Improved Masking for Tweakable Blockciphers with Applications to Authenticated Encryption

A popular approach to tweakable blockcipher design is via masking, where a certain primitive (a blockcipher or a permutation) is preceded and followed by an easy-to-compute tweak-dependent mask. In this work, we revisit the principle of masking. We do so alongside the introduction of the tweakable Even-Mansour construction MEM. Its masking function combines the advantages of word-oriented LFSR- and powering-up-based methods. We show in particular how recent advancements in computing discrete logarithms over finite fields of characteristic 2 can be exploited in a constructive way to realize highly efficient, constant-time masking functions. If the masking satisfies a set of simple conditions, then MEM is a secure tweakable blockcipher up to the birthday bound. The strengths of MEM are exhibited by the design of fully parallelizable authenticated encryption schemes OPP (nonce-respecting) and MRO (misuse-resistant). If instantiated with a reduced-round BLAKE2b permutation, OPP and MRO achieve speeds up to 0.55 and 1.06 cycles per byte on the Intel Haswell microarchitecture, and are able to significantly outperform their closest competitors

A principal component meta-analysis on multiple anthropometric traits identifies novel loci for body shape

Large consortia have revealed hundreds of genetic loci associated with anthropometric traits, one trait at a time. We examined whether genetic variants affect body shape as a composite phenotype that is represented by a combination of anthropometric traits. We developed an approach that calculates averaged PCs (AvPCs) representing body shape derived from six anthropometric traits (body mass index, height, weight, waist and hip circumference, waist-to-hip ratio). The first four AvPCs explain >99% of the variability, are heritable, and associate with cardiometabolic outcomes. We performed genome-wide association analyses for each body shape composite phenotype across 65 studies and meta-analysed summary statistics. We identify six novel loci: LEMD2 and CD47 for AvPC1, RPS6KA5/C14orf159 and GANAB for AvPC3, and ARL15 and ANP32 for AvPC4. Our findings highlight the value of using multiple traits to define complex phenotypes for discovery, which are not captured by single-trait analyses, and may shed light onto new pathways

The Influence of Age and Sex on Genetic Associations with Adult Body Size and Shape: A Large-Scale Genome-Wide Interaction Study

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified more than 100 genetic variants contributing to BMI, a measure of body size, or waist-to-hip ratio (adjusted for BMI, WHRadjBMI), a measure of body shape. Body size and shape change as people grow older and these changes differ substantially between men and women. To systematically screen for age-and/or sex-specific effects of genetic variants on BMI and WHRadjBMI, we performed meta-analyses of 114 studies (up to 320,485 individuals of European descent) with genome-wide chip and/or Metabochip data by the Genetic Investigation of Anthropometric Traits (GIANT) Consortium. Each study tested the association of up to similar to 2.8M SNPs with BMI and WHRadjBMI in four strata (men &lt;= 50y, men &gt; 50y, women &lt;= 50y, women &gt; 50y) and summary statistics were combined in stratum-specific meta-analyses. We then screened for variants that showed age-specific effects (G x AGE), sex-specific effects (G x SEX) or age-specific effects that differed between men and women (G x AGE x SEX). For BMI, we identified 15 loci (11 previously established for main effects, four novel) that showed significant (FDR&lt; 5%) age-specific effects, of which 11 had larger effects in younger (&lt; 50y) than in older adults (&gt;= 50y). No sex-dependent effects were identified for BMI. For WHRadjBMI, we identified 44 loci (27 previously established for main effects, 17 novel) with sex-specific effects, of which 28 showed larger effects in women than in men, five showed larger effects in men than in women, and 11 showed opposite effects between sexes. No age-dependent effects were identified for WHRadjBMI. This is the first genome-wide interaction meta-analysis to report convincing evidence of age-dependent genetic effects on BMI. In addition, we confirm the sex-specificity of genetic effects on WHRadjBMI. These results may providefurther insights into the biology that underlies weight change with age or the sexually dimorphism of body shape.</p

Solving a 61206120 -bit DLP on a Desktop Computer

In this paper we show how some recent ideas regarding the discrete logarithm problem (DLP) in finite fields of small characteristic may be applied to compute logarithms in some very large fields extremely efficiently. By combining the polynomial time relation generation from the authors’ CRYPTO 2013 paper, an improved degree two elimination technique, and an analogue of Joux’s recent small-degree elimination method, we solved a DLP in the record-sized finite field of 26120 elements, using just a single core-month. Relative to the previous record set by Joux in the field of 24080 elements, this represents a 50 % increase in the bitlength, using just 5 % of the core-hours. We also show that for the fields considered, the parameters for Joux’s LQ(1/4 + o(1)) algorithm may be optimised to produce an LQ(1/4) algorithm

A family of semifields in characteristic 2

We construct and describe the basic properties of a family of semifields in characteristic $2.$ The construction relies on the properties of projective polynomials over finite fields. We start by associating non-associative products to each such polynomial. The resulting presemifields form the degenerate case of our family. They are isotopic to the Knuth semifields which are quadratic over left and right nucleus. The non-degenerate members of our family display a very different behaviour. Their left and right nucleus agrees with the center, the middle nucleus is quadratic over the center. None of those semifields is isotopic or Knuth equivalent to a commutative semifield. As a by-product we obtain the complete taxonomy of the characteristic $2$ semifields which are quadratic over the middle nucleus, bi-quadratic over the left and right nucleus and not isotopic to twisted fields. This includes {determining} when two such semifields are isotopic and the order of the autotopism group.Comment: 23 page