Search Results (1,491)

Climate change poses significant challenges to agricultural production, water availability, and food and nutrition security, particularly in semi-arid regions where rural livelihoods depend heavily on rain-fed agriculture. In Eswatini, increasing temperatures, erratic rainfall, and recurrent droughts have intensified pressures on smallholder farming systems; however, limited empirical research has examined how climate variability simultaneously affects agriculture, water resources, and household food security within an integrated food–water–nutrition nexus framework. Therefore, this study assessed the impacts of climate change on agricultural production, water availability, food security, and access to nutritious food among smallholder households in the Lubombo Region of Eswatini. A concurrent triangulated mixed-methods approach was employed, combining quantitative data from 880 households with qualitative insights from open-ended responses. Descriptive statistics, Spearman’s correlation, binary logistic regression, and thematic analysis were used to analyse the data. The findings reveal that climate change significantly affects both agricultural and water systems, which in turn directly influence household food security outcomes. The majority of households reported declining crop yields (56.5%), widespread food shortages (79.5%), meal skipping (69.0%), and high levels of food-related anxiety (87.6%). Water insecurity is also prevalent, with over 83% of households experiencing water shortages and nearly all respondents indicating that climate change has affected water access. Correlation and regression analyses demonstrate that drought frequency and reduced rainfall are the strongest predictors of both water insecurity and food insecurity, highlighting the central role of climate variability. Water scarcity emerged as a critical pathway linking climate change to food insecurity, with strong associations between water shortages and reduced crop yields, food shortages, and coping strategies such as skipping meals. Qualitative findings further highlighted declining agricultural productivity, loss of traditional foods, reduced dietary diversity, and increased psychological stress associated with food insecurity. The study concludes that food insecurity in the Lubombo region is multidimensional, driven by the interconnected effects of climate variability, water scarcity, and socio-economic constraints. The findings emphasise the need for integrated, climate-resilient strategies that simultaneously address agricultural production, water resource management, and household adaptive capacity to enhance food and nutrition security. Future research should evaluate the effectiveness of nexus-based adaptation strategies and climate-smart interventions in enhancing long-term food, water, and nutrition security in vulnerable smallholder farming systems. Full article

Email remains a major Initial Access vector for phishing and ransomware attacks, requiring security mechanisms that can combine multiple sources of threat evidence before malicious content reaches end users. Modern commercial email gateways already incorporate antivirus, reputation-based filtering, email authentication, and vendor-provided threat-intelligence mechanisms. However, their correlation logic, scoring criteria, decision thresholds, and automated response workflows are often proprietary or insufficiently documented. Moreover, transparent evaluations of the incremental benefit provided by external CTI enrichment and unified Indicator of Compromise (IoC) and Indicator of Attack (IoA) correlation remain limited. To address this gap, this study presents and experimentally evaluates a transparent CTI-supported email gateway workflow that integrates external intelligence feeds, IoC/IoA correlation, contextual threat scoring, predefined decision thresholds, and automated response actions. The proposed configuration was compared with a commercial baseline using the same vendor-native security controls in an isolated VMware ESXi-based environment. The evaluation included 1000 emails comprising 500 benign emails, 200 emails containing ransomware attachments, and 300 emails containing phishing URLs. The CTI-supported configuration achieved an overall detection rate of 98.8%, compared with 64.2% for the commercial baseline. Phishing URL and ransomware attachment detection rates reached 99.3% and 98.0%, respectively, while the false positive rate decreased from 4.5% to 1.2%. In the evaluated scenarios, the CTI-supported architecture interrupted the modeled attack chain at the Initial Access stage, demonstrating the measurable benefit of external CTI enrichment and unified correlation beyond the gateway’s native controls. Full article

