Ten years of cube attacks

In 2009, Dinur and Shamir proposed the cube attack, an algebraic cryptanalysis technique that only requires black box access to a target cipher. Since then, this attack has received both many criticisms and endorsements from crypto community; this work aims at revising and collecting the many attacks that have been proposed starting from it. We categorise all of these attacks in five classes; for each class, we provide a brief summary description along with the state-of-the-art references and the most recent cryptanalysis results. Furthermore, we extend and refine the new notation we proposed in 2021 and we use it to provide a consistent definition for each attack family. Finally, in the appendix, we provide an in-depth description of the kite attack framework, a cipher independent tool we firstly proposed in 2018 that implements the kite attack on GPUs. To prove its effectiveness, we use Mickey2.0 as a use case, showing how to embed it in the framework

Onion under Microscope: An in-depth analysis of the Tor network

Tor is an anonymity network that allows offering and accessing various kinds of resources, known as hidden services, while guaranteeing sender and receiver anonymity. The Tor web is the set of web resources that exist on the Tor network, and Tor websites are part of the so-called dark web. Recent research works have evaluated Tor security, evolution over time, and thematic organization. Nevertheless, few information are available about the structure of the graph defined by the network of Tor websites. The limited number of Tor entry points that can be used to crawl the network renders the study of this graph far from being simple. In this paper we aim at better characterizing the Tor Web by analyzing three crawling datasets collected over a five-month time frame. On the one hand, we extensively study the global properties of the Tor Web, considering two different graph representations and verifying the impact of Tor's renowned volatility. We present an in depth investigation of the key features of the Tor Web graph showing what makes it different from the surface Web graph. On the other hand, we assess the relationship between contents and structural features. We analyse the local properties of the Tor Web to better characterize the role different services play in the network and to understand to which extent topological features are related to the contents of a service

Inferring urban social networks from publicly available data

The emergence of social networks and the definition of suitable generative models for synthetic yet realistic social graphs are widely studied problems in the literature. By not being tied to any real data, random graph models cannot capture all the subtleties of real networks and are inadequate for many practical contexts -- including areas of research, such as computational epidemiology, which are recently high on the agenda. At the same time, the so-called contact networks describe interactions, rather than relationships, and are strongly dependent on the application and on the size and quality of the sample data used to infer them. To fill the gap between these two approaches, we present a data-driven model for urban social networks, implemented and released as open source software. Given a territory of interest, and only based on widely available aggregated demographic and social-mixing data, we construct an age-stratified and geo-referenced synthetic population whose individuals are connected by "strong ties" of two types: intra-household (e.g., kinship) or friendship. While household links are entirely data-driven, we propose a parametric probabilistic model for friendship, based on the assumption that distances and age differences play a role, and that not all individuals are equally sociable. The demographic and geographic factors governing the structure of the obtained network, under different configurations, are thoroughly studied through extensive simulations focused on three Italian cities of different size

Postfordismo e trasformazione urbana.Casi di recupero dei vuoti industriali e indicazioni per le politiche nel territorio torinese

Il volume sulle aree dismesse e la trasformazione urbana promosso dalla Direzione Competitività della Regione Piemonte e dall'ente strumentale di ricerca economica e sociale, IRES Piemonte, racchiude contributi su esperienze di recupero dei vuoti urbani industriali e casi rilevanti della trasformazione urbana che hanno interessato Torino e la sua area metropolitana.- Prefazione #7- Introduzione #9- 1. Le ristrutturazioni industriali e il territorio: crisi, declino,metamorfosi? #33- 2. Scoprire i vuoti industriali: analisi e riflessioni a partire da censimenti e mappature di aree industriali dismesse a Torino #51- 3. Le aree dismesse nella riqualificazione e nella rigenerazione urbana a Torino (1990-2015) #113- 4. La trasformazione urbana tra grandi interventi e architetture “ordinarie”. #147- 5. Due esperienze di rigenerazione urbana sul territorio torinese:il Comitato Parco Dora sulla Spina 3 e il Comitato Urban in Barriera di Milano, a Torino #169- 6. Da cittadella industriale a Spina 3: una riconversione incompiuta #193- 7. Ex Diatto - Ex Westinghouse, due casi emblematici per le politiche di rivitalizzazione delle aree industriali torinesi #211- 8. Mirafiori. Dalla componentistica allo yogurt: storia di un progetto di re-industrializzazione #229- 9. Area OSI OVEST-NORD: Toolbox Coworking! #247- 10. Abilitare il territorio metropolitano alla rigenerazione e ad un nuovo sviluppo. Il caso di None, dall'industria subita all'industria inseguita #275- 11. Le ex-Acciaierie Mandelli di Collegno: la storia di una fabbrica,l'attualità del dibattito urbanistico. #301- 12. I programmi territoriali quale motore di rigenerazione urbana e di politiche di contenimento del consumo di suolo nel comune di Settimo Torinese #323- 13. La Regione Piemonte e la sfida del contenimento del consumo di suolo e del riutilizzo delle aree dismesse #353- 14. Torino, la nascita della città postindustriale: quale bilancio? #365- 15. Valutare i rischi della riqualificazione urbanistica e ambientale delle aree industriali dismesse #381- 16. Le aree industriali dismesse e il loro impatto sulla salute: il ruolo dei cittadini e delle amministrazioni locali nell'identificazione dei problemi e delle possibili soluzioni. #405- 17. I giovani e la città che cambia. Nuovi passi e nuovi sguardi sulle tracce di un passato industriale #427- Elenco degli autori e delle autrici #44

