Marmore im Erzgebirge

Das Erzgebirge verfügt über beträchtliche Marmorvorkommen. Schon seit Jahrhunderten sind die Kalzit- und Dolomitmarmore als Düngemittel, später als Grundstoffe in der chemischen Industrie, in der Glasproduktion und als Zuschlagstoffe in der Baustoffindustrie begehrt. Die Monografie enthält die geologische Beschreibung von über 100 Marmorlagerstätten auf sächsischem und tschechischem Gebiet. Die Marmorvorkommen werden anhand von geologischen Übersichtskarten, Rissausschnitten, geologischen Schnitten und zahlreichen Fotos beschrieben. Schwerpunkte sind dabei die geschichtliche Entwicklung des jeweiligen Abbaus, die geologischen Verhältnisse, die bergtechnischen Bedingungen, die Verwendung des Rohstoffs und die Einflüsse des Marmorbergbaus auf die Umwelt. Die aufbereiteten Daten sind für künftige Bergbauunternehmungen von Interesse

Remote Inter-Chip Power Analysis Side-Channel Attacks at Board-Level

The current practice in board-level integration is to incorporate chips and components from numerous vendors. A fully trusted supply chain for all used components and chipsets is an important, yet extremely difficult to achieve, prerequisite to validate a complete board-level system for safe and secure operation. An increasing risk is that most chips nowadays run software or firmware, typically updated throughout the system lifetime, making it practically impossible to validate the full system at every given point in the manufacturing, integration and operational life cycle. This risk is elevated in devices that run 3rd party firmware. In this paper we show that an FPGA used as a common accelerator in various boards can be reprogrammed by software to introduce a sensor, suitable as a remote power analysis side-channel attack vector at the board-level. We show successful power analysis attacks from one FPGA on the board to another chip implementing RSA and AES cryptographic modules. Since the sensor is only mapped through firmware, this threat is very hard to detect, because data can be exfiltrated without requiring inter-chip communication between victim and attacker. Our results also prove the potential vulnerability in which any untrusted chip on the board can launch such attacks on the remaining system

Impeccable Circuits

By injecting faults, active physical attacks pose serious threats to cryptographic hardware where Concurrent Error Detection (CED) schemes are promising countermeasures. They are usually based on an Error-Detecting Code (EDC) which enables detecting certain injected faults depending on the specification of the underlying code. Here, we propose a methodology to enable correct, practical, and robust implementation of code-based CEDs. We show that straightforward hardware implementations of given code-based CEDs can suffer from severe vulnerabilities, not providing the desired protection level. In particular, propagation of faults into combinatorial logic is often ignored in security evaluation of these schemes. First, we formally define this detrimental effect and demonstrate its destructive impact. Second, we introduce an implementation strategy to limit the fault propagation effect. Third, in contrast to many other works where the fault coverage is the main focus, we present a detailed implementation strategy which can guarantee the detection of any fault covered by the underlying EDC. This holds for any time of the computation and any location in the circuit, both in data processing and control unit. In short, we provide practical guidelines how to construct efficient CED schemes with arbitrary EDCs to achieve the desired protection level. We practically evaluate the efficiency of our methodology by case studies covering different symmetric block ciphers and various linear EDCs

Active Fences against Voltage-based Side Channels in Multi-Tenant FPGAs

Dynamic and partial reconfiguration together with hardware parallelism make FPGAs attractive as virtualized accelerators. However, recently it has been shown that multi-tenant FPGAs are vulnerable to remote side-channel attacks (SCA) from malicious users, allowing them to extract secret keys without a logical connection to the victim core. Typical mitigations against such attacks are hiding and masking schemes, to increase attackers’ efforts in terms of side-channel measurements. However, they require significant efforts and tailoring for a specific algorithm, hardware implementation and mapping. In this paper, we show a hiding countermeasure against voltage-based SCA that can be integrated into any implementation, without requiring modifications or tailoring to the protected module. We place a properly mapped Active Fence of ring oscillators between victim and attacker circuit, enabled as a feedback of an FPGA-based sensor, leading to reduced side-channel leakage. Our experimental results based on a Lattice ECP5 FPGA and an AES-128 module show that two orders of magnitude more traces are needed for a successful key recovery, while no modifications to the underlying cryptographic module are necessary

A versatile fluorescence lifetime imaging system for scanning large areas with high time and spatial resolution

"Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9286"We present a flexible fluorescence lifetime imaging device which can be employed to scan large sample areas with a spatial resolution adjustable from many micrometers down to sub-micrometers and a temporal resolution of 20 picoseconds. Several different applications of the system will be presented including protein microarrays analysis, the scanning of historical samples, evaluation of solar cell surfaces and nanocrystalline organic crystals embedded in electrospun polymeric nanofibers. Energy transfer processes within semiconductor quantum dot superstructures as well as between dye probes and graphene layers were also investigated.This work was financially supported by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through Programa Operacional Factores de Competitividade (COMPETE: FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-014628) and the Portuguese Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT) through the projects "Functional structuring, inter-particle interaction and energy transfer in ensembles of nanocrystal dots" (PTDC/FIS/113199/2009), Ultra-fast spectroscopy on the dynamics and relaxation of Dirac electrons in graphene" (PTDC/FIS/101434/ 2008) and "Low dimensional nanostructures for nonlinear optical applications" PTDC/CTmNAN/114269/2009

Modelling the Impact of Artemisinin Combination Therapy and Long-Acting Treatments on Malaria Transmission Intensity

Lucy Okell and colleagues predict the impact on transmission outcomes of ACT as first-line treatment for uncomplicated malaria in six areas of varying transmission intensity in Tanzania

Constitutivism

A brief explanation and overview of constitutivism

Modelling the Protective Efficacy of Alternative Delivery Schedules for Intermittent Preventive Treatment of Malaria in Infants and Children

BACKGROUND: Intermittent preventive treatment in infants (IPTi) with sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) is recommended by WHO where malaria incidence in infancy is high and SP resistance is low. The current delivery strategy is via routine Expanded Program on Immunisation contacts during infancy (EPI-IPTi). However, improvements to this approach may be possible where malaria transmission is seasonal, or where the malaria burden lies mainly outside infancy. METHODS AND FINDINGS: A mathematical model was developed to estimate the protective efficacy (PE) of IPT against clinical malaria in children aged 2-24 months, using entomological and epidemiological data from an EPI-IPTi trial in Navrongo, Ghana to parameterise the model. The protection achieved by seasonally-targeted IPT in infants (sIPTi), seasonal IPT in children (sIPTc), and by case-management with long-acting artemisinin combination therapies (LA-ACTs) was predicted for Navrongo and for sites with different transmission intensity and seasonality. In Navrongo, the predicted PE of sIPTi was 26% by 24 months of age, compared to 16% with EPI-IPTi. sIPTc given to all children under 2 years would provide PE of 52% by 24 months of age. Seasonally-targeted IPT retained its advantages in a range of transmission patterns. Under certain circumstances, LA-ACTs for case-management may provide similar protection to EPI-IPTi. However, EPI-IPTi or sIPT combined with LA-ACTs would be substantially more protective than either strategy used alone. CONCLUSION: Delivery of IPT to infants via the EPI is sub-optimal because individuals are not protected by IPT at the time of highest malaria risk, and because older children are not protected. Alternative delivery strategies to the EPI are needed where transmission varies seasonally or the malaria burden extends beyond infancy. Long-acting ACTs may also make important reductions in malaria incidence. However, delivery systems must be developed to ensure that both forms of chemoprevention reach the individuals who are most exposed to malaria