Antithrombin III prevents and rapidly reverses leukocyte recruitment in ischemia/reperfusion

BACKGROUND: P-selectin has recently been shown to be essential for leukocyte rolling after the reperfusion of ischemic mesentery. However, the mediators responsible for neutrophil rolling in ischemic microvessels remain entirely unclear. METHODS AND RESULTS: Intravital microscopy was used to examine leukocyte kinetics in a feline mesentery ischemia/reperfusion model. Sixty minutes of ischemia followed by reperfusion caused a profound increase in leukocyte rolling and adhesion. Pretreatment with the endogenous antithrombotic agent antithrombin III (ATIII) infused as a bolus (250 U/kg) reduced neutrophil rolling and adhesion to preischemic levels during reperfusion. No effect was seen with heat-inactive ATIII. Importantly, ATIII posttreatment also significantly reduced neutrophil rolling and adhesion during reperfusion, suggesting that ATIII can reverse the leukocyte recruitment response induced by ischemia/reperfusion. Vascular permeability was also reduced by 50% after ATIII administration. To determine whether ATIII could reverse thrombin-induced rolling directly, neutrophil rolling was performed on human endothelium in flow chambers. Indeed, thrombin-induced rolling, but not histamine-induced rolling, could be rapidly reversed with ATIII on endothelium, suggesting that ATIII affects thrombin rather than directly affecting neutrophils or the endothelium. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates for the first time that thrombin plays an important role in ischemia-induced leukocyte rolling and adhesion and that ATIII can be used therapeutically postreperfusion to attenuate the leukocyte recruitment response in inflammation without the nonspecific effects associated with anti-adhesion molecule therapy.     

Universal Service-Providers for Private Information Retrieval

A private information retrieval scheme allows a user to retrieve a data item of his choice from a remote database (or several copies of a database) while hiding from the database owner which particular data item he is interested in. We consider the question of private information retrieval in the so-called ``commodity-based' model, recently proposed by Beaver for practically oriented service-provider Internet applications. We present simple and modular schemes allowing us to reduce dramatically the overall communication involving users, and substantially reduce their computation, using off-line messages sent from service-providers to databases and users. The service-providers do not need to know the database contents nor the future user's requests; all they need to know is an upper bound on the data size. Our solutions can be made resilient against collusions of databases with more than a majority (in fact, all-but-one) of the service-providers. Received 21 September 1998 and revised 21 December 1999 Online publication 19 May 2000     

Almost-Everywhere Secure Computation with Edge Corruptions

We consider secure multi-party computation (MPC) in a setting where the adversary can separately corrupt not only the parties (nodes) but also the communication channels (edges), and can furthermore choose selectively and adaptively which edges or nodes to corrupt. Note that if an adversary corrupts an edge, even if the two nodes that share that edge are honest, the adversary can control the link and thus deliver wrong messages to both players. We consider this question in the information-theoretic setting, and require security against a computationally unbounded adversary.In a fully connected network the above question is simple (and we also provide an answer that is optimal up to a constant factor). What makes the problem more challenging is to consider the case of sparse networks. Partially connected networks are far more realistic than fully connected networks, which led Garay and Ostrovsky [Eurocrypt’08] to formulate the notion of (unconditional) almost everywhere (a.e.) secure computation in the node-corruption model, i.e., a model in which not all pairs of nodes are connected by secure channels and the adversary can corrupt some of the nodes (but not the edges). In such a setting, MPC among all honest nodes cannot be guaranteed due to the possible poor connectivity of some honest nodes with other honest nodes, and hence some of them must be “given up” and left out of the computation. The number of such nodes is a function of the underlying communication graph and the adversarial set of nodes.In this work we introduce the notion of almost-everywhere secure computation with edge corruptions, which is exactly the same problem as described above, except that we additionally allow the adversary to completely control some of the communication channels between two correct nodes—i.e., to “corrupt” edges in the network. While it is easy to see that an a.e. secure computation protocol for the original node-corruption model is also an a.e. secure computation protocol tolerating edge corruptions (albeit for a reduced fraction of edge corruptions with respect to the bound for node corruptions), no polynomial-time protocol is known in the case where a constant fraction of the edges can be corrupted (i.e., the maximum that can be tolerated) and the degree of the network is sublinear.We make progress on this front, by constructing graphs of degree O(n ^? ) (for arbitrary constant 0<?<1) on which we can run a.e. secure computation protocols tolerating a constant fraction of adversarial edges. The number of given-up nodes in our construction is μn (for some constant 0<μ<1 that depends on the fraction of corrupted edges), which is also asymptotically optimal.     

Cryptography in the Multi-string Model

The common random string model introduced by Blum, Feldman, and Micali permits the construction of cryptographic protocols that are provably impossible to realize in the standard model. We can think of this model as a trusted party generating a random string and giving it to all parties in the protocol. However, the introduction of such a third party should set alarm bells going off: Who is this trusted party? Why should we trust that the string is random? Even if the string is uniformly random, how do we know it does not leak private information to the trusted party? The very point of doing cryptography in the first place is to prevent us from trusting the wrong people with our secrets. In this paper, we propose the more realistic multi-string model. Instead of having one trusted authority, we have several authorities that generate random strings. We do not trust any single authority; we only assume a majority of them generate random strings honestly. Our results also hold even if different subsets of these strings are used in different instances, as long as a majority of the strings used at any particular invocation is honestly generated. This security model is reasonable and at the same time very easy to implement. We could for instance imagine random strings being provided on the Internet, and any set of parties that want to execute a protocol just need to agree on which authorities’ strings they want to use. We demonstrate the use of the multi-string model in several fundamental cryptographic tasks. We define multi-string non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs and prove that they exist under general cryptographic assumptions. Our multi-string NIZK proofs have very strong security properties such as simulation-extractability and extraction zero-knowledge, which makes it possible to compose them with arbitrary other protocols and to reuse the random strings. We also build efficient simulation-sound multi-string NIZK proofs for circuit satisfiability based on groups with a bilinear map. The sizes of these proofs match the best constructions in the single common random string model. We also suggest a universally composable commitment scheme in the multi-string model. It has been proven that UC commitment does not exist in the plain model without setup assumptions. Prior to this work, constructions were only known in the common reference string model and the registered public key model. The UC commitment scheme can be used in a simple coin-flipping protocol to create a uniform random string, which in turn enables the secure realization of any multi-party computation protocol.