Contact Tracing is considered as the first and the most effective step towards containing an outbreak, as resources for mass testing and large quantity of vaccines are highly unlikely available for immediate utilization. Effective contact tracing can allow societies to reopen from lock-down even before availability of vaccines. The objective of mobile contact tracing is to speed up the manual interview based contact tracing process for containing an outbreak efficiently and quickly. In this article, we throw light on some of the issues and challenges pertaining to the adoption of mobile contact tracing solutions for fighting COVID-19. In essence, we proposed an Evaluation framework for mobile contact tracing solutions to determine their usability, feasibility, scalability and effectiveness. We evaluate some of the already proposed contact tracing solutions in light of our proposed framework. Furthermore, we present possible attacks that can be launched against contact tracing solutions along with their necessary countermeasures to thwart any possibility of such attacks.
Blockchain is a decentralised, replicated, transparent and immutable data store. Blockchains are best described not as 'trustless', but on the basis of distributed trust: trusting everyone in aggregate. Consensus protocols are the heart and soul of the blockchains as they help in achieving this distributed trust. Blockchains are updated via the consensus protocols that guarantee their consistency and integrity over geographically distributed network nodes. Various algorithms can be applied to achieve a consensus based on the requirements like performance, security, scalability, consistency, and failure redundancy. Creating a global fair decentralised consensus protocol is of prime importance, in order to address above-mentioned requirements sufficiently. This paper focuses on analysing the already proposed consensus protocols adopted by popular blockchain platforms to determine their feasibility and efficiency. Parameters that are critical in evaluating blockchain consensus protocol are also discussed. This paper also analyses the hardness of achieving the fair decentralised trust with proof.
Abstract-In this paper, we propose a secure, lightweight acoustic pseudo-random number generator (SLA-LFSR-PRNG) that consumes less memory, CPU capacity and adopts the multi-thread parallelization to generate huge random numbers per second by taking the advantages of multi-core CPU and massively parallel architecture of GPU. The generator is based on cryptographically secure Linear Feedback Shift Register(LFSR) and extracts the entropy from sound sources. The major attraction of proposed Pseudo Random Number Generator(PRNG) is its immunity to major attacks on pseudo-random number generators. The paper presents test results of proposed PRNG subjected to NIST SP 800-22 statistical test suite and also shows the performance comparison of proposed generator on different systems.
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