Engineering Standards: An Introduction for Electrical and Computer Engineering Students

Engineering standards are summaries of industrial best practices. The specifications are written in terms of functional, mechanical and electrical aspects that allow proper usage of available components to build a system. Standards may also be regarded as codified guidelines that define how tests should be performed, and how products are to be designed. Standards are created by bringing together experience and expertise of stakeholders on specific issues. Standards protect public health and safety, improve product quality, help to advance the growth of new technologies, and foster international trade. It is important that students get familiar with standards while in school

PHOABE : securely outsourcing multi-authority attribute based encryption with policy hidden for cloud assisted IoT

Attribute based encryption (ABE) is an encrypted access control mechanism that ensures efficient data sharing among dynamic group of users. Nevertheless, this encryption technique presents two main drawbacks, namely high decryption cost and publicly shared access policies, thus leading to possible users’ privacy leakage. In this paper, we introduce PHOABE, a Policy-Hidden Outsourced ABE scheme. Our construction presents several advantages. First, it is a multi-attribute authority ABE scheme. Second, the expensive computations for the ABE decryption process is partially delegated to a Semi Trusted Cloud Server. Third, users’ privacy is protected thanks to a hidden access policy. Fourth, PHOABE is proven to be selectively secure, verifiable and policy privacy preserving under the random oracle model. Five, estimation of the processing overhead proves its feasibility in IoT constrained environments

Constant-size threshold attribute based SignCryption for cloud applications

In this paper, we propose a novel constant-size threshold attribute-based signcryption scheme for securely sharing data through public clouds. Our proposal has several advantages. First, it provides flexible cryptographic access control, while preserving users’ privacy as the identifying information for satisfying the access control policy are not revealed. Second, the proposed scheme guarantees both data origin authentication and anonymity thanks to the novel use of attribute based signcryption mechanism, while ensuring the unlinkability between the different access sessions. Third, the proposed signcryption scheme has efficient computation cost and constant communication overhead whatever the number of involved attributes. Finally, our scheme satisfies strong security properties in the random oracle model, namely Indistinguishability against the Adaptive Chosen Ciphertext Attacks (IND-CCA2), Existential Unforgeability against Chosen Message Attacks (EUFCMA) and privacy preservation of the attributes involved in the signcryption process, based on the assumption that the augmented Multi-Sequence of Exponents Decisional Diffie-Hellman (aMSE-DDH) problem and the Computational Diffie Hellman Assumption (CDH) are hard

PAbAC : a privacy preserving attribute based framework for fine grained access control in clouds

Several existing access control solutions mainly focus on preserving confidentiality of stored data from unauthorized access and the storage provider. Moreover, to keep sensitive user data confidential against untrusted servers, existing solutions usually apply cryptographic methods by disclosing data decryption keys only to authorized users. However, these solutions inevitably introduce a heavy computation overhead on the data owner for key distribution and data management when fine-grained data access control is desired. In addition, access control policies as well as users’ access patterns are also considered as sensitive information that should be protected from the cloud. In this paper, we propose PAbAC, a novel privacy preserving Attribute-based framework, that combines attribute-based encryption and attribute-based signature mechanisms for securely sharing outsourced data via the public cloud. Our proposal is multifold. First, it ensures fine-grained cryptographic access control enforced at the data owner’s side, while providing the desired expressiveness of the access control policies. Second, PAbAC preserves users’ privacy, while hiding any identifying information used to satisfy the access control. Third, PAbAC is proven to be highly scalable and efficient for sharing outsourced data in remote servers, at both the client and the cloud provider side

Ramadan fasting influences on food intake consumption, sleep schedule, body weight and some plasma parameters in healthy fasting volunteers

This study examines the changes in the lifestyle that accompanied Ramadan fasting. For this purpose, we followed the questionnaire programming meals, food consumption and sleep rhythm. We also followed changes in plasma biological parameters. The results show that daily energy consumption was not changed and neither was the body weight. Nevertheless, a decrease in fat mass was detected. Concerning plasma, we found a decrease in blood glucose from the 7th day of fasting. This effect was found also at the 21st day, accompanied by a reduction in insulin levels. Our results on plasma lipids showed a decrease in triglycerides with total cholesterol level unchanged. Furthermore, we noted an increased HDL-C against a decreased LDL-C fraction. Taken together, these results suggest that fasting may induce beneficial effects in blood lipid concentrations.Keywords: Ramadan fasting, food intake consumption, sleep schedule, body weight, plasma parameters, healthy fasting volunteersAfrican Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(21), pp. 3327-333

Studying the ultrasonic assisted transesterification of castor oil by using factorial design for optimization of biodiesel production

This work presents the biodiesel production from castor oil with methanol in presence of potassium hydroxide as catalyst at room temperature using ultrasonic bath. A factorial design of experiments and a central composite design have been used to evaluate the influence of operating conditions on biodiesel synthesis from inedible castor oil. The response chosen was viscosity while the variables studied were catalyst concentration and the methanol/vegetable oil molar ratio at room temperature in an ultrasonic bath. The methanol/vegetable oil molar ratio is the most important factor, having a negative influence on viscosity.The catalyst concentration has a small negative influence on viscosity and this is attributed to the presence of ultra-sonification. A second order model was obtained to predict the produced biodiesel viscosity. Within the experimental range studied the model matched the results from the experiments