Heuristic method for bitsliced representation of randomly generated 8×8 cryptographic S-Box

The article is devoted to the issues of increasing the security and efficiency of software implementation for the symmetric block ciphers. For the implementation of cryptoalgorithms on low-end CPUs (8/16/32-bit microcontrollers), it is important to provide increased resistance to power consumption analysis attacks. With regard to the implementation of ciphers on high-end CPUs (x86, ARM Cortex-A), it is important to eliminate the vulnerability primarily to timing and cache attacks. The authors used a bitslice approach to securely implement block ciphers, which has potential advantages such as high speed and low computing resources. However, the known bitsliced methods have a significant limitation, since they work with deterministic S-Boxes or arbitrary S-Boxes of smaller sizes. The paper proposes a new heuristic method for bitsliced representation of cryptographic 8×8 S-Boxes containing randomly generated values. These values defy description using algebraic expressions. The method is based on the decomposition of the truth table, which describes the S-Box, into two parts. One part of the table forms logical masks, and the other is split into bit vectors. To find a logical description of these vectors an exhaustive search is used. After finding the description of all vectors, these two parts of the table are combined into one using logical operations. The use of this method oriented on software implementation in the logical basis {AND, OR, XOR, NOT} ensures the minimization of arbitrary 8×8 S-Boxes. The proposed method can be implemented using standard logical instructions on any 8/16/32/64-bit processors. It is also possible to use logical SIMD instructions from the SSE, AVX, AVX-512 extensions for x86-64 processors, which provides high performance due to the use of long registers. The corresponding software has been developed that implements the method of searching for bitsliced representations of a given S-Box, and also automatically generates C++ code for it based on SSE, AVX and AVX-512 instructions. The effectiveness of the method on the S-Box of known block ciphers, in particular the Ukrainian encryption standard "Kalyna", has been investigated. It was found that the developed algorithm requires almost half as many gates for the bitsliced description of an arbitrary S-Box than the best of known algorithm (370 gates versus 680, respectively). For ciphers that use two or four S-Box tables, joint minimization can yield up to 330 or 300 gates per table, respectively. Keywords: bitslicing; S-Box; logical minimization; SIMD; x86-64 CPU; software implementation; block ciphers.

When protest humor is not all fun: The ambiguity of humor in the 2017 Romanian anti-corruption grassroots mobilization

This article focuses on the ambiguous ideological work of citizen-produced humor in protest. Using the case of the 2017 Romanian anti-corruption protests as empirical data, the article shows how humor can simultaneously signal grassroots creativity and resistance to power structures, and reproduce conservative gender and class hierarchies. Unlike other types of texts, humor presents itself as an innocent and light message, absolved of the need for critical scrutiny. However, protest studies need to engage in a more nuanced way with the ideological articulation of democratic politics via protest humor by asking not only how humor helps protest communication, but also how it achieves shared enjoyment, for whom, and to what consequences for the ideological articulation of democratic politics. The article concludes by proposing that researcher reflexivity can afford a new sensitivity to the ambiguousness of protest humor.

Creencia y pertenencia: El laberinto de las sociedades posotomanas

Post-colonial coagulation is the dilemma of many societies in endless formation due to the aftermath of colonialism and the dominance of coloniality, and even more so when this aftermath has been converted into a never-ending labyrinth for political-Islamic anthropology, particularly in the Arab case. The present study primarily aims to analyze the emergence of Abrahamic religions among Arab tribes and their role in supplanting the canon of identity and belonging, forming a universal standard for legal identity substantially different from the European one, and overturning the ancient tribal concept. The study then shifts to analyz-ing the formation of Islamic ideology as positive law by means of an empirical parallelism with Roman law, thus introducing the Latin concept of interpolare. We therefore arrive at the conclusion of how foreign-colonial interference played the main role in diluting the identity canon and that of belonging, creating a false identity, shaped to conform to colonial compromises, wrapping religious epistemology in a forced normative system to have caused schizophrenia and cognitive resistance to power and normative disobe-dience, even prompting schizophrenia and an aversion to reality.

Resisting to Game of Thrones: a fannish agonism

PurposeFans have been characterized as specialized consumers who often express disagreements with the entertainment industry's decisions, especially when it comes to the original content of the works that serve as the basis for the development of media products, evidencing a kind of consumer resistance. Under a Foucauldian perspective aligned with the consumer culture theory (CCT), power relations are established in a dynamic of power exercise and resistance to power. Based on this, the authors pose the following research question: how do fans of media products resist the changes made by the entertainment industry in relation to their canons?Design/methodology/approachThe authors adopted the Foucault's genealogy of power as a method, analyzing the comments posted on the Westeros.Org website, the main discussion forum of fans of A Song of Ice and Fire (ASoIaF) book series and Game of Thrones (GoT) TV series.FindingsThe findings reveal ways of resistance in relation to the adaptation of the media text permeated by an entertainment dispositif, which considers the adaptation legitimate, and a fannish dispositif, which criticizes the way this adaptation was made. However, their empirical categories reveal that they are forged not only from singularities but also from overlaps. The authors conclude, therefore, that this process occurs in an agonist way, in which conflicts are fought as a reciprocal incitement revealing a productive and ethical relationship.Originality/valueThe agonism shows how consumers can simultaneously be led to incorporate and resist to discourses and market practices. This demonstrates how resistance is not necessarily a force opposed to another, but a dynamic of reciprocal negotiation.

