Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
To Attest or Not to Attest, This is the Question – Provable Attestation in FIDO2

FIDO2 is currently the main initiative for passwordless authentication in web servers. It mandates the use of secure hardware authenticators to protect the authentication protocol’s secrets from compromise. However, to ensure that only secure authenticators are being used, web servers need a method to attest their properties. The FIDO2 specifications allow for authenticators and web servers to choose between different attestation modes to prove the characteristics of an authenticator, however the properties of most these modes have not been analysed in the context of FIDO2. In this work, we analyse the security and privacy properties of FIDO2 when different attestation modes included in the standard are used, and show that they lack good balance between security, privacy and revocation of corrupted devices. For example, the basic attestation mode prevents remote servers from tracing user’s actions across different services while requiring reduced trust assumptions. However in case one device is compromised, all the devices from the same batch (e.g., of the same brand or model) need to be recalled, which can be quite complex (and arguably impractical) in consumer scenarios. As a consequence we suggest a new attestation mode based on the recently proposed TokenWeaver, which provides more convenient mechanisms for revoking a single token while maintaining user privacy.
Quantum Attacks on Hash Constructions with Low Quantum Random Access Memory

At ASIACRYPT 2022, Benedikt, Fischlin, and Huppert proposed the quantum herding attacks on iterative hash functions for the first time. Their attack needs exponential quantum random access memory (qRAM), more precisely $$2^{0.43n}$$ quantum accessible classical memory (QRACM). As the existence of large qRAM is questionable, Benedikt et al. leave an open question on building low-qRAM quantum herding attacks. In this paper, we answer this open question by building a quantum herding attack, where the time complexity is slightly increased from Benedikt et al.'s $$2^{0.43n}$$ to ours $$2^{0.46n}$$ , but it does not need qRAM anymore (abbreviated as no-qRAM). Besides, we also introduce various low-qRAM or no-qRAM quantum attacks on hash concatenation combiner, hash XOR combiner, Hash-Twice, and Zipper hash functions.
Tighter Security for Generic Authenticated Key Exchange in the QROM

We give a tighter security proof for authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols that are generically constructed from key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) in the quantum random oracle model (QROM). Previous works (Hövelmanns et al., PKC 2020) gave reductions for such a KEM-based AKE protocol in the QROM to the underlying primitives with square-root loss and a security loss in the number of users and total sessions. Our proof is much tighter and does not have square-root loss. Namely, it only loses a factor depending on the number of users, not on the number of sessions. Our main enabler is a new variant of lossy encryption which we call parameter lossy encryption. In this variant, there are not only lossy public keys but also lossy system parameters. This allows us to embed a computational assumption into the system parameters, and the lossy public keys are statistically close to the normal public keys. Combining with the Fujisaki-Okamoto transformation, we obtain the first tightly IND-CCA secure KEM in the QROM in a multi-user (without corruption), multi-challenge setting. Finally, we show that a multi-user, multi-challenge KEM implies a square-root-tight and session-tight AKE protocol in the QROM. By implementing the parameter lossy encryption tightly from lattices, we obtain the first square-root-tight and session-tight AKE from lattices in the QROM.
Efficient Secure Storage with Version Control and Key Rotation

Periodic key rotation is a widely used technique to enhance key compromise resilience. Updatable encryption (UE) schemes provide an efficient approach to key rotation, ensuring post-compromise security for both confidentiality and integrity. However, these UE techniques cannot be directly applied to frequently updated databases due to the risk of a malicious server inducing the client to accept an outdated version of a file instead of the latest one. To address this issue, we propose a scheme called Updatable Secure Storage (USS), which provides a secure and key updatable solution for dynamic databases. USS ensures both data confidentiality and integrity, even in the presence of key compromises. By using efficient key rotation and file update procedures, the communication costs of these operations are independent of the size of the database. This makes USS particularly well-suited for managing large and frequently updated databases with secure version control. Unlike existing UE schemes, the integrity provided by USS holds even when the server learns the current secret key and intentionally violates the key update protocol.
Practically Efficient Private Set Intersection from Trusted Hardware with Side-Channels

