Abstract. We performed a sanity check of public keys collected on the web and found that the vast majority works as intended. Our main goal was to test the validity of the assumption that different random choices are made each time keys are generated. We found that this is not always the case, resulting in public keys that offer no security. Our conclusion is that generating secure public keys in the real world is challenging. We did not study usage of public keys.
We present STEP-archives, a novel and practical data archival architecture, where an attacker who wants to censor or tamper with a data object must cause obvious collateral damage to a large number of other objects in the system. We use maximum distance separable erasure codes to entangle unrelated data blocks and provide redundancy against storage failures, which results in an archive with constant time read-write operations. We show a tradeoff for the attacker between attack complexity, irrecoverability, and collateral damage. We also show that the problem is asymmetric between attackers and defenders; while a defender can efficiently recover from imperfect attacks, an attacker must solve an NP-hard problem to find a perfect (irrecoverable) attack that minimizes collateral damage to other data objects, or even approximate its size. We then study efficient sample-heuristic attack algorithms that lead to irrecoverable but large damage and demonstrate how some strategies and parameter choices allow to resist these sample attacks. Finally, we provide empirical evidence that an attacker who wants to irrecoverably tamper with a document archived long enough must destroy a constant fraction of the archive.
Abstract. Steinhaus graphs on n vertices are certain simple graphs in bijective correspondence with binary {0,1}-sequences of length n − 1. A conjecture of Dymacek in 1979 states that the only nontrivial regular Steinhaus graphs are those corresponding to the periodic binary sequences 110...110 of any length n − 1 = 3m. By an exhaustive search the conjecture was known to hold up to 25 vertices. We report here that it remains true up to 117 vertices. This is achieved by considering the weaker notion of parity-regular Steinhaus graphs, where all vertex degrees have the same parity. We show that these graphs can be parametrized by an F 2 -vector space of dimension approximately n/3 and thus constitute an efficiently describable domain where true regular Steinhaus graphs can be searched by computer.
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