Corrosion morphologies on magnesium alloy AZ 91

Initiation and early propagation of pitting and filiform corrosion on bare alloy AZ91 (9% Al, 1% Zn) are investigated by natural immersion corrosion tests, electrochemical measurements and microanalytical studies. Initiation sites are few. Corrosion spreads from these sites first in the form of filiform corrosion for a limited period of time and pitting which later develops into a cellular type of etching. The important factors affecting filiform corrosion are temperature, material structure and degree of polarization at the anodic sites. Filiform attack on AZ91, unlike the classical mechanisms of filiform corrosion on coated metals, is driven by hydrogen evolution reaction on the cathodic sites of the surface, occurs under significant anodic control, propagates at a high, constant speed independent of degree of polarization along preferential paths determined by compositional and crystallographic factors, and is a temporary phenomenon under open circuit conditions. Pitting corrosion is more predominant with decreasing anodic polarization.     

Ratio of free-to-total prostate specific antigen in serum cannot distinguish patients with prostate cancer from those with chronic inflammation of the prostate

PURPOSE: We demonstrate the effect of chronic inflammation of the prostate on the ratio of free-to-total prostate specific antigen (PSA) in serum calculated as a percentage of free PSA and, therefore, that percentage of free PSA is an unspecific means to distinguish among prostate cancer, chronic prostatitis and benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). MATERIALS AND METHODS: Total, free and percentage of free PSA was measured in 66 men with prostate cancer, 119 with BPH and 17 with asymptomatic chronic prostatitis. In all patients the diagnosis was histopathologically confirmed by microscopic examination of prostatic specimens after sextant biopsy, transurethral prostatic resection or prostatectomy. RESULTS: The median values of total, free and percentage of free PSA were 4.11 microg./l., 0.75 microg./l. and 20.4% in patients with BPH, 10.0 microg./l., 0.84 microg./l. and 8.5% in those with prostate cancer, and 7.60 microg./l., 1.23 microg./l. and 10.6% in those with chronic prostatitis. Patients with prostate cancer and chronic prostatitis had a significantly lower percentage of free PSA than those with BPH. Receiver operating characteristics curve analysis showed that percentage of free PSA as a discriminator between prostate cancer and BPH was not suitable for differentiating between prostate cancer and chronic prostatitis. CONCLUSIONS: Chronic prostatitis is not characterized by elevated total PSA concentrations alone but also by a decreased percentage of free PSA, a tendency similar to that in prostate cancer. This unspecific change in percentage of free PSA must be considered to interpret the percentage of free PSA correctly.     

High-Temperature Creep Behavior of Mixed Conducting La0.5Sr0.5Fe1−xCoxO3-δ (0.5≤x≤1) Materials

Steady-state compressive creep rate of La_0.5Sr_0.5Fe_0.5Co_0.5O_3−δ (LSFC) and La_0.5Sr_0.5CoO_3−δ (LSC) is reported in the temperature region 900°–1050°C and stress range 5–28 MPa. The stress exponents for the two materials were 1.71±0.18 and 1.24±0.15, respectively. The activation energy for creep was considerably higher for LSC (619±56 kJ/mol) than for LSFC (392±28 kJ/mol). The grain size exponent for LSC was 1.28±0.14. Considerably higher creep rates were observed for both materials in N₂ compared with air. Relaxation by creep of chemical-induced stresses in oxygen-permeable membranes is addressed, especially at low partial pressure of oxygen.     

Efficient identity-based GQ multisignatures

ISO/IEC 14888 specifies a variety of digital signature mechanisms to sign messages of arbitrary length. These schemes can be applied to provide entity authentication, data origin authentication, non-repudiation, and data integrity verification. ISO/IEC 14888 consists of three parts under the general title Information technology—Security techniques—Digital signatures. Part II, or ISO/IEC 14888-2 specifies the general structure and the fundamental procedures for the generation and verification of an identity-based signature (IBS) mechanism for messages of arbitrary length. Particularly, the IBS scheme of Guillou and Quisquater (GQ) is described in Clauses 6–8. In this paper, an efficient identity-based multisignature (IBMS) scheme is proposed for the GQ IBS scheme, which allows multiple users using the ISO/IEC 14888-2 standard GQ scheme to generate multisignatures. The scheme is efficient in the sense that both the length and the verification time of the multisignatures are fixed. The proposed ID-based multisignature scheme is also secure against forgeability under adaptive chosen-message attack and adaptive chosen-identity attack in random oracle model.     

Design of DL-based certificateless digital signatures

Public-key cryptosystems without requiring digital certificates are very attractive in wireless communications due to limitations imposed by communication bandwidth and computational resource of the mobile wireless communication devices. To eliminate public-key digital certificate, Shamir introduced the concept of the identity-based (ID-based) cryptosystem. The main advantage of the ID-based cryptosystem is that instead of using a random integer as each user’s public key as in the traditional public-key systems, the user’s real identity, such as user’s name or email address, becomes the user’s public key. However, all identity-based signature (IBS) schemes have the inherent key escrow problem, that is private key generator (PKG) knows the private key of each user. As a result, the PKG is able to sign any message on the users’ behalf. This nature violates the “non-repudiation” requirement of digital signatures. To solve the key escrow problem of the IBS while still taking advantage of the benefits of the IBS, certificateless digital signature (CDS) was introduced. In this paper, we propose a generalized approach to construct CDS schemes. In our proposed CDS scheme, the user’s private key is known only to the user himself, therefore, it can eliminate the key escrow problem from the PKG. The proposed construction can be applied to all Discrete Logarithm (DL)-based signature schemes to convert a digital signature scheme into a CDS scheme. The proposed CDS scheme is secure against adaptive chosen-message attack in the random oracle model. In addition, it is also efficient in signature generation and verification.     

