We prove that the families matrix powering, iterated matrix product, and adjoint matrix are VQP–complete, where VQP denotes Valiant’s class of quasipolynomial–computable families of multivariate polynomials. This proves a conjecture by Bürgisser [3, Conjecture 8.1].

We show that the linear cryptanalytic attack on RC5 that was published by Kaliski and Yin at Crypto’95 does not work as expected due to the failure of some hidden assumptions involved. Then we present new linear attacks on RC5. Our attacks use the same linear approximation as the one used by Kaliski and Yin. Therefore, the plaintext requirement of our attack is around 4w2r−2 which is impractica...

We try to capture the essence of information technology and computer science, arguing that information technologists have the same principal goal as all technologists: to create machines with certain properties. To achieve this, they formalize the problem, i.e. abstract the properties into a specification and invent or develop a schema, i.e. an abstraction of the machine’s structure. Subsequent...

The most efficient collision attacks on members of the SHA family presented so far all use complex characteristics which were manually constructed by Wang et al. In this report, we describe a method to search for characteristics in an automatic way. This is particularly useful for multi-block attacks, and as a proof of concept, we give a two-block collision for 64-step SHA-1 based on a new char...

We provide a systematization of approaches to accountability that have been taken in computer-science research. Toward this end, we categorize these approaches along the axes of time, information, and action; within each of these axes, we identify multiple questions of interest. Different researchers have (explicitly or implicitly) used “accountability” to mean different things. Our systematiza...

The Web is playing a very important role in our lives, and is becoming an essential element of the computing infrastructure. With such a glory come the attacks–the Web has become criminals’ preferred targets. Web-based vulnerabilities now outnumber traditional computer security concerns. Although various security solutions have been proposed to address the problems on the Web, few have addresse...

A venerable line of research aims to provide a general-purpose programming language with a well-defined subset that compiles into efficient queries, perhaps by translation into SQL or some other suitable query language. This talk discusses some older and more recent advances in this direction, including the languages Kleisli, LINQ, Ferry, M, and Links. Twenty-five years ago, Copeland and Maier ...

Informally, an obfuscator O is an (efficient, probabilistic) “compiler” that takes as input a program (or circuit) P and produces a new program O(P ) that has the same functionality as P yet is “unintelligible” in some sense. Obfuscators, if they exist, would have a wide variety of cryptographic and complexity-theoretic applications, ranging from software protection to homomorphic encryption to...

J ust over a year ago, the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society jointly published the Computer Science Curricula 2013 (CS2013) (www.acm.org/education/CS2013-final-report.pdf), an update to the undergraduate computing programs guidelines they've been publishing about once every decade since 1968. If you're like most people, undergraduate computer science curricula gu...

Our aim is to discuss what, when and, how deep logic should be taught in the computer science education in connection with the so called “Bologna process”. We survey the spread of logic in the computer science education. We draw special attention to the process resulting by 1987 in a comprehensive school in the international logic research called “Computer Science Logic”. It includes the invest...