Private set intersection (PSI) is one of the most important privacy-enhancing technologies with applications such as malware and spam detection, recognition of child pornography, contact discovery, or, more recently, contact tracing. In this paper, we investigate how PSI can be constructed and implemented simply and practically efficient. To this end, a natural possibility is the use of trusted execution environments (TEEs), which are commonly used in place of a trusted third party due to their presumed security guarantees. However, this trust is often not warranted: Today’s TEEs like Intel SGX suffer from a number of side-channels that allow the host to learn secrets of a TEE, unless countermeasures are taken. Furthermore, due to the high complexity and closed-source nature, it cannot be ruled out that a TEE is passively corrupted, i.e. leaks secrets to the manufacturer or a government agency such as the NSA. When constructing a protocol using TEEs, such (potential) vulnerabilities need to be accounted for. Otherwise, all security may be lost. We propose a protocol for two-party PSI whose security holds in a setting where TEEs cannot be fully trusted, e.g. due to the existence of side-channels. In particular, we deal with the possibilities that i) the TEE is completely transparent for the host, except for very simple secure cryptographic operations or ii) that it leaks all secrets to a third party, e.g. the manufacturer. Even in this challenging setting, our protocol is not only very fast, but also conceptually simple, which is an important feature as more complex protocols tend to be implemented with subtle security faults. To formally capture this setting, we define variants of the ideal functionality for TEEs due to Pass et al. (EUROCRYPT 2017). Using these functionalities, we prove our protocol’s security, which holds under universal composition. To illustrate the usefulness of our model, we sketch other possible applications like (randomized) oblivious transfer or private computation of the Hamming distance. Our PSI implementation, which uses Intel SGX as TEE, computes the intersection between two sets with $$2^{24}$$ 128-bit elements in 7.3 s. This makes our protocol the fastest PSI protocol to date with respect to single-threaded performance.
Non-interactive Commitment from Non-transitive Group Actions

Group actions are becoming a viable option for post-quantum cryptography assumptions. Indeed, in recent years some works have shown how to construct primitives from assumptions based on isogenies of elliptic curves, such as CSIDH, on tensors or on code equivalence problems. This paper presents a bit commitment scheme, built on non-transitive group actions, which is shown to be secure in the standard model, under the decisional Group Action Inversion Problem. In particular, the commitment is computationally hiding and perfectly binding, and is obtained from a novel and general framework that exploits the properties of some orbit-invariant functions, together with group actions. Previous constructions depend on an interaction between the sender and the receiver in the commitment phase, which results in an interactive bit commitment. We instead propose the first non-interactive bit commitment based on group actions. Then we show that, when the sender is honest, the constructed commitment enjoys an additional feature, i.e., it is possible to tell whether two commitments were obtained from the same input, without revealing the input. We define the security properties that such a construction must satisfy, and we call this primitive linkable commitment. Finally, as an example, an instantiation of the scheme using tensors with coefficients in a finite field is provided. In this case, the invariant function is the computation of the rank of a tensor, and the cryptographic assumption is related to the Tensor Isomorphism problem.
Non-interactive Zero-Knowledge Functional Proofs

In this paper, we consider to generalize NIZK by empowering a prover to share a witness in a fine-grained manner with verifiers. Roughly, the prover is able to authorize a verifier to obtain extra information of witness, i.e., besides verifying the truth of the statement, the verifier can additionally obtain certain function of the witness from the accepting proof using a secret functional key provided by the prover. To fulfill these requirements, we introduce a new primitive called non-interactive zero-knowledge functional proofs (fNIZKs), and formalize its security notions. We provide a generic construction of fNIZK for any $${\textsf{NP}}$$ relation $$\mathcal {R}$$ , which enables the prover to share any function of the witness with a verifier. For a widely-used relation about set membership proof (implying range proof), we construct a concrete and efficient fNIZK, through new building blocks (set membership encryption and dual inner-product encryption), which might be of independent interest.
Exploiting the Symmetry of $$\mathbb {Z}^n$$: Randomization and the Automorphism Problem

