ABSTRACT
Wearable devices that collect data about human beings are widely used in healthcare applications. Once collected, the health data will be securely transmitted to smartphones in most scenarios. Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) can protect wireless communications between wearables and smartphones, and a typical solution is the Bluetooth Secure Simple Pairing (SSP) protocol with numeric comparison. However, this protocol requires equivalent computation on both devices, even though their computational capabilities are significantly different. This paper proposes a lightweight numeric comparison protocol for communications in which two parties have unbalanced computational capabilities, e.g., a wearable sensor and a smartphone, named UnBalanced secure Pairing using numeric comparison (UB-Pairing for short). The security of UB-Pairing is analyzed using the modified Bellare-Rogaway model (mBR). The analysis results show that UB-Pairing achieves the security goals. We also carry out a number of experiments to evaluate the performance of UB-Pairing. The results show that UB-Pairing is friendly to wearable devices, and more efficient than standard protocols when the computation capabilities of the two communication parties are highly unbalanced.
ABSTRACT
This study aimed to explore the application value of new biological specimen oral fluid in SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid and antibody detection. Oral fluid and paired respiratory and blood specimens from 7 confirmed cases of two COVID-19 cluster epidemic were collected in Beijing from October to November 2021. SARS-CoV-2 virus and IgG antibody were detected by real time PCR kits and serum antibody detection reagents, and SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibody in oral fluids was detected by a new established method of magnetic particle chemiluminescence. The results showed that the nucleic acid amplification test of SARS-CoV-2 on nasopharyngeal swabs, throat swabs and oral fluid specimens from 3 confirmed cases of COVID-19 was positive, among which the Ct value for ORF1a/b and N gene of oral fluid samples in 2 cases was close to that of throat swab, and the Ct value of oral fluid sample for 1 case was higher than that of throat swab. The complete genome sequence of one oral fluid specimen was obtained, which belonged to the VOC/Delta variant strain. The SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies of the paired oral fluid and serum were all positive, and the S/CO values of oral fluid were all lower than those of serum. The series of oral fluid results showed that SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibody level increased from 11 to 32 days after the onset of the disease.