Quantum forgery attacks on COPA,AES-COPA and marble authenticated encryption algorithms

The classic forgery attacks on COPA, AES-COPA and Marble authenticated encryption algorithms need to query about 2^(n/2) times, and their success probability is not high. To solve this problem, the corresponding quantum forgery attacks on COPA, AES-COPA and Marble authenticated encryption algorithms are presented. In the quantum forgery attacks on COPA and AES-COPA, we use Simon's algorithm to find the period of the tag generation function in COPA and AES-COPA by querying in superposition, and then generate a forged tag for a new message. In the quantum forgery attack on Marble, Simon's algorithm is used to recover the secret parameter L, and the forged tag can be computed with L. Compared with classic forgery attacks on COPA, AES-COPA and Marble, our attack can reduce the number of queries from O(2^(n/2)) to O(n) and improve success probability close to 100%.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figure

EviPrompt: A Training-Free Evidential Prompt Generation Method for Segment Anything Model in Medical Images

Medical image segmentation has immense clinical applicability but remains a challenge despite advancements in deep learning. The Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibits potential in this field, yet the requirement for expertise intervention and the domain gap between natural and medical images poses significant obstacles. This paper introduces a novel training-free evidential prompt generation method named EviPrompt to overcome these issues. The proposed method, built on the inherent similarities within medical images, requires only a single reference image-annotation pair, making it a training-free solution that significantly reduces the need for extensive labeling and computational resources. First, to automatically generate prompts for SAM in medical images, we introduce an evidential method based on uncertainty estimation without the interaction of clinical experts. Then, we incorporate the human prior into the prompts, which is vital for alleviating the domain gap between natural and medical images and enhancing the applicability and usefulness of SAM in medical scenarios. EviPrompt represents an efficient and robust approach to medical image segmentation, with evaluations across a broad range of tasks and modalities confirming its efficacy

Quantum Searchable Encryption for Cloud Data Based on Full-Blind Quantum Computation

Searchable encryption (SE) is a positive way to protect users sensitive data in cloud computing setting, while preserving search ability on the server side, i.e., it allows the server to search encrypted data without leaking information about the plaintext data. In this paper, a multi-client universal circuit-based full-blind quantum computation (FBQC) model is proposed. In order to meet the requirements of multi-client accessing or computing encrypted cloud data, all clients with limited quantum ability outsource the key generation to a trusted key center and upload their encrypted data to the data center. Considering the feasibility of physical implementation, all quantum gates in the circuit are replaced with the combination of {\pi}/8 rotation operator set {Rz({\pi}/4), Ry({\pi}/4), CRz({\pi}/4), CRy({\pi}/4), CCRz({\pi}/4), CCRy({\pi}/4)}. In addition, the data center is only allowed to perform one {\pi}/8 rotation operator each time, but does not know the structure of the circuit (i.e., quantum computation), so it can guarantee the blindness of computation. Then, through combining this multi-client FBQC model and Grover searching algorithm, we continue to propose a quantum searchable encryption scheme for cloud data. It solves the problem of multi-client access mode under searchable encryption in the cloud environment, and has the ability to resist against some quantum attacks. To better demonstrate our scheme, an example of our scheme to search on encrypted 2-qubit state is given in detail. Furthermore, the security of our scheme is analysed from two aspects: external attacks and internal attacks, and the result indicates that it can resist against such kinds of attacks and also guarantee the blindness of data and computation.Comment: 20 pages, 13 figure

A Novel Quantum Visual Secret Sharing Scheme

Inspired by Naor et al.'s visual secret sharing (VSS) scheme, a novel n out of n quantum visual secret sharing (QVSS) scheme is proposed, which consists of two phases: sharing process and recovering process. In the first process, the color information of each pixel from the original secret image is encoded into an n-qubit superposition state by using the strategy of quantum expansion instead of classical pixel expansion, and then these n qubits are distributed as shares to n participants, respectively. During the recovering process, all participants cooperate to collect these n shares of each pixel together, then perform the corresponding measurement on them, and execute the n-qubit XOR operation to recover each pixel of the secret image. The proposed scheme has the advantage of single-pixel parallel processing that is not available in the existing analogous quantum schemes and perfectly solves the problem that in the classic VSS schemes the recovered image has the loss in resolution. Moreover, its experiment implementation with the IBM Q is conducted to demonstrate the practical feasibility.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figure

Treatment of Surgical Brain Injury by Immune Tolerance Induced by Peripheral Intravenous Injection of Biotargeting Nanoparticles Loaded With Brain Antigens

