Enhanced three-factor security protocol for consumer USB mass storage devices

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an extremely popular interface standard for computer peripheral connections and is widely used in consumer Mass Storage Devices (MSDs). While current consumer USB MSDs provide relatively high transmission speed and are convenient to carry, the use of USB MSDs has been prohibited in many commercial and everyday environments primarily due to security concerns. Security protocols have been previously proposed and a recent approach for the USB MSDs is to utilize multi-factor authentication. This paper proposes significant enhancements to the three-factor control protocol that now makes it secure under many types of attacks including the password guessing attack, the denial-of-service attack, and the replay attack. The proposed solution is presented with a rigorous security analysis and practical computational cost analysis to demonstrate the usefulness of this new security protocol for consumer USB MSDs.

Remaking place and securitising space: Urban regeneration and the strategies, tactics and practices of policing in the UK

Urban regeneration programmes in the UK over the past 20 years have increasingly focused on attracting investors, middle-class shoppers and visitors by transforming places and creating new consumption spaces. Ensuring that places are safe and are seen to be safe has taken on greater salience as these flows of income are easily disrupted by changing perceptions of fear and the threat of crime. At the same time, new technologies and policing strategies and tactics have been adopted in a number of regeneration areas which seek to establish control over these new urban spaces. Policing space is increasingly about controlling human actions through design, surveillance technologies and codes of conduct and enforcement. Regeneration agencies and the police now work in partnerships to develop their strategies. At its most extreme, this can lead to the creation of zero-tolerance, or what Smith terms 'revanchist', measures aimed at particular social groups in an effort to sanitise space in the interests of capital accumulation. This paper, drawing on an examination of regeneration practices and processes in one of the UK's fastest-growing urban areas, Reading in Berkshire, assesses policing strategies and tactics in the wake of a major regeneration programme. It documents and discusses the discourses of regeneration that have developed in the town and the ways in which new urban spaces have been secured. It argues that, whilst security concerns have become embedded in institutional discourses and practices, the implementation of security measures has been mediated, in part, by the local socio-political relations in and through which they have been developed.

Economists are not dismal, the world is not a Petri dish and other reasons for optimism

One of the recurrent themes in the debate around how to ensure global food security concerns the capacity of the planet to support its growing population. Neo-Malthusian thinking suggests that we are in a situation in which further expansion of the population cannot be supported and that the population checks, with their dismal consequences envisaged by Malthus, will lead to a new era of stagnant incomes and population. More sophisticated models of the link between population and income are less gloomy however. They see population growth as an integral component of the economic growth which is necessary to ensure that the poorest achieve food security. An undue focus on the difficulties of meeting the demands of the increasing population risks damaging this growth. Instead, attention should be focused on ensuring that the conditions to ensure that economic growth accompanies population growth are in place.

Investigation into the adoption intention of social CRM in Saudi banks

The growth of Web 2.0 generation will have influence on developing strong relationships with customers. Even though Web 2.0 technologies and applications have gained significant attention recently by academics and practitioners, research into its potential integration with CRM system remains a poorly investigated subject. This paper aims to investigate the adoption intention of social CRM system, focusing on Saudi banks. A conceptual model was proposed based on technology organisation and environment (TOE) framework. A qualitative approach was applied to validate the research model. The finding suggests that technology infrastructure, and competitive pressures tend to be the most influential drivers to adopt social CRM. In contrast, the limited number of IT experts, security concerns, and organisational structure were found to negatively affect social CRM adoption intention.

Transfer effects in implicit memory and consumer choice

Two experiments investigated transfer effects in implicit memory and consumer choice, using a preference judgement task. Experiment 1 examined whether it is possible to obtain priming for unfamiliar food labels. Additionally, it investigated whether the experience of seeing a brand name with a particular product type would benefit subsequent processing of the brand name when linked with a different product type. Experiment 2 examined whether changes in modality between study and test would affect priming for unfamiliar brand names. Both questions are theoretically important, as well as pertaining to practical concerns in the consumer choice literature. Experiment 1 demonstrated significant priming for unfamiliar food labels, and established that priming was unaffected by changing the product type with which the brand name was associated. In Experiment 2, priming on both auditory and visual versions of the preference judgement task was reduced by changes in modality. The results and implications are discussed in relation to consumer choice and current theories of implicit memory.

Consumption of welfare-friendly food products in Great Britain, Italy and Sweden, and how it may be influenced by consumer attitudes to, and behaviour towards, animal welfare attributes

The interest in animal welfare and welfare-friendly food products has been increasing in Europe over the last 10 years. The media, highlighting traditional farming methods and food scares such as those related to salmonella, bovine spongiform encephalopathy/variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (BSE) and avian influenza, have brought the methods of animal farming to public attention. Concerns about farm animal welfare are reflected in the increase in the number of vegetarians and vegans and an increase in consumers wishing to purchase food which is more animal welfare-friendly. This paper considers consumers’ attitudes to animal welfare and to marketing practices, such as product labelling, welfare grading systems and food assurance marks using comparative data collected in a survey of around 1500 consumers in each of Great Britain, Italy and Sweden as part of the EU-funded Welfare Quality research project. The findings suggest a need for the provision of improved consumer information on the welfare provenance of food using appropriate product labelling and other methods.

