The importance of human FcyRI in mediating protection to malaria

The success of passive immunization suggests that antibody-based therapies will be effective at controlling malaria. We describe the development of fully human antibodies specific for Plasmodium falciparum by antibody repertoire cloning from phage display libraries generated from immune Gambian adults. Although these novel reagents bind with strong affinity to malaria parasites, it remains unclear if in vitro assays are predictive of functional immunity in humans, due to the lack of suitable animal models permissive for P. falciparum. A potentially useful solution described herein allows the antimalarial efficacy of human antibodies to be determined using rodent malaria parasites transgenic for P. falciparum antigens in mice also transgenic for human Fc-receptors. These human IgG1s cured animals of an otherwise lethal malaria infection, and protection was crucially dependent on human FcγRI. This important finding documents the capacity of FcγRI to mediate potent antimalaria immunity and supports the development of FcγRI-directed therapy for human malaria.

Secure ownership transfer in multi-tag/multi-owner passive RFID systems

In this paper we propose a secure ownership transfer protocol for a multi-tag and multi-owner RFID environment. Most of the existing work in this area do not comply with the EPC Global Class-1 Gen-2 (C1G2) standard since they use expensive hash operations or sophisticated encryption schemes that cannot be implemented on low-cost passive tags that are highly resource constrained. Our work aims to fill this gap by proposing a protocol based on simple XOR and 128-bit Pseudo Random Number Generators (PRNG), operations that can be easily implemented on low-cost passive RFID tags. The protocol thus achieves EPC C1G2 compliance while meeting the security requirements. Also, our protocol provides additional protection using a blind-factor to prevent tracking attacks.

Secure ownership transfer for multi-tag multi-owner passive RFID environment with individual-owner-privacy

In this paper we propose a secure ownership transfer protocol for a multi-tag multi-owner RFID environment that provides individual-owner-privacy. To our knowledge, the existing schemes do not provide individual-owner-privacy and most of the existing schemes do not comply with the EPC Global Class-1 Gen-2 (C1G2) standard since the protocols use expensive hash operations or sophisticated encryption schemes that cannot be implemented on low-cost passive tags that are highly resource constrained. Our work aims to fill these gaps by proposing a protocol that provides individual-owner-privacy, based on simple XOR and 128-bit pseudo-random number generators (PRNG), operations that are easily implemented on low-cost RFID tags while meeting the necessary security requirements thus making it a viable option for large scale implementations. Our protocol also provides additional protection by hiding the pseudo-random numbers during all transmissions using a blind-factor to prevent tracking attacks.