Development and authentication of Panax ginseng cv. Sunhong with high yield and multiple tolerance to heat damage, rusty roots and lodging.

Ginseng (Panax ginseng) has been used as a valuable medicinal plant in Asia, and the demand for ginseng production for health functional food is increasing worldwide after the COVID-19 crisis. Although a number of cultivars have been developed to increase ginseng production, none of them were widely cultivated in Korea because they could not resist various environmental stresses while being grown in one place for at least 4 years. To address this, Sunhong was developed as a ginseng cultivar with high yield and multiple stress tolerance by pure line selection. Sunhong showed high yield and heat tolerance comparable to Yunpoong, a representative high-yielding cultivar, and exhibited 1.4 times lower prevalence of rusty roots than Yunpoong, suggesting that Sunhong can keep its high yield and quality during long-term cultivation. In addition, distinct color and lodging resistance were expected to increase the convenience of cultivation. To supply pure seeds to farmers, we also established a reliable high-throughput authentication system for Sunhong and seven ginseng cultivars through genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) analysis. The GBS approach enabled to identify a sufficient number of informative SNPs in ginseng, a heterozygous and polyploid species. These results contribute to the improvement of yield, quality, and homogeneity, and therefore promote the ginseng industry. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13580-023-00526-x.

Advances in medical image watermarking: a state of the art review.

Watermarking has been considered to be a potent and persuasive gizmo for its application in healthcare setups that work online, especially in the current COVID-19 scenario. The security and protection of medical image data from various manipulations that take place over the internet is a topic of concern that needs to be addressed. A detailed review of security and privacy protection using watermarking has been presented in this paper. Watermarking of medical images helps in the protection of image content, authentication of Electronic Patient Record (EPR), and integrity verification. At first, we discuss the various prerequisites of medical image watermarking systems, followed by the classification of Medical Image Watermarking Techniques (MIWT) that include state-of-the-art. We have classified MIWT's into four broader classes for providing better understanding of medical image watermarking. The existing schemes have been presented along with their cons so that the reader may be able to grasp the shortcomings of the technique in order to develop novel techniques proving the inevitability of the presented review. Further, various evaluation parameters along with potential challenges pertaining to medical image watermarking systems have been discussed to provide a deep insight into this research area.

Privacy-Preserving Fast Three-Factor Authentication and Key Agreement for IoT-Based E-Health Systems

Electronic healthcare (e-health) systems have received renewed interest, particularly in the current COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., lockdowns and changes in hospital policies due to the pandemic). However, ensuring security of both data-at-rest and data-in-transit remains challenging to achieve, particularly since data is collected and sent from less insecure devices (e.g., patients' wearable or home devices). While there have been a number of authentication schemes, such as those based on three-factor authentication, to provide authentication and privacy protection, a number of limitations associated with these schemes remain (e.g., (in)security or computationally expensive). In this study, we present a privacy-preserving three-factor authenticated key agreement scheme that is sufficiently lightweight for resource-constrained e-health systems. The proposed scheme enables both mutual authentication and session key negotiation in addition to privacy protection, with minimal computational cost. The security of the proposed scheme is demonstrated in the Real-or-Random model. Experiments using Raspberry Pi show that the proposed scheme achieves reduced computational cost (of up to 89.9% in comparison to three other related schemes).

A Secure and Efficient Scheme for Mutual Authentication for Integrity of Exchanged Data in IoMT

The emergence of pandemic diseases like Covid-19 in recent years has made it more important for Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) environments to build contact between patients and doctors in order to control their health state. Patients will be able to send their healthcare data to the cloud server of the medical service provider in remote medical environments through sensors connected to their smart devices, such as watches or smartphones. However, patients' worries surrounding their data privacy protection are still present. In order to ensure the security and privacy of patients' healthcare data in remote medical environments, a number of different schemes have been proposed by researchers. However, these schemes have not been able to take all security requirements into account. Consequently, in this study, we have proposed a secure and effective protocol to safeguard the privacy of patients' medical data when it is sent to the server. This protocol entails two components: mutual authentication of the patient and the server of the medical service provider, as well as the integrity of the exchanged data. Also, our scheme satisfies security requirements and is resistant to well-known attacks. Following this, we used the Scyther tool to formally analyze our proposed scheme. The results showed that the scheme is secure, and in the section on performance analysis, we demonstrated that the proposed scheme performs better than comparable schemes. © 2023 IEEE.

