Janus: Toward Preventing Counterfeits in Supply Chains Utilizing a Multi-Quorum Blockchain

The modern pharmaceutical supply chain lacks transparency and traceability, resulting in alarming rates of counterfeit products entering the market. These illegitimate products cause harm to end users and wreak havoc on the supply chain itself, costing billions of dollars in profit loss. In this paper, in response to the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA), we introduce Janus, a novel pharmaceutical track-and-trace system that utilizes blockchain and cloning-resistant hologram tags to prevent counterfeits from entering the pharmaceutical supply chain. We design a multi-quorum consensus protocol that achieves load balancing across the network. We perform a security analysis to show robustness against various threats and attacks. The implementation of Janus proves that the system is fair, scalable, and resilient

Fusion: Privacy-preserving distributed protocol for high-dimensional data mashup

© 2015 IEEE. In the last decade, several approaches concerning private data release for data mining have been proposed. Data mashup, on the other hand, has recently emerged as a mechanism for integrating data from several data providers. Fusing both techniques to generate mashup data in a distributed environment while providing privacy and utility guarantees on the output involves several challenges. That is, how to ensure that no unnecessary information is leaked to the other parties during the mashup process, how to ensure the mashup data is protected against certain privacy threats, and how to handle the high-dimensional nature of the mashup data while guaranteeing high data utility. In this paper, we present Fusion, a privacy-preserving multi-party protocol for data mashup with guaranteed LKC-privacy for the purpose of data mining. Experiments on real-life data demonstrate that the anonymous mashup data provide better data utility, the approach can handle high dimensional data, and it is scalable with respect to the data size

Exponential inequalities in probability spaces revisited

We revisit several results on exponential integrability in probability spaces and derive some new ones. In particular, we give a quantitative form of recent results by Cianchi-Musil and Pick in the framework of Moser-Trudinger-type inequalities, and recover Ivanisvili-Russell's inequality for the Gaussian measure. One key ingredient is the use of a dual argument, which is new in this context, that we also implement in the discrete setting of the Poisson measure on integers

BroncoVote: Secure Voting System Using Ethereum’s Blockchain

Voting is a fundamental part of democratic systems; it gives individuals in a community the faculty to voice their opinion. In recent years, voter turnout has diminished while concerns regarding integrity, security, and accessibility of current voting systems have escalated. E-voting was introduced to address those concerns; however, it is not cost-effective and still requires full supervision by a central authority. The blockchain is an emerging, decentralized, and distributed technology that promises to enhance different aspects of many industries. Expanding e-voting into blockchain technology could be the solution to alleviate the present concerns in e-voting. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based voting system, named BroncoVote, that preserves voter privacy and increases accessibility, while keeping the voting system transparent, secure, and cost-effective. BroncoVote implements a university-scaled voting framework that utilizes Ethereum’s blockchain and smart contracts to achieve voter administration and auditable voting records. In addition, BroncoVote utilizes a few cryptographic techniques, including homomorphic encryption, to promote voter privacy. Our implementation was deployed on Ethereum’s Testnet to demonstrate usability, scalability, and efficiency

SafePath: Differentially-private publishing of passenger trajectories in transportation systems

© 2018 Elsevier B.V. In recent years, the collection of spatio-temporal data that captures human movements has increased tremendously due to the advancements in hardware and software systems capable of collecting person-specific data. The bulk of the data collected by these systems has numerous applications, or it can simply be used for general data analysis. Therefore, publishing such big data is greatly beneficial for data recipients. However, in its raw form, the collected data contains sensitive information pertaining to the individuals from which it was collected and must be anonymized before publication. In this paper, we study the problem of privacy-preserving passenger trajectories publishing and propose a solution under the rigorous differential privacy model. Unlike sequential data, which describes sequentiality between data items, handling spatio-temporal data is a challenging task due to the fact that introducing a temporal dimension results in extreme sparseness. Our proposed solution introduces an efficient algorithm, called SafePath, that models trajectories as a noisy prefix tree and publishes ϵ-differentially-private trajectories while minimizing the impact on data utility. Experimental evaluation on real-life transit data in Montreal suggests that SafePath significantly improves efficiency and scalability with respect to large and sparse datasets, while achieving comparable results to existing solutions in terms of the utility of the sanitized data

Regulation of ABCA1 expression and cholesterol efflux during adipose differentiation of 3T3-L1 cells.