The influence of prostate volume on the ratio of free to total prostate specific antigen in serum of patients with prostate carcinoma and benign prostate hyperplasia

BACKGROUND: Determining the ratio of free to total prostate specific antigen (f-PSA to t-PSA, calculated as the percentage of f-PSA [f-PSA%]) in serum allow for a clearer distinction between patients with prostate carcinoma (PCa) and patients with benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH) than determining the level of t-PSA alone. To find influencing factors on f-PSA%, the authors investigated prostate volume, TNM classification, and tumor stage. METHODS: The authors measured f-PSA and t-PSA in 36 men with untreated PCa (tumor classification: T1, 2, 3pNO, MO), 44 patients with BPH, and 54 healthy controls. Prostate volume was determined by transrectal ultrasound. RESULTS: The median values of t-PSA and f-PSA% were 7.8 micrograms/L and 10.5% in PCa patients, 4.3 micrograms/L and 20.8% in patients with BPH, and 1.4 micrograms/L and 23.6% in the control group. Patients with PCa had a significantly lower proportion of f-PSA than BPH patients and healthy men. There was no correlation of f-PSA% to TNM stage or tumor grade. In PCa patients a significant positive correlation (correlation coefficient [r] = 0.51, P < 0.001) was found between f-PSA% and prostate volume, whereas there was no significant correlation in BPH patients (r = -0.27, P > 0.05). There was a significant difference in f-PSA% between PCa and BPH patients with prostate volumes smaller than 40 cm3 (9.0% vs. 21.6%, P < 0.01) but not between patients in these 2 groups with prostate volumes exceeding 40 cm3 (15.1% vs. 18.2%, P = 0.11). CONCLUSIONS: Determining the ratio of f-PSA to t-PSA to discriminate between PCa and BPH patients yields significant results only in men with a prostate volume of less than 40 cm3.     

Environmental issues related to end‐of‐life options of plastics containing brominated flame retardants

Bromine is used as the building block for some of the most effective flame retarding agents available to the plastics industry today. They are used to protect against the risk of accidental fires in a wide range of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE). Brominated flame retardants (BFRs), as all flame retardants, act to decrease the risk of fire by increasing the fire resistance of the materials in which they are applied. There is a perception that BFRs affect adversely the end‐of‐life management of plastics through formation of Polybrominated Dibenzo Dioxins and Dibenzo Furans (PBDD/F). In fact, there exists a wide range of data and practical experience demonstrating that the end‐of‐life management of plastics containing BFRs is fully compliant with legislation setting the strictest limit values for PBDD/F and is fully compatible with an integrated waste management concept. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

PUF-Based Key Distribution in Wireless Sensor Networks

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) can be seen as kind of hardware oneway functions, who are easily fabricated but difficult to clone, duplicate or predict. Therefore, PUFs with unclonable and unpredictable properties are welcome to be applied in designing lightweight cryptography protocols. In this paper, a Basic Key Distribution Scheme (Basic-KDS) based on PUFs is firstly proposed. Then, by employing different deployment modes, a Random Deployment Key Distribution Scheme (RD-KDS) and a Grouping Deployment Key Distribution Scheme (GD-KDS) are further proposed based on the Basic-KDS for large scale wireless sensor networks. In our proposals, a sensor is not pre-distributed with any keys but will generate one by the embedded PUF when receiving a challenge from the gateway, which provides perfect resilience against sensor capture attacks. Besides, the unclonable and unpredictable properties of PUF guarantee the key uniqueness and two-way authentication. Analysis and experiment results show that our proposals have better performances in improving the resilience, secureconnectivity, and efficiency as compared to other schemes.     

A novel threshold changeable secret sharing scheme

A(t,n)threshold secret sharing scheme is a fundamental tool in many security applications such as cloud computing and multiparty computing.In conventional threshold secret sharing schemes,like Shamir’s scheme based on a univariate polynomial,additional communication key share scheme is needed for shareholders to protect the secrecy of their shares if secret reconstruction is performed over a network.In the secret reconstruction,the threshold changeable secret sharing(TCSS)allows the threshold to be a dynamic value so that if some shares have been compromised in a given time,it needs more shares to reconstruct the secret.Recently,a new secret sharing scheme based on a bivariate polynomial is proposed in which shares generated initially by a dealer can be used not only to reconstruct the secret but also to protect the secrecy of shares when the secret reconstruction is performed over a network.In this paper,we further extend this scheme to enable it to be a TCSS without any modification.Our proposed TCSS is dealer-free and non-interactive.Shares generated by a dealer in our scheme can serve for three purposes,(a)to reconstruct a secret;(b)to protect the secrecy of shares if secret reconstruction is performed over a network;and(c)to enable the threshold changeable property.