Background: Health security among structurally vulnerable populations depends not only on healthcare access but also on livelihood stability, caregiving capacity, and social participation. Evidence on how community-engaged participatory interventions address social determinants of health in low- and middle-income settings remains limited, particularly regarding how such interventions are implemented, documented, and evaluated in practice. Methods: This qualitative implementation study examined a participatory livelihood and caregiving intervention in a rural Thai setting. Over a nine-month period, 50 core participants from structurally vulnerable households engaged in integrated livelihood and caregiving activities. Data were collected through field observations, participatory reflection meetings, implementation records, LINE-group communication archives, and voluntary household financial logs, and were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Results: Findings revealed perceived improvements across four interconnected dimensions of well-being: caregiving capacity, social connectedness, livelihood flexibility, and household economic buffering. Participants more consistently described household stabilization achieved through reduced expenditure, resource sharing, and livelihood diversification than rapid income growth. Sustained group participation was associated with strengthened peer support networks and greater self-reported confidence in managing caregiving and household challenges; however, these findings rest on self-reported and predominantly qualitative evidence, with financial documentation available for only a small, non-random subset of participants. Conclusions: These exploratory findings suggest that community-engaged livelihood and caregiving interventions may strengthen multidimensional health security by supporting stabilization processes rather than delivering immediate economic gains. Relational support, adaptive implementation, and community participation emerged as candidate mechanisms linking policy intentions to community health responsiveness. Health policy frameworks in comparable low- and middle-income settings may benefit from incorporating structural and relational social determinants alongside income-based metrics, although confirmatory research with comparison groups is needed before these implementation-level insights can inform generalizable policy guidance. Full article

This work provides a structured synthesis of visual cryptography, a secret sharing technique that enables image reconstruction only when a specific number of shares are combined, with decryption performed visually by overlaying the shares. Although conceptually simple and distinctive in its reliance on the human visual system rather than complex computation, this method has been predominantly studied from theoretical and construction-oriented perspectives. The work consolidates fundamental concepts, mathematical foundations, operational principles, and security considerations of selected schemes, providing a common context for analyzing their characteristics. Particular attention is given to known attack vectors, including information leakage from individual shares and integrity violations caused by forged shares, together with corresponding mitigation approaches reported in the literature. In addition to this synthesis, the work presents an experimental investigation of the $\varphi$ correlation coefficient and its behavior for genuine and forged shares. Experiments conducted on a dataset of 100 images show that genuine–genuine share pairs consistently exhibit higher mean $\varphi$ correlation values than genuine–forged pairs, although the observed values depend on the underlying scheme. While these results suggest that $\varphi$ correlation may provide useful information for share authenticity analysis, the experiment used the same forged target image throughout the dataset, limiting the variation of the forged samples and potentially making the observed differences partly dependent on the selected target image. Finally, three Proof-of-Concept application scenarios demonstrate possible integrations of visual cryptography into QR code security, physical document verification, and IoT access control, illustrating its potential use in practical security systems. Full article

Urban informality in amphibious territories represents a critical yet understudied dimension of contemporary urbanisation in the Global South. This article analyses the interrelations between spatial transformation, social equity, and environmental change in Las Flores, an informal settlement located between the Mallorquín Lagoon and the Magdalena River in Barranquilla, Colombia. Drawing on a mixed-methods approach combining GIS interpretation, participatory mapping, and in-depth interviews, the study examines how processes of informal territorialisation have reshaped both the physical landscape and the social fabric of this amphibious environment. Results indicate that the settlement has expanded progressively over the past two decades, occupying areas of the wetland previously covered by mangroves and natural vegetation. This expansion has been accompanied by environmental degradation, soil infilling, and declining water quality. Residents face persistent infrastructural deficits, limited access to education and healthcare, and increasing social fragmentation between the formal and informal sectors. Yet, the community also exhibits strong organisational capacity, adaptive livelihoods, and a deep sense of place that sustains local identity and resilience. These dynamics exemplify the paradox of amphibious life: coexistence with water as both a resource and a source of vulnerability. Building on these findings, the study develops an urban socio-ecological conceptualisation of Amphibious Justice, a framework for interpreting equity, recognition, and governance in hybrid territories where urbanisation and land–water dynamics intersect. The article proposes a framework of equitable amphibious urbanism that integrates environmental restoration, social inclusion, and participatory governance. The findings suggest that sustainability in such territories cannot be achieved through technocratic restoration or forced resettlement, but through co-produced strategies that recognise local knowledge, tenure security, and ecological stewardship. Ultimately, the case of Las Flores offers insights into how cities in the Global South can pursue just and adaptive coexistence with water amid growing climate and urban pressures. Full article

