engaged with their Germanness through ideas of 'Kameradschaft', German diligence and the joint duty of 'durchhalten' – 'making do'. The critical importance of female impersonation in the achievement of the theatre's cultural aims rounds out our analysis of the D.T.L. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion of the fourth-century commentary of Marius Victorinus on Paul's epistle to the Galatians serves as a critical witness to late ancient understanding of Paul's self-identification with the stigmata of Christ (of Gal 6:17), as the marks of his humiliating death on the cross. Echoing Paul on "being crucified with Christ", Victorinus exhorted Christians to follow that example in suffering for their faith, warning them that suffering is inevitable. The present textual study uses linguistic, grammatical, rhetorical, and socio-historical analysis, particularly on the key terms, stigmata and mysterium. It concludes that Victorinus associated these terms to give meaning to trauma and suffering for Christians. The term mysterium in Victorinus' work is closely associated with central aspects of Christ's life and work, especially his crucifixion and death. While rejecting the "history of religions" school of thought on Christian liturgy borrowing from mystery religions, this study concludes that Victorinus' use of the term mysterium reflects a move in fourth century Christianity to adapt language of the mysteries for the sacraments; more particularly, baptism is understood as a symbolic re-enactment of Christ's crucifixion, death and resurrection. Such an approach enhances the meaning of suffering in terms of service to Christ, for in baptism Christians share not only in Christ's death, as suffering "with Christ", but also in his resurrection, as victory over sin, suffering and death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the use of social media platforms, this study seeks to shed light on the legal definition of impersonation, its history, the rationale behind its criminalization, the strategy employed by the criminal justice system to address it, and how unique this offense is in comparison to other similar ones. To ascertain the extent and boundaries of criminalization under the new Jordanian Cybercrime Act, the researcher used a descriptive and analytical technique to present the criminal law text of impersonation and analyze its content. This research discovered that Jordanian Cybercrime Act No. 17 of 2023 was exceptional in that it rendered impersonation on social media platforms illegal. However, because the primary characteristic of this offense's structure is its technological nature, it has proven challenging to define the boundaries and content of the offense, as well as the fact that impersonation in its new form is distinct from fraud, invasion of privacy, overstepping privacy, and illegal access. The study concludes by recommending that the minimum and maximum limits of the monetary penalty be lowered. It also highlights the necessity for the Jordanian legislature to outlaw impersonation under the Penal Code because it can be committed in real life by common means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article emerges from a series of phone calls with the visual artist Beth Emily Richards in anticipation of her exhibition Poor Copy at The Northern Charter in Newcastle and Jerwood Arts London in 2018. A gossipy piece, it draws lines of connection between telephones, telepathic cats, urban legends and 'King of Pop' Michael Jackson's apparent visitation to Devon in 2003. This visit which, as lore goes, is also contested forms the basis for Richards' subsequent show and sustained engagement with contemporary mythmaking. Calling up lovers of the telephone Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and Avital Ronell, celebrity impersonators and television illusionists, this article writes in and through the mystics of 'electric speech'. The outmoded phone call is engaged as both a 'conduit for thought' and a poor copy – the line is cut or stalked, or a story is interrupted or interfered with – revealing a forensic fascination with the sinister and the unknown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet has advanced so quickly that we can now access any service at any time, from any location. As a result of this capability, People around the world can benefit from the popularity and convenience of teleworking systems. Teleworking systems, however, are vulnerable to a range of attacks; as an unauthorized user enters the open communication line and compromises the whole system, that, in turn, creates a big hurdle for the teleworkers. Professional groups have presented numerous mechanisms for the security of teleworking systems to stop any harm, but there are still a lot of security issues like insider, stolen verifier, masquerade, replay, traceability and impersonation threats. In this paper, we propose that one of the security issues with teleworking systems is the lack of a secure authentication mechanism. In order to provide a secure teleworking environment, we have proposed a lightweight and secure protocol to authenticate all the participants and make the requisite services available in an efficient manner. The security analysis of the presented protocol has been investigated formally using the random oracle model (ROM) and ProVerif simulation and informally through illustration/attack discussions. Meanwhile, the performance metrics have been measured by considering computation and communication overheads. Upon comparing the proposed protocol with prior works, it has been demonstrated that our protocol is superior to its competitors. It is suitable for implementation because it achieved a 73% improvement in computation and 34% in communication costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), impersonation, eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle and other attacks occur in the process of communication between entities through public channels, which will lead to the leakage of user privacy or the incorrect issuance of control instructions, resulting in economic losses and even power system operation failures. In view of this situation, we design a lightweight key agreement scheme based on a chaotic map for the AMI. We use the chaotic map to