Screening immune system function in at-risk newborns

This paper explores the introduction of a screening test to highlight impaired immune system status for newborn infants and its efficacy as a preventative clinical measure. Moreover, it is suggested that screening of the infantile immune system has the potential to highlight susceptibility to a range of infant and childhood diseases, bestowing an opportunity to introduce early intervention to reduce the incidence of these diseases. Development of the neonatal immune system is an important health issue, implicated in many childhood problems such as allergies, infection, and autoimmunity. The neonate has a limited immune system and ability to combat bacteria. Depleted levels of the tripeptide reduced glutathione (GSH) has been linked to numerous conditions and its intracellular level is acknowledged as an indicator of immune system function. Introduction of an immune system screening program for infants is formally reviewed and assessed. Several benefits are reported in the treatment of impaired immune systems, a trial screening program is proposed for at-risk infants to gather further evidence as to its efficacy. Infants at risk of impaired immune system function include cystic fibrosis, premature infants, and low birth weight infants. The interventions include breastfeeding, milk banks, and appropriate formula to support the immune system

Applied batch cryptography

The material presented in this thesis may be viewed as comprising two key parts, the first part concerns batch cryptography specifically, whilst the second deals with how this form of cryptography may be applied to security related applications such as electronic cash for improving efficiency of the protocols. The objective of batch cryptography is to devise more efficient primitive cryptographic protocols. In general, these primitives make use of some property such as homomorphism to perform a computationally expensive operation on a collective input set. The idea is to amortise an expensive operation, such as modular exponentiation, over the input. Most of the research work in this field has concentrated on its employment as a batch verifier of digital signatures. It is shown that several new attacks may be launched against these published schemes as some weaknesses are exposed. Another common use of batch cryptography is the simultaneous generation of digital signatures. There is significantly less previous work on this area, and the present schemes have some limited use in practical applications. Several new batch signatures schemes are introduced that improve upon the existing techniques and some practical uses are illustrated. Electronic cash is a technology that demands complex protocols in order to furnish several security properties. These typically include anonymity, traceability of a double spender, and off-line payment features. Presently, the most efficient schemes make use of coin divisibility to withdraw one large financial amount that may be progressively spent with one or more merchants. Several new cash schemes are introduced here that make use of batch cryptography for improving the withdrawal, payment, and deposit of electronic coins. The devised schemes apply both to the batch signature and verification techniques introduced, demonstrating improved performance over the contemporary divisible based structures. The solutions also provide an alternative paradigm for the construction of electronic cash systems. Whilst electronic cash is used as the vehicle for demonstrating the relevance of batch cryptography to security related applications, the applicability of the techniques introduced extends well beyond this

Modeling architectural non functional requirements: From use case to control case

While the functional requirements of a system can be effectively modeled through the Use Case driven approach, there is no standard or de facto method for modeling non-functional requirements of the system architecture. Often such requirements are dealt with in a reactive manner rather than proactively. Yet increasingly a contributing factor in project difficulty and failure are the non-functional requirements imposed on the solution architecture. This paper proposes a Control Case approach to record and model non-functional requirements. This technique enables the control case to represent the nonfunctional requirements from different perspectives, most typically the various operating conditions. Furthermore, we propose an extension to the “4+1" view model for depicting software architecture by adding the control case view. The combination of both the use case and control case views thus reflects the complete requirements across the collective system life cycle views: design, process, implementation and deployment

Efficient Batch Signature Generation using Tree Structures

E-mail: fpavlovsk, [email protected] Abstract We propose an efficient batch signature generationscheme for signing multiple messages simultaneously. The scheme can be based on any signature scheme with ap-pendix and resultant signatures preserve the property of independent verification by different recipients. The scheme isshown to be of almost constant complexity for both generation and verification as the number of messages increaseswhile the size of the signature increases only logarithmically with the number of messages in the batch. It is demon-strated that the security of the batch signature is equivalent to the security of the underlying signature mechanisms