False data injection attacks (FDIAs) pose a growing threat to distributed energy resource (DER) aggregators because a compromised aggregator can expose and affect a number of enrolled DERs. However, DER aggregators only have access to limited measurements from DERs and the systems. This makes existing FDIA detection methods ineffective in this setting due to two main limitations: (1) they are grounded in full observability of a microgrid or distribution system and therefore are incompatible with the limited observability of a DER aggregator; (2) they can only either detect anomalies or explain why a deviation occurs, but not both simultaneously. To address these limitations, we propose a physics-guided fusion-based cyberattack detection method specifically designed for DER aggregators. This approach integrates two complementary modules: a forecasting-assisted residual method for rapidly anomaly detection, and a PV-aware sensitivity-based method to diagnose and explain their underlying physical causes. A gradient boosting machine (GBM) is then leveraged to fuse these outputs, optimizing the precision–recall tradeoff. The proposed method is tested on one microgrid test system with different bus observability levels across static and gradual attack scenarios with multiple levels of attack sophistication. Across the scenarios, the proposed method achieves a 0.91–0.93 precision–recall area under the curve score (PR-AUC), demonstrating the method’s effectiveness in securing DER aggregators with partial system visibility. Full article

Freshwater scarcity can weaken water governance when hydrological pressure interacts with intensive agricultural demand, regulatory weakness, and political conflict. This research evaluates whether Irrigation District 005 (IR 005) in Chihuahua, northern Mexico, demonstrates local water-governance fragility across three domains: public security, the rule of law, and the ability to sustain water access and food production. A mixed-methods approach integrates legal and human rights documentation, institutional records, published studies, and a structured media review with hydrological, agricultural, climatic, and reservoir data. Water balances were analysed for 1998–2023, precipitation trends for 1980–2020, and crop water requirements were estimated using the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Irrigation and Drainage Paper No. 56 (FAO-56) Penman–Monteith framework, the crop coefficient (Kc), the water-stress coefficient (Ks), the United States Soil Conservation Service (SCS) Curve Number method, and application-efficiency assumptions. The 2020 water conflict resulted in fatalities, injuries, arrests, and documented human rights violations. Rule-of-law capacity was further diminished by unauthorised withdrawals, cultivation beyond authorised irrigation plans, and limited enforcement. The annual water balance shifted to persistent deficits after 2016, reaching an estimated deficit of 2268 cubic hectometres (hm³) in 2020. Annual precipitation did not exhibit a statistically significant monotonic decline during 1980–2020 (Mann–Kendall Z = −0.79, τ = −0.0878, p = 0.4251; Sen’s slope = −1.1628 mm yr⁻¹; Mann–Whitney p = 0.5313), indicating that recent stress is more closely linked to production scale, crop mix, governance conditions, and irrigation efficiency than to a long-term reduction in rainfall. Sensitivity analysis revealed that ±15% changes in Kc and Ks altered gross water requirements by approximately ±16–17%, while equivalent changes in effective precipitation produced changes of only 1–3%. These results demonstrate heightened water-governance fragility resulting from mutually reinforcing hydrological, institutional, and conflict-related pressures. Future research should refine locally calibrated water-demand parameters and develop reproducible monitoring systems that combine hydrological, institutional, satellite, and participatory data to support anticipatory, transparent, and rights-based water governance. Full article

