Effect of empowering leadership on employees’ workplace loneliness: a moderated mediation model

BackgroundWorkplace loneliness has become a prevalent experience among employees in organizations; however, there is limited empirical research on how leaders can address and mitigate this issue. Drawing upon self-determination theory and empowering leadership theory, this study examines the impact of empowering leadership on workplace loneliness by exploring the mediator of role breadth self-efficacy and the moderator of leader–member conversational quality.MethodsA time-lagged research design was used, collecting data through a two-wave online survey involving 531 employees in Chinese public sectors. The participants consisted of 321 males and 210 females, with an average age of 35 years (SD = 7.36).ResultsOur findings indicate that empowering leadership positively influences employees’ role breadth self-efficacy, reducing their workplace loneliness. Moreover, leader–member conversational quality strengthens this indirect effect, suggesting that empowering leadership is more effective in reducing workplace loneliness when leader–member conversational quality is high.ConclusionThis study expands and enriches research on the antecedents of workplace loneliness from the leadership approach, providing valuable insights for organizations to implement interventions that effectively alleviate employees’ workplace loneliness

Energy performance plan analysis in a new ecological city

Conforming to urban development needs, in accordance with ecological and low-carbon requirements, is the first priority of contemporary urban construction. At the first stages of planning a new town, energy planning and analysis, and establishing sustainable energy development strategies, are methods to reinforce the ideal of an ecological city. Therefore, to meet urban planning requirements, energy planning often requires determination of the energy consumption index, and knowledge of local energy demands and natural and social environments (to build a reasonable energy structure), adjusted through the evaluation,design, and optimization of the construction of ecological cities. This paper explores energy planning through an analysis of the application of energy sources in the planning of the eco-city of Jinan City

CaSE: Cache-Assisted Secure Execution on ARM Processors

Recognizing the pressing demands to secure embedded applications, ARM TrustZone has been adopted in both academic research and commercial products to protect sensitive code and data in a privileged, isolated execution environment. However, the design of TrustZone cannot prevent physical memory disclosure attacks such as cold boot attack from gaining unrestricted read access to the sensitive contents in the dynamic random access memory (DRAM). A number of system-on-chip (SoC) bound execution solutions have been proposed to thaw the cold boot attack by storing sensitive data only in CPU registers, CPU cache or internal RAM. However, when the operating system, which is responsible for creating and maintaining the SoC-bound execution environment, is compromised, all the sensitive data is leaked. In this paper, we present the design and development of a cache-assisted secure execution framework, called CaSE, on ARM processors to defend against sophisticated attackers who can launch multi-vector attacks including software attacks and hardware memory disclosure attacks. CaSE utilizes TrustZone and Cache-as-RAM technique to create a cache-based isolated execution environment, which can protect both code and data of security-sensitive applications against the compromised OS and the cold boot attack. To protect the sensitive code and data against cold boot attack, applications are encrypted in memory and decrypted only within the processor for execution. The memory separation and the cache separation provided by TrustZone are used to protect the cached applications against compromised OS. We implement a prototype of CaSE on the i.MX53 running ARM Cortex-A8 processor. The experimental results show that CaSE incurs small impacts on system performance when executing cryptographic algorithms including AES, RSA, and SHA1

Scale-MIA: A Scalable Model Inversion Attack against Secure Federated Learning via Latent Space Reconstruction

Federated learning is known for its capability to safeguard participants' data privacy. However, recently emerged model inversion attacks (MIAs) have shown that a malicious parameter server can reconstruct individual users' local data samples through model updates. The state-of-the-art attacks either rely on computation-intensive search-based optimization processes to recover each input batch, making scaling difficult, or they involve the malicious parameter server adding extra modules before the global model architecture, rendering the attacks too conspicuous and easily detectable. To overcome these limitations, we propose Scale-MIA, a novel MIA capable of efficiently and accurately recovering training samples of clients from the aggregated updates, even when the system is under the protection of a robust secure aggregation protocol. Unlike existing approaches treating models as black boxes, Scale-MIA recognizes the importance of the intricate architecture and inner workings of machine learning models. It identifies the latent space as the critical layer for breaching privacy and decomposes the complex recovery task into an innovative two-step process to reduce computation complexity. The first step involves reconstructing the latent space representations (LSRs) from the aggregated model updates using a closed-form inversion mechanism, leveraging specially crafted adversarial linear layers. In the second step, the whole input batches are recovered from the LSRs by feeding them into a fine-tuned generative decoder. We implemented Scale-MIA on multiple commonly used machine learning models and conducted comprehensive experiments across various settings. The results demonstrate that Scale-MIA achieves excellent recovery performance on different datasets, exhibiting high reconstruction rates, accuracy, and attack efficiency on a larger scale compared to state-of-the-art MIAs

Energy performance plan analysis in a new ecological city

Conforming to urban development needs, in accordance with ecological and low-carbon requirements, is the first priority of contemporary urban construction. At the first stages of planning a new town, energy planning and analysis, and establishing sustainable energy development strategies, are methods to reinforce the ideal of an ecological city. Therefore, to meet urban planning requirements, energy planning often requires determination of the energy consumption index, and knowledge of local energy demands and natural and social environments (to build a reasonable energy structure), adjusted through the evaluation,design, and optimization of the construction of ecological cities. This paper explores energy planning through an analysis of the application of energy sources in the planning of the eco-city of Jinan City

