Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB): Open Journal Systems
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How delusions can uncover sources of harm and pathology: The epistemic value of interoceptive and unconscious information
Get PDFPrevailing views of delusional beliefs frame them as pathological and harmful, leaving little room for understanding why delusions may emerge. Lisa Bortolotti’s book, “Why Delusions Matter,” offers a more compassionate perspective on delusions, framing them as adaptive and meaningful responses to crises. Many psychologists and philosophers have asserted that delusions can function as psychological defense mechanisms or adaptive coping strategies that protectively obscure painful realities. However, some delusions, especially those that arise in the context of traumatic experiences and psychosis, can be better understood as the body’s attempt to alert us to sources of harm and reveal, rather than obscure, important information. Drawing from neuroscience literature and the author’s personal encounters with psychosis and trauma, this article explores the ways in which some delusions can help us access interoceptive information from the body, uncovering sources of pathology, as well as previously unconscious information about harmful traumatic experiences. Ultimately, taking an epistemic justice lens to delusions, uplifts their value in revealing very real embodied experiences of the individual expressing them
Zoraida and Carcayona: Female Christian and Muslim Converts in Early Modern Spanish Literature
No full textStudies on the representation of Muslim women in early modern Spanish literature are not numerous, and aspects of their religious identities and conversions are usually less examined. This paper focuses on the role of female Muslim characters in texts written between the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Spain. In these works the female protagonists convert to a new faith: One to Islam, the other to Christianity. In doing so, they cut ties with the fatherly figure in order to follow the new religion. My research attempts to answer two questions: What does the paternal house represent in regards to the faith that the daughters are rejecting? What role does Islam play in the different approach to female characters’ faith?
In order to carry out my study, I analyze two texts: The first one is La leyenda de la doncella Carcayona (Legend of the Damsel Carcayçiyona) (Aragon, c. 1587), where the protagonist, Carcayçiyona, abandons paganism for Islam; the second is Miguel de Cervantes’s “The Captive’s Tale” (“Historia del cautivo”), a novella inserted in his famous Don Quixote, Part I (Madrid, 1605), where Zoraida, the daughter of a wealthy and powerful Algerian Muslim, converts from Islam to Christianity.
By setting parallels among the female protagonists’ religious conversion and focusing on their voluntary estrangement from their fathers, I argue that in both texts, fathers represent the rejected faith while daughters are depicted as the carriers of the newly adopted religion, be it Islam or Christianity. More importantly, since in both cases women are formerly or newly converted Muslims, and the texts are produced in a Christian-ruled nation, this paper underscores the complexities of the encounters between Islam and Christianity in a Mediterranean setting
Bit t-SNI Secure Multiplication Gadget for Inner Product Masking
No full textMasking is a sound countermeasure to protect against differential power analysis. Since the work by Balasch et al. in ASIACRYPT 2012, inner product masking has been explored as an alternative to the well known Boolean masking. In CARDIS 2017, Poussier et al. showed that inner product masking achieves higherorder security versus Boolean masking, for the same shared size, in the bit-probing model. Wang et al. in TCHES 2020 verified the inner product masking’s security order amplification in practice and proposed new gadgets for inner product masking. Finally, Wu et al. in TCHES 2022 showed that this security amplification comes from the bit-probing model, but that Wang et al.’s gadgets are not higher-order bitprobing secure reducing the computation’s practical security. The authors concluded their work with the open question of providing an inner product multiplication gadget which maintains the masking’s bit-probing security, and conjectured that such gadget maintains the practical security order amplification of the masking during its computation.In this paper, we answer positively to Wu et al.’s open problems. We are the first to present a multiplication gadget for inner product masking which is proven secure in the bit-level probing model using the t-Strong Non-Interference (SNI) property. Moreover, we provide practical evidence that the gadget indeed maintains the security amplification of its masking. This is done via an evaluation of an assembly implementation of the gadget on an ARM Cortex-M4 core. We used this implementation to take leakage measurements and show no leakage happens for orders below the gadget’s bit-probing security level either for its univariate or multivariate analysis
