One of the recent realms that gathered attention of researchers is the security issues of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems that have tradeoff between controlled costs and improved efficiency. Evolvement and benefits of RFID technology signifies that it can be low-cost, efficient and secured solution to many pervasive applications. But RFID technology will not intermingle into human lives until prevailing and flexible privacy mechanisms are conceived. However, ensuring strong privacy has been an enormous challenge due to extremely inadequate computational storage of typical RFID tags. So in order to relieve tags from responsibility, privacy protection and security assurance was guaranteed by central server. In this paper, we suggest serverless, forward secure and untraceable authentication protocol for RFID tags. This authentication protocol safeguards both tag and reader against almost all major attacks without the intervention of server. Though it is very critical to guarantee untraceability and scalability simultaneously, here we are proposing a scheme to make our protocol more scalable via ownership transfer. To the best of our knowledge this feature is incorporated in the serverless system for the first time in pervasive environments. One extension of RFID authentication is RFID tag searching, which has not been given much attention so far. But we firmly believe that in near future tag searching will be a significant issue RFID based pervasive systems. So in this paper we propose a serverless RFID tag searching protocol in pervasive environments. This protocol can search a particular tag efficiently without server's intervention. Furthermore they are secured against major security threats.

RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) is anticipated to be a core technology that will be used in many practical applications of our life in near future. It has received considerable attention within the healthcare for almost a decade now. The technology's promise to efficiently track hospital supplies, medical equipment, medications and patients is an attractive proposition to the healthcare industry. However, the prospect of wide spread use of RFID tags in the healthcare area has also triggered discussions regarding privacy, particularly because RFID data in transit may easily be intercepted and can be send to track its user (owner). In a nutshell, this technology has not really seen its true potential in healthcare industry since privacy concerns raised by the tag bearers are not properly addressed by existing identification techniques. There are two major types of privacy preservation techniques that are required in an RFID based healthcare system-(1) a privacy preserving authentication protocol is required while sensing RFID tags for different identification and monitoring purposes, and (2) a privacy preserving access control mechanism is required to restrict unauthorized access of private information while providing healthcare services using the tag ID. In this paper, we propose a framework (PriSens-HSAC) that makes an effort to address the above mentioned two privacy issues. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first framework to provide increased privacy in RFID based healthcare systems, using RFID authentication along with access control technique.

Contamination of aquatic environments with dioxins, the most toxic group of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), is a major ecological issue. Dioxins are highly lipophilic and bioaccumulate in fatty tissues of marine organisms used for seafood where they constitute a potential risk for human health. Lipid droplets (LDs) purified from date palm, Phoenix dactylifera, seeds were characterized and their capacity to extract dioxins from aquatic systems was assessed. The bioaffinity of date palm LDs toward 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD), the most toxic congener of dioxins was determined. Fractioned LDs were spheroidal with mean diameters of 2.5 µm, enclosing an oil-rich core of 392.5 mg mL-1. Isolated LDs did not aggregate and/or coalesce unless placed in acidic media and were strongly associated with three major groups of polypeptides of relative mass 32–37, 20–24, and 16–18 kDa. These masses correspond to the LD-associated proteins, oleosins, caleosins, and steroleosins, respectively. Efficient partitioning of TCDD into LDs occurred with a coefficient of log KLB/w,TCDD = 7.528 ± 0.024; it was optimal at neutral pH and was dependent on the presence of the oil-rich core, but was independent of the presence of LD-associated proteins. Bioinformatic analysis of the date palm genome revealed nine oleosin-like, five caleosin-like, and five steroleosin-like sequences, with predicted structures having putative lipid-binding domains that match their LD stabilizing roles and use as bio-based encapsulation systems. Transcriptomic analysis of date palm seedlings exposed to TCDD showed strong up-regulation of several caleosin and steroleosin genes, consistent with increased LD formation. The results suggest that the plant LDs could be used in ecological remediation strategies to remove POPs from aquatic environments. Recent reports suggest that several fungal and algal species also use LDs to sequester both external and internally derived hydrophobic toxins, which indicates that our approach could be used as a broader biomimetic strategy for toxin removal.

