The burden of secrecy in the management of multimorbidity in older people living with HIV aged 70 and over.

The secrecy surrounding HIV continues to be a major concern for older people living with HIV (OPWH) despite their long-term experience of HIV and the presence of other chronic diseases. Our study aims to highlight how the secrecy surrounding HIV can affect the management of the other conditions. The results of this socio-anthropological sub-study of the ANRS EP66 SEPTAVIH study, which assesses frailty in OPWH, are based on in-depth interviews conducted with 20 OPWH with multimorbidities aged 70 years and over and 9 caregivers. Based on a cross-sectional thematic analysis, this study shows that HIV infection differs from other chronic diseases due to the secrecy and stigma associated with HIV. These specific issues associated with HIV complicate the lives of OPWH, depriving them of support from loved ones and forcing them to exclude their general practitioner from their care system. This then causes OPWH with multiple chronic diseases to become socially vulnerable and isolated. Interventions that support the sharing of information on HIV among OPWH and also among caregivers need to be identified as a matter of urgency in order to improve the lives and management of OPWH with multimorbidities.Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT03958786.

Refinements and Extensions of Ziv's Model of Perfect Secrecy for Individual Sequences.

We refine and extend Ziv's model and results regarding perfectly secure encryption of individual sequences. According to this model, the encrypter and the legitimate decrypter share a common secret key that is not shared with the unauthorized eavesdropper. The eavesdropper is aware of the encryption scheme and has some prior knowledge concerning the individual plaintext source sequence. This prior knowledge, combined with the cryptogram, is harnessed by the eavesdropper, who implements a finite-state machine as a mechanism for accepting or rejecting attempted guesses of the plaintext source. The encryption is considered perfectly secure if the cryptogram does not provide any new information to the eavesdropper that may enhance their knowledge concerning the plaintext beyond their prior knowledge. Ziv has shown that the key rate needed for perfect secrecy is essentially lower bounded by the finite-state compressibility of the plaintext sequence, a bound that is clearly asymptotically attained through Lempel-Ziv compression followed by one-time pad encryption. In this work, we consider some more general classes of finite-state eavesdroppers and derive the respective lower bounds on the key rates needed for perfect secrecy. These bounds are tighter and more refined than Ziv's bound, and they are attained using encryption schemes that are based on different universal lossless compression schemes. We also extend our findings to the case where side information is available to the eavesdropper and the legitimate decrypter but may or may not be available to the encrypter.

Strategic In/Visibility of Turkish Egg Donors: Reproductive Labor, Secrecy, and Stigma in the Transnational Bioeconomy.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a Northern Cypriot clinic, I examine how practices of secrecy function as strategic tools for invisibilization in the lived realities of Turkish egg donors engaged in an illicit, gendered, and stigmatized form of reproductive labor, both within and across national borders. Combining feminist studies of reproductive labor with an analysis of secrecy, stigma, and dirty work, I adopt a notion of secrecy as an embodied social practice to explore ethnographically how secrecy is integral to the bioavailability of Turkish egg donors. Secret practices enable these young women to intimately navigate gendered moral, health, socio-legal, and financial concerns within the challenging wider context of restrictive reproductive biopolitics, a legally ambigious cross-border biomedical market, fragile socio-economic conditions, and a heteropatriarchal sexual culture in Turkey. For Turkish egg donors, who opt for strategic invisibilization, moral and financial concerns sometimes override health and legal considerations. Secrecy sustains this transnational bioeconomy while simultaneously concealing its exploitative harms and risks.

Enhancing Security in Visible Light Communication: A Tabu-Search-Based Method for Transmitter Selection.

In this paper, we explore the secrecy performance of a visible light communication (VLC) system consisting of distributed light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and multiple users (UEs) randomly positioned within an indoor environment while considering the presence of an eavesdropper. To enhance the confidentiality of the system, we formulate a problem of maximizing the sum secrecy rate for UEs by searching for an optimal LED for each UE. Due to the non-convex and non-continuous nature of this security maximization problem, we propose an LED selection algorithm based on tabu search to avoid getting trapped in local optima and expedite the search process by managing trial vectors from previous iterations. Moreover, we introduce three LED selection strategies with a low computational complexity. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves a secrecy performance very close to the global optimal value, with a gap of less than 1%. Additionally, the proposed strategies exhibit a performance gap of 28% compared to the global optimal.