Kite attack: reshaping the cube attack for a flexible GPU-based maxterm search

Dinur and Shamir’s cube attack has attracted significant attention in the literature. Nevertheless, the lack of implementations achieving effective results casts doubts on its practical relevance. On the theoretical side, promising results have been recently achieved leveraging on division trails. The present paper follows a more practical approach and aims at giving new impetus to this line of research by means of a cipher-independent flexible framework that is able to carry out the cube attack on GPU/CPU clusters. We address all issues posed by a GPU implementation, providing evidence in support of parallel variants of the attack and identifying viable directions for solving open problems in the future. We report the results of running our GPU-based cube attack against round-reduced versions of three well-known ciphers: Trivium, Grain-128 and SNOW 3G. Our attack against Trivium improves the state of the art, permitting full key recovery for Trivium reduced to (up to) 781 initialization rounds (out of 1152) and finding the first-ever maxterm after 800 rounds. In this paper, we also present the first standard cube attack (i.e., neither dynamic nor tester) to yield maxterms for Grain-128 up to 160 initialization rounds on non-programmable hardware. We include a thorough evaluation of the impact of system parameters and GPU architecture on the performance. Moreover, we demonstrate the scalability of our solution on multi-GPU systems. We believe that our extensive set of results can be useful for the cryptographic engineering community at large and can pave the way to further results in the area

ISODAC: a high performance solution for indexing and searching heterogeneous data

Searching for words or sentences within large sets of textual documents can be very challenging unless an index of the data has been created in advance. However, indexing can be very time consuming especially if the text is not readily available and has to be extracted from files stored in different formats. Several solutions, based on the MapReduce paradigm, have been proposed to accelerate the process of index creation. These solutions perform well when data are already distributed across the hosts involved in the elaboration. On the other hand, the cost of distributing data can introduce noticeable overhead. We propose ISODAC, a new approach aimed at improving efficiency without sacrificing reliability. Our solution reduces to the bare minimum the number of I/O operations by using a stream of in-memory operations to extract and index text. We further improve the performance by using GPUs for the most computationally intensive tasks of the indexing procedure. ISODAC indexes heterogeneous documents up to 10.6x faster than other widely adopted solutions, such as Apache Spark. As proof-of-concept, we developed a tool to index forensic disk images that can easily be used by investigators through a web interface

AZT-induced hypermethylation of human thymidine kinase gene in the absence of total DNA hypermethylation

Genome-wide DNA hypermethylation induced by 3'-azido-3'-deoxythymidine (AZT) has been suggested to be involved in the development of AZT resistance. We used a CD4 T-lymphoblastoid CEM line and its AZT-resistant MT500 variant with reduced thymidine kinase activity, Evaluation of total DNA methylation, after AZT treatment, failed to show an increase in the 5-methylcytosine level in both parental and AZT-resistant cells, The effect was instead observed at a more specific gene level, on the three HpaII sites present in exon 1 of the human thymidine kinase gene, These results suggest that AZT treatment can induce site-specific hypermethylation, even in the absence of a more general DNA hypermethylating effect