A High-performance NTT/MSM Accelerator for Zero-knowledge Proof Using Load-balanced Fully-pipelined Montgomery Multiplier
No full textZero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is an attractive cryptographic paradigm that allows a party to prove the correctness of a given statement without revealing any additional information. It offers both computation integrity and privacy, witnessing many celebrated deployments, such as computation outsourcing and cryptocurrencies. Recent general-purpose ZKP schemes, e.g., zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (zk-SNARK), suffer from time-consuming proof generation, which is mainly bottlenecked by the large-scale number theoretic transformation (NTT) and multi-scalar point multiplication (MSM). To boost its wide application, great interest has been shown in expediting the proof generation on various platforms like GPU, FPGA and ASIC.So far as we know, current works on the hardware designs for ZKP employ two separated data-paths for NTT and MSM, overlooking the potential of resource reusage. In this work, we particularly explore the feasibility and profit of implementing both NTT and MSM with a unified and high-performance hardware architecture. For the crucial operator design, we propose a dual-precision, load-balanced and fully-pipelined Montgomery multiplier (LBFP MM) by introducing the new mixed-radix technique and improving the prior quotient-decoupled strategy. Collectively, we also integrate orthogonal ideas to further enhance the performance of LBFP MM, including the customized constant multiplication, truncated LSB/MSB multiplication/addition and Karatsuba technique. On top of that, we present the unified, scalable and highperformance hardware architecture that conducts both NTT and MSM in a versatile pipelined execution mechanism, intensively sharing the common computation and memory resource. The proposed accelerator manages to overlap the on-chip memory computation with off-chip memory access, considerably reducing the overall cycle counts for NTT and MSM.We showcase the implementation of modular multiplier and overall architecture on the BLS12-381 elliptic curve for zk-SNARK. Extensive experiments are carried out under TSMC 28nm synthesis and similar simulation set, which demonstrate impressive improvements: (1) the proposed LBFP MM obtains 1.8x speed-up and 1.3x less area cost versus the state-of-the-art design; (2) the unified accelerator achieves 12.1x and 5.8x acceleration for NTT and MSM while also consumes 4.3x lower overall on-chip area overhead, when compared to the most related and advanced work PipeZK
Jackson, Diderot and the round and red cherries
No full textThis article explores what Diderot\u27s treatment of Molyneux\u27s question can teach us about qualia. Is there within perception an irreducible dimension of sensory donation that grants us access to specific knowledge, which cannot be obtained otherwise? In section 1, I place the story of the child who would never have seen red in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding in relation to Jackson\u27s example of Mary the physicist who knows the whole theory of optics without ever having seen a colour. In section 2, I reinterpret Diderot\u27s response, which offers an alternative approach to Molyneux\u27s question and consequently to the problem of qualia. Indeed, Diderot considered the idea that a blind mathematician, upon gaining sight, could distinguish and demonstrate the respective properties of the circle and the square
Molyneux\u27s question about perceptual knowledge
No full textMolyneux addressed his question to Locke in two forms. The question that is most often discussed in the literature is the 1693 version–about whether a newly sighted man could distinguish a globe and a cube when they are presented to his sight alone. But in 1688, he asked whether this man could know which was the globe. While Locke and Molyneux probably thought this an unnecessary add-on, we argue that it changes the question. Locke had no account of how one could know a contingent singular fact by sight or by vision. We argue that we know in these ways by using a process of active sensory exploration that employs the modality in question. A new form of Molyneux’s question emerges from this understanding of perceptual knowledge. While the variety of sensory exploration methods within and across modalities raises considerable difficulties for a positive answer, the original question, like the later version, can ultimately be answered only by empirical investigation
