Sharif Digital Repository

Metal matrix composite coatings have gained great attention due to their exclusive properties. They have shown the properties of a metallic host material modified by addition of a second phase. In electrodeposition of Ni/WC nano composite, nickel was deposited on the substrates by DC electrodeposition in Watt's based bath containing nickel sulfate, nickel chloride, boric acid and sodium dodecyl sulfate. WC content in the coating was determined by different parameters such as current density, powder content and surfactant amount. Mechanism of electrodeposition was analyzed by cyclic voltammetry and was confirmed by Guglielmi model. Surface morphology was studied by scanning electron... 

Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are powerful security primitives that provide cheap and secure solutions for security-related applications. Strong PUFs provide a large set of challenge-response pairs (CRPs) and are suitable for device authentication. Weak PUFs produce a small number of CRPs and can be used for key extraction. In this paper, we propose a novel method to enhance the CRP set of traditional ring oscillator-based PUFs (RO-PUFs). RO-PUFs are one of the most reliable types of PUFs and the best fit to implement on the field-programmable gate arrays. To the best of our knowledge, our method provides the maximum number of CRPs compared with the state of the art. In addition, the... 

Abstract : Vertically aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) arrays were synthesized by thermal chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on stainless steel substrates coated by cobalt nanoparticles as catalyst. Morphological and elemental analyses conducted by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) revealed that bamboo-like CNTs were blocked by Co nanoparticles at the tips. The fabricated nanotubes underwent functionalization by electrochemical oxidation in sulfuric acid, and the subsequent structural studies, as well as Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy confirmed that the tips of functionalized CNTs were opened while oxygenated functional groups were... 

We present a realization of the transitive signature scheme based on the algebraic properties of bilinear group pairs. The scheme is proven secure, i.e. transitively unforgeable under adaptive chosen message attack, assuming hardness of the computational co-Diffie-Hellman problem in bilinear group pairs and the security of the underlying standard signature scheme under known message attack. Our scheme mostly conforms to previously designed schemes of Micali-Rivest and Bellare-Neven in structure; yet there are two contributions: firstly, we take advantage of bilinear group pairs which were previously used by Boneh, Lynn, and Shacham to build short signature schemes. Secondly, we show that a... 

Microburst (MB) wind shear is one of the most important meteorological dangers threatening the aircraft (AC) safety and the life of passengers. Though there are some ground-based 3D Lidar systems to detect low-level MB wind shears to alert the pilots, there have been fewer scientific attempts to identify model-based MB parameters via AC onboard air and position data. The latter refers to the development and identification of an acceptable MB model upon which an automatic flight control (AFC) system can be designed to control the AC through wind shear microburst. In essence, accurate knowledge of MB model is an essential prerequisite for design and analysis of AFC systems that can safely fly... 

In this work, we used λ-DNA to produce metallic DNA samples and we investigated the stabilization time of their impedances. This is in order to show that the DNA molecules can possibly be utilized as a frame for assembling the nanocircuits and as an electronic element as well, in nanoelectric devices. It has been shown that metallic DNA has lower stabilization time than natural DNA. As expected, it is shown that making the bundled DNA oriented, impacts their impedance stabilization. In order to find the characteristic impedance of the DNA molecules under direct current, we designed and made patterned electrodes to make electrical connections between the DNAs and the used current source. The... 

Mu and Varadharajan proposed an electronic voting scheme and claimed that their scheme authenticates the Voters, protects the anonymity of them, and detects the identity of double voters. Due to some weaknesses in Mu-Varadharajan scheme, several modified schemes have been proposed by Lin et al., Hwang et al., Rodríguez-Henríquez et al. and Asaar et al.; however this paper shows that these schemes suffer from some weaknesses in fulfilling the pointed properties. For this purpose, we get Hwang et al. scheme as a case study and apply our new attacks on it. Also we consider the applicability of the attacks on other pointed schemes. In addition, we present a new scheme and show that the scheme... 

