Lattice Blind Signatures with Forward Security

Blind signatures play an important role in both electronic cash and electronic voting systems. Blind signatures should be secure against various attacks (such as signature forgeries). The work puts a special attention to secret key exposure attacks, which totally break digital signatures. Signatures that resist secret key exposure attacks are called forward secure in the sense that disclosure of a current secret key does not compromise past secret keys. This means that forward-secure signatures must include a mechanism for secret-key evolution over time periods. This paper gives a construction of the first blind signature that is forward secure. The construction is based on the SIS assumption in the lattice setting. The core techniques applied are the binary tree data structure for the time periods and the trapdoor delegation for the key-evolution mechanism.Comment: ACISP 202

CARIBE: Cascaded IBE for Maximum Flexibility and User-side Control

Mass surveillance and a lack of end-user encryption, coupled with a growing demand for key escrow under legal oversight and certificate authority security concerns, raise the question of the appropriateness of continued general dependency on PKI. Under this context, we examine Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) as an alternative to public-key encryption. Cascade encryption, or sequential multiple encryption, is the concept of layering encryption such that the ciphertext from one encryption step is the plaintext of the next. We describe CARIBE, a cascaded IBE scheme, for which we also provide a cascaded CCA security experiment, IND-ID-C.CCA, and prove its security in the computational model. CARIBE combines the ease-of-use of IBE with key escrow, limited to the case when the entire set of participating PKGs collaborate. Furthermore, we describe a particular CARIBE scheme, CARIBE-S, where the receiver is a self-PKG – one of the several PKGs included in the cascade. CARIBE-S inherits IND-ID-C.CCA from CARIBE, and avoids key escrow entirely. In essence, CARIBE-S offers the maximum flexibility of the IBE paradigm and gives the users complete control without the key escrow problem

Magnetic Behavior of Surface Nanostructured 50-nm Nickel Thin Films

Thermally evaporated 50-nm nickel thin films coated on borosilicate glass substrates were nanostructured by excimer laser (0.5 J/cm2, single shot), DC electric field (up to 2 kV/cm) and trench-template assisted technique. Nanoparticle arrays (anisotropic growth features) have been observed to form in the direction of electric field for DC electric field treatment case and ruptured thin film (isotropic growth features) growth for excimer laser treatment case. For trench-template assisted technique; nanowires (70–150 nm diameters) have grown along the length of trench template. Coercive field and saturation magnetization are observed to be strongly dependent on nanostructuring techniques

The quality of research synthesis in surgery: the case of laparoscopic surgery for colorectal cancer

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

SPARC 2018 Internationalisation and collaboration : Salford postgraduate annual research conference book of abstracts

Welcome to the Book of Abstracts for the 2018 SPARC conference. This year we not only celebrate the work of our PGRs but also the launch of our Doctoral School, which makes this year’s conference extra special. Once again we have received a tremendous contribution from our postgraduate research community; with over 100 presenters, the conference truly showcases a vibrant PGR community at Salford. These abstracts provide a taster of the research strengths of their works, and provide delegates with a reference point for networking and initiating critical debate. With such wide-ranging topics being showcased, we encourage you to take up this great opportunity to engage with researchers working in different subject areas from your own. To meet global challenges, high impact research inevitably requires interdisciplinary collaboration. This is recognised by all major research funders. Therefore engaging with the work of others and forging collaborations across subject areas is an essential skill for the next generation of researchers