Minimizing Trust in Hardware Wallets with Two Factor Signatures

We introduce the notion of two-factor signatures (2FS), a generalization of a two-out-of-two threshold signature scheme in which one of the parties is a hardware token which can store a high-entropy secret, and the other party is a human who knows a low-entropy password. The security (unforgeability) property of 2FS requires that an external adversary corrupting either party (the token or the computer the human is using) cannot forge a signature. This primitive is useful in contexts like hardware cryptocurrency wallets in which a signature conveys the authorization of a transaction. By the above security property, a hardware wallet implementing a two-factor signature scheme is secure against attacks mounted by a malicious hardware vendor; in contrast, all currently used wallet systems break under such an attack (and as such are not secure under our definition). We construct efficient provably-secure 2FS schemes which produce either Schnorr signature (assuming the DLOG assumption), or EC-DSA signatures (assuming security of EC-DSA and the CDH assumption) in the Random Oracle Model, and evaluate the performance of implementations of them. Our EC-DSA based 2FS scheme can directly replace currently used hardware wallets for Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies to enable security against malicious hardware vendors

Direct association between pharyngeal viral secretion and host cytokine response in severe pandemic influenza

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Severe disease caused by 2009 pandemic influenza A/H1N1virus is characterized by the presence of hypercytokinemia. The origin of the exacerbated cytokine response is unclear. As observed previously, uncontrolled influenza virus replication could strongly influence cytokine production. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the relationship between host cytokine responses and viral levels in pandemic influenza critically ill patients.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Twenty three patients admitted to the ICU with primary viral pneumonia were included in this study. A quantitative PCR based method targeting the M1 influenza gene was developed to quantify pharyngeal viral load. In addition, by using a multiplex based assay, we systematically evaluated host cytokine responses to the viral infection at admission to the ICU. Correlation studies between cytokine levels and viral load were done by calculating the Spearman correlation coefficient.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Fifteen patients needed of intubation and ventilation, while eight did not need of mechanical ventilation during ICU hospitalization. Viral load in pharyngeal swabs was 300 fold higher in the group of patients with the worst respiratory condition at admission to the ICU. Pharyngeal viral load directly correlated with plasma levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-6, IL-12p70, IFN-γ, the chemotactic factors MIP-1β, GM-CSF, the angiogenic mediator VEGF and also of the immuno-modulatory cytokine IL-1ra (p < 0.05). Correlation studies demonstrated also the existence of a significant positive association between the levels of these mediators, evidencing that they are simultaneously regulated in response to the virus.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Severe respiratory disease caused by the 2009 pandemic influenza virus is characterized by the existence of a direct association between viral replication and host cytokine response, revealing a potential pathogenic link with the severe disease caused by other influenza subtypes such as H5N1.</p

Interleukin-6 Is a Potential Biomarker for Severe Pandemic H1N1 Influenza A Infection

Pandemic H1N1 influenza A (H1N1pdm) is currently a dominant circulating influenza strain worldwide. Severe cases of H1N1pdm infection are characterized by prolonged activation of the immune response, yet the specific role of inflammatory mediators in disease is poorly understood. The inflammatory cytokine IL-6 has been implicated in both seasonal and severe pandemic H1N1 influenza A (H1N1pdm) infection. Here, we investigated the role of IL-6 in severe H1N1pdm infection. We found IL-6 to be an important feature of the host response in both humans and mice infected with H1N1pdm. Elevated levels of IL-6 were associated with severe disease in patients hospitalized with H1N1pdm infection. Notably, serum IL-6 levels associated strongly with the requirement of critical care admission and were predictive of fatal outcome. In C57BL/6J, BALB/cJ, and B6129SF2/J mice, infection with A/Mexico/4108/2009 (H1N1pdm) consistently triggered severe disease and increased IL-6 levels in both lung and serum. Furthermore, in our lethal C57BL/6J mouse model of H1N1pdm infection, global gene expression analysis indicated a pronounced IL-6 associated inflammatory response. Subsequently, we examined disease and outcome in IL-6 deficient mice infected with H1N1pdm. No significant differences in survival, weight loss, viral load, or pathology were observed between IL-6 deficient and wild-type mice following infection. Taken together, our findings suggest IL-6 may be a potential disease severity biomarker, but may not be a suitable therapeutic target in cases of severe H1N1pdm infection due to our mouse data

A community approach to mortality prediction in sepsis via gene expression analysis.

