Recently, the Little Dragon Two and Poly-Dragon multivariate based public-key cryptosystems were proposed as efficient and secure schemes. In particular, the inventors of the two schemes claim that Little Dragon Two and Poly-Dragon resist algebraic cryptanalysis. In this paper, we show that MXL2, an algebraic attack method based on the XL algorithm and Ding’s concept of Mutants, is able to break Little Dragon Two with keys of length up to 229 bits and Poly-Dragon with keys of length up to 299. This contradicts the security claim for the proposed schemes and demonstrates the strength of MXL2 and the Mutant concept. This strength is further supported by experiments that show that in attacks on both schemes the MXL2 algorithm outperforms the Magma’s implementation of F4.

We investigate a periodic quantum graph in the form of a square lattice with a general self-adjoint coupling at the vertices. We analyse the spectrum's high-energy behaviour. Depending on the coupling type, bands and gaps have different asymptotics. Bands may be flat even if the edges are coupled, and non-flat band widths may behave like\mathcal O (n^ j),\, j= 1, 0,-1,-2,-3, as the band index n. The gaps may be of asymptotically constant width or linearly growing with the latter case being generic.

We extend the idea of crossvalidation to choose the smoothing parameters of the double-kernel local linear regression for estimating a conditional density. Our selection rule optimises the estimated conditional density function by minimising the integrated squared error. We also discuss three other bandwidth selection rules, an ad hoc method used by Fan et al. (1996), a bootstrap method of Hall et al. (1999) for bandwidth selection in the estimation of conditional distribution functions, modified by Bashtannyk & Hyndman (2001) to cover conditional density functions, and finally a simple approach proposed by Hyndman & Yao (2002). The performance of the new approach is compared with these three methods by simulation studies, and our method performs outstandingly well. The method is illustrated by an application to estimating the transition density and the Value-at-Risk of treasury-bill data.

1. INDEX THEORY, ELLIPTIC CURVES AND LOOP GROUPS One can look at elliptic genus from several different points of view; from index theory, from representation theory of Kac-Moody affine Lie algebras or from the theory of elliptic functions and modular forms. Each of them shows us some quite different interesting features of ellitic genus. On the other hand we can also combine the forces of these three different mathematical fields to derive many interesting results in topology such as rigidity, divisibility and vanishing of topological invariants..

We treat all the bivariate lack-of-memory (BLM) distributions in a unified approach and develop some new general properties of the BLM distributions, including joint moment generating function, product moments, and dependence structure. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the survival functions of BLM distributions to be totally positive of order two are given. Some previous results about specific BLM distributions are improved. In particular, we show that both the Marshall–Olkin survival copula and survival function are totally positive of all orders, regardless of parameters. Besides, we point out that Slepian’s inequality also holds true for BLM distributions.