Adipose cells specialized in energy storage, contain large intracellular triglyceride-rich lipid droplets, are enriched with free cholesterol, and express sterol-regulated transcription factors such as liver X receptor (LXR). The recent identification of the LXR-dependent ATP binding cassette transporter A1 (ABCA1) pathway for cholesterol release from peripheral cells has led us to address the question of the expression and function of ABCA1 in adipocytes. In 3T3-L1 adipose cells, we observed a strong induction of ABCA1 mRNA during adipose differentiation, but only limited variations in ABCA1 protein. Lipid efflux onto apolipoprotein A-I (apoA-I), which depends on ABCA1, was comparable in adipocytes and preadipocytes, demonstrating a differential regulation of ABCA1 mRNA and cholesterol efflux. We also found that total cell cholesterol remained stable during differentiation of 3T3-L1 cells, but membrane cholesterol was lower in adipocytes than in preadipocytes, suggesting redistribution of cholesterol to the lipid droplet. Finally, we show that under standard lipolytic stimulation, 3T3-L1 adipocytes do not release cholesterol onto apoA-I, a process that required long exposures to lipolytic agents (24 h). In conclusion, despite large induction of ABCA1 mRNA during differentiation, cholesterol efflux through the ABCA1 pathway remains limited in adipocytes and requires prolonged lipolysis. This is consistent with the view of the adipocyte behaving as a cholesterol sink, with plasma cholesterol-buffering properties

Working sick and out of sorts: a cross-cultural approach on presenteeism climate, organizational justice and work–family conflict

A climate of presenteeism has important effects on employee well-being and the organization itself. Our study, based on surveys of health sector employees in six different countries (Brazil, Ecuador, Lebanon, Portugal, Russia and Spain) examines whether organizational justice plays a mediating role in the relationship between a presenteeism climate in the organization and work–family conflict (WFC). Our results indicate that the perception of organizational justice and the presenteeism climate do influence WFC. Moreover, higher levels of WFC were found in non-Latin countries. This study contributes to the work attendance and life balance field by providing cross-cultural empirical evidence corroborating the effect of justice and presenteeism climate on the WFC.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

A Certificateless One-Way Group Key Agreement Protocol for End-to-End Email Encryption

Over the years, email has evolved into one of the most widely used communication channels for both individuals and organizations. However, despite near ubiquitous use in much of the world, current information technology standards do not place emphasis on email security. Not until recently, webmail services such as Yahoo\u27s mail and Google\u27s gmail started to encrypt emails for privacy protection. However, the encrypted emails will be decrypted and stored in the service provider\u27s servers. If the servers are malicious or compromised, all the stored emails can be read, copied and altered. Thus, there is a strong need for end-to-end (E2E) email encryption to protect email user\u27s privacy. In this paper, we present a certificateless one-way group key agreement protocol with the following features, which are suitable to implement E2E email encryption: (1) certificateless and thus there is no key escrow problem and no public key certificate infrastructure is required; (2) one-way group key agreement and thus no back-and-forth message exchange is required; and (3) n-party group key agreement (not just 2- or 3-party). This paper also provides a security proof for the proposed protocol using proof by simulation . Finally, efficiency analysis of the protocol is presented at the end of the paper

Home Performance with ENERGY STAR: Utility Bill Analysis on Homes Participating in Austin Energy's Program

Home Performance with ENERGY STAR (HPwES) is a jointly managed program of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This program focuses on improving energy efficiency in existing homes via a whole-house approach to assessing and improving a home's energy performance, and helping to protect the environment. As one of HPwES's local sponsors, Austin Energy's HPwES program offers a complete home energy analysis and a list of recommendations for efficiency improvements, along with cost estimates. To determine the benefits of this program, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) collaborated with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to conduct a statistical analysis using energy consumption data of HPwES homes provided by Austin Energy. This report provides preliminary estimates of average savings per home from the HPwES Loan Program for the period 1998 through 2006. The results from this preliminary analysis suggest that the HPwES program sponsored by Austin Energy had a very significant impact on reducing average cooling electricity for participating households. Overall, average savings were in the range of 25%-35%, and appear to be robust under various criteria for the number of households included in the analysis