699 research outputs found
AND Protocols Using Only Uniform Shuffles
Secure multi-party computation using a deck of playing cards has been a
subject of research since the "five-card trick" introduced by den Boer in 1989.
One of the main problems in card-based cryptography is to design
committed-format protocols to compute a Boolean AND operation subject to
different runtime and shuffle restrictions by using as few cards as possible.
In this paper, we introduce two AND protocols that use only uniform shuffles.
The first one requires four cards and is a restart-free Las Vegas protocol with
finite expected runtime. The second one requires five cards and always
terminates in finite time.Comment: This paper has appeared at CSR 201
Secure Grouping Protocol Using a Deck of Cards
We consider a problem, which we call secure grouping, of dividing a number of
parties into some subsets (groups) in the following manner: Each party has to
know the other members of his/her group, while he/she may not know anything
about how the remaining parties are divided (except for certain public
predetermined constraints, such as the number of parties in each group). In
this paper, we construct an information-theoretically secure protocol using a
deck of physical cards to solve the problem, which is jointly executable by the
parties themselves without a trusted third party. Despite the non-triviality
and the potential usefulness of the secure grouping, our proposed protocol is
fairly simple to describe and execute. Our protocol is based on algebraic
properties of conjugate permutations. A key ingredient of our protocol is our
new techniques to apply multiplication and inverse operations to hidden
permutations (i.e., those encoded by using face-down cards), which would be of
independent interest and would have various potential applications
The Effects of Road Salt (NaCl), Predation, and Competition on the Growth and Community Interactions of Spotted Salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum) and Wood Frogs (Lithobates sylvaticus)
Road deicing salts are frequently used in northern regions of the world during the winter and early spring months. As a result, a significant portion of road runoff into surrounding aquatic habitats contains road deicing salts. Previous studies found road salt contaminations in vernal pools that pond-breeding amphibians commonly use, including spotted salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum) and wood frogs (Lithobates sylvaticus). Studies have examined the impact of road salt on both amphibian species, but to our knowledge no previous studies have examined how road salt impacts the interspecific competition between both amphibians. We hypothesized that road salt would negatively impact growth and survivorship of both amphibian species. During the spring and summer of 2017, we conducted an outdoor mesocosm experiment in which we created eight experimental conditions with three main factors:presence/absence of NaCl (1000 mg/L Cl ), presence/absence of interspecific competition between the two amphibian species (A. maculatum and L. sylvaticus ), and presence/absence of predatory dragonfly larvae (Family Libellulidae). Our experiment revealed that salt delayed hatching and increased deformity in spotted salamander hatchlings. Additionally, salt reduced salamander survivorship by 62% and frog survivorship by 30%. Wood frog tadpoles and road salt interacted to diminish salamander survivorship a further 80% beyond salt alone, likely through an increase in interspecific competition. Road salt increased the larval period of salamanders and decreased the proportion metamorphosed by the end of the experiment. Dragonfly larvae reduced salamander survivorship by 35%, whereas they increased wood frog tadpole development rates. Dragonfly larvae and salt interacted to alter tadpole denticle size, with salt negating the impact of dragonfly larvae. Thus, we found that salt interfered with aquatic predatory chemical cues. Overall, the results of this study suggest that management strategies should be implemented in order to reduce the impact of road salts on freshwater aquatic ecosystems
Card-Based Cryptography Meets Formal Verification
Card-based cryptography provides simple and practicable protocols for performing secure multi-party computation (MPC) with just a deck of cards. For the sake of simplicity, this is often done using cards with only two symbols, e.g., ♣ and ♡. Within this paper, we target the setting where all cards carry distinct symbols, catering for use-cases with commonly available standard decks and a weaker indistinguishability assumption. As of yet, the literature provides for only three protocols and no proofs for non-trivial lower
bounds on the number of cards. As such complex proofs (handling very large combinatorial state spaces) tend to be involved and error-prone, we propose using formal verification for finding protocols and proving lower bounds. In this paper, we employ the technique of software bounded model checking (SBMC), which reduces the problem to a bounded state space, which is automatically searched exhaustively using a SAT solver as a backend.