Categories of GM risk-benefit perceptions and their antecedents

The stated benefits and perceived risks of genetic modification (GM) cover very diverse issues, such as food safety, world food security, and the environment, that may differentially affect consumer acceptance. In this research, we hypothesize that consumers perceive up to eight dimensions: risks to business (farmers, agribusiness, etc.), benefits to business, risks and benefits to the environment, risks and benefits to the developing world, and risks and benefits to self and family. Moral concerns are also recognized. Using data collected in 2002 in the United States, France, and the UK, we investigate these different dimensions. Second, we analyze the extent to which the dimensions of risk-benefit perceptions can be explained by general attitudes widely used to explain food purchase behavior (such as general attitude to the environment, to technology, etc.), as well as by perceived knowledge of GM, level of education, and trust in various sources of information. In all locations, the majority of consumers only perceive a medium level of risk from GM products. Attitude to technology is the most important attitude variable—those with a positive attitude to technology in general also have a positive attitude to GM technology. More Americans than Europeans fall into this category. Those who trust government and the food industry tend to think GM technology is less risky, whereas those who trust activists believe the opposite. Americans are more trusting of the former, Europeans of the latter. Level of education is positively associated with benefit perceptions and negatively associated with moral concerns. Location continues to play a limited independent role in explaining perceptions even after these factors have been taken into account.

Security, trust and privacy supported by context-aware middleware

Driven by new network and middleware technologies such as mobile broadband, near-field communication, and context awareness the so-called ambient lifestyle will foster innovative use cases in building automation, healthcare and agriculture. In the EU project Hydra1 highlevel security, trust and privacy concerns such as loss of control, profiling and surveillance are considered at the outset. At the end of this project the Hydra middleware development platform will have been designed so as to enable developers to realise secure ambient scenarios especially in the user domains of building automation, healthcare, and agriculture. This paper gives a short introduction to the Hydra project, its user domains and its approach to ensure security by design. Based on the results of a focus group analysis of the building automation domain typical threats are evaluated and their risks are assessed. Then, specific security requirements with respect to security, privacy, and trust are derived in order to incorporate them into the Hydra Security Meta Model. How concepts such as context security, semantic security, and virtualisation support the overall Hydra approach will be introduced and illustrated on the basis of a technical building automation scenario.

Towards semantic resolution of security in ambient environments

Driven by new network and middleware technologies such as mobile broadband, near-field communication, and context awareness the so-called ambient lifestyle will foster innovative use cases in different domains. In the EU project Hydra high-level security, trust and privacy concerns such as loss of control, profiling and surveillance are considered at the outset. At the end of this project the. Hydra middleware development platform will have been designed so as to enable developers to realise secure ambient scenarios. This paper gives a short introduction to the Hydra project and its approach to ensure security by design. Based on the results of a focus group analysis of the user domain "building automation" typical threats are evaluated and their risks are assessed. Then, specific security requirements with respect to security, privacy, and trust are derived in order to incorporate them into the Hydra Security Meta-Model. How concepts such as context, semantic resolution of security, and virtualisation support the overall Hydra approach will be introduced and illustrated on the basis of it technical building automation scenario.

The role of agronomic research in climate change and food security policy

Societal concern is growing about the consequences of climate change for food systems and, in a number of regions, for food security. There is also concern that meeting the rising demand for food is leading to environmental degradation thereby exacerbating factors in part responsible for climate change, and further undermining the food systems upon which food security is based. A major emphasis of climate change/food security research over recent years has addressed the agronomic aspects of climate change, and particularly crop yield. This has provided an excellent foundation for assessments of how climate change may affect crop productivity, but the connectivity between these results and the broader issues of food security at large are relatively poorly explored; too often discussions of food security policy appear to be based on a relatively narrow agronomic perspective. To overcome the limitation of current agronomic research outputs there are several scientific challenges where further agronomic effort is necessary, and where agronomic research results can effectively contribute to the broader issues underlying food security. First is the need to better understand how climate change will affect cropping systems including both direct effects on the crops themselves and indirect effects as a result of changed pest and weed dynamics and altered soil and water conditions. Second is the need to assess technical and policy options for either reducing the deleterious impacts or enhancing the benefits of climate change on cropping systems while minimising further environmental degradation. Third is the need to understand how best to address the information needs of policy makers and report and communicate agronomic research results in a manner that will assist the development of food systems adapted to climate change. There are, however, two important considerations regarding these agronomic research contributions to the food security/climate change debate. The first concerns scale. Agronomic research has traditionally been conducted at plot scale over a growing season or perhaps a few years, but many of the issues related to food security operate at larger spatial and temporal scales. Over the last decade, agronomists have begun to establish trials at landscape scale, but there are a number of methodological challenges to be overcome at such scales. The second concerns the position of crop production (which is a primary focus of agronomic research) in the broader context of food security. Production is clearly important, but food distribution and exchange also determine food availability while access to food and food utilisation are other important components of food security. Therefore, while agronomic research alone cannot address all food security/climate change issues (and hence the balance of investment in research and development for crop production vis à vis other aspects of food security needs to be assessed), it will nevertheless continue to have an important role to play: it both improves understanding of the impacts of climate change on crop production and helps to develop adaptation options; and also – and crucially – it improves understanding of the consequences of different adaptation options on further climate forcing. This role can further be strengthened if agronomists work alongside other scientists to develop adaptation options that are not only effective in terms of crop production, but are also environmentally and economically robust, at landscape and regional scales. Furthermore, such integrated approaches to adaptation research are much more likely to address the information need of policy makers. The potential for stronger linkages between the results of agronomic research in the context of climate change and the policy environment will thus be enhanced.

