A Practical Universal Forgery Attack against PAES-8

\paes~is an authenticated encryption scheme designed by Ye {\it et al.}, and submitted to the CAESAR competition. The designers claim that \paese, which is one of the designs of the \paes-family, provides 128-bit security in the nonce misuse model. In this note, we show our forgery attack against \paese. Our attack works in the nonce misuse model. The attack exploits the slow propagation of message differences. The attack is very close to the universal forgery attack. As long as the target message is not too short, {\it e.g.} more than 10 blocks (160 bytes), a tag is forged only with $2^{11}$ encryption oracle calls, $2^{11}$ computational cost, and negligible memory

General Classification of the Authenticated Encryption Schemes for the CAESAR Competition

An Authenticated encryption scheme is a scheme which provides privacy and integrity by using a secret key. In 2013, CAESAR (the ``Competition for Authenticated Encryption: Security, Applicability, and Robustness\u27\u27) was co-founded by NIST and Dan Bernstein with the aim of finding authenticated encryption schemes that offer advantages over AES-GCM and are suitable for widespread adoption. The first round started with 57 candidates in March 2014; and nine of these first-round candidates where broken and withdrawn from the competition. The remaining 48 candidates went through an intense process of review, analysis and comparison. While the cryptographic community benefits greatly from the manifold different submission designs, their sheer number implies a challenging amount of study. This paper provides an easy-to-grasp overview over functional aspects, security parameters, and robustness offerings by the CAESAR candidates, clustered by their underlying designs (block-cipher-, stream-cipher-, permutation-/sponge-, compression-function-based, dedicated). After intensive review and analysis of all 48 candidates by the community, the CAESAR committee selected only 30 candidates for the second round. The announcement for the third round candidates was made on 15th August 2016 and 15 candidates were chosen for the third round

Mixture Differential Cryptanalysis and Structural Truncated Differential Attacks on round-reduced AES

At Eurocrypt 2017 the first secret-key distinguisher for 5-round AES -- based on the “multiple-of-8” property -- has been presented. Although it allows to distinguish a random permutation from an AES-like one, it seems rather hard to implement a key-recovery attack different than brute-force like using such a distinguisher. In this paper we introduce “Mixture Differential Cryptanalysis” on round-reduced AES-like ciphers, a way to translate the (complex) “multiple-of-8” 5-round distinguisher into a simpler and more convenient one (though, on a smaller number of rounds). Given a pair of chosen plaintexts, the idea is to construct new pairs of plaintexts by mixing the generating variables of the original pair of plaintexts. Here we theoretically prove that for 4-round AES the corresponding ciphertexts of the original pair of plaintexts lie in a particular subspace if and only if the corresponding pairs of ciphertexts of the new pairs of plaintexts have the same property. Such secret-key distinguisher -- which is independent of the secret-key, of the details of the S-Box and of the MixColumns matrix (except for the branch number equal to 5) -- can be used as starting point to set up new key-recovery attacks on round-reduced AES. Besides a theoretical explanation, we also provide a practical verification both of the distinguisher and of the attack. As a second contribution, we show how to combine this new 4-round distinguisher with a modified version of a truncated differential distinguisher in order to set up new 5-round distinguishers, that exploit properties which are independent of the secret key, of the details of the S-Box and of the MixColumns matrix. As a result, while a “classical” truncated differential distinguisher exploits the probability that a couple of texts satisfies or not a given differential trail independently of the others couples, our distinguishers work with sets of N >> 1 (related) couples of texts. In particular, our new 5-round AES distinguishers exploit the fact that such sets of texts satisfy some properties with a different probability than a random permutation. Even if such 5-round distinguishers have higher complexity than e.g. the “multiple-of-8” one present in the literature, one of them can be used as starting point to set up the first key-recovery attack on 6-round AES that exploits directly a 5-round secret-key distinguisher. The goal of this paper is indeed to present and explore new approaches, showing that even a distinguisher like the one presented at Eurocrypt -- believed to be hard to exploit - can be used to set up a key-recovery attack

Getting smarter about smart cities: Improving data privacy and data security

Abstract included in text

Security risk assessment in cloud computing domains

Cyber security is one of the primary concerns persistent across any computing platform. While addressing the apprehensions about security risks, an infinite amount of resources cannot be invested in mitigation measures since organizations operate under budgetary constraints. Therefore the task of performing security risk assessment is imperative to designing optimal mitigation measures, as it provides insight about the strengths and weaknesses of different assets affiliated to a computing platform. The objective of the research presented in this dissertation is to improve upon existing risk assessment frameworks and guidelines associated to different key assets of Cloud computing domains - infrastructure, applications, and users. The dissertation presents various informal approaches of performing security risk assessment which will help to identify the security risks confronted by the aforementioned assets, and utilize the results to carry out the required cost-benefit tradeoff analyses. This will be beneficial to organizations by aiding them in better comprehending the security risks their assets are exposed to and thereafter secure them by designing cost-optimal mitigation measures --Abstract, page iv

Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Reconfigurable Communication-centric Systems on Chip 2010 - ReCoSoC\u2710 - May 17-19, 2010 Karlsruhe, Germany. (KIT Scientific Reports ; 7551)

ReCoSoC is intended to be a periodic annual meeting to expose and discuss gathered expertise as well as state of the art research around SoC related topics through plenary invited papers and posters. The workshop aims to provide a prospective view of tomorrow\u27s challenges in the multibillion transistor era, taking into account the emerging techniques and architectures exploring the synergy between flexible on-chip communication and system reconfigurability

Rio de Janeiro on Trial: Law and Urban Reform in Modern Brazil

Between 1903 and 1909, the leaders of Brazil’s young republic, together with a newly empowered technical elite of physicians and engineers, carried out a major urban reform project in Rio de Janeiro, envisioning the then capital city as a symbol of the nation’s civilizational progress. To embellish, sanitize, and modernize the city, state authorities ordered thousands of expropriations and evictions that ultimately concentrated land in the hands of an even smaller elite and removed the poor from Rio’s downtown. In this dissertation, I argue that the urban reform was a watershed in the social, intellectual, and political histories of law in Brazil. The cross-class legal mobilization of urban citizens against the reform forced actors on both sides to re-articulate concepts such as individual rights, administrative independence and discretion, judicial review, public good, and separation of powers. By analyzing court records, legal doctrine, legislation, legislative debates, administrative documents, and newspapers, I show how legal mobilization, ideas, and institutions changed the histories of urban development, state interventionism and citizenship in Brazil. Legislators, state attorneys, and legal scholars who supported the ruling elite’s nation-building project promoted administrative independence and discretion as instruments of material progress. Although they were divided by class and race, landlords and tenants formed surprising alliances to resist expropriations and evictions by mobilizing rights claiming in courtrooms, the press, and street protest. Representing them, political activists and lawyers elaborated rights-based arguments that advanced a liberal conception of law and state power, centered on judicial review as a channel for limiting executive interference in people’s properties, homes, and bodies. Some of these activists and lawyers were political opponents of the liberal oligarchs who controlled the presidency and congress. Their arguments helped create a rights consciousness among the city’s residents that placed individual rights in opposition to state interventionism. While landlords relied on a conception of the absolute right to property to preserve their patrimonial power, Rio’s poor invoked the inviolability of their homes to oppose violent sanitary measures such as forced vaccinations and evictions. Overall, litigation failed to undermine the transfer of property to wealthy investors and the expulsion of the poor from the city’s center. Nonetheless, the courts played a decisive role in molding how the reform plan ultimately transformed Rio’s urban space. More importantly, opposition to the reform fueled the emergence of a rights consciousness and strategies of legal mobilization that allowed people who lacked political power, such as small property owners, and those who were largely excluded from political participation, such as poor tenants, to actively transform conceptions of citizenship and law in Brazil. Through consciousness and mobilization, they claimed their rights to live, work, and profit in the city, and forced elite law and policy makers – congressmen, public administrators, and legal scholars – to consider people’s individual rights against an emerging, powerful and exclusionary, administrative state.PHDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145910/1/pjimenez_1.pd

Portland Daily Press: July 31,1883

https://digitalmaine.com/pdp_1883/1161/thumbnail.jp

Climate Change, new Metanarrative for Humanity : Climate Policy in the western Mediterranean