Must the Reality of Death Be Unspeakable?

Attention to the manifestations of death anxiety in the clinical context is often absent in the discourse of psychoanalytic training. This exchange addresses some of the causes of such an absence: a fraught relation between privacy and secrecy, primacy of psychic reality and interpretation, and cultural underpinnings of sanitization of death.

A new lattice-based password authenticated key exchange scheme with anonymity and reusable key.

In this article, we propose a novel bilateral generalization inhomogenous short integer solution (BiGISIS)-based password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) scheme for post-quantum era security. The hardness assumption of the constructed PAKE is based on newly proposed hard lattice problem, BiGISIS. The main aim of this article is to provide a solution for the post-quantum secure PAKE scheme, which is one of the open problems in the literature. The proposed PAKE is the first BiGISIS-based PAKE that satisfies anonymity and reusable key features. The bilateral-pasteurization (BiP) approach is used to obtain the reusable key, and anonymity is achieved thanks to the additional identity components and hash functions. The reusable key structure reduces the time in the key generation, and anonymity prevents illegal user login attempts. The security analysis is done by following the real-or-random (RoR) model assumptions. As a result of security examinations, perfect forward secrecy (PFS) and integrity are satisfied, and the resistance against eavesdropping, manipulation-based attack (MBA), hash function simulation, impersonation, signal leakage attack (SLA), man-in-the-middle (MitM), known-key security (KKS), and offline password dictionary attack (PDA) is captured. According to the comparison analysis, the proposed PAKE is the first SLA-resistant lattice-based PAKE with reusable key and anonymity properties.

Secrecy in Everyday Life.

Secrecy is common, yet we know little about how it plays out in daily life. Most existing research on secrecy is based on methods involving retrospection over long periods of time, failing to capture secrecy "in the wild." Filling this gap, we conducted two studies using intensive longitudinal designs to present the first picture of secrecy in everyday life. We investigated momentary contextual factors and individual differences as predictors of mind-wandering to and concealing secrets. Contextual factors more consistently predicted secrecy experiences than person-level factors. Feeling more negative about a secret predicted a greater likelihood of mind-wandering to the secret. Interacting with the secret target was linked with a greater likelihood of secret concealment. Individual differences were not consistently associated with mind-wandering to secrets. We conclude that daily experiences with secrets may be better predicted by momentary feelings rather than individual differences such as personality traits.

Determinants of intention to conceal tuberculosis status among family members: an analysis of seven Sub-Saharan African countries.

BACKGROUND: Tuberculosis (TB) remains a significant public health burden in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), accounting for about 25% of global TB cases. In several communities, TB diagnosis, treatment, and control have become a critical challenge, largely due to the intention to conceal TB status among family members. It is therefore crucial to understand the factors associated with the intentions to conceal TB status among family members in SSA. METHODS: This quantitative study utilised data from the most recent Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). The objective was to examine the factors associated with the intention to conceal the TB status of family members. The sample consisted of 58,849 individuals aged 10 years or older from seven SSA countries. Binary logistic regression was employed to assess the associations between TB status concealment and various socio-demographic and economic variables. RESULTS: The overall prevalence of TB status concealment intentions for the seven countries was 28.0% (95% CI: 27.6-28.4). Malawi and Eswatini accounted for the highest (47.3%) and lowest (3.0%) prevalence of TB concealment intentions respectively. TB status concealment intentions decreased with increasing age (p < 0.001). Living in rural areas was associated with lower odds of intending to conceal the TB of family members compared to living in urban areas (aOR = 0.92; p = 0.008). Higher education levels were associated with lower odds of TB status concealment intentions (aOR = 0.50; p < 0.001) compared to lower education levels. As participants wealth index increased, the odds of TB status concealment intentions decreased (aOR = 0.83; p < 0.001). Country of residence also showed significant associations with individuals in Ghana (aOR = 4.51; p < 0.001), Lesotho (aOR = 2.08; p < 0.001), Malawi (aOR = 4.10; p < 0.001), Namibia (aOR = 4.40; p < 0.001), and Sao-Tome and Principe (aOR = 5.56; p < 0.001) showing higher odds of TB status concealment intentions compared to Eswatini. CONCLUSIONS: The findings conclude that several social determinants of health, including age, urbanicity, education, and wealth contribute to TB status concealment intentions for family members. Considering these factors is important for designing targeted interventions to improve TB control in the sample. In light of the unavailability of cultural variables in the dataset, future research can leverage qualitative approaches to conduct a more comprehensive exploration of the cultural factors linked to TB status concealment intentions in the population.

