Email and chat still constitute the majority of electronic communication on the Internet. The standardisation and acceptance of protocols such as SMTP, IMAP, POP3, XMPP, and IRC has allowed to deploy servers for email and chat in a decentralised and interoperable fashion. These protocols can be secured by providing encryption with TLS—directly or via the STARTTLS extension. X.509 PKIs and ad ho...

This document specifies how to establish secure connection-oriented media transport sessions over the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol using the Session Description Protocol (SDP). It defines a new SDP protocol identifier, ’TCP/TLS’. It also defines the syntax and semantics for an SDP ’fingerprint’ attribute that identifies the certificate that will be presented for the TLS session. This...

DNA lesions can block replication forks and lead to the formation of single-stranded gaps. These replication complications are mitigated by DNA damage tolerance mechanisms, which prevent deleterious outcomes such as cell death, genomic instability, and carcinogenesis. The two main tolerance strategies are translesion DNA synthesis (TLS), in which low-fidelity DNA polymerases bypass the blocking...

TLS is one of the most widely deployed cryptographic protocols on the Internet; it is used to protect the confidentiality and integrity of transmitted data in various client-server protocols. Its non-standard use of cryptographic primitives, however, makes it hard to formally assess its security. It is in fact difficult to use traditional (well-understood) security notions for the key-exchange ...

In this research, the student will do a survey on TLS security, based on a recent paper by Krawczyk, Paterson, and Wee [KPW13]. Security is first shown for the most common mode of TLS, which is the TLS-RSA, under some security assumptions in the random oracle model. The security of other modes of TLS is then derived, and is shown to hold in the standard model.

Use case diagrams (UCDs) are widely used to describe requirements and desired functionality of software products. However, UCDs are loosely linked to programs source code, and maintaining traces between the source code and elements of UCDs is a manual, tedious, and laborious process. We offer a novel approach for automating a part of this process. Developers first specify few traceability links...

Many optical flow estimation techniques are based on the differential optical flow equation. These algorithms involve solving over-determined systems of optical flow equations. Least squares (LS) estimation is usually used to solve these systems even though the underlying noise does not conform to the model implied by LS estimation. To ameliorate this problem, work has been done using the total...

Translesion synthesis (TLS) employs low fidelity polymerases to replicate past damaged DNA in a potentially error-prone process. Regulatory mechanisms that prevent TLS-associated mutagenesis are unknown; however, our recent studies suggest that the PCNA-binding protein Spartan plays a role in suppression of damage-induced mutagenesis. Here, we show that Spartan negatively regulates error-prone ...

Translesion DNA synthesis (TLS) during S-phase uses specialized TLS DNA polymerases to replicate a DNA lesion, allowing stringent DNA synthesis to resume beyond the offending damage. Human TLS involves the conjugation of ubiquitin to PCNA clamps encircling damaged DNA and the role of this post-translational modification is under scrutiny. A widely-accepted model purports that ubiquitinated PCNA...

Most SSL/TLS-based e-commerce applications employ conventional mechanisms for user authentication. These mechanisms—if decoupled from SSL/TLS session establishment—are vulnerable to manin-the-middle (MITM) attacks. In this paper, we elaborate on the feasibility of MITM attacks, survey countermeasures, introduce the notion of SSL/TLS session-aware user authentication (TLS-SA), and present a proo...