Insights into the Mind of a Trojan Designer: The Challenge to Integrate a Trojan into the Bitstream

The threat of inserting hardware Trojans during the design, production, or in-field poses a danger for integrated circuits in real-world applications. A particular critical case of hardware Trojans is the malicious manipulation of third-party FPGA configurations. In addition to attack vectors during the design process, FPGAs can be infiltrated in a non-invasive manner after shipment through alterations of the bitstream. First, we present an improved methodology for bitstream file format reversing. Second, we introduce a novel idea for Trojan insertion

BSA Hydrogel Beads Functionalized with a Specific Aptamer Library for Capturing Pseudomonas aeruginosa in Serum and Blood

Systemic blood stream infections are a major threat to human health and are dramatically increasing worldwide. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a WHO-alerted multi-resistant pathogen of extreme importance as a cause of sepsis. Septicemia patients have significantly increased survival chances if sepsis is diagnosed in the early stages. Affinity materials can not only represent attractive tools for specific diagnostics of pathogens in the blood but can prospectively also serve as the technical foundation of therapeutic filtration devices. Based on the recently developed aptamers directed against P. aeruginosa, we here present aptamer-functionalized beads for specific binding of this pathogen in blood samples. These aptamer capture beads (ACBs) are manufactured by crosslinking bovine serum albumin (BSA) in an emulsion and subsequent functionalization with the amino-modified aptamers on the bead surface using the thiol- and amino-reactive bispecific crosslinker PEG(4)-SPDP. Specific and quantitative binding of P. aeruginosa as the dedicated target of the ACBs was demonstrated in serum and blood. These initial but promising results may open new routes for the development of ACBs as a platform technology for fast and reliable diagnosis of bloodstream infections and, in the long term, blood filtration techniques in the fight against sepsis

Albumin Microspheres as “Trans-ferry-beads” for Easy Cell Passaging in Cell Culture Technology

Protein hydrogels represent ideal materials for advanced cell culture applications, including 3D-cultivation of even fastidious cells. Key properties of fully functional and, at the same time, economically successful cell culture materials are excellent biocompatibility and advanced fabrication processes allowing their easy production even on a large scale based on affordable compounds. Chemical crosslinking of bovine serum albumin (BSA) with N-(3-dimethylaminopropyl)-N’-ethylcarbodiimide hydrochloride (EDC) in a water-in-oil emulsion with isoparaffinic oil as the continuous phase and sorbitan monooleate as surfactant generates micro-meter-scale spherical particles. They allow a significant simplification of an indispensable and laborious step in traditional cell culture workflows. This cell passaging (or splitting) to fresh culture vessels/flasks conventionally requires harsh trypsinization, which can be omitted by using the “trans-ferry-beads” presented here. When added to different pre-cultivated adherent cell lines, the beads are efficiently boarded by cells as passengers and can be easily transferred afterward for the embarkment of novel flasks. After this procedure, cells are perfectly viable and show normal growth behavior. Thus, the trans-ferry-beads not only may become extremely affordable as a final product but also may generally replace trypsinization in conventional cell culture, thereby opening new routes for the establishment of optimized and resource-efficient workflows in biological and medical cell culture laboratories

Electromagnetic Transmission of Intellectual Property Data to Protect FPGA Designs

International audienceOver the past 10 years, the designers of intellectual properties(IP) have faced increasing threats including cloning, counterfeiting, andreverse-engineering. This is now a critical issue for the microelectronicsindustry. The design of a secure, efficient, lightweight protection scheme fordesign data is a serious challenge for the hardware security community. In thiscontext, this chapter presents two ultra-lightweight transmitters using sidechannel leakage based on electromagnetic emanation to send embedded IPidentity discreetly and quickl

High level expression of differentially localized BAG-1 isoforms in some oestrogen receptor-positive human breast cancers

Sensitivity to oestrogens and apoptosis are critical determinants of the development and progression of breast cancer and reflect closely linked pathways in breast epithelial cells. For example, induction of BCL-2 oncoprotein expression by oestrogen contributes to suppression of apoptosis and BCL-2 and oestrogen receptor (ER) are frequently co-expressed in tumours. BAG-1/HAP is a multifunctional protein which complexes with BCL-2 and steroid hormone receptors (including the ER), and can suppress apoptosis and influence steroid hormone-dependent transcription. Therefore, analysis of expression of BAG-1 in human breast cancer is of considerable interest. BAG-1 was readily detected by immunostaining in normal breast epithelial cells and most ER-positive tumours, but was undetectable or weakly expressed in ER-negative tumours. BAG-1 positive cells showed a predominantly cytoplasmic or cytoplasmic plus nuclear distribution of staining. A correlation between ER and BAG-1 was also evident in breast cancer derived cell lines, as all lines examined with functional ER expression also expressed high levels of BAG-1. In addition to the prototypical 36 kDa BAG-1 isoform, breast cancer cells expressed higher molecular weight isoforms and, in contrast to BCL-2, BAG-1 expression was independent of oestrogens. BAG-1 isoforms were differentially localized to the nucleus or cytoplasm and this was also independent of oestrogens. These results demonstrate a close association between BAG-1 and functional ER expression and suggest BAG-1 may be useful as a therapeutic target or prognostic marker in breast cancer. © 1999 Cancer Research Campaig

The JCMT Gould Belt Survey: evidence for radiative heating and contamination in the W40 complex

We present SCUBA-2 450 μm and 850 μm observations of the W40 complex in the Serpens-Aquila region as part of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) Gould Belt Survey (GBS) of nearby star-forming regions. We investigate radiative heating by constructing temperature maps from the ratio of SCUBA-2 fluxes using a fixed dust opacity spectral index, β = 1.8, and a beam convolution kernel to achieve a common 14.8 arcsec resolution. We identify 82 clumps ranging between 10 and 36 K with a mean temperature of 20 ± 3 K. Clump temperature is strongly correlated with proximity to the external OB association and there is no evidence that the embedded protostars significantly heat the dust. We identify 31 clumps that have cores with densities greater than 105cm-3. 13 of these cores contain embedded Class 0/I protostars. Many cores are associated with bright-rimmed clouds seen in Herschel 70 μm images. From JCMT HARP observations of the 12CO 3-2 line, we find contamination of the 850 μm band of up to 20 per cent. We investigate the free-free contribution to SCUBA-2 bands from large-scale and ultracompact HII regions using archival VLA data and find the contribution is limited to individual stars, accounting for 9 per cent of flux per beam at 450 μm or 12 per cent at 850 μm in these cases. We conclude that radiative heating has potentially influenced the formation of stars in the Dust Arc sub-region, favouring Jeans stable clouds in the warm east and fragmentation in the cool west

Power signature watermarking of IP cores for FPGAs

In this paper, we introduce a new method for watermarking of IP cores for FPGA architectures where the signature (watermark) is detected at the power supply pins of the FPGA. This is the first watermarking method where the signature is extracted in this way. We are able to sign IP cores at the netlist as well as the bit. le level, so a wide spectrum of cores can be protected. In principle, the proposed power watermarking method works for all kinds of FPGAs. For Xilinx FPGAs, we demonstrate in detail that we can integrate the watermarking algorithms and the signature into the functionality of the watermarked core. So it is very hard to remove the watermark without destroying the core. Furthermore, we introduce a detection algorithm which can decode the signature from a voltage trace with high reliability. Additionally, two enhanced robustness algorithms are introduced which improve the detection probability in case of considerable noise sources. Using these techniques, it is possible to decode the signature even if other cores operate on the same device at the same time