A Survey of Cybersecurity of Digital Manufacturing

The Industry 4.0 concept promotes a digital manufacturing (DM) paradigm that can enhance quality and productivity, which reduces inventory and the lead time for delivering custom, batch-of-one products based on achieving convergence of additive, subtractive, and hybrid manufacturing machines, automation and robotic systems, sensors, computing, and communication networks, artificial intelligence, and big data. A DM system consists of embedded electronics, sensors, actuators, control software, and interconnectivity to enable the machines and the components within them to exchange data with other machines, components therein, the plant operators, the inventory managers, and customers. This article presents the cybersecurity risks in the emerging DM context, assesses the impact on manufacturing, and identifies approaches to secure DM

Reusable, instant and private payment guarantees for cryptocurrencies

Despite offering numerous advantages, public decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin suffer from scalability issues such as high transaction latency and low throughput. The vast array of so-called Layer-2 solutions tackling the scalability problem focus on throughput, and consider latency as a secondary objective. However, in the context of retail payments, instant finality of transactions is arguably a more pressing concern, besides the overarching concern for privacy. In this paper, we provide an overlay network that allows privacy-friendly low latency payments in a retail market. Our approach follows that of a recent work called Snappy, which achieved low latency but exposed identities of customers and their transaction histories. Our construction ensures this data is kept private, while providing merchants with protection against double-spending attacks. Although our system is still based upon customers registering with a collateral, crucially this collateral is reusable over time. The technical novelty of our work comes from randomness-reusable threshold encryption (RRTE), a cryptographic primitive we designed specifically for the following features: our construction provably guarantees payments to merchants, preserves the secret identity of honest customers and prevents their transactions from being linked. We also present an implementation of our construction, showing its capacity for fast global payments in a retail setting with a delay of less than 1 s

Leprosy services in primary health care in India: comparative economic cost analysis of two public-health settings

Objectives: The WHO recommends inclusion of post-exposure chemoprophylaxis with single-dose rifampicin in national leprosy control programmes. The objective was to estimate the cost of leprosy services at primary care level in two different public-health settings. Methods: Ingredient-based costing was performed in eight primary health centres (PHCs) purposively selected in the Union Territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli (DNH) and the Umbergaon block of Valsad district, Gujarat, India. All costs were bootstrapped, and to estimate the variation in total cost under uncertainty, a univariate sensitivity analysis was performed. Results: The mean annual cost of providing leprosy services was USD 29 072 in the DNH PHC (95% CI: 22 125–36 020) and USD 11 082 in Umbergaon (95% CI: 8334–13 830). The single largest cost component was human resources: 79% in DNH and 83% in Umbergaon. The unit cost for screening the contact of a leprosy patient was USD 1 in DNH (95% CI: 0.8–1.2) and USD 0.3 in Umbergaon (95% CI: 0.2–0.4). In DNH, the unit cost of delivering single-dose of rifampicin (SDR) as chemoprophylaxis for contacts was USD 2.9 (95% CI: 2.5–3.7). Conclusions: The setting with an enhanced public-health financing system invests more in leprosy services than a setting with fewer financial resources. In terms of leprosy visits, the enhanced public-health system is hardly more expensive than the non-enhanced public-health system. The unit cost of contact screening is not high, favouring its sustainability in the programme