“Why is there not an adequate and efficient answer to climate change?” is a question that has been haunting millions of people around the world for the last decades, and that is growingly being made by all publics. Despite the scientific consensus on climate change, the necessary measures to deter this phenomenon are still far from the speed and range necessary to effectively address it (when there are any measures at all). Metanarratives are the grand histories that humankind tells itself to guide its practices and actions. They either work towards solving this civilisational crisis or to stop any effective solutions. The current metanarrative of globalised capitalist positivism is one of the main obstacles to stopping the climate crisis, but there is a conflict of metanarratives in the world today, and new possibilities are coming into existence. Potential future metanarratives for a different climate will either be survival of the fittest or civilising tools when human civilisation is in its most dangerous moment. The current metanarrative underpins capitalist dominance and is perpetuated through capitalist ideology and hegemony, locking humanity into a path of irreversible climate change. The unavoidable systematic change needed to effectively tackle climate change will go as deep as the social construction of what “human nature” is and what relations humans have to each other and the environment. Through an adaptation of Michael Burawoy’s extended case method a methodology has been developed to evaluate the appearance of a new climate change metanarrative articulated with social justice, a climate justice potential metanarrative. A historical study on the evolution of public policy and climate policy in particular for three countries in the western mediterranean - Portugal, Spain and Morocco - was conducted. A revision of information about each of the countries, focusing on the evolution of climate and future scenarios, as well as social, economical, political and industrial tendencies, was done. There were 1107 interviews conducted for this thesis, 46 of which were face-toface and structured. A methodological tool was developed to quantify the difference between really existing climate policy and climate action that would achieve the affirmed goals of stopping climate collapse on the three countries. Over the course of three years post-Paris Agreement enquiries were conducted in Portugal (in the ClimAdaPT.local project), in Spain and Morocco, focusing on national and local politicians, academia, social movements and private enterprises. From believing into climate change until supporting effective climate policies, there is a long path where world views, political affiliation and ideology, cultural values, perception of risks, experiencing climate change, notions of international and social justice, attribution of responsibilities and public participation play a very important role. The inquiries revealed that many personal and collective blocks are determinant in the path into reaching policies that effectively respond to the climate crisis, and that shifting world views and experiences that affect this path will be tested in the coming years. This is a qualitative expression of the current metanarrative of globalised capitalist positivism and the political clashes of the present moment open the door to new metanarratives, including a potential metanarrative of climate justice. Together with other researchers ‘climate policy gap’ graphics were developed for Portugal, Spain and Morocco to help reveal this divide and quantify the under-reaction between diagnosis and action, through layers of political indecision, mis-communication, insufficient action and the power of the fossil fuels industries. The climate policy gaps for the three nations revealed overshoots on even the most ambitious levels of emissions reductions pledged when compared to trajectories compatible with 1.5ºC or 2ºC limits. This research suggests that there is a built-in feature of under-reaction in climate policy, which staves off any emission pathways compatible with stopping a temperature rise above 1.5ºC by 2100. The climate policy gap is a political and methodological tool that reveals systemic shortcomings of climate action, its visibility identifies benchmarks and sectors that should be activated to close these gaps in response to the growing popular demands for climate justice and it quantifies the gap between a metanarrative of globalised capitalist positivism and what is necessary to prevent reaching even the Paris Agreement’s targets. 2018 and 2019 saw the emergence of a much stronger climate justice movement. The three most relevant components of this movement - Blockadia, Youth Climate Strikes (Fridays for Future) and Extinction Rebellion - have combined efforts in a global call for civil disobedience and insurgency on political lines that respond to the climate science that calls for a 50% greenhouse gas global cuts by 2030. They have put in the forefront the issue of social justice. Growingly radical Green New Deals' versions and campaigns such as Climate Jobs are creating political programs for a social revolution in line with German jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin’s idea of revolution as the emergency break when history moves in a catastrophic direction. An early critic of the dangers posed by the threats of progress and technological development led by capitalism, Benjamin proposed an alternative view of revolution: it is not inevitable or a natural result of the contradiction between productive forces and productive relations, but rather an interruption of an historical evolution that is leading to catastrophe. These movements and programs are not enough for the emergence of a new climate justice potential metanarrative, although they are necessary conditions for it. In conclusion, there are signs of the emergence of a climate justice potential metanarrative, with a push for the creation of new institutions, adaptation of old ones, public perception of the dimension of the problem of climate change and effective legislative response to it. Some of the most expressive characteristics of this potential metanarrative were outlined: a human awakening full of impetus for social reordering; a redistribution of power, wellbeing and cooperation; a new notion of prosperity inside natural limits and just resource redistribution; reconnection of knowledges and sciences; the need for a public and participatory science to address human’s and earth’s needs; the teleology of humanity’s collective survival; understanding and respecting life system’s cycles, favouring life’s diversity as an efficient tool against the current increase in entropy in the ecosphere; acknowledging and integrating the care economy into daily life, with the coresponsibilization of men and women for care and maintenance activities; recovering indigenous people’s knowledge of biomimicry as a collective tool, promoting human beneficial effects on life cycles and ecosystems; understanding capitalist production’s incompatibility with basic life system’s principles. A new potential metanarrative for climate change is a historical novelty, but only such a novel Grand History can give humanity a chance to overcome the biggest threat it has ever faced