Cryptanalysis of Hwang-Lo-Hsiao-Chu Authenticated Encryption Schemes

Tseng et al. proposed two efficient authenticated encryption schemes with message linkages for message flows. Hwang et al. (IEICE Trans. Inf. and Syst., Vol. E89-D, No. 4, April 2006) presented a forgery attack against these two schemes and proposed an improvement that they claim resists such attacks. In this paper, we show that the improved authenticated encryption schemes proposed by Hwang et al. are not secure by presenting another message forgery attack against these improved schemes

Evidence acquisition in cloud forensics

In this paper, we present a performance comparison between different digital evidence acquisition protocols in the cloud-computing environment. We focus on data confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity issues

Responding to Emerging Diseases Requires Multi-disciplinary and One Health Training, Egypt

Background: In Egypt, several infectious diseases of zoonotic origin have emerged in recent years like H1N1, MERSCoV and H5N1, the latter now endemic. Responding to these diseases requires a workforce trained in multi-disciplinary approaches to zoonotic disease research and control. It is difficult to deliver multidisciplinary and one health training globally because of the limited number of higher education programs that support such training. In low and middle-income countries where the impacts of emerging zoonotic diseases are felt more directly there is enthusiasm for such training and the use of e-technology can foster international, long-term collaborations. Objectives: To provide health training for infectious diseases research and to foster multidisciplinary collaboration. Methods: We designed and simultaneously held two training workshops, one focused on pediatric infectious diseases and another on emerging infectious diseases to meet the objective. Both workshops had pre- and post-workshop activities for multi-disciplinary methods with an emphasis on the use of mobile technologies to enhance emerging infectious diseases surveillance and research for public health professionals in Egypt. Faculty and scientists from all universities in Egypt and from the National Research Center were invited to participate. Results: 85 participants attended, 31 abstracts were submitted, and over a 3 year period 3 international grant applications were submitted, and 4 abstracts were presented at international conferences. An online forum was developed to continue building collaboration. Conclusions: Interactive on-site workshops are suitable for providing multi-disciplinary training for disease surveillance, research and disease control. Participants shared the opinion that grant proposal and scientific manuscript writing were important skills that they felt they did not have. Long term investments in workshops of this nature are needed to build upon the excitement generated by these activities

An Efficient Pipelined Technique for Signcryption Algorithms

Abstract Signcryption algorithms are based on public key cryptography. The main advantage of signcryption algorithms is to provide both confidentiality and authenticity in one step. Hence, signcryption algorithms lower both communication and computation overheads. This reduction, in communication and computation overheads, makes signcryption algorithms more suitable for realtime applications than other algorithms that combine encryption and digital signature in separate blocks. Although, the signcryption algorithms overcome the communication overhead problem, they still suffer from the need to perform arithmetic modular operations. The arithmetic modular operations have high computation overhead. In this paper, we use a pipelined technique to reduce the computation overhead of signcryption algorithms. We apply the proposed pipelined technique to Rasslan et. al signcryption algorithm. The proposed pipelined technique is suitable for the selected signcryption algorithm. Rasslan et. al. signcryption algorithm is more efficient than all the previously presented algorithms. Rasslan et. al. signcryption algorithm allows the recipient to recover the message blocks upon receiving their corresponding signature blocks. This makes Rasslan et. al signcryption algorithm perfect for some real-time applications. Also, we illustrate the performance analysis of the proposed solution. The performance analysis shows that the proposed technique reduces the computation time required to execute Rasslan et. al. signcryption algorithm with respect to its corresponding values of sequential execution