Finger vein biometrics have been implemented for authentication in a variety of contexts and places. Vein patterns are unique, easy to capture and resistant to surface wear and tear. However, there has been a lack of research on the effectiveness and stability of vein patterns in the elderly population (aged 60 years and above). A lack of inclusivity, has in the past ostracised senior citizens, from accessing basic amenities, such as pension payments and healthcare services. A lack of inclusion of the elderly in finger vein biometric research could result in the exclusion of elderly people from goods and services which use finger vein biometric authentication. As the global population ages, ensuring the usability of biometric technologies for the elderly is both a social and economic imperative.

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.

Mutually unbiased bases (MUBs) have been used in several cryptographic and communications applications. There has been much speculation regarding connections between MUBs and finite geometries. Most of which has focused on a connection with projective and affine planes. We propose a connection with higher dimensional projective geometries and projective Hjelmslev geometries. We show that this proposed geometric structure is present in several constructions of MUBs.