Newcastle disease virus (NDV) expressing the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 as a live virus vaccine candidate

Background: Due to the lack of protective immunity of humans towards the newly emerged SARS-CoV-2, this virus has caused a massive pandemic across the world resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Thus, a vaccine is urgently needed to contain the spread of the virus. Methods: Here, we describe Newcastle disease virus (NDV) vector vaccines expressing the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 in its wild type format or a membrane-anchored format lacking the polybasic cleavage site. All described NDV vector vaccines grow to high titers in embryonated chicken eggs. In a proof of principle mouse study, the immunogenicity and protective efficacy of these NDV-based vaccines were investigated. Findings: We report that the NDV vector vaccines elicit high levels of antibodies that are neutralizing when the vaccine is given intramuscularly in mice. Importantly, these COVID-19 vaccine candidates protect mice from a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV-2 challenge with no detectable viral titer and viral antigen in the lungs. Interpretation: The results suggested that the NDV vector expressing either the wild type S or membrane-anchored S without the polybasic cleavage site could be used as live vector vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. Funding: This work is supported by an NIAID funded Center of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance (CEIRS) contract, the Collaborative Influenza Vaccine Innovation Centers (CIVIC) contract, philanthropic donations and NIH grants

A newcastle disease virus (NDV) expressing a membrane-anchored spike as a cost-effective inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine

A successful severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccine must not only be safe and protective, but must also meet the demand on a global scale at a low cost. Using the current influenza virus vaccine production capacity to manufacture an egg-based inactivated Newcastle disease virus (NDV)/SARS-CoV-2 vaccine would meet that challenge. Here, we report pre-clinical evaluations of an inactivated NDV chimera stably expressing the membrane-anchored form of the spike (NDV-S) as a potent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine in mice and hamsters. The inactivated NDV-S vaccine was immunogenic, inducing strong binding and/or neutralizing antibodies in both animal models. More importantly, the inactivated NDV-S vaccine protected animals from SARS-CoV-2 infections. In the presence of an adjuvant, antigen-sparing could be achieved, which would further reduce the cost while maintaining the protective efficacy of the vaccine

Accumulators in (and Beyond) Generic Groups: Non-Trivial Batch Verification Requires Interaction

We prove a tight lower bound on the number of group operations required for batch verification by any generic-group accumulator that stores a less-than-trivial amount of information. Specifically, we show that $\Omega(t \cdot (\lambda / \log \lambda))$ group operations are required for the batch verification of any subset of $t \geq 1$ elements, where $\lambda \in \mathbb{N}$ is the security parameter, thus ruling out non-trivial batch verification in the standard non-interactive manner. Our lower bound applies already to the most basic form of accumulators (i.e., static accumulators that support membership proofs), and holds both for known-order (and even multilinear) groups and for unknown-order groups, where it matches the asymptotic performance of the known bilinear and RSA accumulators, respectively. In addition, it complements the techniques underlying the generic-group accumulators of Boneh, B{ü}nz and Fisch (CRYPTO \u2719) and Thakur (ePrint \u2719) by justifying their application of the Fiat-Shamir heuristic for transforming their interactive batch-verification protocols into non-interactive procedures. Moreover, motivated by a fundamental challenge introduced by Aggarwal and Maurer (EUROCRYPT \u2709), we propose an extension of the generic-group model that enables us to capture a bounded amount of arbitrary non-generic information (e.g., least-significant bits or Jacobi symbols that are hard to compute generically but are easy to compute non-generically). We prove our lower bound within this extended model, which may be of independent interest for strengthening the implications of impossibility results in idealized models

Privacy and identity management. Fairness, accountability, and transparency in the age of big data: 13th IFIP WG 9.2, 9.6/11.7, 11.6/SIG 9.2.2 International Summer School, Vienna, Austria, August 20-24, 2018, revised selected papers

This book contains selected papers presented at the 13th IFIP WG 9.2, 9.6/11.7, 11.6/SIG 9.2.2 International Summer School on Privacy and Identity Management, held in Vienna, Austria, in August 2018. The 10 full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. Also included are reviewed papers summarizing the results of workshops and tutorials that were held at the Summer School as well as papers contributed by several of the invited speakers. The papers combine interdisciplinary approaches to bring together a host of perspectives: technical, legal, regulatory, socio-economic, social, societal, political, ethical, anthropological, philosophical, historical, and psychological

(More) Side Channels in Cloud Storage

Part 4: Privacy and Transparency in the Age of Cloud ComputingInternational audiencePublic cloud storage services are gaining in popularity and several commercial actors are offering their services for users, however, not always with the security and privacy of their users as the primary design goal. This paper investigates side channels in public cloud storage services that allow the service provider, and in some cases users of the same service, to learn who has stored a given file and to profile users’ usage of the service. These side channels are present in several public cloud storage services that are marketed as secure and privacy-friendly. Our conclusions are that cross-user deduplication should be disabled by default and that public cloud storage services need to be designed to provide unlinkability of users and data, even if the data is encrypted by users before storing it in the cloud

Towards a New Paradigm for Privacy and Security in Cloud Services

The market for cloud computing can be considered as the major growth area in ICT. However, big companies and public authorities are reluctant to entrust their most sensitive data to external parties for storage and processing. The reason for their hesitation is clear: There exist no satisfactory approaches to adequately protect the data during its lifetime in the cloud. The EU Project Prismacloud (Horizon 2020 programme; duration 2/2015–7/2018) addresses these challenges and yields a portfolio of novel technologies to build security enabled cloud services, guaranteeing the required security with the strongest notion possible, namely by means of cryptography. We present a new approach towards a next generation of security and privacy enabled services to be deployed in only partially trusted cloud infrastructures