$$\mathbb {Z}^n$$ is one of the simplest types of lattices, but the computational problems on its rotations, such as $$\mathbb {Z}$$ SVP and $$\mathbb {Z}$$ LIP, have been of great interest in cryptography. Recent advances have been made in building cryptographic primitives based on these problems, as well as in developing new algorithms for solving them. However, the theoretical complexity of $$\mathbb {Z}$$ SVP and $$\mathbb {Z}$$ LIP are still not well understood. In this work, we study the problems on rotations of $$\mathbb {Z}^n$$ by exploiting the symmetry property. We introduce a randomization framework that can be roughly viewed as ‘applying random automorphisms’ to the output of an oracle, without accessing the automorphism group. Using this framework, we obtain new reduction results for rotations of $$\mathbb {Z}^n$$ . First, we present a reduction from $$\mathbb {Z}$$ LIP to $$\mathbb {Z}$$ SCVP. Here $$\mathbb {Z}$$ SCVP is the problem of finding the shortest characteristic vectors, which is a special case of CVP where the target vector is a deep hole of the lattice. Moreover, we prove a reduction from $$\mathbb {Z}$$ SVP to $$\gamma $$ - $$\mathbb {Z}$$ SVP for any constant $$\gamma = O(1)$$ in the same dimension, which implies that $$\mathbb {Z}$$ SVP is as hard as its approximate version for any constant approximation factor. Second, we investigate the problem of finding a nontrivial automorphism for a given lattice, which is called LAP. Specifically, we use the randomization framework to show that $$\mathbb {Z}$$ LAP is as hard as $$\mathbb {Z}$$ LIP. We note that our result can be viewed as a $$\mathbb {Z}^n$$ -analogue of Lenstra and Silverberg’s result in [JoC2017], but with a different assumption: they assume the G-lattice structure, while we assume the access to an oracle that outputs a nontrivial automorphism.
Sender-Anamorphic Encryption Reformulated: Achieving Robust and Generic Constructions

Motivated by the violation of two fundamental assumptions in secure communication - receiver-privacy and sender-freedom - by a certain entity referred to as “the dictator”, Persiano et al. introduced the concept of Anamorphic Encryption (AME) for public key cryptosystems (EUROCRYPT 2022). Specifically, they presented receiver/sender-AME, directly tailored to scenarios where receiver privacy and sender freedom assumptions are compromised, respectively. In receiver-AME, entities share a double key to communicate in anamorphic fashion, raising concerns about the online distribution of the double key without detection by the dictator. The sender-AME with no shared secret is a potential candidate for key distribution. However, the only such known schemes (i.e., LWE and Dual LWE encryptions) suffer from an intrinsic limitation and cannot achieve reliable distribution. Here, we reformulate the sender-AME, present the notion of $$\ell $$ -sender-AME and formalize the properties of (strong) security and robustness. Robustness refers to guaranteed delivery of duplicate messages to the intended receiver, ensuring that decrypting normal ciphertexts in an anamorphic way or decrypting anamorphic ciphertexts with an incorrect duplicate secret key results in an explicit abort signal. We first present a simple construction for pseudo-random and robust public key encryption that shares the similar idea of public-key stegosystem by von Ahn and Hopper (EUROCRYPT 2004). Then, inspired by Chen et al.’s malicious algorithm-substitution attack (ASA) on key encapsulation mechanisms (KEM) (ASIACRYPT 2020), we give a generic construction for hybrid PKE with special KEM that encompasses well-known schemes, including ElGamal and Cramer-Shoup cryptosystems. The constructions of $$\ell $$ -sender-AME motivate us to explore the relations between AME, ASA on PKE, and public-key stegosystem. The results show that a strongly secure $$\ell $$ -sender-AME is such a strong primitive that implies reformulated receiver-AME, public-key stegosystem, and generalized ASA on PKE. By expanding the scope of sender-anamorphic encryption and establishing its robustness, as well as exploring the connections among existing notions, we advance secure communication protocols under challenging operational conditions.
Quantitative Fault Injection Analysis

