11,236 research outputs found
A unified framework for trapdoor-permutation-based sequential aggregate signatures
We give a framework for trapdoor-permutation-based sequential aggregate signatures (SAS) that unifies and simplifies prior work and leads to new results. The framework is based on ideal ciphers over large domains, which have recently been shown to be realizable in the random oracle model. The basic idea is to replace the random oracle in the full-domain-hash signature scheme with an ideal cipher. Each signer in sequence applies the ideal cipher, keyed by the message, to the output of the previous signer, and then inverts the trapdoor permutation on the result. We obtain different variants of the scheme by varying additional keying material in the ideal cipher and making different assumptions on the trapdoor permutation. In particular, we obtain the first scheme with lazy verification and signature size independent of the number of signers that does not rely on bilinear pairings.
Since existing proofs that ideal ciphers over large domains can be realized in the random oracle model are lossy, our schemes do not currently permit practical instantiation parameters at a reasonable security level, and thus we view our contribution as mainly conceptual. However, we are optimistic tighter proofs will be found, at least in our specific application.https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/070.pdfAccepted manuscrip
Keeping Authorities "Honest or Bust" with Decentralized Witness Cosigning
The secret keys of critical network authorities - such as time, name,
certificate, and software update services - represent high-value targets for
hackers, criminals, and spy agencies wishing to use these keys secretly to
compromise other hosts. To protect authorities and their clients proactively
from undetected exploits and misuse, we introduce CoSi, a scalable witness
cosigning protocol ensuring that every authoritative statement is validated and
publicly logged by a diverse group of witnesses before any client will accept
it. A statement S collectively signed by W witnesses assures clients that S has
been seen, and not immediately found erroneous, by those W observers. Even if S
is compromised in a fashion not readily detectable by the witnesses, CoSi still
guarantees S's exposure to public scrutiny, forcing secrecy-minded attackers to
risk that the compromise will soon be detected by one of the W witnesses.
Because clients can verify collective signatures efficiently without
communication, CoSi protects clients' privacy, and offers the first
transparency mechanism effective against persistent man-in-the-middle attackers
who control a victim's Internet access, the authority's secret key, and several
witnesses' secret keys. CoSi builds on existing cryptographic multisignature
methods, scaling them to support thousands of witnesses via signature
aggregation over efficient communication trees. A working prototype
demonstrates CoSi in the context of timestamping and logging authorities,
enabling groups of over 8,000 distributed witnesses to cosign authoritative
statements in under two seconds.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure
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Implicit Bias Reflects the Personal and the Social
This issue’s target article by Payne, Vuletich, and Lundberg (PV&L) does exactly what one should, presenting an argument that is thought-provoking and that challenges current orthodoxy. It also addresses an issue that has increasingly confounded attitudes researchers in recent years. The construct of “implicit bias” was initially conceptualized as a latent construct that exists within persons, relatively resistant to situational influences. A plethora of theoretical models converge on the notion that implicit biases, including intergroup biases, are representations that are stored in memory (e.g., Devine,1989; Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006; Greenwald et al., 2002; Wilson, Lindsay, & Schooler, 2000). Although some perspectives emphasize the role of culture in contributing to implicit measures of bias, even these perspectives rely on the learning and storage of mental representations (Olson & Fazio, 2004)
Ultrafast fluorescent decay induced by metal-mediated dipole-dipole interaction in two-dimensional molecular aggregates
Two-dimensional molecular aggregate (2DMA), a thin sheet of strongly
interacting dipole molecules self-assembled at close distance on an ordered
lattice, is a fascinating fluorescent material. It is distinctively different
from the single or colloidal dye molecules or quantum dots in most previous
research. In this paper, we verify for the first time that when a 2DMA is
placed at a nanometric distance from a metallic substrate, the strong and
coherent interaction between the dipoles inside the 2DMA dominates its
fluorescent decay at picosecond timescale. Our streak-camera lifetime
measurement and interacting lattice-dipole calculation reveal that the
metal-mediated dipole-dipole interaction shortens the fluorescent lifetime to
about one half and increases the energy dissipation rate by ten times than
expected from the noninteracting single-dipole picture. Our finding can enrich
our understanding of nanoscale energy transfer in molecular excitonic systems
and may designate a new direction for developing fast and efficient
optoelectronic devices.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure
The Origin of Sequential Chromospheric Brightenings
Sequential chromospheric brightenings (SCBs) are often observed in the
immediate vicinity of erupting flares and are associated with coronal mass
ejections. Since their initial discovery in 2005, there have been several
subsequent investigations of SCBs. These studies have used differing detection
and analysis techniques, making it difficult to compare results between
studies. This work employs the automated detection algorithm of Kirk et al.
(Solar Phys. 283, 97, 2013) to extract the physical characteristics of SCBs in
11 flares of varying size and intensity. We demonstrate that the magnetic
substructure within the SCB appears to have a significantly smaller area than
the corresponding H-alpha emission. We conclude that SCBs originate in the
lower corona around 0.1 R_sun above the photosphere, propagate away from the
flare center at speeds of 35 - 85 km/s, and have peak photosphere magnetic
intensities of 148 +/- 2.9 G. In light of these measurements, we infer SCBs to
be distinctive chromospheric signatures of erupting coronal mass ejections.Comment: 25 pages, 9 figures, 5 table
Persistent dynamic attractors in activity patterns of cultured neuronal networks
Three remarkable features of the nervous system—complex spatiotemporal patterns, oscillations, and persistent activity—are fundamental to such diverse functions as stereotypical motor behavior, working memory, and awareness. Here we report that cultured cortical networks spontaneously generate a hierarchical structure of periodic activity with a strongly stereotyped population-wide spatiotemporal structure demonstrating all three fundamental properties in a recurring pattern. During these "superbursts," the firing sequence of the culture periodically converges to a dynamic attractor orbit. Precursors of oscillations and persistent activity have previously been reported as intrinsic properties of the neurons. However, complex spatiotemporal patterns that are coordinated in a large population of neurons and persist over several hours—and thus are capable of representing and preserving information—cannot be explained by known oscillatory properties of isolated neurons. Instead, the complexity of the observed spatiotemporal patterns implies large-scale self-organization of neurons interacting in a precise temporal order even in vitro, in cultures usually considered to have random connectivity
Can NSEC5 be practical for DNSSEC deployments?
NSEC5 is proposed modification to DNSSEC that simultaneously guarantees two security properties: (1) privacy against offline zone enumeration, and (2) integrity of zone contents, even if an adversary compromises the authoritative nameserver responsible for responding to DNS queries for the zone. This paper redesigns NSEC5 to make it both practical and performant. Our NSEC5 redesign features a new fast verifiable random function (VRF) based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), along with a cryptographic proof of its security. This VRF is also of independent interest, as it is being standardized by the IETF and being used by several other projects. We show how to integrate NSEC5 using our ECC-based VRF into the DNSSEC protocol, leveraging precomputation to improve performance and DNS protocol-level optimizations to shorten responses. Next, we present the first full-fledged implementation of NSEC5—extending widely-used DNS software to present a nameserver and recursive resolver that support NSEC5—and evaluate their performance under aggressive DNS query loads. Our performance results
indicate that our redesigned NSEC5 can be viable even for high-throughput scenarioshttps://eprint.iacr.org/2017/099.pdfFirst author draf
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