GM crops, developing countries and food security

The agronomic and economic performance of genetically modified (GM) crops relative to their conventional counterparts has been largely investigated worldwide. As a result there is considerable information to conduct a meta-analysis to evaluate the agronomic and economic relative performance of GM crops vs. non GM crops by crop, GM trait, and country’s level of development. Such meta-analysis has been recently conducted showing that overall GM crops outperform non GM crops in both agronomic and economic terms (1). This paper focuses on the agronomic and economic performance of GM crops in developing and developed countries as well as the potential implications for global food security of adoption of GM crops by developing countries. The presumption that technology only benefits the developed world is not supported by the meta-analysis conducted. No evidence that GM technology benefits moredeveloped than developing countries was found. Indeed, the agronomic and economic performance of GM crops vs. conventional crops tends to be better for developing than for developed countries. Although it is manifested that the conventional agronomic practices in developing countries are different to those in developed countries, it is also apparent that GM crop adoption in developing countries may help to tackle the growing concerns over the scarcity of food globally.

Obstacle avoidance routing scheme through optimal sink movement for home monitoring and mobile robotic consumer devices

In recent years, ZigBee has been proven to be an excellent solution to create scalable and flexible home automation networks. In a home automation network, consumer devices typically collect data from a home monitoring environment and then transmit the data to an end user through multi-hop communication without the need for any human intervention. However, due to the presence of typical obstacles in a home environment, error-free reception may not be possible, particularly for power constrained devices. A mobile sink based data transmission scheme can be one solution but obstacles create significant complexities for the sink movement path determination process. Therefore, an obstacle avoidance data routing scheme is of vital importance to the design of an efficient home automation system. This paper presents a mobile sink based obstacle avoidance routing scheme for a home monitoring system. The mobile sink collects data by traversing through the obstacle avoidance path. Through ZigBee based hardware implementation and verification, the proposed scheme successfully transmits data through the obstacle avoidance path to improve network performance in terms of life span, energy consumption and reliability. The application of this work can be applied to a wide range of intelligent pervasive consumer products and services including robotic vacuum cleaners and personal security robots1.

The legitimacy of the UN Security Council: evidence from recent General Assembly debates

Existing research on the legitimacy of the UN Security Council is conceptual or theoretical, for the most part, as scholars tend to make legitimacy assessments with reference to objective standards. Whether UN member states perceive the Security Council as legitimate or illegitimate has yet to be investigated systematically; nor do we know whether states care primarily about the Council's compliance with its legal mandate, its procedures, or its effectiveness. To address this gap, our article analyzes evaluative statements made by states in UN General Assembly debates on the Security Council, for the period 1991–2009. In making such statements, states confer legitimacy on the Council or withhold legitimacy from it. We conclude the following: First, the Security Council suffers from a legitimacy deficit because negative evaluations of the Council by UN member states far outweigh positive ones. Nevertheless, the Council does not find itself in an intractable legitimacy crisis because it still enjoys a rudimentary degree of legitimacy. Second, the Council's legitimacy deficit results primarily from states' concerns regarding the body's procedural shortcomings. Misgivings as regards shortcomings in performance rank second. Whether or not the Council complies with its legal mandate has failed to attract much attention at all.

Efficient biometric and password based mutual authentication for consumer USB mass storage devices

A Universal Serial Bus (USB) Mass Storage Device (MSD), often termed a USB flash drive, is ubiquitously used to store important information in unencrypted binary format. This low cost consumer device is incredibly popular due to its size, large storage capacity and relatively high transfer speed. However, if the device is lost or stolen an unauthorized person can easily retrieve all the information. Therefore, it is advantageous in many applications to provide security protection so that only authorized users can access the stored information. In order to provide security protection for a USB MSD, this paper proposes a session key agreement protocol after secure user authentication. The main aim of this protocol is to establish session key negotiation through which all the information retrieved, stored and transferred to the USB MSD is encrypted. This paper not only contributes an efficient protocol, but also does not suffer from the forgery attack and the password guessing attack as compared to other protocols in the literature. This paper analyses the security of the proposed protocol through a formal analysis which proves that the information is stored confidentially and is protected offering strong resilience to relevant security attacks. The computational cost and communication cost of the proposed scheme is analyzed and compared to related work to show that the proposed scheme has an improved tradeoff for computational cost, communication cost and security.