Active fault injection is a credible threat to real-world digital systems computing on sensitive data. Arguing about security in the presence of faults is non-trivial, and state-of-the-art criteria are overly conservative and lack the ability of fine-grained comparison. However, comparing two alternative implementations for their security is required to find a satisfying compromise between security and performance. In addition, the comparison of alternative fault scenarios can help optimize the implementation of effective countermeasures. In this work, we use quantitative information flow analysis to establish a vulnerability metric for hardware circuits under fault injection that measures the severity of an attack in terms of information leakage. Potential use cases range from comparing implementations with respect to their vulnerability to specific fault scenarios to optimizing countermeasures. We automate the computation of our metric by integrating it into a state-of-the-art evaluation tool for physical attacks and provide new insights into the security under an active fault attacker.
Blockwise Rank Decoding Problem and LRPC Codes: Cryptosystems with Smaller Sizes

In this paper, we initiate the study of the Rank Decoding (RD) problem and LRPC codes with blockwise structures in rank-based cryptosystems. First, we introduce the blockwise errors ( $$\ell $$ -errors) where each error consists of $$\ell $$ blocks of coordinates with disjoint supports, and define the blockwise RD ( $$\ell $$ -RD) problem as a natural generalization of the RD problem whose solutions are $$\ell $$ -errors (note that the standard RD problem is actually a special $$\ell $$ -RD problem with $$\ell =1$$ ). We adapt the typical attacks on the RD problem to the $$\ell $$ -RD problem, and find that the blockwise structures do not ease the problem too much: the $$\ell $$ -RD problem is still exponentially hard for appropriate choices of $$\ell >1$$ . Second, we introduce blockwise LRPC ( $$\ell $$ -LRPC) codes as generalizations of the standard LPRC codes whose parity-check matrices can be divided into $$\ell $$ sub-matrices with disjoint supports, i.e., the intersection of two subspaces generated by the entries of any two sub-matrices is a null space, and investigate the decoding algorithms for $$\ell $$ -errors. We find that the gain of using $$\ell $$ -errors in decoding capacity outweighs the complexity loss in solving the $$\ell $$ -RD problem, which makes it possible to design more efficient rank-based cryptosystems with flexible choices of parameters. As an application, we show that the two rank-based cryptosystems submitted to the NIST PQC competition, namely, RQC and ROLLO, can be greatly improved by using the ideal variants of the $$\ell $$ -RD problem and $$\ell $$ -LRPC codes. Concretely, for 128-bit security, our RQC has total public key and ciphertext sizes of 2.5 KB, which is not only about 50% more compact than the original RQC, but also smaller than the NIST Round 4 code-based submissions HQC, BIKE, and Classic McEliece.
How do nurses work in chronic management in the age of artificial intelligence? development and future prospects

AI is undeniably revolutionizing medical research and patient care across diverse fields. Chronic disease nursing care, a pivotal aspect of clinical management, has significantly reaped the benefits of AI across numerous dimensions. Understanding the operational principles of artificial intelligence before implementation is crucial, avoiding indiscriminate replacement of all tasks with AI. Nurses serve as the primary force in symptom group research, expanding beyond diabetes to encompass various chronic diseases; their primary responsibility involves recording patients' daily symptoms and vital signs. However, a substantial portion of current AI research excludes nurses from the developmental phase, encompassing them solely in user and feedback populations. The comprehensive design of the symptom analysis and long-term management approach necessitates the guidance and oversight of nurses; however, their current insufficient involvement might stem from nursing staff's comparatively limited comprehension of AI and their ambiguous perception of their role's value in AI. Therefore, an imperative exploration of nurses' roles in symptom analysis and long-term management, leveraging the latest research in these areas, is vital to pinpoint breakthroughs in nurses' AI involvement in the future.
Under Attack in the Cyber Battlefield: A Scoping Review of Journalists’ Experiences of Cyberharassment

