Justice for Muslim Women in India: the sinuous path of the All India Muslim Women Personal Law Board1

Muslim Women movements in India have been very active in the past decade, attracting attention both in the Sub-Continent and beyond. This article vows to present a particular trend of this activism centred on the legal sphere, moreover within the frame of the Muslim personal law system and its non-State adjudicative bodies. Through the All India Muslim Women Personal Law Board (AIMWPLB), it will present the example of an attempt to challenge the ‘patriarchal’ legal discourse on Islamic Law by procuring an alternative dispute resolution forum specifically aimed at Muslim women’s issues, as well as advocating for a more gender equal interpretation of the Quran through the prism of ‘Islamic Feminism’. However, it will show that despite its President’s tremendous efforts, the AIMWPLB’s scope remains limited. Although establishing a somewhat successful mediation centre in the Lucknow area, it has for the moment failed to extend its reach in the rest of the Indian Territory. Likewise, its particular discourse on Islamic Law has had but little influence on its overall application in India, and paradoxically could even be counter-productive towards its progression towards a gender equalitarian interpretation

Cloud file sharing using PREaaS

This paper proposes a new method of features extraction for handwritten, printed and isolated numeral recognition. It is essential today for a company to store its data in an encrypted way when it uses Cloud Computing. However, the manipulation of this encrypted data remains complex, and it is very difficult in this case to be able to share the encrypted data between different users. One of the solutions for sharing encrypted data is to use PRE (Proxy Reencryption) which allows both the re-encryption of the data, but also the delegation of this operation by a third party via the use of a specific key. In this article, we propose a solution for sharing encrypted files between users that uses a classic storage system in the Cloud and PRE (re-encryption PRoxy). We present an improvement of an existing PRE algorithm by applying it to elliptical curves in order to improve its performance. Finally, we implement this architecture in the form of a cloud service called PREaaS (PRE as a Service) which allows this mechanism to be used on demand with an API

Dépossession et intensification d'un Tom Cruise imaginaire : le spectateur et la figure de performance

Le présent mémoire porte sur le rapport du spectateur à la performance de star. Malgré la grande quantité d'analyses de star produites au sein des études cinématographiques depuis une trentaine d'années, il n'existe que peu de recherches portant spécifiquement sur la performance filmique de star. En effet, les adeptes des star studies n'utilisent la plupart du temps les performances filmiques que pour développer l'analyse de l'image globale de la star. A l'inverse, les tenants des performance studies prônent le rejet de tout élément extérieur au jeu d'acteur, afin que les chercheurs puissent enfin développer des outils d'analyse précis de l'impact du jeu d'acteur au cinéma. Dans les deux cas, ces approches négligent souvent l'importance cruciale du spectateur dans le rapport à la star. A travers la redéfinition de la performance spécifique de star comme figure de performance , ce mémoire désire observer l'articulation complexe de la performance de star du point de vue du spectateur. Fondée sur une quadruple articulation de sites de sens , la performance de star ne peut faire sens que lorsqu'elle est réappropriée par le spectateur qui la transforme en image mentale cohérente. Le modèle interprétatif proposé est illustré par l'analyse des performances de Tom Cruise dans Eyes Wide Shut et Magnoli

A Journey to the Brink of India’s Legal Landscape: Jammu and Kashmir’s Relationship with the Indian Union

This paper seeks to briefly assess the place of Jammu and Kashmir within the Indian Union, as well as the latter’s repercussions on the daily administration of justice in Srinagar. Although regional States have retained certain specificities and prerogatives under the Constitution of India, J&K’s status is significantly different. Being the only State with its own constitution, J&K’s accession to India has been achieved through specific legal instruments granting it a peculiar type of sovereignty. In order to define the relationship between India and J&K, this article compares similar legal frameworks from a comparative perspective. It submits that J&K belongs to a sui generis legal category, similar to the one New Caledonia currently enjoys within the French Republic. It then seeks to explore how this peculiar status interacts with the administration of justice at the grass-root level in Srinagar. It suggests that the overall acceptance of the judicial system in J&K, as well as its growing integration into the Indian legal framework is closely linked to concerns about efficiency, and most importantly to the permanent residency status of its judicial officers

Critical behaviour of combinatorial search algorithms, and the unitary-propagation universality class

The probability P(alpha, N) that search algorithms for random Satisfiability problems successfully find a solution is studied as a function of the ratio alpha of constraints per variable and the number N of variables. P is shown to be finite if alpha lies below an algorithm--dependent threshold alpha\_A, and exponentially small in N above. The critical behaviour is universal for all algorithms based on the widely-used unitary propagation rule: P[ (1 + epsilon) alpha\_A, N] ~ exp[-N^(1/6) Phi(epsilon N^(1/3)) ]. Exponents are related to the critical behaviour of random graphs, and the scaling function Phi is exactly calculated through a mapping onto a diffusion-and-death problem.Comment: 7 pages; 3 figure

