Virtual reality (VR) technology has emerged as a promising tool in education, offering new possibilities for learning in immersive environments. This paper explores the application of VR in biology education, specifically focusing on teaching the functionality of the cell membrane. The traditional methods of textbook reading and microscopic observation lack interactivity and engagement, motivating the development of a VR-based learning approach designed as a game-like experience. The study compares the knowledge gain of participants who played the VR game with a control group who watched instructional videos. Surprisingly, the control group exhibited a higher knowledge gain compared to the VR group. Analysis suggests that the VR participants were more distracted by the immersive nature of the VR environment and focused less on the instructional content. Future research involving larger and more motivated participant groups, such as freshmen or high school students, may yield different results. Despite the observed limitations, this study highlights the importance of balancing immersive experiences with focused instructional content for better learning outcomes.

Maintaining data confidentiality at the asymmetric-resource devices across emerging technologies needs varying cryptographic algorithms. Quantum computing makes preserving data confidentiality across asymmetric infrastructure more difficult. However, exploiting the architecture of classical cryptographic schemes to integrate the post-quantum constructs could be used to maintain post-quantum level confidentiality over the Internet. This paper presents a post-quantum secure classical ABE-IBE proxy re-encryption scheme (L ABE-IBE PRE) that utilizes the classical ABE-IBE proxy re-encryption capabilities at the end nodes in a system and raises the data confidentiality to post-quantum secure level over the Internet. The proposed L ABE-IBE PRE transforms a ciphertext of the classical ABE scheme to a post-quantum secure ciphertext and from a post-quantum secure ciphertext to a ciphertext of the classical IBE scheme. We compare our proposed L ABE-IBE PRE scheme with classical ABE-IBE proxy re-encryption schemes, including Encryption Switching ABE-IBE (ES.ABE-IBE) scheme (He et al., 2019). We discuss the security and efficiency of our proposed scheme.

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emergent and evolving technology, interconnecting the cyber and physical worlds. IoT technology finds applications in a broad spectrum of areas such as homes, health, water and sanitation, transportation, and environmental monitoring. However, the endless opportunities and benefits of IoT come with many security challenges due to the reduced computation, communication, storage, and energy capabilities of the IoT smart devices. Several computationally lightweight cryptographic protocols exist for these resource-constrained IoT smart devices. However, lightweight solutions render the resource-rich ends of the IoT systems (e.g., edge, fog, or cloud modes) vulnerable as nodes at those ends have the capacity for computationally heavier cryptographic protocols, and they operate in relatively more malicious environments. This asymmetric computational nature of IoT systems requires security protocols that can adapt to the resource availability at the node that they operate. This survey describes the IoT structure, computational capabilities of the devices at the end, edge, fog, and cloud platforms, and classifies existing lightweight cryptographic protocols. The comparative analysis of the existing lightweight cryptographic solutions along with their advantages, drawbacks, and vulnerabilities highlights the need for elastic cryptographic protocols which are capable of adapting to the asymmetric capabilities of the different nodes in IoT systems.

Technical cyber-defence is often insufficient to protect a system as most cyber security incidences involve a human who takes an erroneous action or regrettable decision. To address the human factors, cyber security professionals need a range of technical and non-technical skills to enable them to effectively protect cyber-assets. There is research on the non-technical skills needed in ICT and engineering, but little specific to cyber security, and nothing in an Australian context. To support the job readiness of cyber security graduates it is necessary to identify the non-technical skills that are needed to be competitive in the modern cyber security market.To identify the non-technical skills needed or looked for by the Australian cyber security industry we ran an anonymous online survey. A range of demographic data was collected including gender, location, and role. Survey participants were asked about their use of non-technical skills, and the non-technical skills they seek when hiring junior staff. This paper reports on the most frequently sought after non-technical skills. A brief analysis indicates that some of the most sought after non-technical skills are neither explicitly taught nor explicitly assessed in most Master of Cyber Security degrees in Australia.With more and more Australian universities offering cyber security degrees, the findings of the survey can be used to inform cyber security curriculum design.

Sequences with optimal correlation properties are much sought after for applications in communication systems. In 1980, Alltop (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 26(3):350-354, 1980) described a set of sequences based on a cubic function and showed that these sequences were optimal with respect to the known bounds on auto and crosscorrelation. Subsequently these sequences were used to construct mutually unbiased bases (MUBs), a structure of importance in quantum information theory. The key feature of this cubic function is that its difference function is a planar function. Functions with planar difference functions have been called Alltop functions. This paper provides a new family of Alltop functions and establishes the use of Alltop functions for construction of sequence sets and MUBs.

In 1980 Alltop produced a family of cubic phase sequences that nearly meet the Welch bound for maximum non-peak correlation magnitude. This family of sequences were shown by Wooters and Fields to be useful for quantum state tomography. Alltop's construction used a function that is not planar, but whose difference function is planar. In this paper we show that Alltop type functions cannot exist in fields of characteristic 3 and that for a known class of planar functions, x3is the only Alltop type function.

Elementary properties of the trace map are used to construct a family of two-weight, irreducible cyclic codes. These codes are neither subfield codes nor are they semiprimitive.

The class of generalised Hadamard transforms includes the Fourier, generalised, discrete Fourier, Walsh-Hadamard, complex Hadamard and reverse jacket transforms. The generalised Hadamard transforms may by partly classified by signal length, by group of entries in the transform matrix and by a recently introduced third parameter, the jacket width of the transform matrix. Here we introduce a weighted trace map, which realises the Fourier transform as an exponential weighted sum of Galois ring traces. We give examples of Fourier transforms with jacket width 0, jacket width 1 and maximum jacket width (half the signal length). We show the Fourier transforms of length 4kwith entries in {plusmn1, plusmni} obtained using the weighted trace map from the Galois ring GR(4,k) have jacket width 2k-1

We describe narrow, erasure, hybrid and wide attacks on fingerprinting schemes used for securing digital content, and introduce new classes of codes, namely vector space block design codes and /spl delta/-nonlinear codes, which can be used to defend against such attacks by means of traitor tracing.

Abstract—The trace map has been used very successfully to generate cocyclic complex and Butson Hadamard matrices and simplex codes over Z4 and Z2s. We extend this technique to obtain new linear codes over Zps. It is worth nothing here that these codes are cocyclic but not simplex codes. Further we find that the construction method also gives Butson Hadamard matrices of order psm. I.

This paper proposes a heuristic for planning a distributed search that yields an exhaustive enumeration. The paper is motivated by the need to search for binary extremal self-dual codes. The proposed technique represents the search space as an image. A partial image is obtained by a preliminary sampling of the search space. We propose an image restoration algorithm which can be applied on the partial image in order to identify regions of interest, and prioritize the search accordingly. Experimental results show that the technique can guide the search effectively.

Over the past decade, cocycles have been used to construct Hadamard and generalized Hadamard matrices. This, in turn, has led to the construction of codes-self-dual and others. Here we explore these ideas further to construct cocyclic complex and Butson-Hadamard matrices, and subsequently we use the matrices to construct simplex codes of type /spl alpha/ over Z(4) and Z(2/sup s/), respectively.