Performing Deference in Ahiqar: The significance of a Politics of Resistance in the Narrative and Proverbs of Ahiqar

This article argues that subtle resistance to power was all-important in Ahiqar and this was highlighted through interpreting the narrative and poetic sections symbiotically. This resistance to power, however, was hidden in Ahiqar, embedded in ironic twists on traditionally expected roles, and in the display of obedience, deference, and loyalty that is performed in the face of the king’s power. The article suggested that Ahiqar was performed to audiences at Elephantine and that a potential way for Elephantine audiences to interpret Ahiqar was in light of Persian dominance.

Where Does Power Go When No One Wants It: Two New Academics Grapple With the Hierarchies Implicit Within Conference Spaces

In this article, we provide a dialogical piece of writing inspired by our performative conversation, presented at the European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry 2019. Emboldened by our activist stance that conference presentations and writings can resist arborescent models that dictate the “right” sort of academic, we seek an active engagement with such hierarchical power structures. By engaging in experiential accounts provided through transcript excerpts from conversations, we show how grappling with concepts like power, hierarchy, and insider/outsider groups within a conference space is alive and complicated. Coming to realize that we are already becoming part of an in-group within this prestigious space, we push against the walls of comfort to show our own resistance to power—while also realizing that denying power is exactly the opposite from what we want academics to do.

Ecofeminist ‘lines of convergence’: Remapping the American West in Rebecca Solnit’s Savage Dreams

This article examines the ways Rebecca Solnit’s Savage Dreams (1994) (re)maps two key locations in the American West. The text centres on Yosemite National Park and the Nevada Test Site, locations emblematic of histories of colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism and the military in the United States. Considering how Solnit constructs a counter-map of these places, this article argues that by tracing ‘lines of convergence’ on a landscape deemed empty by the dominant culture, Solnit both documents and is part of resistance to power structures upheld by traditional cartography. Using an ecofeminist framework based on drawing connections in the face of the dominant culture’s emphasis on fragmentation and separation, I discuss how Solnit exposes the silence and violence of the map. I then consider the ways she constructs a ‘testimonial network’ that counters both. Finally, I suggest that Solnit’s textual counter-map prompts us to re-read the traditional map on connective, ecofeminist terms.

Visual Art, Ethical Witnessing, and Resistance

The chapter engages with another popular approach to visual international politics: visuals as a site of resistance to power, both through producing critical artwork and by ethically witnessing international crises. To trace these issues, the chapter analyzes the work of Ai Weiwei, a world-famous artist-activist whose ethical witnessing creatively resists China’s authoritarian party-state. It shows how Ai’s art presents ideological resistance to state power, in both the traditional sense of liberal resistance to authoritarian state oppression and the hermeneutical sense, in which it is necessary to decode his work for its “meaning” as the social construction of the visual. The chapter then considers how Ai’s documentary film Human Flow (2017) provokes transnational resistance through its “visual construction of the social”—and of the global. It thus examines how visual art can serve as an ethical witness to resist reigning political regimes, and how it also can excite affective communities of sense to creatively resist reigning political aesthetics. Chapter 6 thus highlights the need to appreciate the dynamic tension that entangles cultural governance and resistance.

“Everybody’s Donghu”: Artistic Resistance and the Reclaiming of Public Space in China

This paper presents a study of an artistic resistance project in China, “Everybody’s Donghu (East Lake),” held in 2010, 2012, and 2014 with the aim of intervening in the commercial development of an urban scenic space. It aims to demonstrate the practices of resistance in public spaces, particularly in the context of an authoritarian regime such as China, as opposed to democratic societies. First, the recent development of protest and forms of resistance in China will be discussed. It will then focus on the arising conflicts between the conceptualization of an urban space by the urban planners and the imagination of it by the participants. This is followed by a discussion of the tactics deployed in this event, focusing on how the participants appropriate urban space for their own use through performance. Finally, it explores how technology is used in the practices of resistance, concerning the representation of the area through utilization of online space. Overall, this paper argues that appropriating and representing urban space can open up new possibilities of resistance to power and control in the process of urban transformation.