TruSpy: Cache Side-Channel Information Leakage from the Secure World on ARM Devices

As smart, embedded devices are increasingly integrated into our daily life, the security of these devices has become a major concern. The ARM processor family, which powers more than 60% of embedded devices, introduced TrustZone technology to offer security protection via an isolated execution environment called secure world. Caches in TrustZone-enabled processors are extended with a non-secure (NS) bit to indicate whether a cache line is used by the secure world or the normal world. This cache design improves system performance by eliminating the need to perform cache flush during world switches; however, it also enables cache contention between the two worlds. In this work, we present TruSpy, the first study of timingbased cache side-channel information leakage of TrustZone. Our proposed attack exploits the cache contention between normal world and secure world to recover secret information from secure world. Two attacks are proposed in TruSpy, namely, the normal world OS attack and the normal world Android app attack. In the OS-based attack, the attacker is able to access virtual-to-physical address translation and high precision timers. In the Android app-based attack, these tools are unavailable to the attacker, so we devise a novel method that uses the expected channel statistics to allocate memory for cache probing. We also show how an attacker might use the less accurate performance event interface as a timer. Using the T-table based AES implementation in OpenSSL 1.0.1f as an example, we demonstrate that it is possible for a normal world attacker to steal a fine-grained secret from the secure world using a timing-based cache side-channel. We can recover the full AES encryption key via either the OSbased attack or the Android app-based attack. Since our zero permission TruSpy attack is based on the cache design in TrustZone enabled ARM processors, it poses a significant threat to a wide array of devices. To mitigate the newly discovered threat, we also propose both application-based and system-oriented countermeasures

Validation of the Chinese version of the diabetes health profile to predict the impact of mobile health education on quality of life in type 2 diabetes patients

PurposeThe Diabetes Health Profile (DHP18), initially created in the United Kingdom, currently lacks a Chinese version. This study endeavors to authenticate the Chinese adaptation of the DHP18 and assess the influence of mobile health (mHealth) education intervention on the quality of life of individuals living with diabetes.Patients and methodsThe study included 470 Type 2 diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) patients (204 men, 266 women), spanning an age range of 19–79 years, with an average age of 54 ± 12.40 years. Data analysis employed Jamovie and Mplus software. Moreover, test–retest reliability was evaluated in 52 hospitalized T2DM patients through two repeated measurements taken 4 weeks apart.ResultsThe Chinese version DHP18 scale exhibited high reliability, evidenced by a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.88, and coefficient of test–retest reliability of 0.84. Individual subscales also demonstrated strong reliability, ranging from 0.76 to 0.84, with test–retest reliability spanning from 0.71 to 0.74. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) employing a three-factor structure (χ2 = 294.69, GFI = 0.92, TLI = 0.91, RMSEA = 0.05, SRMR = 0.06) validated the scale’s construct validity. Notably, there was a statistically significant difference (p < 0.05) in the quality of life between Type 2 diabetes patients using mHealth education intervention and those without mHealth education intervention. Mediation analysis revealed that Appraisal of Diabetes (ADS) and Self-Management Efficacy (SED) mediated the effects of Psychological Distress (PD) and Behavior Adherence (BA) on quality of life, both significant direct and indirect effects (p < 0.001). In addition, Dietary Abstinence (DE) displayed significant overall impact (β = −0.13, p < 0.001) and indirect influence (β = −0.10, p < 0.01) on diabetic patients’ quality of life, though lacking a significant direct effect (β = −0.03, p = 0.38).ConclusionThe Chinese version of the Diabetes Health Profile Scale meets stringent psychometric standards and stands as an appropriate measurement tool for Chinese T2DM patients, maintaining comparable results to the original scale’s structure. The mHealth education intervention yielded a notably positive impact on the quality of life among T2DM patients. Mediation analysis revealed that the three dimensions of the DHP were mediated by Appraisal of Diabetes and Diabetes Self-Management Efficacy, partially mediated by Psychological Distress and Behavior Adherence, and fully mediated by Dietary Abstinence, providing insight into the positive effects of the mHealth model on the quality of life of diabetic patients

Cross-plane transport in a single-molecule two-dimensional van der Waals heterojunction

Two-dimensional van der Waals heterostructures (2D-vdWHs) stacked from atomically thick 2D materials are predicted to be a diverse class of electronic materials with unique electronic properties. These properties can be further tuned by sandwiching monolayers of planar organic molecules between 2D materials to form molecular 2D-vdW heterojunctions (M-2D-vdWHs), in which electricity flows in a cross-plane way from one 2D layer to the other via a single molecular layer. Using a newly developed cross-plane break junction (XPBJ) technique, combined with density functional theory calculations, we show that M-2D-vdWHs can be created, and that cross-plane charge transport can be tuned by incorporating guest molecules. More importantly, the M-2D-vdWHs exhibit distinct cross-plane charge transport signatures, which differ from those of molecules undergoing in-plane charge transport