Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper, we discuss a point about applying known decomposition techniques in their most general form. Three versions of these methods, which are useful for obtaining upper bounds on the optimal information ratios of access structures, are known as: Stinson’s λ-decomposition, (λ, ω)decomposition and λ-weighted-decomposition, where the latter two are generalizations of the first one. We continue by considering the problem of determining the exact values of the optimal information ratios of the reduced access structures with exactly four minimal qualified subsets on six participants, which remained unsolved in Martí-Farré et al.’s paper [Des. Codes Cryptogr. 61 (2011), 167-186]. We... 

Public verifiability is an interesting feature that cryptographic protocols, such as those used in cloud computing applications, may support. By public verifiability, the client can delegate the verification process to a third party auditor without revealing the private key or data. The main contribution of this paper is achieving public verifiability in the symmetric setting of searchable encryption (SE), separately for single and Boolean keyword search. While Public verifiability in SE has already been achieved using complex tools such as indistinguishability obfuscation or pairing, this work employs basic cryptographic components and assumptions, such as pseudo-random functions, one-way... 

Public verifiability is an interesting feature that cryptographic protocols, such as those used in cloud computing applications, may support. By public verifiability, the client can delegate the verification process to a third party auditor without revealing the private key or data. The main contribution of this paper is achieving public verifiability in the symmetric setting of searchable encryption (SE), separately for single and Boolean keyword search. While Public verifiability in SE has already been achieved using complex tools such as indistinguishability obfuscation or pairing, this work employs basic cryptographic components and assumptions, such as pseudo-random functions, one-way... 

Format compliance, a desirable feature of multimedia security systems, means that the secured bitstream resembles the unprotected compressed bitstream. It is called full format compliance, if the scrambled stream can be decoded by a typical decoder. In this paper, we address the issues that are to be carefully taken into account to develop efficient fully format compliant scrambling methods for compressed video. We also propose new selective scrambling methods for securing compressed video streams. The security issues, in different parts of these scrambling methods, are analyzed and their impact on bit-rate and complexity is discussed. We show that our scrambling methods provide... 

Homomorphic (resp. abelian) secret sharing is a generalization of ubiquitous linear secret sharing in which the secret value and the shares are taken from finite (resp. abelian) groups instead of vector spaces over a finite field. Homomorphic secret sharing was first defined by Benaloh and, later in the early nineties, Frankel and Desmedt presented some relevant results. Except for a few other related topics such as black-box secret sharing and secret sharing over rings, the subject has remained dormant for about three decades. The study of homomorphic secret sharing is resumed in this paper and three main results are presented: (1) mixed-linear schemes, a subclass of abelian schemes to be... 

We introduce the notion of private set operations (PSO) as a symmetric-key primitive in the cloud scenario, where a client securely outsources his dataset to a cloud service provider and later privately issues queries in the form of common set operations. We define a syntax and security notion for PSO and propose a general construction that satisfies it. There are two main ingredients to our PSO scheme: an adjustable join (Adjoin) scheme (MIT-CSAIL-TR-2012-006 (2012) Cryptographic treatment of CryptDB's adjustable join. http://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/popa-join-tr.pdf) and a tuple set (TSet) scheme (Cash, D., Jarecki, S., Jutla, C. S., Krawczyk, H., Rosu, M.-C., and Steiner, M.... 

Database management systems (DBMS) are one of cloud services with major applications in industry and business. In the use of such services, since the cloud service provider cannot be entrusted with the plain data, the databases are typically encrypted prior to outsourcing. One of the most challenging issues in designing these services is supporting SQL join queries on the encrypted database. The multi-adjustable join scheme (M-Adjoin) [Khazaei-Rafiee 2020], an extension of Adjoin [Popa-Zeldovich 2012 and Mironov-Segev-Shahaf 2017], is a symmetric-key primitive that supports the join queries for a list of column labels on an encrypted database. In previous works, the following security... 

A group-characterizable (GC) random variable is induced by a finite group, called main group, and a collection of its subgroups. The notion extends directly to secret sharing schemes (SSSs). It is known that linear and abelian SSSs can be equivalently described in terms of GC SSSs. In this paper, we present a necessary and sufficient condition for a SSS to be equivalent to a GC one. Using this result, we show that homomorphic SSSs (HSSSs) are equivalent to GC SSSs whose subgroups are normal in the main group. We also present two applications for this equivalent description of HSSSs. One concerns lower bounding the information ratio of access structures for the class of HSSSs, and the other... 

Database management systems (DBMS) are one of cloud services with major applications in industry and business. In the use of such services, since the cloud service provider cannot be entrusted with the plain data, the databases are typically encrypted prior to outsourcing. One of the most challenging issues in designing these services is supporting SQL join queries on the encrypted database. The multi-adjustable join scheme (M-Adjoin) [Khazaei-Rafiee 2020], an extension of Adjoin [Popa-Zeldovich 2012 and Mironov-Segev-Shahaf 2017], is a symmetric-key primitive that supports the join queries for a list of column labels on an encrypted database. In previous works, the following security... 

Recently, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Near Field Communication systems are found in various user-friendly services that all of us deal with in our daily lives. As these systems are ubiquitously deployed in different authentication and identification applications, inferring information about our behavior will be possible by monitoring our use of them. In order to provide privacy and security requirements of RFID users in novel authentication applications, lots of security schemes have been proposed which have tried to provide secure and untraceable communication for end-users. In this paper, we investigate the privacy of three RFID security schemes which have been proposed... 