Background: Edible insects constitute a highly nutritious, environmentally sustainable and culturally significant food resource with considerable potential to contribute to food system transformation within academic and broader societal contexts. Although global interest in entomophagy continues to increase, there remains limited research exploring the knowledge, perceptions, attitudes and consumption practices of university populations within rural South African settings. Methods: Three concurrent cross-sectional quantitative studies were conducted at the University of Venda (UNIVEN), located in Thohoyandou, Vhembe District, Limpopo Province, South Africa. Study 1 evaluated the knowledge, attitudes and consumption patterns of edible insects among 200 students. Study 2 examined knowledge and utilisation of edible insects among 390 students. Study 3 investigated knowledge and perceptions regarding edible insects among 200 university staff members. Structured questionnaires covering socio-demographic characteristics, knowledge, perceptions, attitudes and food frequency practices were administered across all studies. Data analysis was performed using SPSS version 28 through descriptive statistics, frequencies and percentages. Analyses were descriptive only; no inferential testing, factor analysis or regression was undertaken, and the three studies are compared as a descriptive synthesis rather than pooled into a single dataset. Results: Findings across all study groups demonstrated high levels of awareness regarding edible insects, with awareness reported by 85% of participants in Study 1 and 100% in Study 2, and 98% of staff members acknowleded the ecological importance of insects. Mopane worms (Gonimbrasia belina), termites and grasshoppers emerged as the most recognised and frequently consumed edible insect species. Consumption prevalence was notably high, reported at 91% in Study 1 and 69.2% in Study 2 and 66.3% among staff in Study 3. General attitudes towards entomophagy were largely favourable, with 41% of students expressing excitement about edible insect consumption and 91.1% of staff supporting the commercialisation of edible insects. Key barriers influencing consumption included religious restrictions (25.1%, reported in Study 2 only; participants with religious dietary prohibitions were excluded at sampling in Studies 1 and 3, limiting cross-study comparability of this barrier), cultural taboos (3%), inadequate market availability and limited awareness regarding nutritional benefits. Staff members further demonstrated positive environmental and sustainability perceptions, with 84.1% recognising edible insects as environmentally beneficial and viable future food sources. Conclusions: Across three independent cross-sectional studies conducted at the University of Venda, broadly similar patterns of awareness, attitudes, perceptions and edible insect consumption were observed. Although the studies differed in sampling and measurement, they consistently suggest that edible insects remain culturally accepted among many students and staff. Nevertheless, challenges relating to nutritional literacy, market accessibility and policy integration continue to limit broader adoption. Strengthening nutrition education initiatives and incorporating edible insects into institutional food systems may enhance the contribution of edible insects towards food security, sustainable protein provision and nutrition sustainability within Limpopo Province and beyond. Full article

For national statistics offices (NSOs), data sharing is essential for the production of official statistics, yet it must comply with stringent confidentiality and governance mandates. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising means to enable trusted and auditable data exchange under these constraints, motivating a growing body of research across public-sector domains. This paper presents an up-to-date survey of blockchain-based data-sharing solutions in government and NSO contexts, reviewing studies published between 2018 and 2026. Given the limited research specific to official statistics, this survey evaluates public-sector solutions with particular attention to their alignment with NSOs’ strict privacy and data governance requirements. Departing from prior reviews that primarily organise the literature by technical architectures or application domains, the survey adopts the Five Safes framework as a unifying analytical lens. Through this governance-focused synthesis, the survey identifies recurring architectural patterns and design principles that support secure and accountable data sharing, including permissioned or consortium blockchains, hybrid on/off-chain storage, selective integration of privacy-enhancing technologies, and smart contracts to automate governance functions such as access control and workflow management. Building on these insights, the paper outlines two distinct reference architectures that distil best practices from existing studies for blockchain-enabled data sharing under public-sector constraints, and highlights open challenges—most notably scalability and integration with legacy systems—pointing to future research directions towards solutions that combine strong security assurances with practical governance compliance. Full article