Supply Chain Authentication for Vaccine Passport Using Blockchain

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the creation of vaccination passports as a means of verifying an individual's vaccination status for travel and access to certain services. The validity of immunization records and supply chain procedures, however, are significant issues. The supply chain for vaccination passports has been called for to be made more secure and transparent using blockchain technology. To ensure safe and effective supply chain management, this article suggests a blockchain-based authentication mechanism for vaccination passports. The issuer, the prover, and the verifier will be the system's three key actors. The issuer will be in charge of producing inventory tokens and providing immunization certificates. The prover will verify the authenticity of the vaccination supply chain, and the verifier will ensure that the inventory token is legitimate. The proposed system will enhance transparency, security, and efficiency in the supply chain for vaccination passports, thereby improving the trustworthiness of vaccination records and facilitating safe travel during the pandemic. © 2023 IEEE.

Approach for Blockchain Technology Implementation in Indian Courts for Speedy Disposal of Cases

Blockchain as a technology if implemented judiciously will prove to be effective and efficient for both private as well public sector enterprises. The use cases in Blockchain provide ample demonstration of improvement in the processes. The paper intends to provide insight into the application of Blockchain in the Indian Judiciary System. Some of the benefits as envisaged by the Blockchain implementation are time-efficient, cost-effective, greater security, and transparency resulting enhancement of trust in the overall working of the legal system. India's global counterparts such as Estonia, China, the UK, Ghana, Ukraine, Canada, and Sweden have already integrated the Blockchain into their legal system. The judicial system in India is under tremendous pressure. According to the data from National Judicial Data Grid, 4.7 Crore cases are pending as on May 2022 at different levels of the judiciary, out of which 1.82 Lac cases have been pending for at least 30 years. For many years courts have been following the traditional working system, but during the Covid-19 pandemic, the courts have adopted the e-justice paradigm via online case hearings and video conferencing. Since, the system has already experienced the use of digital platforms, the experimentation if continued post-pandemic will yield a faster and better result. The technological advancements should complement the traditional working systems for the greater benefit of the entire system. The overall objective of the paper is to explore the application of Blockchain that will help improve the efficiency and transparency in operations in the Indian Judicial system. © 2023 IEEE.

A novel authentication protocol to ensure confidentiality among the Internet of Medical Things in covid-19 and future pandemic scenario.

Diagnosing the patients remotely, controlling the medical equipment, and monitoring the quarantined patients are some of the necessary and frequent activities in COVID-19. Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) makes this works easy and feasible. Sharing information from patients and sensors associated with the patients to doctors is always an integral part of IoMT. Unauthorized access to such information may invite adversaries to disturb patients financially and mentally; furthermore, leaks in its confidentiality will lead to dangerous health concerns for patients. While ensuring authentication and confidentiality, We must focus on the constraints of IoMT, such as low energy consumption, deficient memory, and the dynamic nature of devices. Numerous protocols have been proposed for authentication in healthcare systems such as IoMT and telemedicine. However, many of these protocols were neither computationally efficient nor provided confidentiality, anonymity, and resistance against several attacks. In the proposed protocol, we have considered the most common scenario of IoMT and tried to overcome the limitations of existing works. Describing the system module and security analysis proves it is a panacea for COVID-19 and future pandemics.