Is it time sociology started researching incompetence?

There appears to be a mismatch between apparent incompetence in the world and the amount of sociological research it attracts. The aim of this article is to outline a sociology of incompetence and justify its value. I begin by defining incompetence as unsatisfactory performance relative to standards. Incompetence is thus intrinsically sociological in being negotiated and socially (re)constituted. The next section foregrounds how widespread and serious incompetence is. This renders effective sociological understanding crucial to welfare. The article then systematically analyses uses of the term in the British Journal of Sociology (a good quality general journal) to assess the current state of research. This analysis fully confirms the neglect of incompetence as a research topic. The next section proposes suitable methods for preliminary incompetence research addressing distinctive challenges like the stigma of being incompetent. These sections then allow incompetence to be better contextualised by other contributing concepts like power, bureaucracy and meritocracy. The final section justifies suggestions about directions for future research.

Joint Active and Passive Beamforming in RIS-Assisted Secure ISAC Systems.

This paper investigates joint beamforming in a secure integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system assisted by reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS). The system communicates with legitimate downlink users, detecting a potential target, which is a potential eavesdropper attempting to intercept the downlink communication information from the base station (BS) to legitimate users. To enhance the physical-layer secrecy of the system, we design and introduce interference signals at the BS to disrupt eavesdroppers' attempts to intercept legitimate communication information. The BS simultaneously transmits communication and interference signals, both utilized for communication and sensing to guarantee the sensing and communication quality. By jointly optimizing the BS active beamformer and the RIS passive beamforming matrix, we aim to maximize the achievable secrecy rate and radiation power of the system. We develop an effective scheme to find the active beamforming matrix through fractional programming (FP) and semi-definite programming (SDP) techniques and obtain the RIS phase shift matrix via a local search technique. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in enhancing communication and sensing performance. Additionally, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of introducing the interference signals and RIS in enhancing the physical-layer secrecy of the ISAC system.

Self-concealment, secrecy, and guilt.

OBJECTIVE: Individuals with a tendency to conceal unflattering information about themselves are more likely to be preoccupied by their secrets and tend to report more negative affect. According to theory, this negative affect is due to self-concealers' conflicting motivation to be authentic in their relationship but fear the negative consequences should they reveal their secrets, which promotes ill-fated attempts to suppress. The purpose of the current study was to test a central component of this model. METHODS: Two studies of adults who were in a romantic relationship and keeping a secret from their partner (combined N = 635; 67.2% women; Mage  = 39.6, SD = 11.9) were surveyed on four biweekly occasions. Multilevel mediation analyses were conducted to test whether preoccupation and suppression mediated the link between self-concealing and negative affect and guilt. RESULTS: The data support the hypotheses. Self-concealers were more preoccupied with and prone to suppress their secret than those low on the trait, which, in turn, predicted greater negative affect and guilt. CONCLUSION: The findings suggest that self-concealers' insecurities and fear of the relational consequences of disclosure set the stage for the debilitating cycle of suppression and preoccupation that leaves them feeling anxious and guilty.

Direct-to-consumer genetic testing and the changing landscape of gamete donor conception: key issues for practitioners and stakeholders.

