Deoxyguanosine kinase (DGUOK) catalyzes the first step of the mitochondrial deoxypurine salvage pathway, the phosphorylation of purine deoxyribonucleosides. Mutations in the DGUOK gene have been linked to inherited mtDNA depletion syndromes, neonatal liver failure, nystagmus, and hypotonia. Previously, we reported the first case of a heterozygous unclassified c.592-4_c.592-3delTT alteration in a patient with DGUOK deficiency without the demonstration of its pathogenicity (Dimmock et al., 2008). This alteration was predicted to cause aberrant splicing based upon two computer algorithms. We now report a homozygous c.592-4_c.592-3delTT mutation found in two affected siblings of asymptomatic consanguineous parents. The proband presented with symptoms of idiopathic hepatitis, liver dysfunction, nystagmus, and retinal blindness. This individual died at 6months of age due to liver failure. This individual’s affected sibling presented similarly and has remarkable elevations of tyrosine, methionine, and alanine. Many organic acids were elevated in urine, including lactic acid, Krebs cycle intermediates, and para-hydroxy compounds; ketone bodies were also present. RNA studies support aberrant splicing. Sequencing of cDNA detected exon 5 skipping in the two affected siblings, but not in the normal control. These results indicate that the homozygous c.592-4_c.592-3delTT is deleterious and responsible for the DGUOK deficiency. The parents were subsequently confirmed to be carriers of this mutation. In summary, we have demonstrated that c.592-4_c.592-3delTT is a pathogenic splice acceptor site mutation leading to DGUOK deficiency.

The systems that are able to detect suspicious or malicious activities are a fundamental component in the security process of every organization. These systems generate alerts that correspond to individual events and, in general, these systems do not show the relationships between them. It is important to examine the security data within their overall context in order to better understand what is happening in our systems. In this work, we present a correlation model based on the concept of vector clocks. We also present a tool that is our implementation of this correlation mechanism. This tool can be used by security analysts to generate graphs showing the relationships between the reported events and possibly discovering unknown attack patterns.

Electronic voting has been an active research area since two decades, which involves using information systems and cryptographic schemes in order to reduce costs and human mistakes as well as increase process speed, without discard its security. In the literature there exist some proposals,

Recently, there has been an increasing interest to improve the efficiency in election processes which has brought as a consequence a wide range of proposals for electronic voting. Electronic voting protocols are a reasonable alternative to conventional elections. Nevertheless, they are facing an evolution due to its requirements, especially the ones needed to provide full security considered to represent a democratic electronic vote. In the literature, different protocols based on public key schemes have been proposed to meet such security requirements. In this paper, we propose the use of bilinear pairings in order to provide the security requirements that an electronic voting protocol must meet, without requiring the entire infrastructure needed in a public key scheme. Proposed protocol considers two cryptographic primitives as main building blocks: threshold and blind signature schemes. It is divided in four main stages: set-up, authentication, voting and counting. Moreover, it meets privacy, accuracy and robustness by using bilinear pairings. We make a comparative analysis, which is based on its performance and the key pairs, Trust and Certification Authorities it requires.

Computer forensics investigations are based on the evidence search process to determine the intruder techniques and activities. Current tools are mainly focused in gathering evidence from the target system however its analysis is a highly complicated task. In this paper, we present an Automated Forensic Diagnosis System composed by a Knowledge Attack Base and a series of log analysis processes working all together to reconstruct the attack actions after a security incident occurred. The log analysis is carried out by an Event Correlation Module which helps detecting multi-step attacks as well as reducing the false positive rate. The goal is to assist the forensic investigator reducing the time and complexity of the process.

Electronic voting has been an active research area since two decades, which involves using information systems and cryptographic schemes in order to reduce costs and human mistakes as well as increase process speed, without discard its security. In the literature there exist some proposals, which are based on the difficult to resolve mathematical problems such as: prime factorization or discrete logarithm, both of them from Public Key Cryptography. In this paper we describe an electronic voting protocol that meets privacy, transparency and robustness by using a scheme from Identity Based Cryptography. The proposed protocol is divided in four main phases: set-up, authentication, voting and counting and involves a distributed responsibility model, with t out of n entities that are required during the counting phase to decrypt the votes. The paper includes a correctness test to show how the protocol works.

Electronic voting protocols are a reasonable alternative to conventional elections. Nevertheless, they are facing an evolution due to its requirements, especially the ones needed to provide full security considered to represent a democratic electronic vote. Different algorithms, based on public key schemes, have been proposed in the literature to meet these security requirements. We propose the use of threshold cryptography and bilinear pairings in order to provide the security requirements that an electronic voting protocol must meet, without requiring the entire infrastructure needed in a public key scheme. We make a comparative analysis of our proposal with other electronic voting protocols. It is based in their performance and the cryptographic primitives they use.

It is shown that, in the Bondi-Sachs gauge that fixes the speed of incoming light rays to the value 1, the Einstein equations coupled to a scalar field in spherical symmetry are cast into a symmetric-hyperbolic system of equations for the scalar field, lapse and shift as fundamental variables. In this system of equations, the lapse and shift are incoming characteristic fields, and the scalar field has three components: incoming, outgoing and static. A constraint-preserving boundary condition is prescribed by imposing the projection of the Einstein equation normal to the boundary at the outer value of the radial coordinate. The boundary condition specifies one of the two incoming metric fields. The remaining incoming metric field and the incoming scalar field component need to be specified arbitrarily. Numerical simulations of the scattering of the scalar field by a black hole in the nonlinear regime are presented that illustrate interesting facts about black-hole physics and the behavior of the characteristic variables of the problem.

