To avoid the side effects of the current popular platinum-based anticancer drugs, researchers have made tireless attempts to design appropriate GSH-resistant Ru(ii)-arene complexes. In this regard, ...luminescent ruthenium(ii)-p-cymene-imidazophenanthroline complexes were developed as promising highly cytoselective cancer theraputic agents for HeLa and Caco-2 cells.
The Internet of Drones (IoD) is widely used in a wide range of applications from military to civilian applications from the past years. However, during communication either with the control ...room/ground station server(s) or moving access points in the sky, security and privacy is one the crucial issues which needs to be tackled efficiently. In this direction, blokchain technology can be one of the viable solutions due to the immutability and traceability of various transactions and decentralized nature. In this paper, we provide in-depth challenges and issues of applicability of blokchain in 5G-based Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled IoD environment. We propose and analyze a new blokchain based secure framework for data management among IoD communication entities. The proposed scheme has ability to resist several potential attacks that are essential in IoT-enabled IoD environment. A detailed comparative analysis exhibits that the proposed scheme offers better security and functionality requirements, and also provides less communication and computation overheads as compared to other related schemes.
•We analyze recently proposed Chuang and Chen’s scheme for multi-server environment.•We show that their scheme is still vulnerable to different known attacks.•We then propose an improved scheme with ...user anonymity and low computation overhead.•Formal and informal security analysis/verification show that our scheme is secure.•High security and low overhead make our scheme suitable for practical applications.
Advancement in communication technology provides a scalable platform for various services, where a remote user can access the server from anywhere without moving from its place. It provides a unique opportunity for online services such that a user does not need to be physically present at the service center. These services adopt authentication and key agreement protocols in order to ensure authorized and secure access to the resources. Most of the authentication schemes proposed in the literature support a single-server environment, where the user has to register with each server. If a user wishes to access multiple application servers, he/she requires to register with each server. The multi-server authentication introduces a scalable platform such that a user can interact with any server using single registration. Recently, Chuang and Chen proposed an efficient multi-server authenticated key agreement scheme based on a user’s password and biometrics (Chuang and Chen, 2014). Their scheme is a lightweight, which requires the computation of only hash functions. In this paper, we first analyze Chuang and Chen’s scheme and then identify that their scheme does not resist stolen smart card attack which causes the user’s impersonation attack and server spoofing attack. We also show that their scheme fails to protect denial-of-service attack. We aim to propose an efficient improvement on Chuang and Chen’s scheme to overcome the weaknesses of their scheme, while also retaining the original merits of their scheme. Through the rigorous informal and formal security analysis, we show that our scheme is secure against various known attacks including the attacks found in Chuang and Chen’s scheme. Furthermore, we simulate our scheme for the formal security verification using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool and show that our scheme is secure against the replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. In addition, our scheme is comparable in terms of the communication and computational overheads with Chuang and Chen’s scheme and other related existing schemes.
Development of active materials capable of delivering high specific capacitance is one of the present challenges in supercapacitor applications. Herein, we report a facile and green solvothermal ...approach to synthesize graphene supported tungsten oxide (WO3) nanowires as an active electrode material. As an active electrode material, the graphene–WO3 nanowire nanocomposite with an optimized weight ratio has shown excellent electrochemical performance with a specific capacitance of 465 F g–1 at 1 A g–1 and a good cycling stability of 97.7% specific capacitance retention after 2000 cycles in 0.1 M H2SO4 electrolyte. Furthermore, a solid-state asymmetric supercapacitor (ASC) was fabricated by pairing a graphene–WO3 nanowire nanocomposite as a negative electrode and activated carbon as a positive electrode. The device has delivered an energy density of 26.7 W h kg–1 at 6 kW kg–1 power density, and it could retain 25 W h kg–1 at 6 kW kg–1 power density after 4000 cycles. The high energy density and excellent capacity retention obtained using a graphene–WO3 nanowire nanocomposite demonstrate that it could be a promising material for the practical application in energy storage devices.