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) provides 2-way communications between the utility and the smart meters. Developing authenticated key exchange (AKE) and broadcast authentication (BA) protocols is essential to provide secure communications in AMI. The security of all existing cryptographic protocols is based on the assumption that secret information is stored in the nonvolatile memories. In the AMI, the attackers can obtain some or all of the stored secret information from memories by a great variety of inexpensive and fast side-channel attacks. Thus, all existing AKE and BA protocols are no longer secure. In this paper, we investigate how to develop secure AKE and BA protocols in the... 

This paper analyzes the Piccolo family of lightweight block ciphers against the impossible differential cryptanalysis. A combination of some ploys such as decreasing the S-box computations, finding an appropriate propagation of differentials, utilizing hash tables and using the linearity of the key-schedule as well as disregarding subkeys of two rounds lead to 12-round and 13-round impossible differential attack on Piccolo-80 and 15-round attack on Piccolo-128. The time and data complexity of the attack against Piccolo-80 is 255.18 and 236.34 for 12-round and 269.7 and 243.25 for 13-round, respectively. Moreover, the time and data complexity for 15 rounds cryptanalysis of Piccolo-128 are... 

With the development of modern power systems, Smart Grid as the intelligent generation of electricity networks, has been faced with a tremendous attention. The Smart Grid systems are made up of fine-grained power grid measurements to achieve a high stability and reliability. In these networks, the data security and privacy issues for secure data sharing among the components of the system have emerged as the basic requirement. Typically, a service provider securely shares the data/commands with the smart meters under an arbitrary policy which is determined by the service providers. As the smart grid components are considered to have constrained computational resources, we cannot directly use... 

HIGHT is a lightweight block cipher introduced in CHES 2006 by Hong et al as a block cipher suitable for low-resource applications. In this paper, we propose improved impossible differential and biclique attacks on HIGHT block cipher both exploiting the permutation-based property of the cipher's key schedule algorithm as well as its low diffusion. For impossible differential attack, we found a new 17-round impossible differential characteristic that enables us to propose a new 27-round impossible differential attack. The total time complexity of the attack is 2120.4 where an amount of 259.3 chosen plaintext-ciphertext pairs and 2107.4 memory are required. We also instantiate a new biclique... 

Impossible differential attack is a well-known mean to examine robustness of block ciphers. Using impossible differential cryptanalysis, we analyze security of a family of lightweight block ciphers, named Midori, that are designed considering low energy consumption. Midori state size can be either 64 bits for Midori64 or 128 bits for Midori128; however, both versions have key size equal to 128 bits.In this paper, we mainly study security of Midori64. To this end, we use various techniques such as early-abort, memory reallocation, miss-in-the-middle and turning to account the inadequate key schedule algorithm of Midori64. We first show two new 7-round impossible differential characteristics... 

ARX algorithms are a class of symmetric-key algorithms constructed by Addition, Rotation, and XOR, which achieve the best software performances in low-end microcontrollers. To evaluate the resistance of an ARX cipher against differential cryptanalysis and its variants, the recent automated methods employ constraint satisfaction solvers, such as SMT solvers, to search for optimal characteristics. The main difficulty to formulate this search as a constraint satisfaction problem is obtaining the differential models of the non-linear operations, that is, the constraints describing the differential probability of each non-linear operation of the cipher. While an efficient bit-vector differential... 

Following the fact that there are some efficient implementations of ECC-based RFID authentication protocols on RFID tags, a new family of RFID authentication protocols known as EC-RAC family has been introduced. However, it has been shown that all the versions of EC-RAC protocols are exposed to privacy and/or security threats. In this paper we analyzed a version of the EC-RAC RFID authentication protocol as well as a version of Schnorr protocol which were presented in a recent work and are claimed to have the demanding requirements. We demonstrated an impersonation attack on the claimed improved EC-RAC, and consequently showed that it would not satisfy the tag authentication property. Also,...