New Features of Latin Dances: Analysis of Salsa, ChaCha, and Rumba
The stream cipher Salsa20 was introduced by Bernstein in 2005 as a candidate in the eSTREAM project, accompanied by the reduced versions Salsa20/8 and Salsa20/12. ChaCha is a variant of Salsa20 aiming at bringing better diffusion for similar performance. Variants of Salsa20 with up to 7 rounds (instead of 20) have been broken by differential cryptanalysis, while ChaCha has not been analyzed yet. We introduce a novel method for differential cryptanalysis of Salsa20 and ChaCha, inspired by correlation attacks and related to the notion of neutral bits. This is the first application of neutral bits in stream cipher cryptanalysis. It allows us to break the 256-bit version of Salsa20/8, to bring faster attacks on the 7-round variant, and to break 6- and 7-round ChaCha. In a second part, we analyze the compression function Rumba, built as the XOR of four Salsa20 instances and returning a 512-bit output. We find collision and preimage attacks for two simplified variants, then we discuss differential attacks on the original version, and exploit a high-probability differential to reduce complexity of collision search from 2256to 279for 3-round Rumba. To prove the correctness of our approach we provide examples of collisions and near-collisions on simplified versions.

title: Algebraic Immunity of S-Boxes and Augmented Functions
abstract: In this paper, the algebraic immunity of S-boxes and augmented functions of stream ciphers is investigated. Augmented functions are shown to have some algebraic properties that are not covered by previous measures of immunity. As a result, efficient algebraic attacks with very low data complexity on certain filter generators become possible. In a similar line, the algebraic immunity of the augmented function of the eSTREAM candidate Trivium is experimentally tested. These tests suggest that Trivium has some immunity against algebraic attacks on augmented functions.

title: Chosen IV Statistical Analysis for Key Recovery Attacks on Stream Ciphers
abstract: A recent framework for chosen IV statistical distinguishing analysis of stream ciphers is exploited and formalized to provide new methods for key recovery attacks. As an application, a key recovery attack on simplified versions of two eSTREAM Phase 3 candidates is given: For Grain-128 with IV initialization reduced to up to 180 of its 256 iterations, and for Trivium with IV initialization reduced to up to 672 of its 1152 iterations, it is experimentally demonstrated how to deduce a few key bits. Evidence is given that the present analysis is not applicable on Grain-128 or Trivium with full IV initialization.

title: Non-randomness in eSTREAM Candidates Salsa20 and TSC-4
abstract: Stream cipher initialisation should ensure that the initial state or keystream is not detectably related to the key and initialisation vector. In this paper we analyse the key/IV setup of the eSTREAM Phase 2 candidates Salsa20 and TSC-4. In the case of Salsa20 we demonstrate a key recovery attack on six rounds and observe non-randomness after seven. For TSC-4, non-randomness over the full eight-round initialisation phase is detected, but would also persist for more rounds.

title: Face Authentication Using Morphological Dynamic Link Architecture
abstract: A very attractive approach for face detection is based on multiresolution images (also known as mosaic images). Motivated by the simplicity of this approach, a rule-based face detection algorithm in frontal views is developed first. Second, a novel dynamic link architecture based on multiscale morphological dilation-erosion is proposed for face authentication. More specifically, a sparse grid is placed over the outcome of face detection stage for each person in a reference set. Subsequently, multiscale morphological operations are employed to yield a feature vector at each node of the grid and dynamic link matching is applied to verify the identity of each person from a test set. The first experimental results reported in this paper verify the superiority of the proposed method over the (standard) dynamic link matching that is based on Gabor wavelets.

title: Automatic Identification of Diatoms Using Decision Forests
abstract: A feature based identification scheme for microscopic images of diatoms is presented in this paper. Diatoms are unicellular algae found in water and other places wherever there is humidity and enough light for photo synthesis. The proposed automatic identification scheme follows a decision tree based classification approach. In this paper two different ensemble learning methods are evaluated and results are compared with those of single decision trees. As test sets two different diatom image databases are used. For each image in the databases general features like symmetry, geometric properties, moment invariants, and Fourier descriptors as well as diatom specific features like striae density and direction are computed.

title: Evaluation and optimization of the catalog search process of e-procurement platforms
abstract: With the emerging of e-catalog standards the product search can be used in a very different and improved matter. Beyond the usual keyword search this opens the arena for attribute-based search engines, including parametric search and preference search. We analyze the impact of different search techniques for such e-catalogs on the overall search process costs. It turns out that preference search has a high potential to significantly reduce the process costs. A large-scale use case with the MAN2B e-procurement platform supports our claim. We identify improvements achievable by using preference search, in particular less navigation steps during the product search and better search results due to the BMO query model. Expensive cases, where frustrated users accept bad search results or phone up the company's purchasing department, should decrease significantly. This in turn will enable the purchasing department to focus more on strategic issues like supplier relationship management than on operative issues as it still happens widely today.

title: Face authentication with Gabor information on deformable graphs
abstract: Elastic graph matching has been proposed as a practical implementation of dynamic link matching, which is a neural network with dynamically evolving links between a reference model and an input image. Each node of the graph contains features that characterize the neighborhood of its location in the image. The elastic graph matching usually consists of two consecutive steps, namely a matching with a rigid grid, followed by a deformation of the grid, which is actually the elastic part. The deformation step is introduced in order to allow for some deformation, rotation, and scaling of the object to be matched. This method is applied here to the authentication of human faces where candidates claim an identity that is to be checked. The matching error as originally suggested is not powerful enough to provide satisfying results in this case. We introduce an automatic weighting of the nodes according to their significance. We also explore the significance of the elastic deformation for an application of face-based person authentication. We compare performance results obtained with and without the second matching step. Results show that the deformation step slightly increases the performance, but has lower influence than the weighting of the nodes. The best results are obtained with the combination of both aspects. The results provided by the proposed method compare favorably with two methods that require a prior geometric face normalization, namely the synergetic and eigenface approaches.

title: Nonuniform charge scaling (NUCS): A practical approximation of solvent electrostatic screening in proteins
abstract: In molecular mechanics calculations, electrostatic interactions between chemical groups are usually represented by a Coulomb potential between the partial atomic charges of the groups. In aqueous solution these interactions are modified by the polarizable solvent. Although the electrostatic effects of the polarized solvent on the protein are well described by the Poisson--Boltzmann equation, its numerical solution is computationally expensive for large molecules such as proteins. The procedure of nonuniform charge scaling (NUCS) is a pragmatic approach to implicit solvation that approximates the solvent screening effect by individually scaling the partial charges on the explicit atoms of the macromolecule so as to reproduce electrostatic interaction energies obtained from an initial Poisson--Boltzmann analysis. Once the screening factors have been determined for a protein the scaled charges can be easily used in any molecular mechanics program that implements a Coulomb term. The approach is particularly suitable for minimization-based simulations, such as normal mode analysis, certain conformational reaction path or ligand binding techniques for which bulk solvent cannot be included explicitly, and for combined quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical calculations when the interface to more elaborate continuum solvent models is lacking. The method is illustrated using reaction path calculations of the Tyr 35 ring flip in the bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor.