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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has become a great threat to public health, which has greatly impacted the study and life of undergraduate students in China. This study aims to perform a survey of their knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) associated with COVID-19. Methods: A cross-sectional survey was designed to gather information regarding the COVID-19 related KAP among undergraduates during the home isolation in the outbreak. Subjects were recruited from 10 universities in Shaanxi Province, China. Enrollees voluntarily submitted their answers to a pre-designed questionnaire online. Results: A total of 872 subjects (female, 534; male, 338) were enrolled with ages from 17 to 25 years old. This cohort included 430 medical and 442 non-medical students, 580 freshmen and 292 higher school year students. There were 453 from public schools and 442 from private school, residing in 28 regions and provinces at the time of study. Results showed that appropriate knowledge was acquired by 82.34% subjects; the levels were significantly higher in undergraduates from public universities and medical majors than those from private schools and nonmedical majors (p<0.05). 73.81% subjects reported positive attitudes; females showed significantly higher levels of positive attitudes than males (p<0.05). Proactive practice was found in 87.94% subjects. Using a common scoring method, the overall scores for Knowledge, Attitude and Practice were 4.12 ± 0.749 (range: 0~5), 8.54 ± 1.201 (range: 0~10), and 8.91 ± 1.431 (range: 0~10), respectively. There was a positive correlation between attitude and practice (r = 0.319, p < 0.05) in the whole study group. Total KAP score was 21.57 ± 2.291 (range: 0~25), which was significantly different between gender groups and major groups. Conclusions: Most undergraduates acquired necessary knowledge, positive attitude and proactive practice in response to COVID-19 outbreak; but their KAP scores significantly varied by gender, major and school types.

The 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has affected all aspects of human life. Rapid, accurate, sensitive and user friendly detection method is urgently needed to facilitate early intervention and control the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Here, we propose a one-pot visual SARS-CoV-2 detection system named “opvCRISPR” by integrating reverse transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP) and Cas12a cleavage in a single reaction system. We demonstrate that the collateral activity against single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) reporters of activated Cas12a triggered by RT-LAMP amplicon increases detection sensitivity and makes detection results observable with naked eye. The opvCRISPR enables detection at nearly single molecule level in 45 min. We validate this method with 50 SARS-CoV-2 potentially infected clinical samples. The opvCRISPR diagnostic results provide 100% agreement with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-approved quantitative RT-PCR assay. The opvCRISPR holds great potential for SARS-CoV-2 detection in next-generation point-of-care molecular diagnostics.

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BackgroundThe current COVID-19 pandemic is effectively constrained by intensified public health measures in China, among which ubiquitous education plays a vital part.ObjectiveThis survey aims to understand the status quo acquisition of the ongoing public health education campaign among university students. MethodsWe designed this cross-sectional survey to investigated the knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) associated with COVID-19 among university students during their household isolation at the peak of this pandemic. 872 university undergraduates were recruited from 10 universities in Shaanxi Province, China, in a stratified cluster sampling method. A self-administered and close-ended questionnaire was answered by subjects online voluntarily and anonymously to collect their answers regarding their KAP associated with COVID-19.ResultsResults showed that appropriate knowledge was acquired by 82.34% subjects, but the level was significantly higher in students from public universities and medical programs than in their counterparts (P＜0.05). 73.81% subjects reported positive attitude, with level significantly higher in females (P＜0.01). Proactive practice was found in 87.94% subjects. Taken together, the score of KAP was 4.12±0.749, 8.54±1.201, and 8.91±1.431 respectively, suggesting a positive correlation between attitude and practice (r=0.319, P＜0.01). Total KAP score was 21.57±2.291, apparently correlated with gender (r=0.096, P=0.005) and major (r=-0.081, P=0.017).ConclusionsMost university students acquired necessary knowledge, positive attitude and proactive practice towards COVID-19, but their KAP score significantly varied by gender, major and school type.

In order to overcome the difficulty of password management and improve the usability of authentication systems, biometric authentication has been widely studied and has attracted special attention in both academia and industry. Many biometric authentication systems have been researched and developed, especially for mobile devices. However, the existing biometric authentication systems still have defects. Some biological features have not been deeply investigated. The existing systems could be vulnerable to attacks, such as replay attack and suffer from user privacy intrusion, which seriously hinder their wide acceptance by end users. The literature still lacks a thorough review on the recent advances of biometric authentication for the purpose of secure and privacy-preserving identification. In this paper, we classify and thoroughly review the existing biometric authentication systems by focusing on the security and privacy solutions. We analyze the threats of biometric authentication and propose a number of criteria with regard to secure and privacy-preserving authentication. We further review the existing works of biometric authentication by analyzing their differences and summarizing the advantages and disadvantages of each based on the proposed criteria. In particular, we discuss the problems of aliveness detection and privacy protection in biometric authentication. Based on our survey, we figure out a number of open research issues and further specify a number of significant research directions that are worth special efforts in future research.

Internet of Things (IoT) is gaining increasing popularity. Overwhelming volumes of data are generated by IoT devices. Those data after analytics provide significant information that could greatly benefit IoT applications. Different from traditional applications, IoT applications such as environmental monitoring, smart navigation and smart healthcare come with new requirements such as mobility, real-time response, and location awareness. However, traditional cloud computing paradigm cannot satisfy these demands due to centralized processing and being far away from local devices. Hence, edge computing was introduced to perform data processing and storage in the edge of networks, which is closer to data sources than cloud computing, thus efficient and location-aware. Unfortunately, edge computing brings new security and privacy challenges when applied to data analytics. The literature still lacks a thorough review on the recent advances in secure data analytics in edge computing. In this paper, we first introduce the concept and features of edge computing, and then propose a number of requirements for its secure data analytics by analyzing potential security threats in edge computing. Furthermore, we give a comprehensive review on the pros and cons of the existing works on data analytics in edge computing based on our proposed requirements. Based on our literature survey, we highlight current open issues and propose future research directions.

With the great success of the second‐generation wireless telephone technology and the third‐generation mobile telecommunications technology, and the fast development of the fourth‐generation mobile telecommunications technology, the phase of fifth‐generation mobile networks or fifth‐generation wireless systems (5G) is coming. In this article, we indicate the open research issues of 5G security and trust in the context of virtualized networking and software‐defined networking. We further propose a framework of security and trust focusing on solving 5G network security issues. The proposed framework applies adaptive trust evaluation and management technologies and sustainable trusted computing technologies to ensure computing platform trust and achieve software‐defined network security. It adopts cloud computing to securely deploy various trustworthy security services over the virtualized networks. We analyze that the framework can support and satisfy all security requirements specified in standardization. We also suggest future research work according to the proposed framework and discuss the advantages of our framework in terms of practical deployment. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.