Chrisimos: A useful Proof-of-Work for finding Minimal Dominating Set of a graph

Hash-based Proof-of-Work (PoW) used in the Bitcoin Blockchain leads to high energy consumption and resource wastage. In this paper, we aim to re-purpose the energy by replacing the hash function with real-life problems having commercial utility. We propose Chrisimos, a useful Proof-of-Work where miners are required to find a minimal dominating set for real-life graph instances. A miner who is able to output the smallest dominating set for the given graph within the block interval time wins the mining game. We also propose a new chain selection rule that ensures the security of the scheme. Thus our protocol also realizes a decentralized minimal dominating set solver for any graph instance. We provide formal proof of correctness and show via experimental results that the block interval time is within feasible bounds of hash-based PoW.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figures. An abridged version of the paper got accepted in The International Symposium on Intelligent and Trustworthy Computing, Communications, and Networking (ITCCN-2023) held in conjunction with the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom-2023

Virulence of Bacillus cereus as natural facultative pathogen of Anopheles subpictus Grassi (Diptera: Culicidae) larvae in submerged rice-fields and shallow ponds

Out of 4407 Anopheles subpictus larvae collected from submerged rice-fields and shallow ponds, 1412 were found to be unhealthy and 2.8% of unhealthy larvae were naturally infected by Bacillus cereus. B. cereus formed circular, white and flat colonies. Bacteria were gram positive, ellipsoidal/oval spore forming aerobic rods. Although the isolate was positive for catalase, urease, gelatinase, lipase, nitrate reduction and H2S production, it was negative for indole production, Vogues-Proskauer test, oxidase test and acid/gas production from carbon sources. Through biochemical characterization and fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) analysis, the bacterial isolate was identified as Bacillus cereus. In the laboratory condition, B. cereus suspension resulted in 43.57% and 93.78% death of A. subpictus larvae within 3 and 6 h, respectively. The organisms were sensitive to recommended doses of kanamycin, gatifloxacin, gentamycin, levofloxacin, doxycyclin,  tetracyclin, streptomycin, rifampicin, vancomycin, ciprofloxacin, but found resistant to ampicillin.Key words: Bacillus cereus, fatty acid methyl ester analysis, scanning electron micrograph, biochemicalcharacterization, pathogen, Anopheles subpictus larva

INTERRELATIONSHIP OF STRESS, BODY IMAGE, NEGATIVE MOOD STATE AND SUSCEPTIBILITY TO ABNORMAL EATING BEHAVIOUR AMONG GAME SPECIFIC FEMALE ATHLETES: AN EXPLORATORY APPROACH

Purpose: To achieve and maintain a perfect body shape athlete often follows restrictive dieting which ultimately leads them to eating disorders. The purpose of the study was to identify whether there is an interrelationship of abnormal eating behaviours, perceived stress, negative mood state and self-perception of body image among athletic population and another was to observe the consequences of negative psychological well-being and game specificity on food choices and frequency. A secondary purpose of this study was to identify the “at risk-eating disorder” participants who were involved in different sports category. Methods: One thirty eight healthy young female participants matched for BMI were selected by purposive sampling. Subjects were divided into 4 categories i.e. aesthetic games group, endurance groups, strength group and healthy controls. Structured questionnaires were used for data collection during their non-competitive session. ANOVA followed by Scheffe’s test was applied to compare different parameters among the groups. Regression model examined the associations among disordered eating behaviours, stress, body shape concern, emotional eating, total mood disturbance and food choice. Findings: Result revealed disordered eating behaviour was significantly prominent in control and aesthetic game group than other two groups. Control group obtained the highest score in stress and emotional eating while aesthetic game group secured the highest score in body shape concern. Mood disturbance was more prevalent in strength group. Body mass index, body shape concern, emotional eating and total mood disturbance were identified as strongest predictor of EAT-26 scores. The result revealed that controls and aesthetic game group exhibit more abnormal eating behaviours than others. Value: This result will help to indicate abnormal eating behaviour and its relation with psychological well-being among female athletic population. Interventions programmes should be designed to cope up with competitive pressure to avoid abnormal eating behaviour.  Article visualizations

EFFECT OF 8 WEEKS HIGH INTENSITY INTERVAL TRAINING ON MAXIMUM OXYGEN UPTAKE CAPACITY AND RELATED CARDIO-RESPIRATORY PARAMETERS AT ANAEROBIC THRESHOLD LEVEL OF INDIAN MALE FIELD HOCKEY PLAYERS

Aim: In order to achieve maximal performance, need for high oxygen uptake is complemented with rigorous training program. To evaluate the effect of 8 weeks high intensity interval training (HIIT) on maximum oxygen uptake capacity and related cardio-respiratory parameters at anaerobic threshold level. Materials and methods: High intensity interval training programme was implemented among 20 trained young male hockey players for 3 days/week. The training set included 2 minutes of intense sprint workout followed by a minute each of active recovery and complete rest. The point of anaerobic threshold was identified with ventilatory equivalent method while the players were subjected to exercise on computerized bicycle ergometer. Results: Present study depicts significant increase in maximum oxygen consumption (+8%, p=0.000), maximum heart rate (+3%, p=0.01) and glycogen content (+3%, p=0.421) with significant decrease in pre-exercise heart rate (-7%, p=0.001), recovery heart rate (-7%, p=0.000) and average breathing frequency (-6%, p=0.014) after 8 weeks of interval training. Oxygen consumption (p=0.505), heart rate (p=0.000) and work load (p=0.004) were also improved significantly at anaerobic threshold level by 11%, 6% and 9% respectively. Conclusion: HIIT protocol ultimately allows the athlete to exercise at higher workload with greater cardiac proficiency within the aerobic zone.  Article visualizations