Due to their impressive advantages, Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) systems are ubiquitously found in various novel applications. These applications are usually in need of quick and accurate authentication or identification. In many cases, it has been shown that if such systems are not properly designed, an adversary can cause security and privacy concerns for end-users. In order to deal with these concerns, impressive endeavors have been made which have resulted in various RFID authentications being proposed. In this study, we analyze three lightweight RFID authentication protocols proposed in Wireless Personal Communications (2014), Computers & Security (2015) and Wireless Networks... 

Due to their impressive advantages, Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) systems are ubiquitously found in various novel applications. These applications are usually in need of quick and accurate authentication or identification. In many cases, it has been shown that if such systems are not properly designed, an adversary can cause security and privacy concerns for end-users. In order to deal with these concerns, impressive endeavors have been made which have resulted in various RFID authentications being proposed. In this study, we analyze three lightweight RFID authentication protocols proposed in Wireless Personal Communications (2014), Computers & Security (2015) and Wireless Networks... 

In 1992, Frankel and Desmedt introduced a technique that enables one to reduce the secret space of an ideal homomorphic secret sharing scheme (IHSSS) into any of its characteristic subgroups. In this paper, we propose a similar technique to reduce the secret space of IHSSSs called the quotient technique. By using the quotient technique, we show that it is possible to yield an ideal linear scheme from an IHSSS for the same access structure, providing an alternative proof of a recent result by Jafari and Khazaei. Moreover, we introduce the concept of decomposition of secret sharing schemes. We give a decomposition for IHSSSs, and as an application, we present a necessary and sufficient... 

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an irreversible neurological disorder that progresses gradually and can cause severe cognitive and behavioral impairments. This disease is currently considered a social and economic incurable issue due to its complicated and multifactorial characteristics. Despite decades of extensive research, we still lack definitive AD diagnostic and effective therapeutic tools. Consequently, one of the most challenging subjects in modern medicine is the need for the development of new strategies for the treatment of AD. A large body of evidence indicates that amyloid-β (Aβ) peptide fibrillation plays a key role in the onset and progression of AD. Recent studies have reported... 

Formation of the amyloid beta (Aβ) peptide aggregations represents an indispensable role in appearing and progression of Alzheimer disease. β-sheet breaker peptides can be designed and modified with different amino acids in order to improve biological properties and binding affinity to the amyloid beta peptide. In the present study, three peptide sequences were designed based on the hopeful results of LIAIMA peptide and molecular docking studies were carried out onto the monomer and fibril structure of amyloid beta peptide using AutoDock Vina software. According to the obtained interactions and binding energy from docking, the best-designed peptide (D-GABA-FPLIAIMA) was chosen and... 

Anthropometry is a Greek word that consists of the two words "Anthropo"meaning human species and "metery"meaning measurement. It is a science that deals with the size of the body including the dimensions of different parts, the field of motion and the strength of the muscles of the body. Specific individual dimensions such as heights, widths, depths, distances, environments and curvatures are usually measured. In this article, we investigate the anthropometric characteristics of patients with chronic diseases (diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, heart attacks and strokes) and find the factors affecting these diseases and the extent of the impact of each to make the necessary... 

Background: Stomach cancer is a major health problem in many countries. Understanding the current burden of stomach cancer and the differential trends across various locations is essential for formulating effective preventive strategies. We report on the incidence, mortality, and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) due to stomach cancer in 195 countries and territories from 21 regions between 1990 and 2017. Methods: Estimates from GBD 2017 were used to analyse the incidence, mortality, and DALYs due to stomach cancer at the global, regional, and national levels. The rates were standardised to the GBD world population and reported per 100 000 population as age-standardised incidence rates,... 

Background: Data about the global, regional, and country-specific variations in the levels and trends of colorectal cancer are required to understand the impact of this disease and the trends in its burden to help policy makers allocate resources. Here we provide a status report on the incidence, mortality, and disability caused by colorectal cancer in 195 countries and territories between 1990 and 2017. Methods: Vital registration, sample vital registration, verbal autopsy, and cancer registry data were used to generate incidence, death, and disability-adjusted life-year (DALY) estimates of colorectal cancer at the global, regional, and national levels. We also determined the association... 

Importance: Cancer and other noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are now widely recognized as a threat to global development. The latest United Nations high-level meeting on NCDs reaffirmed this observation and also highlighted the slow progress in meeting the 2011 Political Declaration on the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases and the third Sustainable Development Goal. Lack of situational analyses, priority setting, and budgeting have been identified as major obstacles in achieving these goals. All of these have in common that they require information on the local cancer epidemiology. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study is uniquely poised to provide these crucial data.... 

Since 2000, many countries have achieved considerable success in improving child survival, but localized progress remains unclear. To inform efforts towards United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3.2—to end preventable child deaths by 2030—we need consistently estimated data at the subnational level regarding child mortality rates and trends. Here we quantified, for the period 2000–2017, the subnational variation in mortality rates and number of deaths of neonates, infants and children under 5 years of age within 99 low- and middle-income countries using a geostatistical survival model. We estimated that 32% of children under 5 in these countries lived in districts that had attained...