A Study on the Impact of Yoga Tourism on Tourists Visiting Kerala

Yoga tourism is the latest trend which includes both treatments as well as tourism. Kerala has emerged as the most acclaimed yoga tourist destination in the world. This study delineates the major reasons that increase the suitability of Kerala for yoga practice, the source of information about destinations in Kerala, the kind of tourism which are preferred to be combined with yoga trips, and how long have the tourists been doing yoga in their lives and the impact of yoga in their lives. The study was carried out by a descriptive research design based on survey method. Averages, percentages, chi-square test and factor analysis were used for analyzing the study. The result showed that traditional system of yoga was the major reason for suitability of Kerala for yoga practices, friends, relatives and travel agents remain key persons in giving information to the yoga tourists, and yoga has a high positive impact on tourists’ lives

EFFECT OF GANDHAKA KALPA INTERNALLY AND KSHEERABALA 101 AVARTI TAILA NASYA IN DRY AGE RELATED MACULAR DEGENERATION- A CLINICAL STUDY

Introduction: Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a neurodegenerative disease which is one of the leading causes of vision loss affecting population above the age of 50 years. Of the two types wet and dry AMD, dry AMD constitute 90% of cases. Currently there is no effective treatment for AMD except for antioxidant supplementation which can delay the progression of AMD and its associated vision loss. In Ayurveda, it is a Vata Pitthadhika Drishtigata Roga compounded by Dhatukshaya in Vardhakya. The treatment should be Brimhana, Chakshushya and Rasayana to tackle the degenerative changes. Gandhaka Kalpa from Rasaratnasamucchaya and Ksheerabala 101 Avarti Taila has these properties to ameliorate the disease pathology. Hence a clinical study was planned with the objective to assess the effect of Gandhakakalpa internally and Ksheerabala 101 Avarti Taila Nasya in dry AMD. Methods: The study design was interventional, pre and post evaluation without control. After preparatory phase, patients were given Nasya with Ksheerabala 101 Avarti Taila followed by administration of Gandhaka Kalpa with concurrent administration of Ksheerabala 101 Avarti Taila as Pratimarsa Nasya. Study and follow up were done in 30 eyes. Results were documented and statistically analysed using Friedmains’s test, paired t test, Wilcoxon’s signed rank test and McNemar test according to type of variable. Result: The intervention is statistically significant while considering visual acuity (p < 0.001) and Daily Living Tasks Dependent on Vision questionnaire scores (p< 0.0001) and not significant for optical coherence tomography and Amsler grid findings. Conclusion: The intervention is an effective protocol to be followed in Ayurveda for dry AMD

Influence of crop combinations and soil factors on diversity and association of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in arecanut based cropping systems

Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) species diversity and extent of association were investigated in arecanut based cropping systemsdiffering in crop combinations. The study was carried out in farmers’ fields under acidic soil conditions at three locations representinglow land (Maneikkara), midland (Cheruvanjeri) and high land (Nedumpoyil) regions of Kannur district in Kerala. The croppingsystems in Maneikkara, Cheruvanjeri and Nedumpoyil had arecanut-banana, arecanut-banana-black pepper and arecanut-bananablackpepper-cardamom as component crops. AM spore load and root colonization differed significantly in arecanut in the threecropping systems. Highest spore load was recorded in Maneikkara followed by that in Nedumpoyil and Cheruvanjeri regions.Crops which formed components of the cropping system differed in root colonization levels, with banana recording the highestlevel, followed by arecanut, black pepper and cardamom. Colonization pattern was Paris type in all crops, but varied with respectto predominance of arbuscules in arecanut and vesicles in banana. Arecanut-black pepper-banana system at Cheruvanjeri inmidland was superior with respect to species diversity and species richness as evidenced by Shannon–Weiner index (Hs), Simpson’sindex of diversity (Ds) and species richness index. Arecanut-banana cropping system in Maneikkara in low land had low level ofspecies diversity and species richness, indicating the combined influence of crop combinations and soil factors such as N and P onAM diversity and distribution. Rhizophagus fasciculatus, Funneliformis geosporum, F. mosseae, Glomus macrocarpum,G. aggregatum, G. multicaule, G. glomerulatum and Acaulospora bireticulata were the AMF species identified from the arecanutcropping systems. F. geosporum was the most abundant (29-50%) species in the cropping system. The relative occurrence andabundance of AM species varied significantly with respect to the crops and locations

Inapplicability of Differential Fault Attacks against Cellular Automata based Lightweight Authenticated Cipher

