Bilateral Differential Topography—A Novel Topographic Algorithm for Keratoconus and Ectatic Disease Screening

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to establish a novel bilateral differential topographic algorithm and assess its efficacy for screening of keratoconus and corneal ectasia before corneal refractive surgery.Methods: One hundred and sixty-one consecutive patients (115 men and 46 women, aged 22.8 ± 6.8 years) with keratoconus, including clinical keratoconus, subclinical keratoconus, forme fruste keratoconus (FFK), and corneal ectasia (KC group) and one hundred and seventy-four consecutive patients (97 men and 77 women, aged 25.1 ± 6.7 years) with ametropia (control group) visiting the Eye and ENT hospital of Fudan University from June 2018 to April 2021 were included. Bilateral differential keratometry, elevation, and pachymetry topographies were composed based on raw topographic data obtained by a Scheimpflug imaging anterior segment analyzer. Key bilateral differential characteristic parameters were calculated. SPSS 20 (SPSS Inc., IBM) was used for statistical analyses and the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to determine the diagnostic efficacies.Results: Mann-Whitney tests detected that the front keratometry, front elevation, corneal pachymetry, and back elevation maximal, mean, and standard deviation values within a 1.5-mm radius of the bilateral differential topography were all significantly higher in the KC group than in the control group (all p-values <0.001). The front keratometry mean (ΔFKmean) and standard deviation (ΔFKsd) and the front elevation standard deviation (ΔFEsd) and maximal (ΔFEmax) values within a 1.5-mm radius of the bilateral differential topography yielded the four highest accuracies (area under the ROC curve = 0.985, 0.985, 0.984, and 0.983, respectively) for discriminating KC cases (including FFK cases) from normal cases. Cut-off values of 0.75 diopters (D) for the ΔFKmean, 0.67 D for the ΔFKsd, 2.9 μm for the ΔFEsd, and 14.6 μm for the ΔFEmax had the highest sensitivities (95.7, 95.0, 96.9, and 95.0%, respectively) and specificities (96.0, 97.7, 94.8, and 95.4%, respectively).Conclusion: Bilateral differential topographic parameters may be efficient for the early detection of keratoconus and corneal ectasia secondary to corneal refractive surgery. This bilateral differential topographic algorithm may complement conventional diagnostic models by improving the sensitivity and specificity of screening for early keratoconus and ectasia before corneal refractive surgeries.

Exploring Differential-Based Distinguishers and Forgeries for ASCON

Automated methods have become crucial components when searching for distinguishers against symmetric-key cryptographic primitives. While MILP and SAT solvers are among the most popular tools to model ciphers and perform cryptanalysis, other methods with different performance profiles are appearing. In this article, we explore the use of Constraint Programming (CP) for differential cryptanalysis on the Ascon authenticated encryption family (first choice of the CAESAR lightweight applications portfolio and current finalist of the NIST LWC competition) and its internal permutation. We first present a search methodology for finding differential characteristics for Ascon with CP, which can easily find the best differential characteristics already reported by the Ascon designers. This shows the capability of CP in generating easily good differential results compared to dedicated search heuristics. Based on our tool, we also parametrize the search strategies in CP to generate other differential characteristics with the goal of forming limited-birthday distinguishers for 4, 5, 6 and 7 rounds and rectangle attacks for 4 and 5 rounds of the Ascon internal permutation. We propose a categorization of the distinguishers into black-box and non-black-box to better differentiate them as they are often useful in different contexts. We also obtained limited-birthday distinguishers which represent currently the best known distinguishers for 4, 5 and 6 rounds under the category of non-black-box distinguishers. Leveraging again our tool, we have generated forgery attacks against both reduced-rounds Ascon-128 and Ascon-128a, improving over the best reported results at the time of writing. Finally, using the best differential characteristic we have found for 2 rounds, we could also improve a recent attack on round-reduced Ascon-Hash.

