China could seize Taiwan's outlying islands

Significance They are difficult to defend and therefore a tempting target. Beijing might try to seize them as a way to frighten and demoralise Taiwan's government or as preparation for an assault on Taiwan itself. Impacts A successful attack might embolden China to seize islands claimed by Japan and South-east Asian states. Western sanctions imposed in response to such an attack would be significantly more aggressive than those related to Xinjiang and Hong Kong. Japan would take the possibility of war with China more seriously and strengthen its defence capabilities more vigorously. A weak US response would shake Seoul's confidence in US protection and could make South Korea more likely to develop nuclear weapons.

Do predatory adult odonates estimate their adult prey odonates’ body size and dispersal ability to proceed with a successful attack?

Predator-prey encounters are one of the most challenging behaviors that animals engage in and play a key role in structuring trophic linkages within food webs. Empirical studies suggest that predators (except pathogens, parasites, and parasitoids) tend to be larger in body size and have better dispersal ability than their prey items; however, when predators prey upon members of the same taxonomic group, it is unclear whether such relationships exist between predators and their prey items since both groups may have similar body sizes and dispersal abilities. Adult odonates can be used to test this as they prey upon other odonates within the same suborder, family, genus or species, although such records are uncommon. Using a dataset collected from Sri Lanka and India from 2012 to 2020, this study identified three types of predation behaviors between two suborders of Odonata, i.e., (i) Anisoptera (dragonflies) prey upon Anisoptera, (ii) Anisoptera prey upon Zygoptera (damselflies), and (iii) Zygoptera prey upon Zygoptera. There was no evidence of Anisoptera predation by Zygoptera. Study results showed strong evidence that there is a significant difference in body size (i.e., body length) and dispersal ability (i.e., hind-wing length) between adult predatory odonates and adult prey odonates for all three types of predations. This may indicate that predatory odonates estimate other odonate prey precisely to proceed with a successful attack.

Physiological Basis of Smut Infectivity in the Early Stages of Sugar Cane Colonization

Sugar cane smut (Sporisorium scitamineum) interactions have been traditionally considered from the plant’s point of view: How can resistant sugar cane plants defend themselves against smut disease? Resistant plants induce several defensive mechanisms that oppose fungal attacks. Herein, an overall view of Sporisorium scitamineum’s mechanisms of infection and the defense mechanisms of plants are presented. Quorum sensing effects and a continuous reorganization of cytoskeletal components, where actin, myosin, and microtubules are required to work together, seem to be some of the keys to a successful attack.

Refinement Orders for Quantitative Information Flow and Differential Privacy

Quantitative Information Flow (QIF) and Differential Privacy (DP) are both concerned with the protection of sensitive information, but they are rather different approaches. In particular, QIF considers the expected probability of a successful attack, while DP (in both its standard and local versions) is a max-case measure, in the sense that it is compromised by the existence of a possible attack, regardless of its probability. Comparing systems is a fundamental task in these areas: one wishes to guarantee that replacing a system A by a system B is a safe operation that is the privacy of B is no worse than that of A. In QIF, a refinement order provides strong such guarantees, while, in DP, mechanisms are typically compared w.r.t. the privacy parameter ε in their definition. In this paper, we explore a variety of refinement orders, inspired by the one of QIF, providing precise guarantees for max-case leakage. We study simple structural ways of characterising them, the relation between them, efficient methods for verifying them and their lattice properties. Moreover, we apply these orders in the task of comparing DP mechanisms, raising the question of whether the order based on ε provides strong privacy guarantees. We show that, while it is often the case for mechanisms of the same “family” (geometric, randomised response, etc.), it rarely holds across different families.

The effect of acuspike exercises in some biochemical variables and the transmitting accuracy facing from the top for the young players in volleyball

The use of training exercises in learning and training is now a major stone and important in this aspect, so the researcher wanted to use the acuspike device after determining the existence of some weakness in some of the variant of the skills of the transmitter of the face of the top (tennis) in volleyball, Direct and effective in achieving a point directly or back a weak ball from the opponent team to build a successful attack, the aim of the research to identify the impact of exercises in the acuspike in the development of some kinetic variables and their relation to the accuracy of the forward facing of the top of the players in the volleyball, A team of 12 players from the Diyala team .

An Antiforensic Method against AMR Compression Detection

Adaptive multirate (AMR) compression audio has been exploited as an effective forensic evidence to justify audio authenticity. Little consideration has been given, however, to antiforensic techniques capable of fooling AMR compression forensic algorithms. In this paper, we present an antiforensic method based on generative adversarial network (GAN) to attack AMR compression detectors. The GAN framework is utilized to modify double AMR compressed audio to have the underlying statistics of single compressed one. Three state-of-the-art detectors of AMR compression are selected as the targets to be attacked. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of removing the forensically detectable artifacts of AMR compression under various ratios with an average successful attack rate about 94.75%, which means the modified audios generated by our well-trained generator can treat the forensic detector effectively. Moreover, we show that the perceptual quality of the generated AMR audio is well preserved.

Minerva: The curse of ECDSA nonces

We present our discovery of a group of side-channel vulnerabilities in implementations of the ECDSA signature algorithm in a widely used Atmel AT90SC FIPS 140-2 certified smartcard chip and five cryptographic libraries (libgcrypt, wolfSSL, MatrixSSL, SunEC/OpenJDK/Oracle JDK, Crypto++). Vulnerable implementations leak the bit-length of the scalar used in scalar multiplication via timing. Using leaked bit-length, we mount a lattice attack on a 256-bit curve, after observing enough signing operations. We propose two new methods to recover the full private key requiring just 500 signatures for simulated leakage data, 1200 for real cryptographic library data, and 2100 for smartcard data. The number of signatures needed for a successful attack depends on the chosen method and its parameters as well as on the noise profile, influenced by the type of leakage and used computation platform. We use the set of vulnerabilities reported in this paper, together with the recently published TPM-FAIL vulnerability [MSE+20] as a basis for real-world benchmark datasets to systematically compare our newly proposed methods and all previously published applicable lattice-based key recovery methods. The resulting exhaustive comparison highlights the methods’ sensitivity to its proper parametrization and demonstrates that our methods are more efficient in most cases. For the TPM-FAIL dataset, we decreased the number of required signatures from approximately 40 000 to mere 900.

Identity Theft Prediction Using Game Theory

Digital devices have become an integral part of every person’s life. The range of use of these devices is increasing daily. Over the decades, the number of users has increased from thousands to millions and is still increasing. Due to the multi-functional features of digital devices, their importance is now being recognized more than ever. Initially, they were used only for calling and texting; however, nowadays, they are also being used to store relevant data such as account numbers, card numbers, credentials, private pictures, passport copies, etc. The most common form of Identity Theft attack is through stealing passwords. Once the password is stolen, user privacy is lost, and the data is compromised. Thus, a system consisting of a database that comprises of leaked passwords collected from various social sites and common passwords as a part of a dictionary attack used by hackers has been created by us. When a user enters his/her password, it runs it through the database and checks for a match. This document emphasizes on how game theory can be utilized in predicting the possibility of a successful attack and discusses essential concepts such as the various components of game theory and Nash Equilibrium.