Digital transformation in higher education requires integrated designs connecting strategy, governance, infrastructure, interoperability, applications, cybersecurity, accessibility, analytics, and continuous improvement. This study analyzes the Integrated University Digital Transformation Model implemented at Universidad Técnica de Machala, Ecuador, between 2023 and April 2026. A qualitative embedded case study with a design-science orientation examined institutional documents, technical records, governance evidence, cloud migration reports, interoperability mechanisms, system descriptions, analytics outputs, and cloud security assessment records through thematic analysis, process tracing, and artifact evaluation. Findings showed alignment between the Strategic Information Technology Plan and institutional planning; formal IT governance and information security structures; an API- and microservices-based architecture; a staged migration of 52 institutional servers in four operational lots, with documented post-migration monitoring indicating 99.85% average server uptime and no critical incidents attributable to the migration during the monitored period; an automated and traceable admission allocation process within a broader portfolio of integrated academic–administrative systems; and dashboards supporting evidence-informed decisions. MMGSI-Cloud complemented the architecture by assessing governance capabilities, identifying improvement priorities, and linking findings to an institutional roadmap. The case indicates that university digital transformation is strengthened when technological implementation is integrated with formal governance, systematic assessment, evidence-based planning, and institutional accountability. Full article

The rapid integration of Large Language Models into high-stakes domains has elevated inference-time attacks into a primary security concern for production deployments. These attacks are adversarial techniques that exploit models exclusively through their input–output interface. The existing survey literature lacks a dedicated and structured treatment that jointly maps the attack surface and systematically evaluates the mitigation strategies developed against it. This paper addresses this gap through two original taxonomic contributions. First, LLM vulnerabilities are organized into a three-layer attack surface taxonomy stratified by lifecycle stage, establishing the theoretical primacy of the inference time category. Second, to directly address how these attacks can be mitigated, a defense taxonomy spanning three axes, namely prompt-level, inference-time, and training-time interventions, is proposed, within which 30 mitigation mechanisms published from 2024 onwards are systematically analyzed. Building on this taxonomy, an intersectional comparative analysis is conducted across three dimensions: defense-attack coverage, security-utility-latency tradeoffs, and white-box versus black-box applicability, in order to evaluate how effectively current mitigation strategies neutralize each attack category. These dimensions are further synthesized into a practitioner decision framework that maps deployment constraints to concrete defense configurations and identifies two structural coverage gaps that persist regardless of access level or latency budget. The resulting Defense-Attack Coverage Matrix demonstrates that no single defense mechanism provides comprehensive protection, and that robust deployment mandates layered, complementary strategies. The analysis further reveals that the fundamental unresolved tension limiting effective mitigation is the trade-off between adversarial robustness and model utility, with over-refusal and capability degradation constituting the primary practical barriers to deploying these defenses. Finally, open challenges related to multimodal attack surfaces, agentic LLM security, and the absence of standardized evaluation frameworks are identified, together with concrete future research directions. The taxonomies and analyses presented are intended to serve as an actionable reference for both researchers and practitioners tasked with mitigating inference-time attacks in secure LLM deployments. Full article

Cloud-integrated sensor and Internet of Things (IoT) systems enable scalable data storage, processing, and intelligent monitoring, but their distributed nature exposes network-flow and host-level data to unauthorized access, tampering, and cyberattacks. This study proposes a Weighted Symmetric Hashed Blockchain (WSHB) framework that integrates mutual-information-based feature weighting, deep-learning-based attack classification, AES-256-GCM authenticated encryption, cryptographic hashing, and permissioned-ledger logging. The framework was evaluated independently using HIKARI-2021 for network-based intrusion detection and ADFA-LD for host-based intrusion detection. A transparent comparative evaluation was conducted against LSTM and CNN–RNN baselines using identical data splits, preprocessing settings, input representations, hyperparameter-search budget, and repeated initialization seeds. The proposed WSHB-DNN classifier achieved macro-F1 scores of $0.6837$ on HIKARI-2021 and $0.7914$ on ADFA-LD, showing the strongest overall classification performance among the evaluated models. The cryptographic and permissioned-ledger components provide confidentiality protection, record-level authentication, integrity verification, and tamper-evident logging for confirmed attack-event records. These results demonstrate the potential of WSHB as a reproducible framework for attack classification and secure event logging in cloud-integrated sensor environments. Full article

