Javier Lopez

The increasing number of Internet users forecasts a great importance of this communication mechanism in the near future, and both the Public Administrations and the citizens can substantially benefit from it. Although there are already some working experiences that try to make use of Internet to communicate them, two are the main technological issues that prevent the Public Administrations from

The health care sector is quickly exploiting Information and Communication Technologies towards the provision of e-health services. According to recent surveys, one of the most severe restraining factors for the proliferation of e-health is the (lack of) security measures required to assure both service providers and patients that their relationship and transactions will be carried out in privacy, correctly, and timely. A large number of individuals are not willing to engage in e-health (or are only participating at a reduced level) simply because they do not trust the e-health service providers' sites and the underlying information and communication technologies to be secure enough. This paper considers privacy and security issues and challenges for e-health applications.

In-hospital mortality of patients with infective endocarditis (IE) remains exceedingly high. Quick recognition of parameters accurately identifying high-risk patients is of paramount importance. The objective of this study was to analyze the incidence and severity of thrombocytopenia at presentation and its prognostic impact in patients with native valve left-sided IE. We studied a cohort of 533 consecutive episodes of native valve left-sided IE prospectively recruited. We distinguished 2 groups: group I (n = 175), episodes who had thrombocytopenia at admission, and group II (n = 358) gathered all the episodes who did not. Thrombocytopenia at admission was defined as a platelet count of <150,000/μl. No differences were found in the need for surgery, but in-hospital mortality was significantly higher in patients with thrombocytopenia (p <0.001). Mortality rate was associated with the degree of thrombocytopenia (p…

Limbic encephalitis (LE) associated with antibodies to voltage-gated potassium channels (VGKC-Ab) have recently been reported as an immunotherapy responsive encephalitis typically not associated with cancer. In the present study, we report the clinical, radiological and evolution features of LE associated with VGKC-Ab in our area. Retrospective analysis of clinical, radiological and evolution variables in a series of LE associated with VGKC-Ab without onconeuronal antibodies. Thirteen patients were detected during a 10-years period; 77% were male and the median age was 67 years (50-75 years). The median time of presentation was 10 weeks (1-24 weeks). All patients had episodic memory impairment, 77% had epileptic seizures and 77% had confusion or behaviour disturbances. A REM-behaviour disorder (RBD) was detected in all asked patients. MRI was abnormal in the 84.6%, EEG in the 91%, CSF in 60% and hyponatraemia was detected in the 83% of cases. All cases were treated with IGIV and/or costicosteroids and 61.5% remained asymptomatic or with minimal symptoms. After a median follow-up of 24 months (3-108 months) no patient developed cancer. Demographic and clinical characteristics of our series are similar to those previously reported, confirming its immunotherapy-responsive condition. Chronic presentation or normal MRI does not exclude the syndromic diagnoses, and the coexistence of RBD, hyponatraemia or inflammatory CSF are especially useful to make the diagnoses in these cases.

Native valve infective endocarditis (IE) in patients with normal valves has increased in the last decades. Whether patients with normal valves present a similar prognosis to those with pathologic valves is unresolved. Our aim is to describe epidemiologic and clinical differences between patients with left-sided IE and normal valves and those with native pathologic valves. We analyzed 945 consecutive episodes of IE, 435 of which involved left-sided nonprosthetic IE. They were classified into 2 groups: episodes in normal valves (normal group, n=173) and episodes in pathologic valves (abnormal group, n=262). Patients in the normal group were younger, Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus bovis were more frequently isolated, and vegetations were more frequently found. Heart failure, septic shock, and the need for surgery or death were more common. Multivariate analysis identified the following as factors independently associated with normal valve IE: age<65 years, S bovis, S aureus, heart failure, and vegetation detection. Factors independently associated with in-hospital events included S aureus, periannular complications, heart failure, and septic shock development. In conclusion, compared with patients with abnormal valve IE, patients with IE on normal valves were younger, had a more virulent microbiological profile, developed heart failure and septic shock more frequently, needed more surgical procedures, and had worse prognosis.

