Evaluation of gifted students motivation: More than to be or not to be motivated

In the scientific literature on giftedness, two opposite categories of population are often investigated: successful students and underachievers. As we know, motivation is central in the learning process and school achievement. Therefore, motivation is also helpful to explain the differences between successful gifted students and underachiever gifted students. (Baker, Bridger, & Evans, 1998; McCoach & Siegle, 2003). The purpose of this presentation is to identify specificities of gifted students' motivation, and stimulate researchers and educators to pay attention to this variable as a multi-faceted factor, and not as a monolithic one. The population we studied consisted of gifted young adults who completed secondary school with or without failures. A thematic analysis of their narrative about their motivation was conducted. Results showed that the subjective value they associated with the tasks (Wigfield and Eccles (1983, 2002), and the way they constructed and protected their self-efficacy beliefs (Bandura (1989, 2003)) determined several motivational profiles. Moreover, a high or a low motivational level may sometimes hide important traits, like unhealthy perfectionism. For giftedness identification and counselling, these findings suggest that it is important to measure more than the intellectual level, and that the motivational profiles should also be taken into account within a global approach of the individual

Strong authentication and strong integrity (SASI) is not that strong

In this work, we present a practical passive attack on SASI,an ultra-lightweight mutual authentication protocol for RFID. This attack can be used to reveal with overwhelming probability the secret ID of the prover by eavesdropping about 217 authentications. The result dismantles SASI and, more generally, provides a new approach that threatens ultraightweight authentication protocols

Tree-Based RFID authentication protocols are definitively not privacy-friendly

Authentication for low-cost Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) is a booming research topic. The challenge is to develop secure protocols using lightweight cryptography, yet ensuring privacy. A current trend is to design such protocols upon the Learning Parity from Noise (LPN) problem. The first who introduced this solution were Hopper and Blum in 2001. Since then, many protocols have been designed, especially the protocol of Halevi, Saxena, and Halevi (HSH) that combines LPN and the tree-based key infrastructure suggested by Molnar and Wagner. In this paper, we introduce a new RFID authentication protocol that is less resource consuming than HSH, relying on the same adversary model and security level, though. Afterwards, we show that, if an adversary can tamper with some tags, the privacy claimed in HSH is defeated. In other words, either tags are tamper-resistant, then we suggest a protocol more efficient than HSH, or they are not, then we suggest a significative attack against the untraceability property of HSH