Exploring the adoption of physical security controls in smartphones

The proliferation of smartphones has changed our life due to the enhanced connectivity, increased storage capacity and innovative functionality they offer. Their increased popularity has drawn the attention of attackers, thus, nowadays their users are exposed to many security and privacy threats. The fact that smartphones store significant data (e.g. personal, business, government, etc.) in combination with their mobility, increase the impact of unauthorized physical access to smartphones. However, past research has revealed that this is not clearly understood by smartphone users, as they disregard the available security controls. In this context, this paper explores the attitudes and perceptions towards security controls that protect smartphone user’s data from unauthorized physical access. We conducted a survey to measure their adoption and the rea-sons behind users’ selections. Our results, suggest that nowadays users are more concerned about their physical security, but still reveal that a considerable portion of our sample is prone to unauthorized physical access

Conceivable security risks and authentication techniques for smart devices

With the rapidly escalating use of smart devices and fraudulent transaction of users’ data from their devices, efficient and reliable techniques for authentication of the smart devices have become an obligatory issue. This paper reviews the security risks for mobile devices and studies several authentication techniques available for smart devices. The results from field studies enable a comparative evaluation of user-preferred authentication mechanisms and their opinions about reliability, biometric authentication and visual authentication techniques

A multivariant secure framework for smart mobile health application

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley in Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies, available online: https://doi.org/10.1002/ett.3684 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Wireless sensor network enables remote connectivity of technological devices such as smart mobile with the internet. Due to its low cost as well as easy availability of data sharing and accessing devices, the Internet of Things (IoT) has grown exponentially during the past few years. The availability of these devices plays a remarkable role in the new era of mHealth. In mHealth, the sensors generate enormous amounts of data and the context-aware computing has proven to collect and manage the data. The context aware computing is a new domain to be aware of context of involved devices. The context-aware computing is playing a very significant part in the development of smart mobile health applications to monitor the health of patients more efficiently. Security is one of the key challenges in IoT-based mHealth application development. The wireless nature of IoT devices motivates attackers to attack on application; these vulnerable attacks can be denial of service attack, sinkhole attack, and select forwarding attack. These attacks lead intruders to disrupt the application's functionality, data packet drops to malicious end and changes the route of data and forwards the data packet to other location. There is a need to timely detect and prevent these threats in mobile health applications. Existing work includes many security frameworks to secure the mobile health applications but all have some drawbacks. This paper presents existing frameworks, the impact of threats on applications, on information, and different security levels. From this line of research, we propose a security framework with two algorithms, ie, (i) patient priority autonomous call and (ii) location distance based switch, for mobile health applications and make a comparative analysis of the proposed framework with the existing ones.Published onlin

Abutment screw loosening in single-implant restorations: a systematic review

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to systematically review clinical studies on the incidence of abutment screw loosening in single-implant restorations with different implant-abutment connection geometries. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The literature search was conducted using several electronic databases. Specific terms were used for the database search, which spanned the years 1990 to 2006. The search was augmented by using the option of “related articles” as well as hand searching of references and relevant journals. Relevant studies were selected according to predetermined inclusion and exclusion criteria. Agreement between reviewers was determined by using Cohen’s kappa coefficients. Three-year complication-free rates (survival proportions) were calculated with the aid of a survival function, assuming constant failure rates. Summary estimates per group for complication-free rate after 3 years (M-estimator) were calculated using Tukey’s biweight estimator. RESULTS: The initial database search yielded 1,526 relevant titles. After the subsequent filtering process, 27 studies were finally selected. Interexaminer agreement ranged from good to perfect. The external-connection group comprised 12 studies following 586 single-implant restorations for a mean follow-up time that ranged from 3 to 5 years. The estimated percent of complication-free single-implant restorations after 3 years was 97.3% (95% CI: 95.6–98.3). The internal connection group comprised 15 studies following 1,113 single-implant restorations for a mean follow-up time that ranged from 3 to 10 years. The estimated percentage of complication-free single-implant restorations after 3 years was 97.6% (95% CI: 96.5–98.3). CONCLUSION: The results show that abutment screw loosening is a rare event in single-implant restorations regardless of the geometry of implant-abutment connection, provided that proper antirotational features and torque are employed. Int J Oral Maxillofac Implants 2008;23:681–69

On the Efficiency Modelling of Cryptographic Protocols by Means of the Quality of Protection Modelling Language (QoP-ML)

Part 2: Asian Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (AsiaARES)International audienceThe problem of efficiency in the IT systems is now widely discussed. One of the factors affecting the performance of IT systems is implementation and maintaining a high level of security. In many cases the guaranteed security level is too high in relation to the real threats. The implementation and maintenance of this protection level is expensive in terms of both productivity and financial costs.The paper presents the analysis of TLS Handshake protocol in terms of quality of protection performed by the Quality of Protection Modelling Language (QoP-ML). The analysis concerns efficiency