The influence of chemical boundary conditions (BC) on the response of the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model over the Iberian Peninsula was investigated in this study. Three strategies to supply boundary conditions in the context of the Integrated Assessment Modelling System for the Iberian Peninsula (SIMCA) were tested. Alternative methods consist in providing BC from (1) fixed, time-independent, concentration profiles, (2) concentrations predicted in a CMAQ mother domain (48 km, 1 h resolution) and (3) concentration values from the GEOS-Chem chemical-transport global model (2 × 2.5°, 3 h resolution). High resolution (3 km) simulated concentrations of the main pollutants (NO2, NO, SO2, O3, PM10 and PM2.5) were compared through a comprehensive statistical analysis including observational data from 165 monitoring stations all over the Iberian Peninsula. It was found that model sensitivity to BC for nitrogen and sulphur oxides was limited, being restricted to the vicinity of model boundaries. However, significant domain-wide differences were found when modelling ozone and PM depending on the BC provided to run the tests. Although model performance was affected by spatial and seasonal factors, the results indicate that model-derived, dynamic BC improved CMAQ predictions when compared to those based on static concentrations prescribed in the boundaries. Aggregated statistics suggest that the GEOS-Chem produced the best results for O3 and PM2.5 while NO2 and PM10 were slightly better predicted under the CMAQ nesting approach. Besides the statistical evaluation some other relevant issues in the context of Integrated Assessment Modelling (IAM) are discussed to gain a better insight into the suitability of the methods analyzed and limitations of downscaling methods. Despite being useful to get a better understanding of the role of BC in SIMCA, this study contributed to highlight model deficiencies and therefore to point out future research needs to improve IAM activities in the Iberian Peninsula.

... Javier Lopez University of Malaga, Spain Eric Luiijf TNO DefenceSecurity and Safety, The Netherlands Marcelo Masera Joint ... Germany Jianying Zhou Institute for Infocom Research, Singapore Local Organization Committee Birgit Dorn, Yvonne Grabowski, Torsten Fraunhofer ...

Traffic monitoring is an increasingly important discipline for nowadays networking, as Accounting, Security and Traffic Engineering lay on it. Besides, traffic bandwidth has increased exponentially in the last few years, and high-speed network monitoring has become a challenging task. Performance requirements are highly relevant for passive QoS monitoring systems. A low-level study of the capturing and processing stages on a traffic analysis system (TAS) has shown room for improvement. We provide an architecture able to cope with high-speed traffic monitoring using commodity hardware. Our system is intended to exploit the parallelism available in up-to- date workstations, which also introduces constraints for multithreaded QoS analysis. This paper presents a kernel-level framework (ksensor) that, keeping the previous requirements, removes some issues from user-level processing and effectively integrates QoS algorithms, improving the overall performance.

1. Apyrase (ATP: diphosphohydrolase) has been found in the microsomal fraction of rat salivary gland, mammary gland and uterus.2. This enzyme, already described in plant tissues, is mainly present as a soluble polypeptide in tubers of Solanum tuberosum.3. A fraction of this enzyme is associated with the microsomal fraction with a higher specific activity than the soluble one, for either ATP or ADP as substrate.4. Apyrase bound to microsomes from rat and potato tissues was characterized in its substrate specificity and effect of inhibitors.5. The values for ATP and ADP, optimum pH and metal ion requirement were determined.6. A characteristic common to the microsomal and soluble apyrases is the stimulatory effect of a potato activator protein of soluble plant apyrase.7. The microsomal-bound apyrase from rat and potato tissues were solubilized and subjected to size-exclusion chromatography.8. The mammary gland and salivary gland apyrases eluted as molecular aggregates, in contrast to the uterus and potato enzyme.