Cardless Cash Withdrawal Using Palm Vein Technology

Generally, the easiest way to withdraw money from your bank account is by using an Automated Teller Machine (ATM). The user can withdraw the money by inserting their card into the slot on the machine, and then entering a four-digit Personal Identification Number (PIN) to complete the transaction process. Similarly, some banks adopted the method of using a One Time Password (OTP) to complete the transaction process to make it more secure. With the recent advancements in technology, there are many new methods that can be used for withdrawing money from ATMs, like cardless cash withdrawal or using one's biometrics. But, due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, we refrain from using things that are not sanitized properly. People started avoiding going to the ATMs since hygiene was a major concern during the pandemic. Also, due to the constant hand washing and the use of sanitizers, the use of conventional biometrics was not efficient. As a result, the idea of using a method that is contact-less and is also more secure emerged, i.e., the palm vein technology. The palm vein technology uses a person's vein pattern, which is unique to everyone and can help us achieve better results with greater accuracy. The paper proposes a concept of using a person's vein pattern as a method of contact-less authentication. It is an extremely safe verification procedure because no two people in the world, not even identical twins, can have the same palm vein structure or pattern. Additionally, it is more secure because it is nearly impossible to replicate the palm vein pattern. © 2022 IEEE.

Authentication of Tinospora cordifolia derived herbal supplements using high resolution mass spectrometry-based metabolomics approach – A pilot study

Tinospora cordifolia herbal supplements have recently gained prominence due to their promising immunomodulatory and anti-viral effects against SARS-CoV-2. Mislabelling or diluting Tinospora supplements for profit may harm public health. Thus, validating the label claim of these supplements in markets is critical. This study investigated how high resolution mass spectrometry-based metabolomics and chemometrics can be used to distinguish Tinospora cordifolia from two other closely related species (T. crispa and T. sinensis). The Orthogonal Partial Least Square Discriminant Analysis (OPLS-DA) and PLS-DA based chemometric models predicted the species identity of Tinospora with 94.44% accuracy. These classification models were trained using 54 T. cordifolia, 21 T. crispa, and 21 T. sinensis samples. We identified 7 biomarkers, including corydine, malabarolide, ecdysterone, and reticuline, which discriminated Tinospora cordifolia from the two other species. The label claim of 25 commercial Tinospora samples collected from different parts of India was verified based on the relative abundance of the biomarker compounds, of which 20 were found authentic. The relative abundance of biomarkers significantly varied in the 5 suspicious market samples. This pilot study demonstrates a robust metabolomic approach for authenticating Tinospora species, which can further be used in other herbal matrices for product authentication and securing quality. © 2023 Elsevier B.V.

A Comprehensive Review on Access Control Systems amid Global Pandemic

In the contemporary time of technology, security is the utmost concern for every building automation system. Access Control Systems are the backbone of any security system being employed in any intelligent building, and can be operated in a biometric or non-biometric manner. There are various types of recognition systems available, depending upon the required level of safety and security. The ongoing pandemic has challenged and tested Access Control System in many aspects.This paper aims to review the various forms of access control systems and their viability in the context of COVID-19. It is found that some access control solutions fail to provide the required security during this global epidemic due to their contact-based operations. So, in the midst of the worldwide pandemic, a realistic integrated electronic access control system can be designed to meet the requirements of users. © 2022 IEEE.

NF-Heart: A Near-field Non-contact Continuous User Authentication System via Ballistocardiogram

The increasingly remote workforce resulting from the global coronavirus pandemic has caused unprecedented cybersecurity concerns to organizations. Considerable evidence has shown that one-pass authentication fails to meet security needs when the workforce work from home. The recent advent of continuous authentication (CA) has shown the potential to solve this predicament. In this paper, we propose NF-Heart, a physiological-based CA system utilizing a ballistocardiogram (BCG). The key insight is that the BCG measures the body's micro-movements produced by the recoil force of the body in reaction to the cardiac ejection of blood, and we can infer cardiac biometrics from BCG signals. To measure BCG, we deploy a lightweight accelerometer on an office chair, turning the common chair into a smart continuous identity "scanner". We design multiple stages of signal processing to decompose and transform the distorted BCG signals so that the effects of motion artifacts and dynamic variations are eliminated. User-specific fiducial features are then extracted from the processed BCG signals for authentication. We conduct comprehensive experiments on 105 subjects in terms of verification accuracy, security, robustness, and long-term availability. The results demonstrate that NF-Heart achieves a mean balanced accuracy of 96.45% and a median equal error rate of 3.83% for CA. The proposed signal processing pipeline is effective in addressing various practical disturbances.

