The main goal of Simon’s Algorithm is to find the period of periodic functions. However, if the target function does not satisfy Simon's promise completely or if the number of superposition queries of the adversary is limited, Simon's algorithm cannot compute the actual period, unambiguously. These problems may lead to the failure of period-finding-based (PFB) Quantum attacks. We focus in this paper on relaxing Simon's algorithm so that Quantum adversaries can still carry out the mentioned attacks without any assumptions on the target function. To that end, we use two different methods, which are suitable for some of PFB Quantum attacks. In the first method, as a complement to Kaplan's suggestion, we show that using Simon's algorithm one can find proper partial periods of Boolean vector functions, so that the probability of their establishment, independent of the target function, is directly related to the number of the attacker's Quantum queries. Next, we examine how one can use partial period instead of the actual one. The advantage of this method is twofold: It enables the attackers to perform the Quantum PFB distinguishers, with smaller number of Quantum queries than those of the previous relaxation method. On the other hand, it generalizes the previous forgery attacks on modes of operation for message authentication codes. In the second method, we use Grover's algorithm, as a complement to Simon's algorithm in Quantum key recovery attacks. This ensures that the time complexity of the mentioned attacks is less than that of a Quantum brute-force attack.

Currently, carbon Quantum dots have attracted considerable attention due to their unique properties and desirable advantages. High crystallinity, water solubility, good dispersibility, small size, low toxicity, inexpensive raw materials, high chemical stability, environmental compatibility, low cost, stability under light, desirable charge transfer with advanced electronic conductivity, as well as specific thermal and mechanical properties are some of these features. Carbon Quantum dots have various applications in different fields. Fabrication of precise chemical and biological sensors, bioimaging, solar cells, drug tracking, nanomedicine, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and electrocatalysts are some of these applications. Biological sensors based on carbon Quantum dots are capable of detecting various metal ions, acids, proteins, biotin, polypeptides, DNA and miRNA, water pollutants, hematin, drugs, vitamins, and other chemicals. In the present study, the properties of carbon Quantum dots and some of their fabrication and applications methods have been addressed. In continuation of the paper, the effect of carbon Quantum dots on important factors in plants such as growth and development, photosynthesis, absorption and transportation of substances, resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, as well as their application in agriculture has been investigated.

Hash functions have a very important role in network and telecommunication security. These functions play an important role in hashing a message which are widely used in cryptographic applications such as digital signatures, random number generator algorithms, authentication protocols, and so on. Rotational Cryptanalysis is a relatively new attack that is part of a generic attack on hash functions and is effective on algorithms that have an ARX structure. In this paper, for the first time, we apply a rotational Cryptanalysis and with the given assumption of the markov chain for the modular additions sequence employed in two algorithms Shabal and CubeHash, which are second-round candidates for the SHA-3 competition that use the ARX property in their structure. With the implementation of rotational Cryptanalysis we arrived at the complexity of 2-3393. 58 for the entire 16+3-rounds Shabal algorithm and the complexity of 2-57. 6 for the en-tire 16-round CubeHash algorithm. According to the obtained results, it can be seen that due to the large number of modular additions with the given assumption of markov chain, the Shabal algorithm exhibits greater resistance to rotational Cryptanalysis, compared to the CubeHash algorithm and is less likely to succeed.

In this paper we analyze the security of SEAS protocol. The only security goal of this protocol is to authenticate the RFID tag to the RFID reader which, in this paper, we show that the protocol does not satisfy this property. Hence, we do not recommend this protocol to be employed in any application. In this paper we present a tag impersonation attack against it. Tag impersonation attack is a forgery attack in which the reader authenticates the attacker as a legitimate tag. Our tag impersonation attack’s success probability, which is the first attack against the SEAS protocol to the best of our knowledge, is “1” and its complexity is only two runs of protocol.

The A5/1 algorithm is one of the most famous stream cipher algorithms used for over-the-air communication privacy in GSM. The purpose of this paper is to analyze several weaknesses of A5/1, including an improvement to an attack and investigation of the A5/1 state transition. Biham and Dunkelman proposed an attack on A5/1 with a time and data complexity of 239.91and 221.1, respectively.In this paper, we propose a method for identification and elimination of useless states from the pre-computed tables and a new approach to access the table in the online phase of the attack which reduces the time complexity to 237.89 and the required memory in half. Furthermore, we discuss another weakness of A5/1 by investigating its internal state transition and its keystream sequence period. Consequently, the internal states are divided into two classes, initially periodic and ultimately periodic. The presented model is verified using a variety of simulations which are consistent with the theoretical results.

