Still Wrong Use of Pairings in Cryptography

Several pairing-based cryptographic protocols are recently proposed with a wide variety of new novel applications including the ones in emerging technologies like cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), e-health systems and wearable technologies. There have been however a wide range of incorrect use of these primitives. The paper of Galbraith, Paterson, and Smart (2006) pointed out most of the issues related to the incorrect use of pairing-based cryptography. However, we noticed that some recently proposed applications still do not use these primitives correctly. This leads to unrealizable, insecure or too inefficient designs of pairing-based protocols. We observed that one reason is not being aware of the recent advancements on solving the discrete logarithm problems in some groups. The main purpose of this article is to give an understandable, informative, and the most up-to-date criteria for the correct use of pairing-based cryptography. We thereby deliberately avoid most of the technical details and rather give special emphasis on the importance of the correct use of bilinear maps by realizing secure cryptographic protocols. We list a collection of some recent papers having wrong security assumptions or realizability/efficiency issues. Finally, we give a compact and an up-to-date recipe of the correct use of pairings.Comment: 25 page

Non-perturbative renormalization of HQET and QCD

We discuss the necessity of non-perturbative renormalization in QCD and HQET and explain the general strategy for solving this problem. A few selected topics are discussed in some detail, namely the importance of off-shell improvement in the MOM-scheme on the lattice, recent progress in the implementation of finite volume schemes and then particular emphasis is put on the recent idea to carry out a non-perturbative renormalization of the Heavy Quark Effective Theory.Comment: 13 pages, Lattice2002(plenary

On the Computation of Power in Volume Integral Equation Formulations

We present simple and stable formulas for computing power (including absorbed/radiated, scattered and extinction power) in current-based volume integral equation formulations. The proposed formulas are given in terms of vector-matrix-vector products of quantities found solely in the associated linear system. In addition to their efficiency, the derived expressions can guarantee the positivity of the computed power. We also discuss the application of Poynting's theorem for the case of sources immersed in dissipative materials. The formulas are validated against results obtained both with analytical and numerical methods for scattering and radiation benchmark cases

Counting and effective rigidity in algebra and geometry

The purpose of this article is to produce effective versions of some rigidity results in algebra and geometry. On the geometric side, we focus on the spectrum of primitive geodesic lengths (resp., complex lengths) for arithmetic hyperbolic 2-manifolds (resp., 3-manifolds). By work of Reid, this spectrum determines the commensurability class of the 2-manifold (resp., 3-manifold). We establish effective versions of these rigidity results by ensuring that, for two incommensurable arithmetic manifolds of bounded volume, the length sets (resp., the complex length sets) must disagree for a length that can be explicitly bounded as a function of volume. We also prove an effective version of a similar rigidity result established by the second author with Reid on a surface analog of the length spectrum for hyperbolic 3-manifolds. These effective results have corresponding algebraic analogs involving maximal subfields and quaternion subalgebras of quaternion algebras. To prove these effective rigidity results, we establish results on the asymptotic behavior of certain algebraic and geometric counting functions which are of independent interest.Comment: v.2, 39 pages. To appear in Invent. Mat