A robust semi-fragile watermarking system using Pseudo-Zernike moments and dual tree complex wavelet transform for social media content authentication.

With the growing use of mobile devices and Online Social Networks (OSNs), sharing digital content, especially digital images is extremely high as well as popular. This made us convenient to handle the ongoing COVID-19 crisis which has brought about years of change in the sharing of digital content online. On the other hand, the digital image processing tools which are powerful enough to make the perfect image duplication compromises the privacy of the transmitted digital content. Therefore, content authentication, proof of ownership, and integrity of digital images are considered crucial problems in the world of digital that can be accomplished by employing a digital watermarking technique. On contrary, watermarking issues are to triumph trade-offs among imperceptibility, robustness, and payload. However, most existing systems are unable to handle the problem of tamper detection and recovery in case of intentional and unintentional attacks concerning these trade-offs. Also, the existing system fails to withstand the geometrical attacks. To resolve the above shortcomings, this proposed work offers a new multi-biometric based semi-fragile watermarking system using Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DTCWT) and pseudo-Zernike moments (PZM) for content authentication of social media data. In this research work, the DTCWT-based coefficients are used for achieving maximum embedding capacity. The Rotation and noise invariance properties of Pseudo Zernike moments make the system attain the highest level of robustness when compared to conventional watermarking systems. To achieve authentication and proof of identity, the watermarks of about four numbers are used for embedding as a replacement for a single watermark image in traditional systems. Among four watermarks, three are the biometric images namely Logo or unique image of the user, fingerprint biometric of the owner, and the metadata of the original media to be transmitted. In addition, to achieve the tamper localization property, the Pseudo Zernike moments of the original cover image are obtained as a feature vector and also embedded as a watermark. To attain a better level of security, each watermark is converted into Zernike moments, Arnold scrambled image, and SHA outputs respectively. Then, to sustain the trade-off among the watermarking parameters, the optimal embedding location is determined. Moreover, the watermarked image is also signed by the owner's other biometric namely digital signature, and converted into Public key matrix Pkm and embedded onto the higher frequency subband namely, HL of the 1-level DWT. The proposed system also accomplishes a multi-level authentication, among that the first level is attained by the decryption of the extracted multiple watermark images with the help of the appropriate decryption mechanism which is followed by the comparison of the authentication key which is extracted using the key which is regenerated at the receiver's end. The simulation outcomes evident that the proposed system shows superior performance towards content authentication, to most remarkable intentional and unintentional attacks among the existing watermarking systems.

A Study on Digital Signature in Blockchain Technology

In the recent trends, block chain technology plays a vital role due to its secured methodology. Since many parts of the world severely affected by COVID pandemic situation, people used to perform more of digital transactions day by day. To provide more security for all online transactions, Block chain Technology is one of the solutions that many countries have started to utilize. Every block in a block chain should be validated and verified by the secured hash algorithms and digital signatures. Since Hacking is difficult in Block Chain Technology, due to its secure hash process, many people started using it for various applications. This article discusses about the working of Digital Signatures especially about Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm - ECDSA. Digital signatures are signatures done digitally for the purpose of security. ECDSA works on the mechanism of Elliptic Curve and Cryptography algorithms of Elliptic curve. The proposed research work has selected the private key as a random point, which is of type integer ranging between 1 and n-1 in Elliptic curve to sign documents. Then Public key is calculated by multiplying a point from elliptic curve with the Private key. Using this Public key, our digital signature is verified. This is much secured because no one can crack/hack private key. This process is used to verify digital transactions in the block chain technology. Our study helps researcher in block chain technologies to proceed ahead. © 2023 IEEE.