Research on SKINNY Optimal Differential Trail Search

SKINNY is a tweakable lightweight block cipher algorithm. In order to test its security, this paper performs optimal differential trail search analysis on all SKINNY-64 versions under single-key setting based on the MILP (Mixed Integer Linear Programming) algorithm. Firstly, SKINNY round function is abstracted equivalently by precise constraints, and the objective function is set as the minimum number of active S-box number to optimize SKINNY-64 MILP model. Experiments show the differential trail searched by this method is not necessarily optimal. In order to directly search for the optimal differential trail, the S-box differential probability coding information is added to the optimized SKINNY-64 MILP model, the S-box differential characteristic is reconstructed, and the objective function is set to the minimum value of the probability coding information, which improves the SKINNY-64 MILP model. The results of experimental show that the improved MILP model can directly search for the optimal differential trail, and the complexity is slightly increased, but the search efficiency is significantly improved. Under single-key setting, this method has obvious advantage in searching the optimal differential trails of SKINNY-64 with low round number.

New Automatic Search Method for Truncated-Differential Characteristics Application to Midori, SKINNY and CRAFT

In this paper, using Mixed-Integer Linear Programming, a new automatic search tool for truncated differential characteristic is presented. Our method models the problem of finding a maximal probability truncated differential characteristic, being able to distinguish the cipher from a pseudo-random permutation. Using this method, we analyze Midori64, SKINNY64/X and CRAFT block ciphers, for all of which the existing results are improved. In all cases, the truncated differential characteristic is much more efficient than the (upper bound of) bit-wise differential characteristic proven by the designers, for any number of rounds. More specifically, the highest possible rounds, for which an efficient differential characteristic can exist for Midori64, SKINNY64/X and CRAFT are 6, 7 and 10 rounds, respectively, for which differential characteristics with maximum probabilities of $2^{-60}$, $2^{-52}$ and $2^{-62.61}$ (may) exist. Using our new method, we introduce new truncated differential characteristics for these ciphers with respective probabilities $2^{-54}$, $2^{-4}$ and $2^{-24}$ at the same number of rounds. Moreover, the longest truncated differential characteristics found for SKINNY64/X and CRAFT have 10 and 12 rounds, respectively. This method can be used as a new tool for differential analysis of SPN block ciphers.

DIFFERENTIAL CRYPTANALYSIS OF THE LIGHTWEIGHT BLOCK CIPHER CYPRESS-256

This paper presents the results of differential cryptanalysis of the lightweight block cipher Cypress-256. The method for searching multi-round differential characteristic of the block cipher Cypress-256 is proposed. The searching assumes 1) building a big set of one-round differential characteristics and search for possible combinations of one-round characteristics into multi-round ones; 2) extending one-round differential characteristics with the probability up to certain threshold into multi-round characteristics. The following experiments show that the most probable one-round differential characteristics have input differences with 4-6 active bits which are distributed between different words. Besides that, high-probable one-round differential characteristics, which output differences have a small Hamming weight, cannot be extended to build high-probable multi-round differential characteristics. Due to application of the method assuming extension of one-round differential characteristics into multi-round ones, the differential characteristic up to 6 rounds was built, so 10-round block cipher Cypress-256 is resistant to differential cryptanalysis according to the requirements of practical criterion.

Adaptive Algorithm for Distribution Transformer Protection to Improve Smart Grid Stability

Due to the presence of Distribution Generation (DG), power system becomes more complicated and stability of power is the main challenging task. Saturation of Current Transformer (CT) imposes great dilemma on differential relaying scheme. This manuscript presents a new differential algorithm for distribution transformer protection which adaptively set its characteristic in the event of CT saturation. The proposed scheme is capable to detect magnetizing inrush condition, high resistance internal fault and discriminate external fault with CT saturation. The validation of the proposed scheme is done by simulating a part of the power system in PSCADTM software and programming in MATLAB software. A Full Cycle Discrete Fourier Transform (FCDFT) is implemented to validate the differential protective scheme for 15 MVA, 66/11 kV distribution transformer. An adaptive concept of the differential characteristic is employed in the algorithm to maintain the stability of relay during external fault with CT saturation. Validation and authenticity of the proposed technique are carried out with various test condition generated under wide variation in system parameters. The result on 2 kVA, 230/110 V, single phase transformer shows that the proposed scheme is capable to discriminate inrush, internal and external fault also with CT saturation conditions.