RESEARCH QUESTION: What effect does direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTCGT) have on information finding and sharing in relation to gamete donor conception? DESIGN: This study used in-depth qualitative interviews with parents through donor conception, donors, the relatives of donors and donor-conceived people who have used, or considered using, DTCGT. Interviews were conducted between September 2021 and February 2023. Sixty people defined themselves as having been affected by donor conception and DTCGT. Fifty-seven of these were resident in the UK at the time of interview. The final sample included 19 (spermatozoa, egg or embryo) donors, 25 donor-conceived people, 20 parents through donor conception and two relatives of donors. Five participants occupied more than one of these roles. RESULTS: The rise of DTCGT is affecting how information about donor conception is managed: it shifts patterns of knowledge about donor conception; increases flexibility regarding the age of access to information about donor relatives; can lead to a growing role for non-professionals, including wider family members, in gatekeeping information about donor conception; accentuates the effect of donor conception for donors' and the relatives of donor-conceived people; and shapes, and is shaped, by the formal regulatory donor information management systems. CONCLUSION: Fertility professionals should inform people using, or considering, donor conception, or (potential) donors, about the different ways DTCGT can affect sharing information about donor conception. Support is needed for those affected by these changes.

Novel Noise Injection Scheme to Guarantee Zero Secrecy Outage under Imperfect CSI.

The paper proposes a novel artificial noise (AN) injection strategy in multiple-input single-output multiple-antenna-eavesdropper (MISOME) systems under imperfect channel estimation at the legitimate channel to achieve zero secrecy outage probability under any circumstance. The zero secrecy outage is proved to always be achievable regardless of the eavesdropper's number of antennas or location when the pair secrecy and codeword rates are chosen properly. The results show that when there is perfect channel state information, the zero-outage secrecy throughput increases with the transmit power, which is important for secrecy design. Additionally, an analysis of the secrecy throughput and secrecy energy efficiency gives further insight into the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Views of adolescents living with perinatally acquired HIV on HIV status disclosure in Eswatini.

HIV is recognised as a multifaceted chronic disease, bearing psychosocial consequences that potentially impact on the personal and social well-being of those living with it. Adolescents and youth bear a significant proportion of the burden of the HIV epidemic but they have low rates of disclosure of their HIV status. This study aims to determine the views of adolescents living with perinatally acquired HIV on HIV status disclosure among 361 adolescents aged 15-19 in Eswatini. A cross-sectional study was conducted on adolescents who already knew their status, and data were collected using a structured questionnaire. A majority of the participants, 55% (n = 200), were females, and 44% (n = 160) were males. A low number of adolescents (22%) had disclosed their HIV status to anyone. Adolescents who found it difficult to understand disclosure themselves had low levels of onward disclosure (27%) compared to adolescents who better understood the disclosure event. Our results revealed that adolescents' prevalence of HIV status disclosure was low. This raises concerns as some of the adolescents were in relationships with partners who were not aware of their status. However, older adolescents displayed some level of disclosure self-efficacy in that a higher proportion of them disclosed better than younger adolescents.

Resource Allocation for Secure MIMO-SWIPT Systems in the Presence of Multi-Antenna Eavesdropper in Vehicular Networks.

In this paper, we optimize the secrecy capacity of the legitimate user under resource allocation and security constraints for a multi-antenna environment for the simultaneous transmission of wireless information and power in a dynamic downlink scenario. We study the relationship between secrecy capacity and harvested energy in a power-splitting configuration for a nonlinear energy-harvesting model under co-located conditions. The capacity maximization problem is formulated for the vehicle-to-vehicle communication scenario. The formulated problem is non-convex NP-hard, so we reformulate it into a convex form using a divide-and-conquer approach. We obtain the optimal transmit power matrix and power-splitting ratio values that guarantee positive values of the secrecy capacity. We analyze different vehicle-to-vehicle communication settings to validate the differentiation of the proposed algorithm in maintaining both reliability and security. We also substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by analyzing the trade-offs between secrecy capacity and harvested energy.

SecrecyPerformance Analysis of Backscatter Communications with Side Information.

Backscatter communication (BC) systems are a promising technology for internet of things (IoT) applications that allow devices to transmit information by modulating ambient radio signals without the need for a dedicated power source. However, the security of BC systems is a critical concern due to the vulnerability of the wireless channel. This paper investigates the impact of side information (SI) on the secrecy performance of BC systems. SI mainly refers to the additional knowledge that is available to the communicating parties beyond transmitted data, which can be used to enhance reliability, efficiency, security, and quality of service in various communication systems. In particular, in this paper, by considering a non-causally known SI at the transmitter, we derive compact analytical expressions of average secrecy capacity (ASC) and secrecy outage probability (SOP) for the proposed system model to analyze how SI affects the secrecy performance of BC systems. Moreover, a Monte Carlo simulation validates the accuracy of our analytical results and reveals that considering such knowledge at the transmitter has constructive effects on the system performance and ensures reliable communication with higher rates than the conventional BC systems without SI, namely, lower SOP and higher ASC are achievable.