Improved risk stratification and prognosis prediction in sepsis is a critical unmet need. Clinical severity scores and available assays such as blood lactate reflect global illness severity with suboptimal performance, and do not specifically reveal the underlying dysregulation of sepsis. Here, we present prognostic models for 30-day mortality generated independently by three scientific groups by using 12 discovery cohorts containing transcriptomic data collected from primarily community-onset sepsis patients. Predictive performance is validated in five cohorts of community-onset sepsis patients in which the models show summary AUROCs ranging from 0.765-0.89. Similar performance is observed in four cohorts of hospital-acquired sepsis. Combining the new gene-expression-based prognostic models with prior clinical severity scores leads to significant improvement in prediction of 30-day mortality as measured via AUROC and net reclassification improvement index These models provide an opportunity to develop molecular bedside tests that may improve risk stratification and mortality prediction in patients with sepsis.y NIGMS Glue Grant Legacy Award R24GM102656. J.F.B.-M., R.A., and E.T. were supported by Instituto de Salud Carlos III (grants EMER07/050, PI13/02110, PI16/01156). R.J.L. was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award number UL1TR001417. The CAPSOD study was supported by NIH (U01AI066569, P20RR016480, HHSN266200400064C). P.K. is supported by grants from Bill Melinda Gates Foundation, R01 AI125197-01, 1U19AI109662, and U19AI057229, outside the submitted work. The GAinS study was supported by the National Institute for Health Research through the Comprehensive Clinical Research Network for patient recruitment; Wellcome Trust (Grants 074318 [to J.C.K.], and 090532/Z/09/Z [core facilities Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics including High-Throughput Genomics Group]); European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC Grant agreement no. 281824 (to J.C.K.), the Medical Research Council (98082 [to J.C.K.]); UK Intensive Care Society; and NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre. The Duke HAI study was supported by a research agreement between Duke University and Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics, Inc. According to the terms of the agreement, representatives of the sponsor had an opportunity to review and comment on a draft of the manuscript. The authors had full control of the analyses, the preparation of the manuscript, and the decision to submit the manuscript for publication. For the University of Florida ‘P50’ Study, data were obtained from the Sepsis and Critically Illness Research Center (SCIRC) at the University of Florida College of Medicine, which is supported in part by NIGMS P50 GM111152. This work was supported by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Army Research Office through Grant W911NF-15-1-0107.

Effects of a diet lacking hufa on lipid and fatty acid content of intestine and gills of male gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata L.) broodstock at different stages of the reproductive cycle

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Adaptively Secure Distributed PRFs from LWE

International audienceIn distributed pseudorandom functions (DPRFs), a PRF secret key SK is secret shared among N servers so that each server can locally compute a partial evaluation of the PRF on some input X. A combiner that collects t partial evaluations can then reconstruct the evaluation F(SK, X) of the PRF under the initial secret key. So far, all non-interactive constructions in the standard model are based on lattice assumptions. One caveat is that they are only known to be secure in the static corruption setting, where the adversary chooses the servers to corrupt at the very beginning of the game, before any evaluation query. In this work, we construct the first fully non-interactive adaptively secure DPRF in the standard model. Our construction is proved secure under the LWE assumption against adversaries that may adaptively decide which servers they want to corrupt. We also extend our construction in order to achieve robustness against malicious adversaries

The effects of using crab zoeae (Maja brachydactyla) on growth and biochemical composition of Octopus vulgaris (Cuvier 1797) paralarvae

Octopus vulgaris farming at large scale can only be attained using live prey during the paralarvae stage. Presently, only Artemia complies with this requirement. Nevertheless, its sole use delivers poor paralarvae growth and survival. Some species of marine zooplankton are better prey for marine fish larvae compared to Artemia, since its composition is richer in several important nutritional components. Among these are phospholipids and specific fatty acids, namely docosahexaenoic acid, eicosapentaenoic acid and arachidonic acid. During the present experiment, octopus paralarvae were fed a co-feeding scheme of spider crab (Maja brachydactyla) zoeae and Artemia (1:2, Artemia/Crab zoeae). The use of spider crab zoeae was justified by their availability in commercial facilities, where adult spider crabs are maintained to be sold to the public. There, fecund and spawning females are present in large numbers, and zoeae availability is often high and implies no production or zoeae collection costs. O. vulgaris paralarvae fed on Artemia and crab zoeae grew larger (3.00 ± 0.56 mg dw−1) after 30 days, compared to previous published papers. Also, the paralarvae lipid content was substantially enhanced in highly unsaturated fatty acids and phospholipids. However, survival after 30 days was still very low (1.75 % after 30 days) and needs to be greatly improved.Publicado