32 research outputs found
Building Secure and Anonymous Communication Channel: Formal Model and its Prototype Implementation
Various techniques need to be combined to realize anonymously authenticated
communication. Cryptographic tools enable anonymous user authentication while
anonymous communication protocols hide users' IP addresses from service
providers. One simple approach for realizing anonymously authenticated
communication is their simple combination, but this gives rise to another
issue; how to build a secure channel. The current public key infrastructure
cannot be used since the user's public key identifies the user. To cope with
this issue, we propose a protocol that uses identity-based encryption for
packet encryption without sacrificing anonymity, and group signature for
anonymous user authentication. Communications in the protocol take place
through proxy entities that conceal users' IP addresses from service providers.
The underlying group signature is customized to meet our objective and improve
its efficiency. We also introduce a proof-of-concept implementation to
demonstrate the protocol's feasibility. We compare its performance to SSL
communication and demonstrate its practicality, and conclude that the protocol
realizes secure, anonymous, and authenticated communication between users and
service providers with practical performance.Comment: This is a preprint version of our paper presented in SAC'14, March
24-28, 2014, Gyeongju, Korea. ACMSAC 201
Key-updatable public-key encryption with keyword search (Or: How to realize PEKS with efficient key updates for IoT environments)
Security and privacy are the key issues for the Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Especially, secure search is an important functionality for cooperation among users\u27 devices and non-trusted servers. Public-key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) enables us to search encrypted data and is expected to be used between a cloud server and users\u27 mobile devices or IoT devices. However, those mobile devices might be lost or stolen. For IoT devices, it might be difficult to store keys in a tamper-proof manner due to prohibitive costs. In this paper, we deal with such a key-exposure problem on PEKS and introduce the concept of PEKS with key-updating functionality, which we call key-updatable PEKS (KU-PEKS). Specifically, we propose two models of KU-PEKS: the key-evolution model and the key-insulation model. In the key-evolution model, a pair of public and secret keys can be updated if needed (e.g., the secret key is exposed). In the key-insulation model, the public key remains fixed while the secret key can be updated if needed. The former model makes a construction simple and more efficient than the latter. On the other hand, the latter model is preferable for practical use since a user never updates their public key. We show constructions in each model in a black-box manner. We also give implementation results on Raspberry Pi 3, which can be regarded as a reasonable platform of IoT devices
Vacuum-Assisted Closure (VAC) for Bilateral Severe Ischemic Foot after Revascularization: A Patient Report
The Vacuum-Assisted Closure (VAC) Therapy (KCI, San Antonio, TX) is a unique system that helps promote wound healing. We report a case of severe ischemic foot in which VAC therapy markedly improved wound healing. A 73-year-old man underwent left axillopopliteal bypass and left 3rd, 4th and 5th digital amputations for gangrene. Although his amputation stumps were complicated with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection, the stumps were successfully healed by VAC. He also had gangrene in his right 1st toe, which could not healed by VAC alone, and we performed right femoropopliteal bypass and right 1st digital amputation. The stump with MRSA infection was also successfully healed by VAC. Histopathologic examination revealed a lot of microvessels in the increased granulation tissue
FPGA and ASIC Implementations of the Pairing in Characteristic Three
Since their introduction in constructive cryptographic applications, pairings over (hyper)elliptic curves are at the heart of an ever increasing number of protocols. As they rely critically on efficient algorithms and implementations of pairing primitives, the study of hardware accelerators became an active research area.
In this paper, we propose two coprocessors for the reduced pairing introduced by Barreto {\it et al.} as an alternative means of computing the Tate pairing on supersingular elliptic curves. We prototyped our architectures on FPGAs. According to our place-and-route results, our coprocessors compare favorably with other solutions described in the open literature. We also present the first ASIC implementation of the reduced pairing
The whole blood transcriptional regulation landscape in 465 COVID-19 infected samples from Japan COVID-19 Task Force
「コロナ制圧タスクフォース」COVID-19患者由来の血液細胞における遺伝子発現の網羅的解析 --重症度に応じた遺伝子発現の変化には、ヒトゲノム配列の個人差が影響する--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2022-08-23.Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a recently-emerged infectious disease that has caused millions of deaths, where comprehensive understanding of disease mechanisms is still unestablished. In particular, studies of gene expression dynamics and regulation landscape in COVID-19 infected individuals are limited. Here, we report on a thorough analysis of whole blood RNA-seq data from 465 genotyped samples from the Japan COVID-19 Task Force, including 359 severe and 106 non-severe COVID-19 cases. We discover 1169 putative causal expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) including 34 possible colocalizations with biobank fine-mapping results of hematopoietic traits in a Japanese population, 1549 putative causal splice QTLs (sQTLs; e.g. two independent sQTLs at TOR1AIP1), as well as biologically interpretable trans-eQTL examples (e.g., REST and STING1), all fine-mapped at single variant resolution. We perform differential gene expression analysis to elucidate 198 genes with increased expression in severe COVID-19 cases and enriched for innate immune-related functions. Finally, we evaluate the limited but non-zero effect of COVID-19 phenotype on eQTL discovery, and highlight the presence of COVID-19 severity-interaction eQTLs (ieQTLs; e.g., CLEC4C and MYBL2). Our study provides a comprehensive catalog of whole blood regulatory variants in Japanese, as well as a reference for transcriptional landscapes in response to COVID-19 infection
DOCK2 is involved in the host genetics and biology of severe COVID-19
「コロナ制圧タスクフォース」COVID-19疾患感受性遺伝子DOCK2の重症化機序を解明 --アジア最大のバイオレポジトリーでCOVID-19の治療標的を発見--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2022-08-10.Identifying the host genetic factors underlying severe COVID-19 is an emerging challenge. Here we conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) involving 2, 393 cases of COVID-19 in a cohort of Japanese individuals collected during the initial waves of the pandemic, with 3, 289 unaffected controls. We identified a variant on chromosome 5 at 5q35 (rs60200309-A), close to the dedicator of cytokinesis 2 gene (DOCK2), which was associated with severe COVID-19 in patients less than 65 years of age. This risk allele was prevalent in East Asian individuals but rare in Europeans, highlighting the value of genome-wide association studies in non-European populations. RNA-sequencing analysis of 473 bulk peripheral blood samples identified decreased expression of DOCK2 associated with the risk allele in these younger patients. DOCK2 expression was suppressed in patients with severe cases of COVID-19. Single-cell RNA-sequencing analysis (n = 61 individuals) identified cell-type-specific downregulation of DOCK2 and a COVID-19-specific decreasing effect of the risk allele on DOCK2 expression in non-classical monocytes. Immunohistochemistry of lung specimens from patients with severe COVID-19 pneumonia showed suppressed DOCK2 expression. Moreover, inhibition of DOCK2 function with CPYPP increased the severity of pneumonia in a Syrian hamster model of SARS-CoV-2 infection, characterized by weight loss, lung oedema, enhanced viral loads, impaired macrophage recruitment and dysregulated type I interferon responses. We conclude that DOCK2 has an important role in the host immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection and the development of severe COVID-19, and could be further explored as a potential biomarker and/or therapeutic target