Exploring the Six Worlds of Gröbner Basis Cryptanalysis: Application to Anemoi
No full textGröbner basis cryptanalysis of hash functions and ciphers, and their underlying permutations, has seen renewed interest recently. Anemoi (Crypto’23) is a permutation-based hash function that is efficient for a variety of arithmetizations used in zero-knowledge proofs. In this paper, exploring both theoretical bounds as well as experimental validation, we present new complexity estimates for Gröbner basis attacks on the Anemoi permutation over prime fields.We cast our findings in what we call the six worlds of Gröbner basis cryptanalysis. As an example, keeping the same security arguments of the design, we conclude that at least 41 instead of 37 rounds would need to be used for 256-bit security, whereby our suggestion does not yet include a security margin
FANNG-MPC: Framework for Artificial Neural Networks and Generic MPC
No full textIn this work, we introduce FANNG-MPC, a versatile secure multi-party computation framework capable to offer active security for privacy-preserving machine learning as a service (MLaaS). Derived from the now deprecated SCALE-MAMBA, FANNG is a data-oriented fork, featuring novel set of libraries and instructions for realizing private neural networks, effectively reviving the popular framework. To the best of our knowledge, FANNG is the first MPC framework to offer actively secure MLaaS in the dishonest majority setting.FANNG goes beyond SCALE-MAMBA by decoupling offline and online phases and materializing the dealer model in software, enabling a separate set of entities to produce offline material. The framework incorporates database support, a new instruction set for pre-processed material, including garbled circuits and convolutional and matrix multiplication triples. FANNG also implements novel private comparison protocols and an optimized library supporting Neural Network functionality. All our theoretical claims are substantiated by an extensive evaluation using an open-sourced implementation, including the private inference of popular neural networks like LeNet and VGG16
OT-PCA: New Key-Recovery Plaintext-Checking Oracle Based Side-Channel Attacks on HQC with Offline Templates
No full textIn this paper, we introduce OT-PCA, a novel approach for conducting Plaintext-Checking (PC) oracle based side-channel attacks, specifically designed for Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC). By calling the publicly accessible HQC decoder, we build offline templates that enable efficient extraction of soft information for hundreds of secret positions with just a single PC oracle call. Our method addresses critical challenges in optimizing key-related information extraction, including maximizing decryption output entropy and ensuring error pattern independence, through the use of genetic-style algorithms.Extensive simulations demonstrate that our new attack method significantly reduces the required number of oracle calls, achieving a 2.4-fold decrease for hqc-128 and even greater reductions for hqc-192 and hqc-256 compared to current state-of-the-art methods. Notably, the attack shows strong resilience against inaccuracy in the PC oracle—when the oracle accuracy decreases to 95%, the reduction factor in oracle call requirements increases to 7.6 for hqc-128.Lastly, a real-world evaluation conducted using power analysis on a platform with an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller validates the practical applicability and effectiveness of our approach
Locke’s architecture of ideas and cross-modal recognition: A new approach to Locke\u27s answer to Molyneux\u27s question
No full textIt’s been more than three hundred years since William Molyneux posed his now-famous question to John Locke. While it’s clear Locke agrees with Molyneux that someone born blind and made to see would be unable to recognize at first sight the objects he knew previously only by touch (cross-modal recognition), why Locke thinks this is never made explicit in his Essay or elsewhere. I argue here that this lack of clear textual support motivates the need for a new approach to explaining Locke’s answer to Molyneux’s question. The new approach I offer here is to consider what successful Lockean cross-modal recognition might look like given his “Architecture of Ideas,” the work of his Essay to account for mental content, from simple sensory ideas to knowledge. This allows us to identify which ideas and mental faculties he would likely consider essential for success at Molyneux’s task, and which, if lacking, explain the newly sighted man’s failure. Furthermore, this approach yields some surprising results: there is more than one reason the newly sighted person would fail. And adjusting the question to involve a cross-modal comparison of two-dimensional shapes does not require Locke to change his answer to ‘yes’