Trap Me If You Can -- Million Dollar Curve

A longstanding problem in cryptography is the generation of publicly verifiable randomness. In particular, public verifiability allows to generate parameters for a cryptosystem in a way people can legitimately trust. There are many examples of standards using arbitrary constants which are now challenged and criticized for this reason, some of which even being suspected of containing a trap. Several sources of public entropy have already been proposed such as lotteries, stock market prices, the bitcoin blockchain, board games, or even Twitter and live webcams. In this article, we propose a way of combining lotteries from several different countries which would require an adversary to manipulate several independent draws in order to introduce a trap in the generated cryptosystem. Each and every time a new source of public entropy is suggested, it receives its share of criticism for being easy to manipulate . We do not expect our solution to be an exception on this aspect, and will gladly receive any suggestion allowing to increase the confidence in the cryptosystem parameters we generate. Our method allows to build what we call a Publicly verifiable RNG, from which we extract a seed that is used to instantiate and initialize a Blum-Blum-Shub random generator. We then use the binary stream produced by this generator as an input to a filtering function which deterministically outputs secure and uniformly distributed parameters from uniform bitstreams. We apply our methodology to the ECDH cryptosystem, and propose the Million Dollar Curve as an alternative to curves P-256 and Curve25519

Inequality and higher education: marketplace or social justice?

Professor Hall’s paper addresses the key social issues of poverty and inequality of educational opportunity, comparing the UK’s policy history and experience with that of South Africa and identifying the important roles that higher education leaders at institutional and system levels can play. Professor Hall’s paper is accompanied by a short commentary from six higher education leaders who all have a strong track-record of addressing the issues that Professor Hall’s paper raises

The comparison in the rate of learning of colorful and abstract words in grade three

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

La respuesta de la Unión Europea frente a la crisis del COVID

Trabajo Fin de Grado. Curso Académico 2020-2021. Grado en Economía y Finanza

Composites: A viable option

While it sounded great to be asked to talk about composites, I found it difficult to select subject areas that would be of real interest. My choice is based on saying some things about where the maturity of the composite aircraft structures is today and what that means in terms of future criteria for application. This focus was the basis for my title selection. The other issue that will be addressed was requested by NASA and focuses on composites structures cost. This fits well with the state-of-the-art interpretations I will discuss first, since the cost issue must be viewed from both the current status and future points of view. The difficulty in presenting something in these areas is not in the subjects themselves but in trying to present a real world viewpoint to an audience of composite experts. So, with recognition of the expertise of the audience, I hope you will see something in this presentation about how to view composite aircraft structure