Currently, in high-density indoor environments such as businesses and factories, managing human presence and access control remains a significant challenge. Traditional access control systems based on facial recognition or card scanning typically only record authentication events at the point of entry. Therefore, continuous monitoring, presence detection, or restricted area surveillance are limited. This paper proposes an integrated indoor person detection and management framework based on centralized multi-camera processing for deployment-oriented identification surveillance. The proposed framework combines SCRFD and ArcFace to perform enrollment-based face recognition and distinguish between enrolled and unknown identities. During the experimental evaluation, the facial recognition module using the SCRFD 2.5G configuration achieved a recognition accuracy of approximately 88.2%. YOLOv11n is integrated with DeepSORT to detect and continuously track individuals within the monitored area. Experimental results showed the system achieving an average processing performance of 10.6 FPS, demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed architecture for small- to medium-scale indoor surveillance applications. Additionally, this system framework integrates event-driven spatial analysis using virtual boundaries and surveillance zones to support entry/exit counting, presence monitoring, and intrusion detection in restricted areas. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system framework provides consistent identification monitoring performance, stable multi-object tracking capabilities, and an efficient event management mechanism for typical indoor surveillance scenarios. This work offers a centralized, deployment-oriented surveillance architecture suitable for practical indoor security management and access control applications utilizing multiple cameras. Full article

The MENRO: Monitoring and Management System is a digital solution developed to modernize the manual operations of the Municipal Environment and Natural Resources Office (MENRO). The system provides a secure and user-friendly platform designed to streamline document handling, automate monitoring tasks, and ensure accurate environmental data management. This project specifically aims to: (1) develop a user-friendly interface that enables seamless document and record management, allowing administrators to effortlessly add, edit, update, and store essential information, and (2) design a system that is capable of automatically generating comprehensive lists of apprehension receipts, including violations and penalties issued to establishments under MENRO’s jurisdiction. These functions address long-standing inefficiencies in manual monitoring, recordkeeping, and compliance tracking. The system was evaluated using the ISO/IEC 25010:2011 software quality standards, focusing on functional suitability, performance efficiency, reliability, usability, compatibility, maintainability, portability, and security. Results show high usability and strong security features, ensuring that the platform meets operational needs while safeguarding sensitive environmental and legal records. By integrating real-time data access, automated reporting, and digitized forms used in environmental compliance checks, the system enhances MENRO’s capability to uphold environmental governance with greater transparency, accuracy, and accountability. Full article

Motivated by the increasing security requirements of next-generation satellite-terrestrial communication systems and the emergence of Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) architectures, this paper presents a secrecy analysis of a novel reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted mixed free-space optical (FSO) and radio frequency (RF) satellite downlink transmission system within an O-RAN-enabled non-terrestrial network (NTN) framework. The inherent broadcast nature of RF transmissions presents significant eavesdropping risks, which serves as the primary impetus for this study. We analyze the combined effects of imperfect channel state information (CSI) and random link blockage within such integrated networks. The impact of discrete phase shift constraints at the RIS is also investigated. Closed-form expressions are derived for three key performance metrics: connection outage probability (COP), secrecy outage probability (SOP), and the probability of positive secrecy capacity (PPSC). Through high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) asymptotic analysis, corresponding asymptotic expressions are obtained, and all analytical results are validated via extensive Monte Carlo simulations. Our findings demonstrate that: (i) Link blockage probability and channel estimation accuracy jointly govern the secrecy performance floor. (ii) Increasing the number of RIS elements enhances physical-layer security by driving both the COP and SOP toward their theoretical lower bounds. (iii) Improving channel estimation accuracy diminishes the eavesdropper’s channel advantage and improves the overall system security. These results offer valuable insights for designing secure mixed FSO/RF satellite-terrestrial systems within O-RAN-enabled NTN architectures that effectively balance connectivity and confidentiality. Full article