This work was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health under award number P50NS108676 and Moore Foundation

The increasingly remote workforce resulting from the global coronavirus pandemic has caused unprecedented cybersecurity concerns to organizations. Considerable evidence has shown that one-pass authentication fails to meet security needs when the workforce work from home. The recent advent of continuous authentication (CA) has shown the potential to solve this predicament. In this paper, we propose NF-Heart, a physiological-based CA system utilizing a ballistocardiogram (BCG). The key insight is that the BCG measures the body's micro-movements produced by the recoil force of the body in reaction to the cardiac ejection of blood, and we can infer cardiac biometrics from BCG signals. To measure BCG, we deploy a lightweight accelerometer on an office chair, turning the common chair into a smart continuous identity "scanner". We design multiple stages of signal processing to decompose and transform the distorted BCG signals so that the effects of motion artifacts and dynamic variations are eliminated. User-specific fiducial features are then extracted from the processed BCG signals for authentication. We conduct comprehensive experiments on 105 subjects in terms of verification accuracy, security, robustness, and long-term availability. The results demonstrate that NF-Heart achieves a mean balanced accuracy of 96.45% and a median equal error rate of 3.83% for CA. The proposed signal processing pipeline is effective in addressing various practical disturbances. © 2023 ACM.

Experiences in the use of a unique open-book exam paper for every student in a cohort

Accounting and Finance is a core module for undergraduate students taking the Bachelor or Integrated Undergraduate Masters in Electronic Engineering with Business Management and in the taught Masters in Engineering Management at. the University of York. It is also a popular option module for all Electronic Engineering undergraduate programmes. It is traditionally assessed by a 2 question from 4 closed book exam testing students' knowledge and understanding of the subject at its application to Engineering business problems. One of the many consequences of Covid was the inability to hold closed book exams and a switch mas made to an open book exam where students were required to answer 4 from 4 questions. This change had the advantage of testing more of the module learning outcomes but the disadvantages of opening the module up for cheating and a doubling of the marking load. With the cohort size just under 200 students the issuing of all students with a unique exam was trialed together with automatically marking as much as possible. The pilot was successful in that a unique exam was sent to 94% of the students and most questions could be marked automatically. The paper describes the automation process and provides recommendations on how this could be improved up. © 2022 IEEE.

Unlocking education through relationship building: Identity and agency in English educational institutions during Covid‐19

This paper reports on a longitudinal study in the North of England with 13 educators in schools, colleges and universities during two lockdowns. The project was designed to ‘unlock' education by providing spaces to co‐create new ways of thinking about education in light of the Covid‐19 pandemic. Focus groups were conducted with school and college teachers as well as university staff at the end of the first and second English lockdowns, in summer 2020 and spring 2021. An initial analysis identified issues with expectations and communication between educators and executive management as well as a lack of agency of educators, and how participants framed them as impacting on their identity as educators. Therefore, the framework of tactics of intersubjectivity was adopted to explore how educators discursively positioned themselves and others through constructions of similarity and difference, realness and power, and how their professional identities were affected by the experience of working through the pandemic and by those around them. Whilst educators took opportunities to authenticate their identity and reimagine education, their agency was undermined by top‐down governing involving little successful communication, leading to denaturalising and illegitimising experiences for educators. Executive management were perceived as lacking engagement with staff and understanding of the implications of their decisions on them. The findings call for relationship building and recognition of educators' voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of British Educational Research Journal is the property of Wiley-Blackwell 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.)

