Identity theft

About: Identity theft is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2284 publications have been published within this topic receiving 31700 citations.

Consumerism in the Digital Age

Abstract: This paper discusses "digital consumerism," which is the application of traditional concepts of consumerism to consumer vulnerabilities in digital markets. The relationship of digital consumerism to paradigms of consumer empowerment and consumer vulnerabilities is discussed using examples from the relevant literature. The findings of this literature survey identify new aspects of consumerism in digital markets that have the potential to enhance consumer well-being. The literature survey also revealed that consumer vulnerabilities have grown in complexity faster than regulative efforts. Therefore, there is a need for a reconceptualization of consumerism in order to improve consumer protections and to develop better functioning and healthier digital markets. ********** If we were able to add a "right to healthy food" to the 1960s conceptualization of consumerism, would we have less obesity and fewer health problems in society today? If we were able to embed a "right to financial protection" in the same consumerism concept, would we have had the financial crises and instability of the last few years? If we had anticipated the privacy issues before the Internet became ubiquitous and added "a right to online privacy" to our concept of consumerism, would we now have fewer identity theft problems? The opinions on these questions would clearly vary from person to person, situation to situation, market to market, and culture to culture. However, it is still easy to imagine that we would have fewer of these problems if we had a better understanding of these issues and their potential for affecting our lives. An answer to these questions is evident in the consumerism concept itself. Consumerism propounds the creation of consumer protection by raising market awareness of the vulnerabilities of consumers, market inequalities, and the subsequent regulation of business misbehaviors, deceptions, and marketing malpractices with legislative support (Aaker and Day 1982; Cohen 2010; Day and Aaker 1970; Rotfeld 2010). The major goal of consumerism is to "seek to establish a more equitable and socially responsible capitalist democracy ' (Cohen 2010, 235). Recent technological advances, loosely referred to as the Internet, provide us with opportunities to achieve more equitable and socially responsible market structures (Kucuk 2009; Kucuk and Krishnamurthy 2007). Although the phenomenal transformations produced by online markets reduced the historical dominance of companies and equalized market structures in favor of consumers, dynamically evolving digital markets also changed the nature and sources of consumer vulnerabilities (Kucuk 2009). One example is the rise in the number of identity theft and financial damage cases. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) recently reported receiving its 3 millionth complaint. The total dollar loss claimed since the establishment of the IC3 now exceeds $2 billion. (1) An additional difficulty for both consumers and companies is that not everybody can easily access digital markets or market information. As a result, there are serious inequality problems. Those consumers who can access digital markets frequently encounter unreliable, deceptive, and misleading information. This misinformation increases consumer confusion and vulnerability. Finally, although consumer voices can be enhanced through the Internet, some companies deceptively post in consumer networks (aka "paid-bloggers") or try to override the free speech rights of consumers by asserting ownership rights. In this context, defining and exploring systematic consumer vulnerabilities and reconceptualizing consumerism for digital markets is indispensable to improving our social welfare. Unfortunately, there is currently a limited amount of research focused on how the digital revolution is transforming consumerism. The major questions are: "What new problems do consumers face in digital markets? …

A Survey of Authentication Schemes in Telecare Medicine Information Systems

Abstract: E-Healthcare is an emerging field that provides mobility to its users. The protected health information of the users are stored at a remote server (Telecare Medical Information System) and can be accessed by the users at anytime. Many authentication protocols have been proposed to ensure the secure authenticated access to the Telecare Medical Information System. These protocols are designed to provide certain properties such as: anonymity, untraceability, unlinkability, privacy, confidentiality, availability and integrity. They also aim to build a key exchange mechanism, which provides security against some attacks such as: identity theft, password guessing, denial of service, impersonation and insider attacks. This paper reviews these proposed authentication protocols and discusses their strengths and weaknesses in terms of ensured security and privacy properties, and computation cost. The schemes are divided in three broad categories of one-factor, two-factor and three-factor authentication schemes. Inter-category and intra-category comparison has been performed for these schemes and based on the derived results we propose future directions and recommendations that can be very helpful to the researchers who work on the design and implementation of authentication protocols.

The Brave New World of Bodacious Assumptions in Cryptography

Abstract: T here is a lot at stake in public-key cryptography. It is, after all, a crucial component in efforts to reduce identity theft, online fraud, and other forms of cybercrime. Traditionally, the security of a public-key system rests upon the assumed difficulty of a certain mathematical problem. Hence, newcomers to the field would logically expect that the problems that are used in security proofs come from a small set of extensively studied, natural problems. But they are in for an unpleasant surprise. What they encounter instead is a menagerie of ornate and bizarre mathematical problems whose presumed intractability is a basic assumption in the theorems about the security of many of the cryptographic protocols that have been proposed in the literature.