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There is still no reliable standard extraction method for the speciation of arsenic (As) in plant tissue, and hence there is great interest in developing one for plants that are used as human food. Speciation and bioavailability are critical for accurate human health risk assessment, as As species vary in both their toxicity and bioavailability. Recent incidences of As poisoning in many countries have led to significant research into the fate and dynamics of As in the soil and water environment, including speciation. Although one of the major pathways of ingestion of As is via food, only limited research has been conducted to assess the nature and proportion of various As species present in food crops. In this study, we compared the efficacy of ammonium dihydrogen phosphate and protein extracting solution for the extractability of As from two different species of spinach (amaranth and silverbeet). We found that a microwave-assisted technique with protein extracting solution was most effective, yielding 76-114% extractability and excellent separation and speciation of all As species present in the spinach matrices. The stability test for extracted As species showed them as stable for 45 days without any significant loss or inter-conversion. Both As III and As V were identified in the shoots of amaranth and silverbeet. However, the percentage of As species varied between amaranth and silverbeet. The silverbeet shoot showed a somewhat higher percentage of As V , while the amaranth showed a higher percentage of As III . The samples contained mostly inorganic As, especially As III ([90%) in the edible part of the vegetables, a form that is more toxic and bioavailable than other organic and methylated species.

The combined advances of open mobile platforms and online social networking applications (SNAs) are driving pervasive computing to the real-world users, as the mobile SNAs are expected to revolutionize wireless application industry. While sharing location through mobile SNAs is useful for information access and user interactions, privacy issues must be addressed at the design levels of mobile SNAs. In this paper, we survey mobile SNAs available today and we analyze their privacy designs using feedback and control framework on information capture, construction, accessibility, and purposes. Our analysis results suggest that today's mobile SNAs need better privacy protection on construction and accessibility, to handle increasingly popular mashups between different SNA sites. We also identify two unexpected privacy breaches and suggest three potential location misuse scenarios using mobile SNAs.

Aflatoxins (AF) are highly detrimental to human and animal health. We recently demonstrated that the Aspergillus flavus caleosin, AfPXG, had peroxygenase activity and mediated fungal development and AF accumulation. We now report the characterization of an AfPXG-deficient line using reference strain NRRL3357. The resulting fungal phenotype included a severe decrease in mycelium growth, failure to sporulate, and reduced AF production. Increasing cellular oxidative status by administration of hydrogen peroxide and cumene hydroperoxide did not restore the AfPXG-deficient phenotype, which suggests that AfPXG-deficiency is not directly related to oxidative stress. To investigate possible alternative roles of AfPXG, a gain of function approach was used to overexpress AfPXG, with the reporter gene Gfp, in an AfPXG-deficient line, termed AfPXG+. The resulting phenotype included elevated numbers of stable lipid droplets (LDs) plus enhanced AF production. Highly purified LDs from AfPXG+ cultures sequestered AF and this ability was positively correlated with overall LD number. Site-specific mutagenesis of AfPXG to delete Histidine 85 (AfPXGHis85), a residue essential for its catalytic activity, or deletion of the putative LD targeting domain (AfPXGD126-140), showed that AfPXG-peroxygenase activity was required for AF biosynthesis and that integration of AF into LDs was required for their export via a LD-dependent pathway. Ectopic expression in fungal cells of the plant LD-associated protein, oleosin, also resulted in both additional LD accumulation and enhanced AF secretion. These results suggest that both fungal LDs and their associated caleosin proteins are intimately involved in the biosynthesis, trafficking, and secretion of AF.

Two caleosin/peroxygenase isoforms from date palm, Phoenix dactylifera L., PdCLO2 and PdCLO4, were characterized with respect to their tissue expression, subcellular localization, and oxylipin pathway substrate specificities in developing seedlings. Both PdCLO2 and PdCLO4 had peroxygenase activities that peaked at the mid-stage (radicle length of 2.5 cm) of seedling growth and were associated with the lipid droplet (LD) and microsomal fractions. Recombinant PdCLO2 and PdCLO4 proteins heterologously expressed in yeast cells were localized in both LD and microsomal fractions. Each of the purified recombinant proteins exhibited peroxygenase activity but they were catalytically distinct with respect to their specificity and product formation from fatty acid epoxide and hydroxide substrates. We recently showed that date palm CLO genes were upregulated following exposure to the potent toxin, 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) (Hanano et al., 2016), and we show here that transcripts of 9- and 13-lipoxygenase (LOX) genes were also induced by TCDD exposure. At the enzyme level, 9-LOX and 13-LOX activities were present in a range of seedling tissues and responded differently to TCDD exposure, as did the 9- and 13-fatty acid hydroperoxide reductase activities. This demonstrates that at least two branches of the oxylipin pathway are involved in responses to the environmental organic toxin, TCDD in date palm.