ABSTRACT
Videoconferencing platforms have received a large influx of traffic due to COVID-19 and the global pandemic it has caused. Professionals, students, politicians, and high-risk security individuals utilize these platforms to communicate with their colleagues. They blindly trust these platforms without understanding how secure they are, and their sensitive data may be vulnerable as it is transmitted through these third party platforms. Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams are the most popular among the platforms, and they are examined in this paper. These platforms’ security aspects were to be evaluated by simulating calls within a virtual environment, capturing the network traffic sent to/from the network, and analyzing the captured traffic to determine what information outside listeners had access to. It was discovered that these platforms utilized state-of-the-art encryption methods, but they did not provide end-to-end encryption since vendors as third parties have access to the end-user communication data. It was also discovered that some strange TCP connections were being established as well as unknown DNS communications. It also found TCP communications running in the background. This suggests that the platforms are not being transparent with users, and this could generate potential security concerns with users. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
As the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic second wave is emerging, it is of the upmost importance to screen the population immunity in order to keep track of infected individuals. Consequently, immunoassays for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) with high specificity and positive predictive values are needed to obtain an accurate epidemiological picture. As more data accumulate about the immune responses and the kinetics of neutralizing-antibody (nAb) production in SARS-CoV-2-infected individuals, new applications are forecast for serological assays such as nAb activity prediction in convalescent-phase plasma from recovered patients. This multicenter study, involving six hospital centers, determined the baseline clinical performances, reproducibility, and nAb level correlations of 10 commercially available immunoassays. In addition, three lateral-flow chromatography assays were evaluated, as these devices can be used in logistically challenged areas. All assays were evaluated using the same patient panels in duplicate, thus enabling accurate comparison of the tests. Seven immunoassays examined in this study were shown to have excellent specificity (98 to 100%) and good to excellent positive predictive values (82 to 100%) when used in a low (5%)-seroprevalence setting. We observed sensitivities as low as 74% and as high as 95% at ≥15 days after symptom onset. The determination of optimized cutoff values through receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analyses had a significant impact on the diagnostic resolution of several enzyme immunoassays by increasing the sensitivity significantly without a large trade-off in specificity. We found that spike-based immunoassays seem to be better correlates of nAb activity. Finally, the results reported here will add to the general knowledge of the interlaboratory reproducibility of clinical performance parameters of immunoassays and provide new evidence about nAb activity prediction.