Effect of industrial wastewater ontotal protein and the peroxidase activity in plants

The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of industrial wastewaters on protein and the peroxidase activity in Lycopersicon esculentum Mill., Capsicum annuum L., Phaseolus vulgaris L. and Vicia faba L. Industrial wastewaters were taken from Dardanel Fisheries Company, Tekel alcoholicdrinks companies’ wastewater treatment plants and from one station which is located in the middle of the Sarýçay River. Wastewaters were applied to 6 weeks old plants with directly irrigation water. Physiological changes in the plants were observed by the means of measuring the protein and enzyme activity. The largest increase in protein was observed as 190.9 and 136.3% in V. faba treated with Sarýçay River water and Tekel wastewater, respectively. In P. vulgaris which was treated with Dardanelwastewater, the total protein amount increased by 84% compared to control plants. After the wastewater treatment, the peroxidase activity decreased in all plants. The largest peroxidase decrease was 80% in L. esculentum treated with Tekel wastewater. In P. vulgaris, peroxidase decreased by 59 and 51% when treated with Dardanel wastewater and Sarýçay River water, respectively. It was concluded that the increase in total protein amount and the decrease in peroxidase activity demonstrated theindustrial wastewater’s blocking effects on plants defense systems

Nonrelativistic hydrogen type stability problems on nonparabolic 3-manifolds

We extend classical Euclidean stability theorems corresponding to the nonrelativistic Hamiltonians of ions with one electron to the setting of non parabolic Riemannian 3-manifolds.Comment: 20 pages; to appear in Annales Henri Poincar

Improving Speed of Dilithium’s Signing Procedure

Dilithium is a round 2 candidate for digital signature schemes in NIST initiative for post-quantum cryptographic schemes. Since Dilithium is built upon the “Fiat Shamir with Aborts” framework, its signing procedure performs rejection sampling of its signatures to ensure they do not leak information about the secret key. Thus, the signing procedure is iterative in nature with a number of rejected iterations, which serve as unnecessary overheads hampering its overall performance. As a first contribution, we propose an optimization that reduces the computations in the rejected iterations through early-evaluation of the conditional checks. This allows to perform an early detection of the rejection condition and reject a given iteration as early as possible. We also incorporate a number of standard optimizations such as unrolling and inlining to further improve the speed of the signing procedure. We incorporate and evaluate our optimizations over the software implementation of Dilithium on both the Intel Core i5-4460 and ARM Cortex-M4 CPUs. As a second contribution, we identify opportunities to present a more refined evaluation of Dilithium’s signing procedure in several scenarios where pre-computations can be carried out. We also evaluate the performance of our optimizations and the memory requirements for the pre-computed intermediates in the considered scenarios. We could yield speed-ups in the range of 6% upto 35%, considering all the aforementioned scenarios, thus presenting the fastest software implementation of Dilithium till date

Design and Reliability Performance Evaluation of Network Coding Schemes for Lossy Wireless Networks

This thesis investigates lossy wireless networks, which are wireless communication networks consisting of lossy wireless links, where the packet transmission via a lossy wireless link is successful with a certain value of probability. In particular, this thesis analyses all-to-all broadcast in lossy wireless networks, where every node has a native packet to transmit to all other nodes in the network. A challenge of all-to-all broadcast in lossy wireless networks is the reliability, which is defined as the probability that every node in the network successfully obtains a copy of the native packets of all other nodes. In this thesis, two novel network coding schemes are proposed, which are the neighbour network coding scheme and the random neighbour network coding scheme. In the two proposed network coding schemes, a node may perform a bit-wise exclusive or (XOR) operation to combine the native packet of itself and the native packet of its neighbour, called the coding neighbour, into an XOR coded packet. The reliability of all-to-all broadcast under both the proposed network coding schemes is investigated analytically using Markov chains. It is shown that the reliability of all-to-all broadcast can be improved considerably by employing the proposed network coding schemes, compared with non-coded networks with the same link conditions, i.e. same probabilities of successful packet transmission via wireless channels. Further, the proposed schemes take the link conditions of each node into account to maximise the reliability of a given network. To be more precise, the first scheme proposes the optimal coding neighbour selection method while the second scheme introduces a tuning parameter to control the probability that a node performs network coding at each transmission. The observation that channel condition can have a significant impact on the performance of network coding schemes is expected to be applicable to other network coding schemes for lossy wireless networks

A Lattice-based Provably Secure Multisignature Scheme in Quantum Random Oracle Model

