Nutritional behaviour of (Non-)eSports players – a comparative study

Demand for eSports has generated considerable attention from the sport, event, and entertainment industries. However, time is spent playing and watching the computer games and is not related to physical activity. The aim of this study is to focus on nutritional behaviour between persons who practice eSports and those who do not practice eSports. A standardized questionnaire was implemented and, in total, 339 completed questionnaires were generated. The results show that participants who are not playing eSports games are significant healthier, doing more sports, are older, have higher incomes, eat more fruits and vegetables, but drink more caffeine and alcohol. In summary, the study shows that playing eSports games tend to have a negative impact on a healthy and sporting lifestyle.

Insights on the impact of COVID-19 and the lockdown on amateur golfers

The aim of the research paper is to evaluate how golfers feel about the lockdown, what they did with regard to golf during the lockdown and to what extent they understand the closure of golf courses. A standardized online questionnaire was designed for the primary empirical investigation. In total, 139 respondents completely filled out the questionnaires and were considered in our analyses. The results show that the officially ordered lockdown did not have a large impact on golfers but had at least a medium-to-increased negative influence on their favourite sport of golf. The closure of the golf courses during the lockdown led to a moderate level of approval. The length of the closure tends to be viewed negatively. Despite the problems that golf can expect in the short term, golf as a health- and well-being-promoting sport and a sport that offers natural experiences could benefit from COVID-19 in the medium to long term

Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on German golf – a comparison between club-owned and commercial golf clubs

The COVID-19 pandemic turned the international sports world upside down almost overnight. Both professional and popular sports are suffering from the pandemic in equal measure. Sports clubs, which have to bear high fixed costs, are particularly affected. This also includes golf clubs. A primary empirical survey of German golf clubs shows that although the short term – during the lockdown – economic consequences were severe, especially for commercial golf clubs, the 2020 season can be considered successful. This could be an increased interest in exercise in nature and higher health awareness among the population. It is now crucial that golf clubs and associations focus even more intensely on nature (experiences) and health and develop them strategically

Numerical Investigation into the Influence of Grain Orientation Distribution on the Local and Global Elastic-Plastic Behaviour of Polycrystalline Nickel-Based Superalloy INC-738 LC

Polycrystalline nickel-based superalloys tend to have large grains within component areas where high loads are dominant during operation. Due to these large grains, caused by the manufacturing and cooling process, the orientation of each grain becomes highly important, since it influences the elastic and plastic behaviour of the material. With the usage of the open source codes NEPER and FEPX, polycrystalline models of Inconel 738 LC were generated and their elastic and crystal plasticity behaviour simulated in dependence of different orientation distributions under uniaxial loading. Orientation distributions close to the [100] direction showed the lowest Young’s moduli as well as the highest elastic strains before yielding, as expected. Orientations close to the [589] direction, showed the lowest elastic strains and therefore first plastic deformation under strain loading due to the highest shear stress in the slip systems caused by the interaction of Young’s modulus and the Schmid factor

MEMS-based Gyroscopes as Physical Unclonable Functions

We are at the dawn of a hyper connectivity age otherwise known as the Internet of Things (IoT). It is widely accepted that to be able to reap all benefits from the IoT promise, device security will be of paramount importance. A key requirement for most security solutions is the ability to provide secure cryptographic key storage in a way that will easily scale in the IoT age. In this paper, we focus on providing such a solution based on Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). To this end, we focus on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-based gyroscopes and show via wafer-level measurements and simulations, that it is feasible to use the physical and electrical properties of these sensors for cryptographic key generation. After identifying the most promising features, we propose a novel quantization scheme to extract bit strings from the MEMS analog measurements. We provide upper and lower bounds for the minimum entropy of the bit strings derived from the measurements and fully analyze the intra- and inter-class distributions across the operation range of the MEMS device. We complement these measurements via Monte-Carlo simulations based on the distributions of the parameters measured on actual devices. We also propose and evaluate a key derivation procedure based on fuzzy extractors for Hamming distance, using the min-entropy estimates obtained to derive a full entropy 128-bit key, requiring 1219-bits of helper data with an (authentication) failure probability of 4x10^-7. Thereby, we present a complete cryptographic key generation chain. In addition, we propose a dedicated MEMS-PUF design, which is superior to our measured sensor, in terms of chip area, quality and quantity of key seed features

Fuzzing Embedded Systems Using Debug Interfaces

Fuzzing embedded systems is hard. Their key components - microcontrollers - are highly diverse and cannot be easily virtualized; their software may not be changed or instrumented. However, we observe that many, if not most, microcontrollers feature a debug interface through which a debug probe (typically controllable via GDB, the GNU debugger) can set a limited number of hardware breakpoints. Using these, we extract partial coverage feedback even for uninstrumented binary code; and thus enable effective fuzzing for embedded systems through a generic, widespread mechanism. In its evaluation on four different microcontroller boards, our prototypical implementation GDBFuzz quickly reaches high code coverage and detects known and new vulnerabilities. As it can be applied to any program and system that GDB can debug, GDBFuzz is one of the least demanding and most versatile coverage-guided fuzzers

Securing Systems with Scarce Entropy: LWE-Based Lossless Computational Fuzzy Extractor for the IoT

With the advent of the Internet of Things, lightweight devices necessitate secure and cost-efficient key storage. Since traditional secure key storage is expensive, novel solutions have been developed based on the idea of deriving the key from noisy entropy sources. Such sources when combined with fuzzy extractors allow cryptographically strong key derivation. Information theoretic fuzzy extractors require large amounts of input entropy to account for entropy loss in the key extraction process. It has been shown by Fuller \textit{et al.}~(ASIACRYPT\u2713) that the entropy loss can be reduced if the requirement is relaxed to computational security based on the hardness of the Learning with Errors problem. Using this computational fuzzy extractor, we show how to construct a device-server authentication system providing outsider chosen perturbation security and pre-application robustness. We present the first implementation of a \emph{lossless} computational fuzzy extractor where the entropy of the source equals the entropy of the key on a constrained device. The implementation needs only 1.45KB of SRAM and 9.8KB of Flash memory on an 8-bit microcontroller. Furthermore, we also show how a device-server authentication system can be constructed and efficiently implemented in our system. We compare our implementation to existing work in terms of security, while achieving no entropy loss