Polymer Brushes on Silica Nanostructures Prepared by Aminopropylsilatrane Click Chemistry: Superior Antifouling and Biofunctionality.

In nanobiotechnology, the importance of controlling interactions between biological molecules and surfaces is paramount. In recent years, many devices based on nanostructured silicon materials have been presented, such as nanopores and nanochannels. However, there is still a clear lack of simple, reliable, and efficient protocols for preventing and controlling biomolecule adsorption in such structures. In this work, we show a simple method for passivation or selective biofunctionalization of silica, without the need for polymerization reactions or vapor-phase deposition. The surface is simply exposed stepwise to three different chemicals over the course of ∼1 h. First, the use of aminopropylsilatrane is used to create a monolayer of amines, yielding more uniform layers than conventional silanization protocols. Second, a cross-linker layer and click chemistry are used to make the surface reactive toward thiols. In the third step, thick and dense poly(ethylene glycol) brushes are prepared by a grafting-to approach. The modified surfaces are shown to be superior to existing options for silica modification, exhibiting ultralow fouling (a few ng/cm2) after exposure to crude serum. In addition, by including a fraction of biotinylated polymer end groups, the surface can be functionalized further. We show that avidin can be detected label-free from a serum solution with a selectivity (compared to nonspecific binding) of more than 98% without the need for a reference channel. Furthermore, we show that our method can passivate the interior of 150 nm × 100 nm nanochannels in silica, showing complete elimination of adsorption of a sticky fluorescent protein. Additionally, our method is shown to be compatible with modifications of solid-state nanopores in 20 nm thin silicon nitride membranes and reduces the noise in the ion current. We consider these findings highly important for the broad field of nanobiotechnology, and we believe that our method will be very useful for a great variety of surface-based sensors and analytical devices.

Preparation, Properties and Cell Biocompatibility of Room Temperature LCST-Hydrogels Based on Thermoresponsive PEO Stars.

A series of star and linear polymers based on a poly(ethylene oxide) core and poly(diethylene glycol ethyl ether acrylate) outer arms were synthesised by atom-transfer radical polymerization. The polydispersity of the polymers were low, showing good control of initiation and growth. They all showed lower critical solution (LCST) behaviour, and at 30% concentration most gelled at or below room temperature. The behaviour depended on the number and length of the arms, with the polymers with longer arms gelling at a lower temperature and producing stiffer gels. The shear modulus of the gels varied between 1 and 48 kPa, with the gelling temperature varying between 16 and 23 °C. Attempted cell cultures with the polymers proved unsuccessful, which was determined to be due to the high concentration of polymers needed for gelling.

Information Theoretic Security for Shannon Cipher System under Side-Channel Attacks †.

In this paper, we propose a new theoretical security model for Shannon cipher systems under side-channel attacks, where the adversary is not only allowed to collect ciphertexts by eavesdropping the public communication channel but is also allowed to collect the physical information leaked by the devices where the cipher system is implemented on, such as running time, power consumption, electromagnetic radiation, etc. Our model is very robust as it does not depend on the kind of physical information leaked by the devices. We also prove that in the case of one-time pad encryption, we can strengthen the secrecy/security of the cipher system by using an appropriate affine encoder. More precisely, we prove that for any distribution of the secret keys and any measurement device used for collecting the physical information, we can derive an achievable rate region for reliability and security such that if we compress the ciphertext using an affine encoder with a rate within the achievable rate region, then: (1) anyone with a secret key will be able to decrypt and decode the ciphertext correctly, but (2) any adversary who obtains the ciphertext and also the side physical information will not be able to obtain any information about the hidden source as long as the leaked physical information is encoded with a rate within the rate region. We derive our result by adapting the framework of the one helper source coding problem posed and investigated by Ahlswede and Körner (1975) and Wyner (1975). For reliability and security, we obtain our result by combining the result of Csizár (1982) on universal coding for a single source using linear codes and the exponential strong converse theorem of Oohama (2015) for the one helper source coding problem.

Information Theoretic Security for Broadcasting of Two Encrypted Sources under Side-Channel Attacks †.

In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework to analyze the secure communication problem for broadcasting two encrypted sources in the presence of an adversary which launches side-channel attacks. The adversary is not only allowed to eavesdrop the ciphertexts in the public communication channel, but is also allowed to gather additional information on the secret keys via the side-channels, physical phenomenon leaked by the encryption devices during the encryption process, such as the fluctuations of power consumption, heat, or electromagnetic radiation generated by the encryption devices. Based on our framework, we propose a countermeasure against such adversary by using the post-encryption-compression (PEC) paradigm, in the case of one-time-pad encryption. We implement the PEC paradigm using affine encoders constructed from linear encoders and derive the explicit the sufficient conditions to attain the exponential decay of the information leakage as the block lengths of encrypted sources become large. One interesting feature of the proposed countermeasure is that its performance is independent from the type of side information leaked by the encryption devices.