A total of 32,022 Mexican children (16,473 boys, 15,549 girls) were examined for several congenital oral and paraoral anomalies. The findings for commissural lip pits (boys 53.1, girls 52.4 per 1000) are less than those reported for adults. This may indicate that pits become accentuated with age. Fordyce granules were seen with a prevalence of 1.2 per 1000. This is in contrast to the reported 85.6% prevalence for the adult population, also possibly reflecting increased manifestation with increased age. Our data for exogenous tooth pigmentation show increased prevalence with age (group I [5 to years], 9.8%, versus group II [ to years], 12.9%), possibly indicating decrease in attention to oral hygiene. The prevalence of talon cusp was found to be 0.6 per 1000, and for ankyloglossia 8.3 per 1000. Prevalence values for bifid tongue are reported for the first time, indicating one affected per 187 children examined. The prevalence of fissured tongue (15.7%) shows a statistically significant difference between boys (16.8%) and girls (14.5%). The prevalence of geographic tongue (1.9%) shows a marked difference between group I (2.2%) and group II (1.2%).

12 Grid Security Architecture: Requirements, Fundamentals, Standards and Models Jose L. Vivas, Javier Lopez and Jose A. Montenegro CONTENTS 12.1 Introduction 256 12.2 Grid Security Standards 258 12.2. 1 Standard Bodies 259 12.2. 2 Grid Security Standards 261 12.2. 3 ...

When delegation is implemented using the attribute certificates in a Privilege Management Infrastructure (PMI), it is possible to reach a considerable level of distributed functionality. However, the approach is not flexible enough for the requirements of ubiquitous environments. The PMI can become a too complex solution for devices such as smartphones and PDAs, where resources are limited. In this work we present an approach to solve the previous limitations by defining a second class of attributes, called domain attributes, which are managed directly by users and are not right under the scope of the PMI, thus providing a light solution for constrained devices. However, we relate the two classes of attributes are related by defining a simple ontology. While domain attribute credentials are defined using SAML notation, global attributes are defined using X.509 certificates. For this reason, we additionally introduce XSAML so that both kinds of credentials are integrated. We also introduce the concept of Attribute Federation which is responsible for supporting domain attributes and the corresponding ontology.

Abstract. Logic languages establish a formal framework to solve authorization and delegation conflicts. However, we consider that a visual representation is necessary since graphs are more expressive and understandable than logic languages. In this paper, and after overviewing ...

... This was stimulated by the 1994 decision of the Federal Commu-nications Commission (FCC) to allocate licenses for electronic spectrum via competitive auctions. As of 2011, there are over a hundred published papers on auctions. It is not possible to do justice to all these ...

Delegation is a major goal when a real scalable distributed authorization system is needed. However, the uncontrolled use of delegation statements can become an important security threat; for instance, any user could improperly obtain over a resource the same privileges ...

ABSTRACT While there has been considerable progress in the research and technological development (RTD) of the Internet of Things (IoT), there is still considerable RTD required by international communities for the trust, privacy and security research challenges arising from the constitution of the IoT architectures, infrastructures, communications, devices, objects, applications and services. In this paper, we present an thorough analysis of the ongoing and future RTD work, specifically in Europe, regarding trust, privacy and security of the Internet of Things with a view towards enabling international cooperation efforts around the globe to solve these major research challenges.

Nowadays, it is widely accepted that critical systems have to be formally analyzed to achieve well-known benefits of formal methods. To study the security of communication systems, we have developed a methodology for the application of the formal analysis techniques commonly used in communication protocols to the analysis of cryptographic ones. In particular, we have extended the design and analysis phases with security properties. Our proposal uses a specification notation based on MSC, which can be automatically translated into a generic SDL specification. This SDL system can then be used for the analysis of the desired security properties, by using an observer process schema. Apart from our main goal of providing a notation for describing the formal specification of security systems, our proposal also brings additional benefits, such as the study of the possible attacks to the system, and the possibility of reusing the specifications produced to describe and analyze more complex systems.

Two methods to implement privacy in network com- munication, anonymity and DCSC (data confidentiality and secure computation) are analysed and compared in regard to privacy in mobile agent applications. It is illustrated that privacy through DCSC is more suitable in mobile agent applications. To support this conclusion, privacy is concretely implemented in a bidding mobile agent scheme in this paper.