replace the time-consuming bilinear pairing and elliptic curve method and establish a secure communication channel between legal entities. In addition, we also design a multicast key generation mechanism for message transmission in AMI. The security analysis proves the security of the proposed scheme in the random oracle model, which can meet the security characteristics of anonymity and forward secrecy, and can effectively resist common attacks such as impersonation, replay and man-in-the-middle. The performance analysis results show that the proposed scheme requires lower computational and communication costs than related schemes, so it is more suitable for AMI scenarios with limited resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicle‐to‐grid (V2G) network has a clear advantage in terms of economic advantages, it has attracted the interest of electric vehicle (EV) and power grid users. However, numerous security concerns limit its further progress. In existing V2G protocols a trusted third party independently generates the master key of the system, so if the adversary compromises the third party, then the system may become vulnerable to system master key leakage attack. Recently, Su et al. presented a privacy‐preserving mutual authentication protocol for V2G networks. Firstly, we crypt‐analysis Su et al.'s protocol and show that their protocol is vulnerable to several security attacks such as the reveal of the master secret key, impersonation attacks and the incorrect notion of EV's anonymity and traceability and does not meet the security features they claimed in their paper. Secondly, we verify that Su et al.'s protocol is unsafe against impersonation attacks, system key leakage, and electrical vehicle anonymity attack using the AVISPA tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicular ad‐hoc networks (VANETs) are mobile networks intended to connect vehicles and provide secure communication. In this direction, many researchers worked on establishing secure communication in VANETs. However, VANETs still face potential security and privacy issues due to network openness. In this paper, we proposed a secure communication system for VANETs with privacy, consisting of an Enhanced privacy‐preserving mutual authentication procedure for safe communication in V2V and deriving a session key using vehicle identities and time stamps the secret values (nonce) shared during the session. Further, we compared the proposed technique with existing techniques, and satisfactory results were obtained in favor of the proposed less computation. Finally, a formal security model is established to secure against unknown key share attacks, replay attacks, and key‐compromised impersonation attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By matching and contrasting electoral registry data with information gathered through a survey conducted with candidates for municipal and state legislative offices in the State of Morelos during the 2020-2021 electoral process, the effectiveness of electoral quotas for people with disabilities, Afrodescendants, and lgbtiq+ individuals is examined. The study found that identity impersonation is more common among municipal candidates than among those running for legislative positions, and that some individuals self-identified as vulnerable groups are not registered as part of an electoral affirmative action by political parties. The findings of this study contribute to the affirmative action debates by reflecting on the barriers to descriptive representation, self-identification criteria, and factors behind identity impersonation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In critical pandemic situations, the Telecare Medical Information System (TMIS) is a technological invention that offers secure and authentic patient registration and medical services remotely. Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) uses TMIS to facilitate users/patients with remote medical services. Numerous schemes for authentication have been developed for secure and authentic communication to prevent security attacks encompassing replay, impersonation, and forgery attacks. Ryu et al. have proposed an ECC-based mutual authentication scheme in 2022. Nevertheless, through security scheme analysis, we have evidenced that Ryu et al.'s scheme has a trapdoor for insider attacks and privileged insider attacks. Their proposed scheme offers no assurance of server anonymity. In this paper, we propose a three-factor authentication system based on ECC that protects sensitive patient data from getting out during communication and protects against different types of security attacks. We have conducted an informal security analysis to verify that our scheme withstands security attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This discussion of the fourth-century commentary of Marius Victorinus on Paul’s epistle to the Galatians serves as a critical witness to late ancient understanding of Paul’s self-identification with the stigmata of Christ (of Gal 6:17), as the marks of his humiliating death on the cross. Echoing Paul on “being crucified with Christ”, Victorinus exhorted Christians to follow that example in suffering for their faith, warning them that suffering is inevitable. The present textual study uses linguistic, grammatical, rhetorical, and socio-historical analysis, particularly on the key terms, stigmata and mysterium. It concludes that Victorinus associated these terms to give meaning to trauma and suffering for Christians. The term mysterium in Victorinus’ work is closely associated with central aspects of Christ’s life and work, especially his crucifixion and death. While rejecting the “history of religions” school of thought on Christian liturgy borrowing from mystery religions, this study concludes that Victorinus’ use of the term mysterium reflects a move in fourth century Christianity to adapt language of the mysteries for the sacraments; more particularly, baptism is understood as a symbolic reenactment of Christ’s crucifixion, death and resurrection. Such an approach enhances the meaning of suffering in terms of service to Christ, for in baptism Christians share not only in Christ’s death, as suffering “with Christ”, but also in his resurrection, as victory over sin, suffering and death.