Candida albicans-produced farnesol stimulates Pseudomonas quinolone signal production in LasR-defective Pseudomonas aeruginosa strains

Candida albicans has been previously shown to stimulate the production of Pseudomonas aeruginosa phenazine toxins in dual-species colony biofilms. Here, we report that P. aeruginosa lasR mutants, which lack the master quorum sensing system regulator, regain the ability to produce quorum-sensing-regulated phenazines when cultured with C. albicans. Farnesol, a signalling molecule produced by C. albicans, was sufficient to stimulate phenazine production in LasR− laboratory strains and clinical isolates. P. aeruginosa ΔlasR mutants are defective in production of the Pseudomonas quinolone signal (PQS) due to their inability to properly induce pqsH, which encodes the enzyme necessary for the last step in PQS biosynthesis. We show that expression of pqsH in a ΔlasR strain was sufficient to restore PQS production, and that farnesol restored pqsH expression in ΔlasR mutants. The farnesol-mediated increase in pqsH required RhlR, a transcriptional regulator downstream of LasR, and farnesol led to higher levels of N-butyryl-homoserine lactone, the small molecule activator of RhlR. Farnesol promotes the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in a variety of species. Because the antioxidant N-acetylcysteine suppressed farnesol-induced RhlR activity in LasR− strains, and hydrogen peroxide was sufficient to restore PQS production in las mutants, we propose that ROS are responsible for the activation of downstream portions of this quorum sensing pathway. LasR mutants frequently arise in the lungs of patients chronically infected with P. aeruginosa. The finding that C. albicans, farnesol or ROS stimulate virulence factor production in lasR strains provides new insight into the virulence potential of these strains

Analysis of RMAC

Abstract. In this paper the newly proposed RMAC system is analysed. The scheme allows a (traditional MAC) attack some control over one of two keys of the underlying block cipher and makes it possible to mount several related-key attacks on RMAC. First, an efficient attack on RMAC when used with triple-DES is presented, which rely also on other findings in the proposed draft standard. Second, a generic attack on RMAC is presented which can be used to find one of the two keys in the system faster than by an exhaustive search. Third, related-key attacks on RMAC in a multi-user setting are presented. In addition to beating the claimed security bounds in NIST’s RMAC proposal, this work suggests that, as a general principle, one may wish to avoid designing modes of operation that use related keys.

On the design and security of RC2

Abstract. The block cipher RC2 was designed in 1989 by Ron Rivest for RSA Data Security Inc. In this paper we describe both the cipher and preliminary attempts to use both di erential and linear cryptanalysis.

Multiple linear cryptanalysis of a reduced round RC6

In this paper, we apply multiple linear cryptanalysis to a reduced round RC6 block cipher. We show that 18-round RC6 with weak key is breakable by using the multiple linear attack

On the Security of Tandem-DM

Abstract. We provide the first proof of security for Tandem-DM, one of the oldest and most well-known constructions for turning a block cipher with n-bit block length and 2n-bit key length into a 2n-bit cryptographic hash function. We prove, that when Tandem-DM is instantiated with AES-256, block length 128 bits and key length 256 bits, any adversary that asks less than 2120.4 queries cannot find a collision with success prob-ability greater than 1/2. We also prove a bound for preimage resistance of Tandem-DM. Interestingly, as there is only one practical construction known turn-ing such an (n, 2n) bit block cipher into a 2n-bit compression function that has provably birthday-type collision resistance (FSE’06, Hirose), Tandem-DM is one out of two constructions that has this desirable fea-ture