Once excessive, neurological disorders associated with inflammatory conditions will inevitably cause secondary inflammatory damage to brain tissue. Immunosuppressive therapy can reduce the inflammatory state, but resulting infections can expose the patient to greater risk. Using specific immune tolerance organs or tissues from the body, brain antigen immune tolerance treatment can create a minimal immune response to the brain antigens that does not excessively affect the body's immunity. However, commonly used immune tolerance treatment approaches, such as those involving the nasal, gastrointestinal mucosa, thymus or liver portal vein injections, affect the clinical conversion of the therapy due to uncertain drug absorption, or inconvenient routes of administration. If hepatic portal intravenous injections of brain antigens could be replaced by normal peripheral venous infusion, the convenience of immune tolerance treatment could certainly be greatly increased. We attempted to encapsulate brain antigens with minimally immunogenic nanomaterials, to control the sizes of nanoparticles within the range of liver Kupffer cell phagocytosis and to coat the antigens with a coating material that had an affinity for liver cells. We injected these liver drug-loaded nanomaterials via peripheral intravenous injection. With the use of microparticles with liver characteristics, the brain antigens were transported into the liver out of the detection of immune armies in the blood. This approach has been demonstrated in rat models of surgical brain injury. It has been proven that the immune tolerance of brain antigens can be accomplished by peripheral intravenous infusion to achieve the effect of treating brain trauma after operations, which simplifies the clinical operation and could elicit substantial improvements in the future

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Effects of salt stress on the physiological characteristics of

A pot experiment was used to study the effects of different concentrations of salt (100, 200, 300 mmol/L) stress on the photosynthetic physiology and antioxidant enzyme activities of Solanum photeinocarpum. The results showed that NaCl of 100 and 200 mmol/L could significantly improve the contents of chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b and carotenoid in S. photeinocarpum. However, under different concentrations of salt stress, there was no significant difference in the amount of total chlorophyll in S. photeinocarpum. Besides, as the salt stress increased, the net photosynthetic rate, stomatal conductance, CO2 concentration of intercellular and transpiration rate of S. photeinocarpum gradually decreased, when the concentration of NaCl was 300 mmol/L, reached the lowest value. With the increase of salt stress, the POD activity, CAT activity and soluble sugar content of S. photeinocarpum increased first and then decreased, reaching the highest when the concentration of NaCl was 100 mmol/L. Therefore, S. photeinocarpum had a certain salt tolerance, low concentration of NaCl (≤ 200 mmol/L) stress could promote its growth, but high concentration (> 200 mmol/L) could inhibit its growth

Association between lipid-lowering drugs and allergic diseases: A Mendelian randomization study

Background: Several observational studies suggest a possible link between lipid-lowering drugs and allergic diseases. However, inferring causality from these studies can be challenging due to issues such as bias, reverse causation, and residual confounding. To investigate the potential causal effect of lipid-lowering drugs, proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9) inhibitors and 3-hydroxy-3-methyl-glutaryl-coenzyme A reductase (HMGCR) inhibitors, on allergic diseases (allergic asthma, allergic conjunctivitis, atopic dermatitis, allergic rhinitis, and allergic urticaria), we performed a Mendelian randomization (MR)-based study. Methods: We employed MR and summary-data-based MR (SMR), analyzing genome-wide association study (GWAS) data from people of European descent. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were employed as instrumental variables. We selected 2 types of genetic measures to represent the impact of lipid-lowering drugs, including genetic variants near or within drug target genes correlated with low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), and expression quantitative trait loci of drug target genes. The inverse-variance weighted (IVW)-MR approach was the primary utilized MR method, while sensitivity analyses were used to test the robustness of the results. We used SMR analysis as a supplementary analytical method, applying the heterogeneity in dependent instruments (HEIDI) test to assess if the observed correlation between gene expression and outcome was due to a linkage situation. Results: The IVW-MR analysis revealed significant evidence for an association between PCSK9-mediated LDL-C reduction and a decrease in the risk of allergic asthma (odds ratio [OR] = 1.31, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.11–1.56; P < 0.01). Likewise, SMR analysis discovered an augmented expression of PCSK9 being linked with a heightened susceptibility to allergic asthma (OR = 1.21, 95% CI = 1.03–1.43; P = 0.02). No consistent evidence was found for other associations in either analysis. Conclusion: Our findings support a potential causal relationship between PCSK9 activity and an increased risk of allergic asthma. Thus, PCSK9 inhibitors, which reduce PCSK9 activity, might be considered a priority in future clinical trials investigating drugs for allergic asthma prevention or treatment

Quantum Algorithms and Experiment Implementations Based on IBM Q

With the rapid development of quantum theory and technology in recent years, especially the emergence of some quantum cloud computing platforms, more and more researchers are not satisfied with the theoretical derivation and simulation verification of quantum computation (especially quantum algorithms), experimental verification on real quantum devices has become a new trend. In this paper, three representative quantum algorithms, namely Deutsch-Jozsa, Grover, and Shor algorithms, are briefly depicted, and then their implementation circuits are presented, respectively. We program these circuits on python with QISKit to connect the remote real quantum devices (i.e., ibmqx4, ibmqx5) on IBM Q to verify these algorithms. The experimental results not only show the feasibility of these algorithms, but also serve to evaluate the functionality of these devices