This paper evaluates the prospects for protecting critical social functions from “cyber” attacks carried out over electronic information networks. In particular, it focuses on the feasibility of devising international laws, conventions or agreements to deter and/or punish perpetrators of such attacks. First, it briefly summarizes existing conventions and laws, and explains to which technologica...

A new distinguishing attack on HMAC and NMAC based on a dedicated compression function framework H, proposed in ChinaCrypt2008, is first presented in this paper, which distinguish the HMAC/NMACH from HMAC/NMAC with a random function. The attack needs 2 chosen messages and 2 queries, with a success rate of 0.873. Furthermore, according to distinguishing attack on SPMAC-H, a key recovery attack o...

In this paper, we present new distinguishers of the MAC construction Alred and its specific instance Alpha-MAC based on AES, which is proposed by Daemen and Rijmen in 2005. For the Alred construction, we describe a general distinguishing attack which leads to a forgery attack directly. The complexity is 2 chosen messages and 2 queries with success probability 0.63. We also use a two-round colli...

BACKGROUND In tropical Africa, where malaria is highly endemic, low grade infections are asymptomatic and the diagnosis of clinical malaria is usually based on parasite density. Here we investigate how changes in malaria control and endemicity modify diagnostic criteria of Plasmodium falciparum attacks. METHODS AND FINDINGS Parasitological and clinical data from the population of Dielmo, Sene...

Loiss is a byte-oriented stream cipher designed by Dengguo Feng et al. Its design builds upon the design of the SNOW family of ciphers. The algorithm consists of a linear feedback shift register (LFSR) and a non-linear finite state machine (FSM). Loiss utilizes a structure called Byte-Oriented Mixer with Memory (BOMM) in its filter generator, which aims to improve resistance against algebraic a...

Time-Memory-Data tradeoff attacks (TMD-attacks) like those of Babbage [1], Biryukov and Shamir [2] and Dunkelman, Keller [5] reduce the security level of keystream generator based-stream ciphers to L/2, where L denotes the inner state length. This is one of the reasons why stream ciphers like Trivium [3] and Grain [8] use a session key length n of at most L/2. In this paper, we deal with the qu...

Outliers in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are sensor nodes that issue attacks by abnormal behaviours and fake message dissemination. However, existing cryptographic techniques are hard to detect these inside attacks, which cause outlier recognition a critical and challenging issue for reliable and secure data dissemination in WSNs. To efficiently identify and isolate outliers, this study pres...

We describe new cryptanalytic attacks on the candidate branching program obfuscator proposed by Garg, Gentry, Halevi, Raykova, Sahai and Waters (GGHRSW) using the GGH13 graded encoding, and its variant using the GGH15 graded encoding as specified by Gentry, Gorbunov and Halevi. All our attacks require very specific structure of the branching programs being obfuscated, which in particular must h...

Many stream ciphers use irregular clocking to introduce nonlinearity to the keystream. We present three distinguishers on irregularly clocked linear feedback shift registers. The general idea used is to find suitable linear combinations of keystream bits, here called samples, that are drawn from a biased distribution. We describe how to place windows around the estimated positions around member...

Suppose Γ is a group acting on a set X . A k-labeling of X is a mapping c : X → {1, 2, . . . , k}. A labeling c of X is distinguishing (with respect to the action of Γ) if for any g ∈ Γ, g 6= idX , there exists an element x ∈ X such that c(x) 6= c(g(x)). The distinguishing number, DΓ(X), of the action of Γ on X is the minimum k for which there is a k-labeling which is distinguishing. This paper...