Online advertising opportunities are sold through auctions, billions of times every day across the web. Advertisers who participate in those auctions need to decide on a bidding strategy: how much they are willing to bid for a given impression opportunity. Deciding on such a strategy is not a straightforward task, because of the interactive and reactive nature of the repeated auction mechanism. Indeed, an advertiser does not observe counterfactual outcomes of bid amounts that were not submitted, and successful advertisers will adapt their own strategies based on bids placed by competitors. These characteristics complicate effective learning and evaluation of bidding strategies based on logged data alone.

We explore the use of the Mantin biases (Mantin, Eurocrypt 2005) to recover plaintexts from RC4-encrypted traffic. We provide a more fine-grained analysis of these biases than in Mantin’s original work. We show that, in fact, the original analysis was incorrect in certain cases: the Mantin biases are sometimes non-existent, and sometimes stronger than originally predicted. We then show how to use these biases in a plaintext recovery attack. Our attack targets two unknown bytes of plaintext that are located close to sequences of known plaintext bytes, a situation that arises in practice when RC4 is used in, for example, TLS. We provide a statistical framework that enables us to make predictions about the performance of this attack and its variants. We then extend the attack using standard dynamic programming techniques to tackle the problem of recovering longer plaintexts, a setting of practical interest in recovering HTTP session cookies and user passwords that are protected by RC4 in TLS. We perform experiments showing that we can successfully recover 16-byte plaintexts with 80% success rate using $$2^{31}$$ ciphertexts, an improvement over previous attacks.

The boomerang analysis, together with its offspring the amplified boomerang analysis and the rectangle analysis, are techniques that are widely used in the analysis of block ciphers. Realistic examples are given which demonstrate that the boomerang analysis can commonly give probability values that are highly inaccurate. Thus, any complexity estimates for the security of a block cipher based on the boomerang or rectangle analysis must be viewed extremely sceptically.

BACKGROUND: Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is used in directed sequencing for the discovery of novel polymorphisms. As the first step in PCR directed sequencing, effective PCR primer design is crucial for obtaining high-quality sequence data for target regions. Since current computational primer design tools are not fully tuned with stable underlying laboratory protocols, researchers may still be forced to iteratively optimize protocols for failed amplifications after the primers have been ordered. Furthermore, potentially identifiable factors which contribute to PCR failures have yet to be elucidated. This inefficient approach to primer design is further intensified in a high-throughput laboratory, where hundreds of genes may be targeted in one experiment. RESULTS: We have developed a fully integrated computational PCR primer design pipeline that plays a key role in our high-throughput directed sequencing pipeline. Investigators may specify target regions defined through a rich set of descriptors, such as Ensembl accessions and arbitrary genomic coordinates. Primer pairs are then selected computationally to produce a minimal amplicon set capable of tiling across the specified target regions. As part of the tiling process, primer pairs are computationally screened to meet the criteria for success with one of two PCR amplification protocols. In the process of improving our sequencing success rate, which currently exceeds 95% for exons, we have discovered novel and accurate computational methods capable of identifying primers that may lead to PCR failures. We reveal the laboratory protocols and their associated, empirically determined computational parameters, as well as describe the novel computational methods which may benefit others in future primer design research. CONCLUSION: The high-throughput PCR primer design pipeline has been very successful in providing the basis for high-quality directed sequencing results and for minimizing costs associated with labor and reprocessing. The modular architecture of the primer design software has made it possible to readily integrate additional primer critique tests based on iterative feedback from the laboratory. As a result, the primer design software, coupled with the laboratory protocols, serves as a powerful tool for low and high-throughput primer design to enable successful directed sequencing.

This paper argues that the cipher systems based on cellular automata (CA) proposed by S. Nandi et al. (1994) are affine and are insecure. A reply by S. Nandi and P. Pal Chaudhuri is given. The reply emphasizes the point that the regular, modular, cascadable structure of local neighborhood CA can be employed for building low cost cipher system hardware. This cost effective engineering solution can achieve desired level of security with larger size CA.

Tips and techniques for EDA users partnering with commercial EDA vendors, including an examination of the critical role that standards play in a successful partnership.With an explicit buy-if-available bias assumed for the commercial EDA user, partnering strategies are compared with contract development, in-house development and wait-and-see/do-without strategies for functionality not commercially available.requirements and pays the full cost of development, retaining ownership.In-house development implies the development of a solution, using in-house staff and equipment or incrementally added permanent headcount.Wait-and-see/do-without (probably the most common strategic alternative to buy-if-available) implies that the problem is not addressed directly with resources or initiatives.This is commonly the result of other problems/functionality receiving higher priority, low or narrow benefits accruing from a solution, or triage.