Covid-19 Contactless Remedies for Students in Educational Institutes

As we all know fingerprint recognition is one of the secure and accurate Biometric Technologies. If think about it in deep even with the Biometric system the virus can be spread during these situations. To overcome this, we need to come up with a secure and contactless way of authentication. So, let's update to some contactless remedies like Iris authentication which are unique for every individual and they don't need to have any physical contact. So, we can use this Iris detection for a secure and contactless authentication system. The main aim of this research is to provide contactless remedies for students in Educational institutes like Smart Locking system, Attendance management system, and Library Transaction by using their Iris authentication and Face Recognition. Coming to the outline of the attendance management system, we will first collect the data from the Kaggle repository. Next, we split the data into training and testing, then we will train the data using transfer learning techniques and test the model by using test data. Finally, we integrated the trained model with the flask. If the Iris matches then the attendance of a particular person will be posted. If not matched then we train the model by adding new person's data. For the construction of modern electronic security systems, real-time face recognition is crucial. Face detection, feature extraction, and face recognition are the three procedures involved. After recognizing the face, it will check whether the person's face matches the collected database. If it matches it will show the person's name, the number of books he took, and what those books are for Library transactions and in the same way the locker will be open if the person's data is matched. The proposed methods are secure and unique contactless ways of authentication for every individual. So, we can use these detection and authentication systems for secure and contactless applications. It can be successfully used for students in Educational institutes like Smart Locking system, Attendance management system, and Library Transaction by using their Iris authentication and Face Recognition. The Covid-19 infection in society will undoubtedly decline if the proposed argument is implemented. © 2023 The authors and IOS Press.

A Study of Cryptographic Primitives in the context of Blockchain's Data Integrity and Privacy

In Today's World, Blockchain is a promising Technology in all areas;things have also been drastically changed after COVID-19;challenges surfaced for implementing blockchain technology in the context of its computational complexity and security. After invention of it in 2008, cryptocurrency applications, i.e., Bitcoin it also getting introduced in Different applications. One of the Major Building blocks of Blockchain is Cryptography techniques. This paper discusses Cryptographic primitives used in different phases of Blockchain implementation and the challenges of implementing these cryptographic primitives. Bitcoin uses Cryptographic primitives to generate public-private key pairs and mining, while Ethereum uses Elliptic curve cryptography to create public-private keys and digital signatures. This paper divided uses of cryptographic primitives into three categories used in Blockchains, i.e., key generation Hashes, signature generation hashes, and proof hashes. © 2022 IEEE.

FPGA Based Light Weight Encryption of Medical Data for IoMT Devices using ASCON Cipher

Internet of Things applications with various sensors in public network are vulnerable to cyber physical attacks. The technology of IoT in smart health monitoring systems popularly known as Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices. The rapid growth of remote telemedicine has witnessed in the post COVID era. Data collected over IoMT devices is sensitive and needs security, hence provided by enhancing a light weight encryption module on IoMT device. An authenticated Encryption with Associated Data is employed on the IoMT device to enhance the security to the medical wellness of patient. This paper presents FPGA-based implementation of ASCON-128, a light weight cipher for data encryption. A LUT6 based substitution box (SBOX) is implemented on FPGA as part of cipher permutation block. The proposed architecture takes 1330 number of LUTs, which is 35% less compared to the best existing design. Moreover, the proposed ASCON architecture has improved the throughput by 45% compared to the best existing design. This paper presents the results pertaining to encryption and decryption of medical data as well as normal images. © 2022 IEEE.

Machine Learning based Automated Product Billing and Inventory

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions were imposed to stop the spread of the virus. As a result, the shopping malls, retail stores and grocery stores had to be shut down leading to significant losses. Though online shopping is always an option, buying daily groceries online is not a feasible option due to delivery times. As the world is now recovering from the pandemic, people have now started visiting malls, retail stores and other places for buying grocery items. In such situation it then becomes very crucial to help people shop more efficiently to reduce the buying time. This will help to keep the crowd under control without jeopardizing the safety and social distance norms. The major problem with most top retail stores is that the customer must wait in long queues after buying their products for getting them billed and payment. This puts pressure on the management and billing staff as well as makes the process of shopping a time consuming and unpleasant experience for the customer. The other issue is that most retail stores waste a significant area of their shop in setting up the billing counters and furthermore also must recruit people for running the billing counters. This project proposes a way of solving the above-mentioned problems and issues with the help of a smart shopping cart. A cart with built in billing and product scanning system which will prepare the bill as the customer is shopping, thus saving customer's valuable time, area of the shop and eliminating the need for recruiting employees for billing. © 2022 IEEE.