The Internet of Drones (IoD) provides a coordinated access to unmanned aerial vehicles that are referred as drones. The on-going miniaturization of sensors, actuators, and processors with ubiquitous ...wireless connectivity makes drones to be used in a wide range of applications ranging from military to civilian. Since most of the applications involved in the IoD are real-time based, the users are generally interested in accessing real-time information from drones belonging to a particular fly zone. This happens if we allow users to directly access real-time data from flying drones inside IoD environment and not from the server. This is a serious security breach which may deteriorate performance of any implemented solution in this IoD environment. To address this important issue in IoD, we propose a novel lightweight user authentication scheme in which a user in the IoD environment needs to access data directly from a drone provided that the user is authorized to access the data from that drone. The formal security verification using the broadly accepted automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications tool along with informal security analysis show that our scheme is secure against several known attacks. The performance comparison demonstrates that our scheme is efficient with respect to various parameters, and it provides better security as compared to those for the related existing schemes. Finally, the practical demonstration of our scheme is done using the widely accepted NS2 simulation.
In recent years, the research in generic Internet of Things (IoT) attracts a lot of practical applications including smart home, smart city, smart grid, industrial Internet, connected healthcare, ...smart retail, smart supply chain and smart farming. The hierarchical IoT network (HIoTN) is a special kind of the generic IoT network, which is composed of the different nodes, such as the gateway node, cluster head nodes, and sensing nodes organized in a hierarchy. In HIoTN, there is a need, where a user can directly access the real-time data from the sensing nodes for a particular application in generic IoT networking environment. This paper emphasizes on the design of a new secure lightweight three-factor remote user authentication scheme for HIoTNs, called the user authenticated key management protocol (UAKMP). The three factors used in UAKMP are the user smart card, password, and personal biometrics. The security of the scheme is thoroughly analyzed under the formal security in the widely accepted real-or-random model, the informal security as well as the formal security verification using the widely accepted automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications tool. UAKMP offers several functionality features including offline sensing node registration, freely password and biometric update facility, user anonymity, and sensing node anonymity compared to other related existing schemes. In addition, UAKMP is also comparable in computation and communication costs as compared to other existing schemes.
Enhancing the performance and stability of the low-cost materials for electrochemical energy storage device is an important aspect. Herein, we report microwave-assisted solvothermal synthesis of ...three-dimensional (3D) spherical CuO structures composed of either one-dimensional (rod-like) or two-dimensional (2D) flake-like building blocks by varying the reaction medium, i.e., water and ethylene glycol (EG). A higher EG in the reaction medium facilitates formation of the flake-like structures. A specific surface area of 168.47 m2 g–1 is achieved with the 3D flower-like CuO, synthesized using copper acetate precursor in 1:3 water/EG solvent ratio. The same sample delivers a specific capacitance of 612 F g–1 at an applied current density of 1 A g–1 and shows high stability with capacity retention of 98% after 4000 galvanostatic charge–discharge cycles. The high specific capacitance of flower-shaped CuO architecture is attributed to large surface area and availability of sufficient pores for ions diffusion. Furthermore, two-electrode asymmetric supercapacitor device is fabricated using the 3D flower-shaped CuO as positive electrode and activated carbon as negative electrode, which shows an energy density of 27.27 Wh kg–1 at a power density of 800 W kg–1. This underlines the potential of inexpensive CuO architecture as an active material for energy storage devices.
Fog computing (fog networking) is known as a decentralized computing infrastructure in which data, applications, compute as well as data storage are scattered in the most logical and efficient place ...among the data source (i.e., smart devices) and the cloud. It gives better services than cloud computing because it has better performance with reasonably low cost. Since the cloud computing has security and privacy issues, and fog computing is an extension of cloud computing, it is therefore obvious that fog computing will inherit those security and privacy issues from cloud computing. In this paper, we design a new secure key management and user authentication scheme for fog computing environment, called SAKA-FC. SAKA-FC is efficient as it only uses the lightweight operations, such as one-way cryptographic hash function and bitwise exclusive-OR (XOR), for the smart devices as they are resource-constrained in nature. SAKA-FC is shown to be secure with the help of the formal security analysis using the broadly accepted Real-Or-Random (ROR) model, the formal security verification using the widely-used Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool and also the informal security analysis. In addition, SAKA-FC is implemented for practical demonstration using the widely-used NS2 simulator.