INTERRELATIONSHIP OF STRESS, BODY IMAGE, NEGATIVE MOOD STATE AND SUSCEPTIBILITY TO ABNORMAL EATING BEHAVIOUR AMONG GAME SPECIFIC FEMALE ATHLETES: AN EXPLORATORY APPROACH

Purpose: To achieve and maintain a perfect body shape athlete often follows restrictive dieting which ultimately leads them to eating disorders. The purpose of the study was to identify whether there is an interrelationship of abnormal eating behaviours, perceived stress, negative mood state and self-perception of body image among athletic population and another was to observe the consequences of negative psychological well-being and game specificity on food choices and frequency. A secondary purpose of this study was to identify the “at risk-eating disorder” participants who were involved in different sports category. Methods: One thirty eight healthy young female participants matched for BMI were selected by purposive sampling. Subjects were divided into 4 categories i.e. aesthetic games group, endurance groups, strength group and healthy controls. Structured questionnaires were used for data collection during their non-competitive session. ANOVA followed by Scheffe’s test was applied to compare different parameters among the groups. Regression model examined the associations among disordered eating behaviours, stress, body shape concern, emotional eating, total mood disturbance and food choice. Findings: Result revealed disordered eating behaviour was significantly prominent in control and aesthetic game group than other two groups. Control group obtained the highest score in stress and emotional eating while aesthetic game group secured the highest score in body shape concern. Mood disturbance was more prevalent in strength group. Body mass index, body shape concern, emotional eating and total mood disturbance were identified as strongest predictor of EAT-26 scores. The result revealed that controls and aesthetic game group exhibit more abnormal eating behaviours than others. Value: This result will help to indicate abnormal eating behaviour and its relation with psychological well-being among female athletic population. Interventions programmes should be designed to cope up with competitive pressure to avoid abnormal eating behaviour.  Article visualizations

A PUF-based Secure Communication Protocol for IoT

Security features are of paramount importance for IoT, and implementations are challenging given the resource-constrained IoT set-up. We have developed a lightweight identity-based cryptosystem suitable for IoT, to enable secure authentication and message exchange among the devices. Our scheme employs Physically Unclonable Function (PUF), to generate the public identity of each device, which is used as the public key for each device for message encryption. We have provided formal proofs of security in the Session Key security and Universally Composable Framework of the proposed protocol, which demonstrates the resilience of the scheme against passive as well as active attacks. We have demonstrated the set up required for the protocol implementation and shown that the proposed protocol implementation incurs low hardware and software overhead

GIS Based Approach to Determine the Changes of Water Hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) Cover and Relation with Lesser Whistling Teal (Dendrocygna javanica) Assemblage at Santragachi Wetland, West Bengal

The present investigation is conducted to study the year wise (2011 to 2018) changes of water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) cover at Santragachi Lake a Wetland under National Wetland Conservation Programme of India. Further the relationship between water hyacinth cover and the most abundant migratory waterbirds of Satragachi, Lesser Whistling Teal (LWT; Dendrocygna javanica) is assessed because this bird species is fully depended on water hyacinth mat for their roosting. The study comprises of eight satellite images procured from Google earth (2011 to 2018) to explore this relationship. A marked decline in the number of LWT at Santragachi wetland is observed in the year of 2017 and 2018. It is very interesting fact that from 2017-2018, the water hyacinth mat of this wetland is almost cleared before winter and the result of cluster analysis supports this fact. Significant positive correlation is also observed within LWT number and water hyacinth cover area (r = 0.7481 at p< 0.05) along with the total perimeter (r = 0.8648 at p< 0.05) of the water hyacinth islands at Santragachi wetland. However, open water area is also needed for diving, swimming, food searching for the LWT and other waterbirds. Therefore, more study is needed to optimize the clearing operations, focused on optimizing the shape and size of water hyacinth islands for proper management of the waterbirds habitat

Open Sesame: A Novel Non-SAT-Attack against CAS-Lock

CAS-Lock (proposed in CHES2020), is an advanced logic locking technique that harnesses the concept of single-point function in providing SAT-attack resiliency. It is claimed to be powerful and efficient enough in mitigating state-of-the-art attacks against logic locking techniques. Despite the security robustness of CAS-Lock as claimed by the authors, we expose a serious vulnerability by exploiting the same and device a novel attack algorithm. The proposed attack can reveal the correct key by extracting the Distinguishing Input Patterns (DIPs) pertaining to a carefully chosen key simulation of the locked design. The correct key is obtained from the combination of elements from the set of extracted DIPs. Our attack is successful against various AND/OR cascaded-chain configurations of CAS-Lock and reports a 100% success rate in recovering the correct key

A Tale of Twin Primitives: Single-chip Solution for PUFs and TRNGs

Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and True Random Number Generators (TRNGs) are two highly useful hardware primitives to build up the root-of-trust for an embedded device. PUFs are designed to offer repetitive and instance-specific randomness, whereas TRNGs are expected to be invariably random. In this paper, we present a dual-mode PUF-TRNG design that utilises two different hardware-intrinsic properties, i.e. oscillation frequency of the Transition Effect Ring Oscillator (TERO) cell and the propagation delay of a buffer within the cell to serve the purpose of both PUF and TRNG depending on the exact requirement of the application. The PUF design is also proposed to have a built-in resistance to machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) attacks, whereas the TRNG exhibits sufficient randomness