Key Recovery from State Information of Sprout: Application to Cryptanalysis and Fault Attack

Abstract. Design of secure light-weight stream ciphers is an important area in cryptographic hardware & embedded systems and a very recent design by Armknecht and Mikhalev (FSE 2015) has received serious attention that uses shorter internal state and still claims to resist the time-memory-data-tradeoff (TMDTO) attacks. An instantiation of this design paradigm is the stream cipher named Sprout with 80-bit secret key. In this paper we cryptanalyze the cipher and refute various claims. The designers claim that the secret key of Sprout can not be recovered efficiently from the complete state information using a guess and determine attack. However, in this paper, we show that it is possible with a few hundred bits in practical time. More importantly, from around 850 key-stream bits, complete knowledge of NFSR (40 bits) and a partial knowledge of LFSR (around one third, i.e., 14 bits); we can obtain all the secret key bits. This cryptanalyzes Sprout with 2^{54} attempts (considering constant time complexity required by the SAT solver in each attempt, which is around 1 minute in a laptop). This is less than the exhaustive key search. Further, we show how related ideas can be employed to mount a fault attack against Sprout that requires around 120 faults in random locations (20 faults, if the locations are known), whereas the designers claim that such a fault attack may not be possible. Our cryptanalytic results raise quite a few questions about this design paradigm in general that should be revisited with greater care

Understanding how social discussion platforms like Reddit are influencing financial behavior

This study proposes content and interaction analysis techniques for a large repository created from social media content. Though we have presented our study for a large platform dedicated to discussions around financial topics, the proposed methods are generic and applicable to all platforms. Along with an extension of topic extraction method using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, we propose a few measures to assess user participation, influence and topic affinities specifically. Our study also maps user-generated content to components of behavioral finance. While these types of information are usually gathered through surveys, it is obvious that large scale data analysis from social media can reveal many potentially unknown or rare insights. Characterising users based on their platform behavior to provide critical insights about how communities are formed and trust is established in these platforms using graphical analysis is also studied.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, and 1 algorithm; Published in WI-IAT 2022 (The 21st IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology

Study on Relationship among the Various Physico-Chemical Soil Properties and Identification of Soil Acidifying Components

Soil acidity is one of the major obstacles to crop growth to a great extent. IN different districts of West Bengal, soil acidity has been reported as a considerable factor behind crop growth restriction. Hence, a comprehensive study has been conducted with a view to study the relationship among the various forms of soil acidity and other physico-chemical soil properties, covering Godkhali, Coochbehar and Purulia under investigation. Outcomes of the investigation clearly reveal that all the physico-chemical properties has been found to have significant influence on different forms of acidity. Along with this, it can be also inferred that among the forms of different soil acidity, for all the forms, significant positive linear association has been observed. It has been also obtained that hydrolytic acidity, extractable acidity and pH-dependent acidity can be considered as the most vital soil acidifying component

Supply response of major oilseeds in India: A mix of price and non-price factors

Oilseeds are one of the most important determinants of India’s agricultural economy, next only to cereals and pulses. The self-sufficiently in oilseed obtained during the early 1990s could not be sustained sufficiently. Despite, being the fourth largest oilseed crop-producing nation in the world, India is also one of the largest importers of vegetable oils. This study appraises the relationship between price and non-price factors to understand the behaviour of major oilseeds (mustard/rapeseed and groundnut) cultivated in India from 1997-98 to 2019-2020. Supply response is the responsiveness of supply, which can be identified using production response to different determining factors. Mustard/rapeseed and groundnut are the oilseeds that are mainly produced in India. This study specifically attempted to quantify the relationship between oilseed production and different factors, such as annual rainfall, annual temperature, yield, and revenue difference for both crops. The findings suggested that yield and revenue difference of mustard with wheat are the most determining factors for mustard production, whereas annual rainfall, the temperature during the growing season, and revenue difference between groundnut with rice and soyabean are the most significant determinants of groundnut’s production response. Crop equivalent productivity further validated that groundnut competed and outperformed the two promising crops (soybean and paddy). The trend analysis (1997-98 to 2019-2020) also indicated that wheat was the dominant crop over mustard from 1997-98 to 2013-14. Afterwards, i.e., from 2014-15 to 2019-20, mustard surpassed wheat productivity (on equivalent terms) and outperformed cereal.

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Not AvailableEducation is a Nation’s strength. Association analysis of academic performance and its infuential factors has remained research interest for all education researchers all over the world. India being an agriculture dominated country, for its development in agricultural front it requires ahuge numberof efcient technocrats having strong academic background. In this study an attempt has been made to examine the associationship of academic performance of the agriculture graduates, as measured through overall grade point average (OGPA) with the factors supposed to infuence the academic performance. Special emphasis has been given to visualize the performance in presence of the infuences of nominal factors. Students at masters level were surveyed for their social, economic, demographic and family and educational background through a designed questionnaire and tested accordingly. Statistical tools, starting from frequency, percentage, Chi-square test, test for normality, Cramer’s V test, multiple regression analysis with the inclusion of dummy variables were employed. Dependency of OGPA with gender, caste and expenditure on education is recorded. The dependency of educational expenditure on OGPA is quite obvious. But the dependency of OGPA with those of gender and caste is most probably not a good sign for a healthy higher education system. This study will help the education planners to take group oriented action plan for improving the education standard in higher education institutions.Not Availabl