•Secure key management and authentication mechanism is designed for fog devices.•Scheme has been validated using formal verification.•Results obtained are convincing.
Previous studies have not adequately captured the heterogeneous nature of the diabetes epidemic in India. The aim of the ongoing national Indian Council of Medical Research-INdia DIABetes study is to ...estimate the national prevalence of diabetes and prediabetes in India by estimating the prevalence by state.
We used a stratified multistage design to obtain a community-based sample of 57 117 individuals aged 20 years or older. The sample population represented 14 of India's 28 states (eight from the mainland and six from the northeast of the country) and one union territory. States were sampled in a phased manner: phase I included Tamil Nadu, Chandigarh, Jharkhand, and Maharashtra, sampled between Nov 17, 2008, and April 16, 2010; phase II included Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Karnataka, and Punjab, sampled between Sept 24, 2012, and July 26, 2013; and the northeastern phase included Assam, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, Manipur, and Meghalaya, with sampling done between Jan 5, 2012, and July 3, 2015. Capillary oral glucose tolerance tests were used to diagnose diabetes and prediabetes in accordance with WHO criteria. Our methods did not allow us to differentiate between type 1 and type 2 diabetes. The prevalence of diabetes in different states was assessed in relation to socioeconomic status (SES) of individuals and the per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) of each state. We used multiple logistic regression analysis to examine the association of various factors with the prevalence of diabetes and prediabetes.
The overall prevalence of diabetes in all 15 states of India was 7·3% (95% CI 7·0-7·5). The prevalence of diabetes varied from 4·3% in Bihar (95% CI 3·7-5·0) to 10·0% (8·7-11·2) in Punjab and was higher in urban areas (11·2%, 10·6-11·8) than in rural areas (5·2%, 4·9-5·4; p<0·0001) and higher in mainland states (8·3%, 7·9-8·7) than in the northeast (5·9%, 5·5-6·2; p<0·0001). Overall, 1862 (47·3%) of 3938 individuals identified as having diabetes had not been diagnosed previously. States with higher per-capita GDP seemed to have a higher prevalence of diabetes (eg, Chandigarh, which had the highest GDP of US$ 3433, had the highest prevalence of 13·6%, 12.8-15·2). In rural areas of all states, diabetes was more prevalent in individuals of higher SES. However, in urban areas of some of the more affluent states (Chandigarh, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu), diabetes prevalence was higher in people with lower SES. The overall prevalence of prediabetes in all 15 states was 10·3% (10·0-10·6). The prevalence of prediabetes varied from 6·0% (5·1-6·8) in Mizoram to 14·7% (13·6-15·9) in Tripura, and the prevalence of impaired fasting glucose was generally higher than the prevalence of impaired glucose tolerance. Age, male sex, obesity, hypertension, and family history of diabetes were independent risk factors for diabetes in both urban and rural areas.
There are large differences in diabetes prevalence between states in India. Our results show evidence of an epidemiological transition, with a higher prevalence of diabetes in low SES groups in the urban areas of the more economically developed states. The spread of diabetes to economically disadvantaged sections of society is a matter of great concern, warranting urgent preventive measures.
Indian Council of Medical Research and Department of Health Research, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India.
Security and privacy are the major concerns in cloud computing as users have limited access on the stored data at the remote locations managed by different service providers. These become more ...challenging especially for the data generated from the wearable devices as it is highly sensitive and heterogeneous in nature. Most of the existing techniques reported in the literature are having high computation and communication costs and are vulnerable to various known attacks, which reduce their importance for applicability in real-world environment. Hence, in this paper, we propose a new cloud based user authentication scheme for secure authentication of medical data. After successful mutual authentication between a user and wearable sensor node, both establish a secret session key that is used for future secure communications. The extensively-used Real-Or-Random (ROR) model based formal security analysis and the broadly-accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool based formal security verification show that the proposed scheme provides the session-key security and protects active attacks. The proposed scheme is also informally analyzed to show its resilience against other known attacks. Moreover, we have done a detailed comparative analysis for the communication and computation costs along with security and functionality features which proves its efficiency in comparison to the other existing schemes of its category.