Information Leakage Rate of Optical Code Division Multiple Access Network Using Wiretap Code.

Secrecy capacity is usually employed as the performance metric of the physical layer security in fiber-optic wiretap channels. However, secrecy capacity can only qualitatively evaluate the physical layer security, and it cannot quantitatively evaluate the physical layer security of an imperfect security system. Furthermore, secrecy capacity cannot quantitatively evaluate the amount of information leakage to the eavesdropper. Based on the channel model of an optical CDMA network using wiretap code, the information leakage rate is analyzed to evaluate the physical layer security. The numerical results show that the information leakage rate can quantitatively evaluate the physical layer security of an optical CDMA wiretap channel, and it is related to transmission distance, eavesdropping position, confidential information rate and optical code.

Physical Layer Security: Channel Sounding Results for the Multi-Antenna Wiretap Channel.

Many physical-layer security works in the literature rely on purely theoretical work or simulated results to establish the value of physical-layer security in securing communications. We consider the secrecy capacity of a wireless Gaussian wiretap channel using channel sounding measurements to analyze the potential for secure communication in a real-world scenario. A multi-input, multi-output, multi-eavesdropper (MIMOME) system is deployed using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) over an 802.11n wireless network. Channel state information (CSI) measurements were taken in an indoor environment to analyze time-varying scenarios and spatial variations. It is shown that secrecy capacity is highly affected by environmental changes, such as foot traffic, network congestion, and propagation characteristics of the physical environment. We also present a numerical method for calculating MIMOME secrecy capacity in general and comment on the use of OFDM with regard to calculating secrecy capacity.

Optimizing Finite-Blocklength Nested Linear Secrecy Codes: Using the Worst Code to Find the Best Code.

Nested linear coding is a widely used technique in wireless communication systems for improving both security and reliability. Some parameters, such as the relative generalized Hamming weight and the relative dimension/length profile, can be used to characterize the performance of nested linear codes. In addition, the rank properties of generator and parity-check matrices can also precisely characterize their security performance. Despite this, finding optimal nested linear secrecy codes remains a challenge in the finite-blocklength regime, often requiring brute-force search methods. This paper investigates the properties of nested linear codes, introduces a new representation of the relative generalized Hamming weight, and proposes a novel method for finding the best nested linear secrecy code for the binary erasure wiretap channel by working from the worst nested linear secrecy code in the dual space. We demonstrate that our algorithm significantly outperforms the brute-force technique in terms of speed and efficiency.

Secrecy Performance Analysis of Cooperative Multihop Transmission for WSNs under Eavesdropping Attacks.

Multihop transmission is one of the important techniques to overcome the transmission coverage of each node in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, multihop transmission has a security issue due to the nature of a wireless medium. Additionally, the eavesdropper also attempts to interrupt the legitimate users' transmission. Thus, in this paper, we study the secrecy performance of a multihop transmission under various eavesdropping attacks for WSNs. To improve the secrecy performance, we propose two node selection schemes in each cluster, namely, minimum node selection (MNS) and optimal node selection (ONS) schemes. To exploit the impact of the network parameters on the secrecy performance, we derive the closed-form expression of the secrecy outage probability (SOP) under different eavesdropping attacks. From the numerical results, the ONS scheme shows the most robust secrecy performance compared with the other schemes. However, the ONS scheme requires a lot of channel information to select the node in each cluster and transmit information. On the other side, the MNS scheme can reduce the amount of channel information compared with the ONS scheme, while the MNS scheme still provides secure transmission. In addition, the impact of the network parameters on the secrecy performance is also insightfully discussed in this paper. Moreover, we evaluate the trade-off of the proposed schemes between secrecy performance and computational complexity.