This scoping review synthesises evidence on journalists’ experiences of online harassment. This review aims to (i) understand the prevalence and impact of cyberharassment among journalists, (ii) explore coping strategies adopted by this population, and (iii) map out differences influenced by sociodemographic characteristics. The search was performed until 31st August 2023 in 4 database hosts, accessing a total of 13 databases. A total of 19 records were deemed eligible for inclusion in this review. This review demonstrates that online harassment of journalists is pervasive on a global scale and that it is not confined to a particular geographical region, culture, or sociopolitical context. Apart from a myriad of emotional and psychological sequalae on an individual and collective level, cyberharassment of journalists threatens press freedom and deters the journalistic “watchdog” role through the promotion of self-censorship. There is significant knowledge about female journalists’ lived experiences of cyberharassment, partly due to the amplified frequency and severity of the abuse that is received. Yet little is known about the impact of cyberharassment on male journalists, and journalists with marginalised identities. Recommendations for the mitigation of the effects of cyberharassment among journalists are imparted on an individual, collective, organisational and societal level.
Patient privacy protection: Generating available medical treatment plans based on federated learning and CBR

Although the favorable impact of sharing electronic medical records (EMRs) with other hospitals on improving clinical decision-making efficiency is widely acknowledged, the actual implementation of EMR sharing has been limited to some extent because of patient privacy protections. This study proposes a three-stage framework to retrieve medical treatment plans from multiple hospitals based on federated learning and case-based reasoning (CBR). We demonstrate that the proposed framework compensates for the privacy protection weaknesses of CBR and solves the problem of data islands among hospitals.
SCRNN

Colorectal cancer holds a prominent place on the global health landscape. Its early detection is crucial for successful patient outcomes. Histological analysis of tissue samples plays an indispensable role in diagnosing and classifying colorectal cancer. Accurate classification is paramount, as it influences the choice of treatment and patient prognosis. This chapter investigates the statistics surrounding colorectal cancer, its vital role in the healthcare sector, and the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in automating its diagnosis. This chapter proposes a ShuffleNetV2-CRNN (SCRNN), a novel deep learning architecture designed for colorectal cancer classification from histological images. SCRNN combines the efficiency of ShuffleNetV2 for feature extraction with the context-awareness of a convolutional-recurrent neural network for precise classification. SCRNN is evaluated against chosen deep models – Simple CNN, vGG16, ResNet-18, and MobileNet. Experimental results demonstrate appreciable performance of SCRNN across a diverse range of tissue types.
LIDA‐YOLO: An unsupervised low‐illumination object detection based on domain adaptation

Abstract The low‐light environment is integral to everyday activities but poses significant challenges in object detection. Due to the low brightness, noise, and insufficient illumination of the acquired image, the model's object detection performance is reduced. Opposing recent studies mainly developing using supervised learning models, this paper suggests LIDA‐YOLO, an approach for unsupervised adaptation of low‐illumination object detectors. The model improves the YOLOv3 by using normal illumination images as the source domain and low‐illumination images as the target domain and achieves object detection in low‐illumination images through an unsupervised learning strategy. Specifically, a multi‐scale local feature alignment and global feature alignment module are proposed to align the overall attributes of the image and feature biases such as background, scene, and target layout are thus reduced. The experimental results of LIDA‐YOLO on the ExDark dataset achieved the highest performance mAP score of 56.65% compared to several current state‐of‐the‐art unsupervised domain adaptation object detection methods. Compared to I3Net, the performance improvement is 4.04%, and compared to OSHOT, the performance improvement is 6.5%. LIDA‐YOLO achieves a performance improvement of 2.7% compared to the supervised baseline method YOLOv3. Overall, the suggested LIDA‐YOLO model requires fewer samples and presents a stronger generalization ability than previous works.