Utilisation de la Propagation de Contraintes Booléennes pour la Production de Sous-Clauses

http://www710.univ-lyon1.fr/~csolnonLa propagation de contraintes booléennes (BCP) est la technique la plus utile et la plus utilisÈe dans les solveurs SAT. Dans cet article, nous proposons une autre utilisation de cette technique dans le but de réduire, en termes de nombre de clauses et de longueur des clauses, la formule initiale. En considérant le graphe d'implications généré par la procédure BCP comme un arbre de résolution, nous pouvons déduire des sous-clauses de la formule initiale. Nous montrons ensuite, comment une telle extension peut être implémentée dans les solveurs actuels où la procédure BCP est utilisée à chaque noeud de l'arbre de recherche. Nous présentons une première implémentation de cette approche dans le cadre d'un pré-traitement pour le solveur Zchaff. Pour finir, des résultats comparatifs préliminaires montrant les points forts et les faiblesses de l'approche sont fournis sur certaines classes d'instances de nature structurées

Ethics in rehearsal

In this essay we explore a rather spare kind of meeting: a conversation between three people with minimal facilitating equipment. The stakes are high because these are meetings in which the barrister in an asylum or immigration case first meets with a client who is at risk of deportation. We focus on two dimensions of these encounters. First, we identify the aesthetic that configures and animates most asylum cases: the aesthetic of inconsistency. The meetings we observed were all about inconsistency; about working out how to respond to actual and anticipated challenges to the coherence of a refugee or migrant's personal narrative. The logic of inconsistency is so persistent and so corrosive that the exercise of anticipation – ‘rehearsal’ – is essentially open‐ended. This leads to the second dimension of our meetings. Barristers who work in this area of law develop a particular style or ethos, which allows them to accompany vulnerable clients through the rehearsal and also to make sense of their own involvement in the machinery of deportation. In these two aspects we find the basic choreographic principles of our meetings: the articulations which shape their material and affective ecology, and which inform the barrister's interpretation and performance of his or her professional role

Time-Memory Trade-offs for Parallel Collision Search Algorithms

Parallel versions of collision search algorithms require a significant amount of memory to store a proportion of the points computed by the pseudo-random walks. Implementations available in the literature use a hash table to store these points and allow fast memory access. We provide theoretical evidence that memory is an important factor in determining the runtime of this method. We propose to replace the traditional hash table by a simple structure, inspired by radix trees, which saves space and provides fast look-up and insertion. In the case of many-collision search algorithms, our variant has a constant-factor improved runtime. We give benchmarks that show the linear parallel performance of the attack on elliptic curves discrete logarithms and improved running times for meet-in-the-middle applications

Logical Reasoning to Detect Weaknesses About SHA-1 and MD4/5

In recent years, studies about the SATisfiability Problem (short for SAT) were more and more numerous because of its conceptual simplicity and ability to express a large set of various problems. Within a practical framework, works highlighting SAT impli- cations in real world problems had grown significantly. In this way, a new field called logical cryptanalysis appears in the 2000s and consists in an algebraic cryptanalysis in a binary context thanks to SAT solving. This paper deals with this concept applied to cryptographic hash functions. We first present the logical cryptanalysis principle, and provide details about our encoding approach. In a second part, we put the stress on the contribution of SAT to analyze the generated problem thanks to the discover of logical inferences and so simplifications in order to reduce the computational complexity of the SAT solving. This is mainly realized thanks to the use as a preprocessor of learning and pruning techniques from the community. Third, thanks to a probabilistic reasoning applied on the formulas, we present a weakness based on the use of round constants to detect probabilistic relations as implications or equivalences between certain vari- ables. Finally, we present a practical framework to exploit these weaknesses through the inversions of reduced-step versions of MD4, MD5, SHA-0 and SHA-1 and open some prospects

A SAT-based approach for index calculus on binary elliptic curves

Logical cryptanalysis, first introduced by Massacci in 2000, is a viable alternative to common algebraic cryptanalysis techniques over boolean fields. With XOR operations being at the core of many cryptographic problems, recent research in this area has focused on handling XOR clauses efficiently. In this paper, we investigate solving the point decomposition step of the index calculus method for prime degree extension fields $\mathbb{F}_{2^n}$, using SAT solving methods. We experimented with different SAT solvers and decided on using WDSat, a solver dedicated to this specific problem. We extend this solver by adding a novel breaking symmetry technique and optimizing the time complexity of the point decomposition step by a factor of $m!$ for the $(m+1)$\textsuperscript{th} Semaev\u27s summation polynomial. While asymptotically solving the point decomposition problem with this method has exponential worst time complexity in the dimension $l$ of the vector space defining the factor base, experimental running times show that the the presented SAT solving technique is significantly faster than current algebraic methods based on Gröbner basis computation. For the values $l$ and $n$ considered in the experiments, the WDSat solver coupled with our breaking symmetry technique is up to 300 times faster then MAGMA\u27s F4 implementation, and this factor grows with $l$ and $n$