AES - CMCCv1, AVALANCHEv1, CLOCv1, and SILCv1 are four candidates of the first round of CAESAR. CLOCv1 is presented in FSE 2014 and SILCv1 is designed upon it with the aim of optimizing the hardware implementation cost. In this paper, structural weaknesses of these candidates are studied. We present distinguishing attacks against AES - CMCCv1 with the complexity of two queries and the success probability of almost 1, and distinguishing attacks on CLOCv1 and SILCv1 with the complexity of O (2n/2) queries and the success probability of 0:63, in which n is bit length of message blocks. In addition, a forgery attack is presented against AVALANCHEv1 which requires only one query and has the success probability of 1. The attacks reveal weaknesses in the structure of these first round candidates and inaccuracy of their security claims.

Deoxys is a final-round candidate of the CAESAR competition. Deoxys is built upon an internal tweakable block cipher Deoxys-BC, where in addition to the plaintext and key, it takes an extra non-secret input called a tweak. This paper presents the first impossible differential Cryptanalysis of Deoxys-BC-256 which is used in Deoxys as an internal tweakable block cipher. First, we find a 4.5-round ID characteristic by utilizing a miss-in-the-middle-approach. We then present several Cryptanalysis based upon the 4.5 rounds distinguisher against round-reduced Deoxys-BC-256 in both single-key and related-key settings. Our contributions include impossible differential attacks on up to 8-round Deoxys-BC-256 in the single-key model. Our attack reaches 9 rounds in the related-key related-tweak model which has a slightly higher data complexity than the best previous results obtained by a related-key related-tweak rectangle attack presented at FSE 2018, but requires a lower memory complexity with an equal time complexity.

CAESAR is a competition for designing authenticated encryption schemes (AE). The schemes that are considered in this competition are supported associated data (AEAD). 57 candidates have been submitted to this competition, out of them 30 candidates later announced as the second round candidates. In this paper, we analysis the security of MORUS, a second round candidate of CAESAR, against mixed integer linear programing based linear Cryptanalysis. In this study, the length of associated data is considered as zero (AD|=0|) and linear characteristics for two version of MORUS, MORUS-640 and MORUS-1280, reduced to 3 rounds with bias and respectively are presented. The result of this paper is the first third party linear analysis on round reduced of MORUS, to the best of our knowledge.

CAESAR competition is a competition for the design of cryptographic authenticated encryption schemes with associated data (AEAD). NORX is one of the CEASAR candidates which has been selected for the second round of this completion also. In this paper, the first linear Cryptanalysis of this scheme is presented using mixed integer linear programming (MILP). The analysis conducted in this paper has been done for the reduced round NORX8, NORX16, NORX32 and NORX64. Our best linear characteristics for these variants reduced to one round out of four rounds have biases 2-52, 2-47, 2-21 and 2-76 respectively. Due to the optimized answer for NORX8, this version of reduced NORX provides optimal security against linear attack.

In this paper, we propose a new method to launch a more efficient algebraic Cryptanalysis. Algebraic Cryptanalysis aims at finding the secret key of a cipher by solving a collection of polynomial equations that describe the internal structure of the cipher. Chosen correlated plaintexts, as what appears in higher order differential Cryptanalysis and its derivatives such as cube attack or integral Cryptanalysis, forces many linear relations between intermediate state bits in the cipher. In this paper, we take these polynomial relations into account, so it becomes possible to simplify the equation system arising from algebraic Cryptanalysis, and consequently, solve the polynomial system more efficiently. We take advantage of the Universal Proning technique to provide an efficient method to recover such linear polynomials. Another important parameter in the algebraic Cryptanalysis of ciphers is to effectively describe the cipher. We employ the so-called Forward-Backward representation of S-boxes together with Universal Proning to help provide a more powerful algebraic Cryptanalysis based on Gröbner-basis computation. We show our method is more efficient than doing algebraic Cryptanalysis with MQ representation, and also than employing MQ together with Universal Proning. To show the effectiveness of our approach, we applied it for the Cryptanalysis of several lightweight block ciphers. By this approach, we managed to mount algebraic attack on 12-round LBlock, 6-round MIBS, 7-round PRESENT and 9-round SKINNY light-weight block ciphers, so far.