Adding security functions in existing Web application servers is now vital for the IS of companies and organizations. Writing crosscutting functions in complex software should take advantage of the modularity offered by new software development approaches. With aspect-oriented programming (AOP), separating concerns when designing an application fosters reuse, parameterization and maintenance. In this paper, we design a security aspect called AProSec for detecting SQL injection and Cross Scripting Site (XSS) that are common attacks in Web servers. We experiment this aspect with the AspectJ language and the JBoss AOP framework. With this experimentation, we show the advantage of runtime platforms such as JBoss AOP for changing security policies at runtime. Finally, we describe related work on security and AOP

Computer forensics searches for evidence to reassemble the actions that led the system from a secure state to the moment an intrusion was detected The main source of data for a forensic investigation is the information provided by log files. Log files are generated by applications to keep a register of the actions occurred on the system. However, the massive amount of recorded events complicates the forensic investigation. A model composed by a set of agents in order to collect, filter, normalize, and to correlate events coming from diverse log files is proposed in this paper. The purpose of the model is to assist the analyst in the evidence search process of a forensic investigation.

We present a new computational framework (LEO) that enables us to carry out the very first large-scale, high-resolution computations in the context of the characteristic approach in numerical relativity. At the analytic level, our approach is based on a new implementation of the eth formalism, using a nonstandard representation of the spin-raising and spin-lowering angular operators in terms of nonconformal coordinates on the sphere; we couple this formalism to a partially first-order reduction (in the angular variables) of the Einstein equations. The numerical implementation of our approach supplies the basic building blocks for a highly parallel, easily extensible numerical code. We demonstrate the adaptability and excellent scaling of our numerical code by solving, within our numerical framework, for a scalar field minimally coupled to gravity (the Einstein-Klein-Gordon problem) in 3 dimensions. The nonlinear code is globally second-order convergent, and has been extensively tested using as a reference a calibrated code with the same initial and boundary data and radial marching algorithm. In this context, we show how accurately we can follow quasinormal mode ringing. In the linear regime, we show energy conservation for a number of initial data sets with varying angular structure. A striking result that arises in this context is the saturation of the flow of energy through the Schwarzschild radius. As a final calibration check, we perform a large simulation with resolution never achieved before.

Event logging and log files are playing an important role in system and network security. Log files record computer system activities, are used to provide requirements of reliability, security and accountability applications. Information stored in log files can be obtained from different devices, not necessarily clock synchronized, and they do not arrive in the same order they are generated. Nevertheless, log information has to be coherent in time to be useful. To support the events we propose to use Lamport's logic clocks, originated at different sources, in a causal relationship. As a result the administrator will count all the events involved general idea in a computer incident. A model implementation is also presented.

Background. Balneotherapy is among the most widely used modalities of physical therapy in countries rich in mineral waters. This trial was intended to ascertain whether balneotherapy (i.e., therapeutic bath in mineral water) has any influence on the antioxidant system and whether there are any differences compared to bathing in tap water.Methods. The ten subjects in Group I bathed in alkaline thermal water, Group II used alkaline, chlorine-containing mineral water, whereas Group III bathed in tap water. Catalase, superoxide dismutase, malondialdehyde protein and glutathione peroxidase levels were measured at baseline and after concluding the course of balneotherapy.Results. Balneotherapy with either of the two mineral waters reduced the activity of all four enzymes studied. Using tap water, however, had no influence on either catalase or superoxide dismutase activity after one session or glutathione peroxidase levels after a course of ten balneotherapy treatments.Conclusions. Thermal water may have a beneficial effect on the formation of free radicals. The therapeutic efficacy of mineral vs. tap water is different, although bathing in hot water itself reduces enzyme activity. (C) 2007 IMSS. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Two of the most used tools in the area of computer security are the firewalls and the Intrusion Detection Systems. Both of them fulfill the task for which they were designed for but unfortunately their response to an attack can be limited. The communication of both tools increases the response capacity of the system, but we need a protocol to communicate them. In this paper we present how is to communicate two security tools: snort and Iptables. The communication is based on the Intrusion Detection Message Exchange Format (IDMEF) proposed by the Intrusion Detection Working Group (IDWG).

The aim of this paper is to show some solutions for key management in ad hoc networks. The major problem in providing security services in such infrastructure less networks is how to manage the cryptographic keys that are needed. In order to design practical and sufficient key management systems it is necessary to understand the characteristics of ad hoc networks and why traditional key management systems cannot be used.

Steganography is defined as the art and science of hiding information, it takes one piece of information and hides it within another. The piece more used to hide information are the digital images. In this paper we present a way to use unused fields in the IP header of TCP/IP packets in order to send information between to nodes over Internet.

Incorporating various specialty libraries in different programming languages (FORTRAN and C/C++) with the main body of the source code remains a major challenge for developing scientific and engineering application software packages. The main difficulty originates from the fact that Fortran 90/95 pointers and C/C++ pointers are structurally different. In this paper, we present a technique that allows us to circumvent this difficulty without using any nonstandard features of these programming languages. This technique has helped us to develop a FORTRAN 90/95 interface for the GrACE library, which is written in C++ for facilitating spacial grid generation, adaptive mesh refinement, and load balance maintenance. The method outlined in this presentation provides a general guideline for the creation of the FORTRAN 90/95 interface for a C/C++ library. We show that this method is system independent and has low overhead cost, and can be easily extended to situations where building the C/C++ interface for a FORTRAN 90/95 application library is required.