Authenticated encryption (AE) schemes are a necessity to secure the physical devices connected to the Internet. Two AE schemes, TinyJambu and Elephant, are finalists of NIST lightweight cryptography competition. Another AE scheme, ACORN v3, a CAESAR competition finalist, has been shown to be particularly vulnerable against Differential Fault Attack (DFA), even more than its previous version ACORN v2. TinyJambu is also susceptible to DFA. An optimized interpolation attack has been proposed against one instance of Elephant, Delirium, recently. We propose methods to strengthen these schemes using the Cellular Automata (CA) and increase their resistance to these attacks. The Programmable Cellular Automata (PCA) 90-150 is effectively deployed to make these ciphers robust against DFA. We also provide mathematical analysis of the invigorated schemes and show that significant improvement is achieved in all the three enhanced schemes

TN-IDS for Network Layer Attacks in RPL based IoT Systems

Routing protocol for Low power and lossy network (RPL) is a standardized optimal protocol for routing in Internet of Things (IoT). The constrained wireless sensor network in IoT is characterized by lack of processing speed, low power and low memory. Sometimes various network attacks enabling the RPL network affect the network performance dismally. This leads to drastic variation in energy consumption at nodes and disturb the RPL network protocol structure. This leads to reduced processing speed and memory allocation in the network. We first illustrate the attacks and their impact in RPL network by simulation. To detect such attacks, we propose an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) scheme for RPL network based on trust computation. Trust based Neighbor notification IDS (TN-IDS) is a secure hierarchical distribution system which monitors the network intrusion and checks the performance of the network. The new TN-IDS system will track all nodes in the network and identify the malicious nodes. The activity list prepared by IDS indicates them to a sink node. This is achieved by introducing a distributed leader election algorithm to collect metrics related to the RPL network. Hence, the performance metrics of the RPL network together with TN-IDS module can identify the malicious node and isolate them

Comparison of proof-of-work based blockchains against federated consensus and proof-of-validation based blockchains

This paper reports the results of survey done on the architecture and functionalities involved in blockchains. Moreover, it reports the results of comparison between proof-of-work-based blockchains, Bitcoin and Ethereum, against federated consensus-based blockchain, Ripple, and proof-of-validation-based blockchain, Tendermint, along the parameters like peer to peer network setup and maintenance, cryptocurrency involved, details of transaction execution and validation, block creation, block validation and consensus protocol and application development

Reinforcing Lightweight Authenticated Encryption Schemes against Statistical Ineffective Fault Attack

The increasing use of resource limited devices with less memory, less computing resource and less power supply, motivates the adoption of lightweight cryptography to provide security solution. ASCON is a finalist and GIMLI is a round 2 candidate of NIST lightweight cryptography competition. ASCON is a sponge function based authenticated encryption (AE) scheme suitable for high performance applications. It is suitable for use in environments like Internet of Things (IoT) where large number of very constrained devices communicate with high-end servers. The drawback is that fault analyses like Statistical Ineffective fault attack (SIFA) and Sub-Set Fault Analysis (SSFA) are possible. GIMLI is also a sponge function based AE scheme which is susceptible to SIFA. In this work, we modify ASCON 128a and GIMLI exploiting the pseudo-random properties of Cellular Automata (CA) to prevent these attacks. We analyse and show that these attacks are inapplicable in the reinforced cipher

A Secure Software Defined Networking based Framework for IoT Networks

The connectivity is increasing in the world with the increased usage of IoT (Internet of Things) devices. To this end, amount of data that needs to be stored and retrieved securely has increased tremendously, but the IoT devices have a small amount of memory and computation capacity. Consequently, a storage area with a large amount of secured storage space is needed. Software-defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging network technology which implements a new paradigm of insecure applications and IoT services. To build a heterogeneous secure network, we introduced SDN controller broadcast encryption using the Open Network Operating System integrated with network switches and SDN Controllers. In this paper, we propose a secured data sharing system in IoT devices in which the IoT devices are connected to an SDN controller and data from the IoT device is encrypted. Only the corresponding authorized switch receives the data and knows the exact key to decrypt the ciphertext, so the data is stored and retrieved securely. In this system, we use Wheatstone algorithm to encrypt the data from the IoT devices. The usage of this algorithm helps to avoid botnet attacks and other types of attacks on the data. The proposed system established new forwarding paths through controller and it communicated with authorized switches for secure data transmissions. We analyzed the performance of our proposed algorithm using OMNeT++ to simulate our entire scenario and confirmed that the algorithm is efficient and secure in IoT applications. This extends the security features of IoT applications