Search

Password‐authenticated key exchange (PAKE) is a cryptographic primitive that can establish secure remote communications between the client and the server, especially with the advantage of amplifying memorable passwords into strong session keys. However, the arrival of the quantum computing era has brought new challenges to traditional PAKE protocols. Thus, designing an efficient post‐quantum PAKE scheme becomes an open research question. In this paper, the authors construct a quantum‐safe PAKE protocol, which is a horizontal extension of the password‐authenticated key (PAK) protocol in the field of module lattices. Subsequently, the authors accompany the proposed protocol with a rigorous security proof in the random oracle model with two adaptions: applying the CDF‐Zipf model to characterise the ability of the adversary and using the pairing with errors assumption to simplify the proof. Taking the flexibility of the module learning with errors (MLWE) problem, the authors elaborately select three parameter sets to meet different application scenarios. Specifically, the authors' Recommended‐PAKE implementation achieves 177‐bit post‐quantum security with a generous margin to cope with later improvement in cryptanalysis. The performance results indicate that the authors' MLWE‐PAKE is quite practical: compared with the latest Yang‐PAK, the authors' Recommended‐PAK reduces the communication cost and the running time by 36.8% and 13.8%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urbanization can induce environmental changes such as the urban heat island effect, which in turn influence the terrestrial ecosystem. However, the effect of urbanization on the phenology of subtropical vegetation remains relatively unexplored. This study analyzed the changing trend of vegetation photosynthetic phenology in Dongting Lake basin, China, and its response to urbanization using nighttime light and chlorophyll fluorescence datasets. Our results indicated the start of the growing season (SOS) of vegetation in the study area was significantly advanced by 0.70 days per year, whereas the end of the growing season (EOS) was delayed by 0.24 days per year during 2000–2017. We found that urbanization promoted the SOS advance and EOS delay. With increasing urbanization intensity, the sensitivity of SOS to urbanization firstly increased then decreased, while the sensitivity of EOS to urbanization decreased with urbanization intensity. The climate sensitivity of vegetation phenology varied with urbanization intensity; urbanization induced an earlier SOS by increasing preseason minimum temperatures and a later EOS by increasing preseason precipitation. These findings improve our understanding of the vegetation phenology response to urbanization in subtropical regions and highlight the need to integrate human activities into future vegetation phenology models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]