Our contribution is twofold: (a) We identify two protocols for converting between different bit encodings with overlapping bases, and then show them to be card-minimal. This completes the picture of tight lower bounds on the number of cards with respect to runtime behavior and shuffle properties of conversion protocols. For computing AND, we show that there is no protocol with finite runtime using four cards with distinguishable symbols and fixed output encoding, and give a four-card protocol with an expected finite
runtime using only random cuts. (b) We provide a general translation of proofs for lower bounds to a bounded model checking framework for automatically finding card- and length-minimal protocols and to give additional confidence in lower bounds. We apply this to validate our method and, as an example, confirm our new AND protocol to have a shortest run for protocols using this number of cards
The Minimum Number of Cards in Practical Card-based Protocols
The elegant “five-card trick” of den Boer (EUROCRYPT 1989) allows two players to securely compute a logical AND of two private bits, using five playing cards of symbols and . Since then, card-based protocols have been successfully put to use in classroom environments, vividly illustrating secure multiparty computation – and evoked research on the minimum number of cards needed for several functionalities.
Securely computing arbitrary circuits needs protocols for negation, AND and bit copy in committed-format, where outputs are commitments again. Negation just swaps the bit\u27s cards, computing AND and copying a bit times can be done with six and cards, respectively, using the simple protocols of Mizuki and Sone (FAW 2009).
Koch, Walzer and Härtel (ASIACRYPT 2015) showed that five cards suffice for computing AND in finite runtime, albeit using relatively complex and unpractical shuffle operations. In this paper, we show that if we restrict shuffling to closed permutation sets, the six-card protocol is optimal in the finite-runtime setting. If we additionally assume a uniform distribution on the permutations in a shuffle, we show that restart-free four-card AND protocols are impossible. These shuffles are easy to perform even in an actively secure manner (Koch and Walzer, ePrint 2017).
For copying bit commitments, the protocol of Nishimura et al. (ePrint 2017) needs only cards, but performs a number of complex shuffling steps that is only finite in expectation. We show that it is impossible to go with less cards. If we require an a priori bound on the runtime, we show that the -card protocol is card-minimal
Lack of association of Toll-like receptor 9 gene polymorphism with Behcet's disease in Japanese patients
The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com.ArticleTISSUE ANTIGENS. 70(1-5) 423-426 (2007)journal articl
Charge excitations associated with charge stripe order in the 214-type nickelate and superconducting cuprate
Charge excitations were studied for stipe-ordered 214 compounds,
LaSrNiO and 1/8-doped La(Ba, Sr)CuO
using resonant inelastic x-ray scattering in hard x-ray regime. We have
observed charge excitations at the energy transfer of 1 eV with the momentum
transfer corresponding to the charge stripe spatial period both for the
diagonal (nikelate) and parallel (cuprates) stripes. These new excitations can
be interpreted as a collective stripe excitation or charge excitonic mode to a
stripe-related in-gap state.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
Resonant inelastic x-ray scattering study of hole-doped manganites La1-xSrxMnO3 (x=0.2 and 0.4)
Electronic excitations near the Fermi energy in the hole doped manganese
oxides (La1-xSrxMnO3, x=0.2 and 0.4) have been elucidated by using the resonant
inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) method. A doping effect in the strongly
correlated electron systems has been observed for the first time. The
scattering spectra show that a salient peak appears in low energies indicating
the persistence of the Mott gap. At the same time, the energy gap is partly
filled by doping holes and the energy of the spectral weight shifts toward
lower energies. The excitation spectra show little change in the momentum space
as is in undoped LaMnO3, but the scattering intensities in the low energy
excitations of x=0.2 are anisotropic as well as temperature dependent, which
indicates a reminiscence of the orbital nature
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