A survey of COVID-19 contact-tracing apps.

Recently, the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 virus caused a major health crisis by affecting masses around the world. The virus, which is known to be highly contagious, has forced the research community and governments to fight the disease and take prompt actions by applying various strategies to keep the numbers under control. These strategies range from imposing strict social distancing measures, isolating infected cases, and enforcing either a partial or a full lockdown, to mathematical modeling and contact-tracing applications. In this work, we survey the current contact-tracing apps and organize them based on underlying technologies such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, geofencing, and Quick Response (QR) codes. We compare the main features of 22 existing applications and highlight each of the pros and cons associated with these different technologies.

Robust and Fragile Medical Image Watermarking: A Joint Venture of Coding and Chaos Theories.

A secure spatial domain, hybrid watermarking technique for obtaining watermark (authentication information) robustness and fragility of the host medical image (content integrity) using product codes, chaos theory, and residue number system (RNS) is proposed. The proposed scheme is highly fragile and unrecoverable in terms of the host image, but it is significantly robust and recoverable in terms of the watermark. Altering the medical image may result in misdiagnosis, hence the watermark that may contain patient information and organization logo must be protected against certain attacks. The host medical image is separated into two parts, namely, the region of interest (ROI) and region of noninterest (RONI) using a rectangular region. The RONI part is used to embed the watermark information. Moreover, two watermarks are used: one to achieve authenticity of image and the other to achieve the robustness against both incidental and malicious attacks. Effectiveness in terms of security, robustness, and fragility of the proposed scheme is demonstrated by the simulations and comparison with the other state-of-the-art techniques.