The multisignature schemes are attracted to utilize in some cryptographic applications such as the blockchain. Though the lattice-based constructions of multisignature schemes exist as quantum-secure multisignature, a multisignature scheme whose security is proven in the quantum random oracle model (QROM), rather than the classical random oracle model (CROM), is not known. In this paper, we propose a first lattice-based multisignature scheme whose security is proven in QROM. Although our proposed scheme is based on the Dilithium-QROM signature, whose security is proven in QROM, their proof technique cannot be directly applied to the multisignature setting. The difficulty of proving the security in QROM is how to program the random oracle in the security proof. To solve the problems in the security proof, we develop several proof techniques in QROM. First, we employ the searching query technique by Targi and Unruh to convert the Dilithium-QROM into the multisignature setting. For the second, we develop a new programming technique in QROM since the conventional programming techniques seem not to work in the multisignature setting of QROM. We combine the programming technique by Unruh with the one by Liu and Zhandry. The new technique enables us to program the random oracle in QROM and construct the signing oracle in the security proof

No Place to Hide: Contactless Probing of Secret Data on FPGAs

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have been the target of different physical attacks in recent years. Many different countermeasures have already been integrated into these devices to mitigate the existing vulnerabilities. However, there has not been enough attention paid to semi-invasive attacks from the IC backside due to the following reasons. First, the conventional semi-invasive attacks from the IC backside --- such as laser fault injection and photonic emission analysis --- cannot be scaled down without further effort to the very latest nanoscale technologies of modern FPGAs and programmable SoCs. Second, the more advanced solutions for secure storage, such as controlled Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), make the conventional memory-readout techniques almost impossible. In this paper, however, novel approaches have been explored: Attacks based on Laser Voltage Probing (LVP) and its derivatives, as commonly used in Integrated Circuit (IC) debug for nanoscale low voltage technologies, are successfully launched against a $60$ nanometer technology FPGA. We discuss how these attacks can be used to break modern bitstream encryption implementations. Our attacks were carried out on a Proof-of-Concept PUF-based key generation implementation. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time that LVP is used to perform an attack on secure ICs

On the Non-Existence of Short Vectors in Random Module Lattices

Recently, Lyubashevsky & Seiler (Eurocrypt 2018) showed that small polynomials in the cyclotomic ring $Z_q[X]/(X^n+1)$, where $n$ is a power of two, are invertible under special congruence conditions on prime modulus $q$. This result has been used to prove certain security properties of lattice-based constructions against unbounded adversaries. Unfortunately, due to the special conditions, working over the corresponding cyclotomic ring does not allow for efficient use of the Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) algorithm for fast multiplication of polynomials and hence, the schemes become less practical. In this paper, we present how to overcome this limitation by analysing zeroes in the Chinese Remainder (or NTT) representation of small polynomials. Concretely, we follow the proof techniques from Stehlé and Steinfeld (Eprint 2013/004) and provide upper bounds on the probabilities related to the (non)-existence of a short vector in a random module lattice with no assumptions on the prime modulus. Then, we apply these results, along with the generic framework by Kiltz et al. (Eurocrypt 2018), to a number of lattice-based Fiat-Shamir signatures so they can both enjoy tight security in the quantum random oracle model and support fast multiplication algorithms (at the cost of slightly larger public keys and signatures), such as the Bai-Galbraith signature scheme (CT-RSA 2014), Dilithium-QROM (Kiltz et al., Eurocrypt 2018) and qTESLA (Alkim et al., PQCrypto 2017). These techniques can also be applied to prove that recent commitment schemes by Baum et al. (SCN 2018) are statistically binding with no additional assumptions on $q$

More Efficient Commitments from Structured Lattice Assumptions

We present a practical construction of an additively homomorphic commitment scheme based on structured lattice assumptions, together with a zero-knowledge proof of opening knowledge. Our scheme is a design improvement over the previous work of Benhamouda et al. in that it is not restricted to being statistically binding. While it is possible to instantiate our scheme to be statistically binding or statistically hiding, it is most efficient when both hiding and binding properties are only computational. This results in approximately a factor of 4 reduction in the size of the proof and a factor of 6 reduction in the size of the commitment over the aforementioned scheme

The First Thorough Side-Channel Hardware Trojan

Hardware Trojans have gained high attention in academia, industry and by government agencies. The effective detection mechanisms and countermeasures against such malicious designs are only possible when there is a deep understanding of how hardware Trojans can be built in practice. In this work, we present a mechanism which shows how easily a stealthy hardware Trojan can be inserted in a provably-secure side-channel analysis protected implementation. Once the Trojan is triggered, the malicious design exhibits exploitable side-channel leakage leading to successful key recovery attacks. Such a Trojan does not add or remove any logic (even a single gate) to the design which makes it very hard to detect. In ASIC platforms, it is indeed inserted by subtle manipulations at the sub-transistor level to modify the parameters of a few transistors. The same is applicable on FPGA applications by changing the routing of particular signals, leading to null resource utilization overhead. The underlying concept is based on a secure masked hardware implementation which does not exhibit any detectable leakage. However, by running the device at a particular clock frequency one of the requirements of the underlying masking scheme is not fulfilled anymore, i.e., the Trojan is triggered, and the device\u27s side-channel leakage can be exploited. Although as a case study we show an application of our designed Trojan on an FPGA-based threshold implementation of the PRESENT cipher, our methodology is a general approach and can be applied on any similar circuit