A framework for cryptography algorithms on mobile devices

Mobile communication devices have become a popular tool for gathering and disseminating information and data. With the evidence of the growth of wireless technology and a need for more flexible, customizable and better-optimised security schemes, it is evident that connection-based security such as HTTPS may not be sufficient. In order to provide sufficient security at the application layer, developers need access to a cryptography package. Such packages are available as third party mobile cryptographic toolkits or are supported natively on the mobile device. Typically mobile cryptographic packages have reduced their number of API methods to keep the package lightweight in size, but consequently making it quite complex to use. As a result developers could easily misuse a method which can weaken the entire security of a system without knowing it. Aside from the complexities in the API, mobile cryptography packages often do not apply sound cryptography within the implementation of the algorithms thus causing vulnerabilities in its utilization and initialization. Although FIPS 140-2 and CAPI suggest guidelines on how cryptographic algorithms should be implemented, they do not define the guidelines for implementing and using cryptography in a mobile environment. In our study, we do not define new cryptographic algorithms, instead, we investigate how sound cryptography can be applied practically in a mobile application environment and developed a framework called Linca (which stands for Logical Integration of Cryptographic Architectures) that can be used as a mobile cryptographic package to demonstrate our findings. The benefit that Linca has is that it hides the complexity of making incorrect cryptographic algorithm decisions, cryptographic algorithm initialization and utilization and key management, while maintaining a small size. Linca also applies sound cryptographic fundamentals internally within the framework, which radiates these benefits outwards at the API. Because Linca is a framework, certain architecture and design patterns are applied internally so that the cryptographic mechanisms and algorithms can be easily maintained. Linca showed better results when evaluated against two mobile cryptography API packages namely Bouncy Castle API and Secure and Trust Service API in terms of security and design. We demonstrate the applicability of Linca on using two realistic examples that cover securing network channels and on-device data.Dissertation (MSc (Computer Science))--University of Pretoria, 2007.Computer ScienceMScunrestricte

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

The Changing Landscape for Stroke\ua0Prevention in AF: Findings From the GLORIA-AF Registry Phase 2

Background GLORIA-AF (Global Registry on Long-Term Oral Antithrombotic Treatment in Patients with Atrial Fibrillation) is a prospective, global registry program describing antithrombotic treatment patterns in patients with newly diagnosed nonvalvular atrial fibrillation at risk of stroke. Phase 2 began when dabigatran, the first non\u2013vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulant (NOAC), became available. Objectives This study sought to describe phase 2 baseline data and compare these with the pre-NOAC era collected during phase 1. Methods During phase 2, 15,641 consenting patients were enrolled (November 2011 to December 2014); 15,092 were eligible. This pre-specified cross-sectional analysis describes eligible patients\u2019 baseline characteristics. Atrial fibrillation disease characteristics, medical outcomes, and concomitant diseases and medications were collected. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results Of the total patients, 45.5% were female; median age was 71 (interquartile range: 64, 78) years. Patients were from Europe (47.1%), North America (22.5%), Asia (20.3%), Latin America (6.0%), and the Middle East/Africa (4.0%). Most had high stroke risk (CHA2DS2-VASc [Congestive heart failure, Hypertension, Age  6575 years, Diabetes mellitus, previous Stroke, Vascular disease, Age 65 to 74 years, Sex category] score  652; 86.1%); 13.9% had moderate risk (CHA2DS2-VASc = 1). Overall, 79.9% received oral anticoagulants, of whom 47.6% received NOAC and 32.3% vitamin K antagonists (VKA); 12.1% received antiplatelet agents; 7.8% received no antithrombotic treatment. For comparison, the proportion of phase 1 patients (of N = 1,063 all eligible) prescribed VKA was 32.8%, acetylsalicylic acid 41.7%, and no therapy 20.2%. In Europe in phase 2, treatment with NOAC was more common than VKA (52.3% and 37.8%, respectively); 6.0% of patients received antiplatelet treatment; and 3.8% received no antithrombotic treatment. In North America, 52.1%, 26.2%, and 14.0% of patients received NOAC, VKA, and antiplatelet drugs, respectively; 7.5% received no antithrombotic treatment. NOAC use was less common in Asia (27.7%), where 27.5% of patients received VKA, 25.0% antiplatelet drugs, and 19.8% no antithrombotic treatment. Conclusions The baseline data from GLORIA-AF phase 2 demonstrate that in newly diagnosed nonvalvular atrial fibrillation patients, NOAC have been highly adopted into practice, becoming more frequently prescribed than VKA in Europe and North America. Worldwide, however, a large proportion of patients remain undertreated, particularly in Asia and North America. (Global Registry on Long-Term Oral Antithrombotic Treatment in Patients With Atrial Fibrillation [GLORIA-AF]; NCT01468701

SMSSec : an end-to-end protocol for secure SMS

Short Message Service is usually used to transport unclassified information, but with the rise of mobile commerce it has become an integral tool for conducting business. However, SMS does not guarantee confidentiality and integrity of the message content. This paper proposes a protocol called SMSSec that can be used to secure an SMS communication sent by Java's Wireless Messaging API. The physical limitations of the intended devices such as mobile phones, made it necessary to develop a protocol which would make minimal use of computing resources. SMSSec has a two-phase protocol with the first handshake using asymmetric cryptography which occurs only once, and a more efficient symmetric nth handshake which is used more dominantly. What distinguishes this work from conventional protocols is the ability to perform the secure transmission with limited size messages. Performance analysis showed that the encryption speed on the mobile device is faster than the duration of the transmission. To achieve security in the mobile enterprise environment, this is deemed a very acceptable overhead. Furthermore, a simple mechanism handles fault tolerance without additional overhead is proposed

Critical care admission following elective surgery was not associated with survival benefit: prospective analysis of data from 27 countries

This was an investigator initiated study funded by Nestle Health Sciences through an unrestricted research grant, and by a National Institute for Health Research (UK) Professorship held by RP. The study was sponsored by Queen Mary University of London