In this dissertation we present new methods for designing efficient Raptor codes in finite and practical block lengths. First we propose an extension of Raptor codes which keeps all the desirable properties, including the linear complexity of encoding and decoding per information bit, and improves the performance in terms of the reception rate. Our simulations show a 10% reduction in the requir...

We report the case of an adult patient with neurophysiological evidence of persisting conduction block in the forearm segment of the left median nerve and absent responses from the sensory branch of the musculocutaneous nerve (MCN), which had developed during an episode of acute generalised varicella zoster virus (VZV) infection. Clinical manifestations of motor involvement in herpes zoster (HZ...

The 128-bit block cipher TWIS was proposed by Ojha et al in 2009. It is a lightweight block cipher and its design is inspired from CLEFIA. In this paper, we first study the properties of TWIS structure, and as an extension we also considered the generalized TWIS-type structure which can be called G-TWIS cipher, where the block size and round number can be arbitrary values. Then we present a ser...

A psoas compartment block has been used to provide anesthesia for orthopedic surgical procedures and analgesia for post-operative pain. Currently, this block is advocated for relieving pain in the lower extremity and pelvic area resulting from various origins. We report a case of a 69-year-old male patient who had gait abnormality with posterior pelvic and hip pain, which were both aggravated b...

Recently multi-block collision attacks (MBCA) were found on the Merkle-Damg̊ard (MD)-structure based hash functions MD5, SHA-0 and SHA-1. In this paper, we introduce a new cryptographic construction called 3C devised by enhancing the MD construction. We show that the 3C construction is at least as secure as the MD construction against single-block and multi-block collision attacks. This is the f...

We report the case of an adult patient with neurophysiological evidence of persisting conduction block in the forearm segment of the left median nerve and absent responses from the sensory branch of the musculocutaneous nerve (MCN), which had developed during an episode of acute generalised varicella zoster virus (VZV) infection. Clinical manifestations of motor involvement in herpes zoster (HZ...

Let D be the ring of integers in a finite extension of the rationals. The classic examination of the factorization properties of algebraic integers usually begins with the study of norms. In this paper, we show using the ideal class group, C(D), of D that a deeper examination of such properties is possible. Using the class group, we construct an object known as a block monoid, which allows us t...

Linear cryptanalysis, along with differential cryptanalysis, is an important tool to evaluate the security of block ciphers. This work introduces a novel extension of linear cryptanalysis – zero-correlation linear cryptanalysis – a technique applicable to many block cipher constructions. It is based on linear approximations with a correlation value of exactly zero. For a permutation on n bits, ...

A pair of matrices is said to be imbeddable precisely when one is an isometric projection of the other on a suitable subspace. The concept of imbedding has been the subject of extensive study. Particular emphasis has been placed on relating the spectra of the matrices involved, especially when both matrices are Hermitian or normal. In this paper, the notion of block imbedding is introduced and ...

Applications in constrained optimization (and other areas) produce symmetric matrices with a natural block 2 2 structure. An optimality condition leads to the problem of perturbing the (1,1) block of the matrix to achieve a speci®c inertia. We derive a perturbation of minimal norm, for any unitarily invariant norm, that increases the number of nonnegative eigenvalues by a given amount, and we s...