Vikas Srivastava

Vikas Srivastava, Debasish Roy, Sihem Mesnager et al.

Voting is a primary democratic activity through which voters select representatives or approve policies. Conventional paper ballot elections have several drawbacks that might compromise the fairness, effectiveness, and accessibility of the voting process. Therefore, there is an increasing need to design safer, effective, and easily accessible alternatives. E-Voting is one such solution that uses digital tools to simplify voting. Existing state-of-the-art designs for secure E-Voting are based on number-theoretic hardness assumptions. These designs are no longer secure due to quantum algorithms such as Shor's algorithm. We present the design and analysis of \textit{first} post-quantum secure end-to-end verifiable E-Voting protocol based on multivariate polynomials to address this issue. The security of our proposed design depends on the hardness of the MQ problem, which is an NP-hard problem. We present a simple yet efficient design involving only standard cryptographic primitives as building blocks.

Somnath Kumar, Kunal Dey, Vikas Srivastava et al.

The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) introduces challenges in secure authentication and delegation due to the limited computational capabilities of devices. Proxy signature schemes offer an effective solution by enabling controlled delegation of signing rights to more capable entities, such as gateway nodes. However, most existing schemes rely on classical assumptions that are likely to be broken by quantum adversaries. In this work, we address these challenges by proposing an isogeny-based post-quantum proxy signature scheme, \textit{CSI-PS}. The scheme leverages the hardness of the Group Action Inverse Problem (GAIP) to ensure quantum-resistant security while maintaining efficiency suitable for resource-constrained environments. We further demonstrate its applicability in IoT architectures through a gateway-based delegation model. Our analysis shows that the proposed scheme strikes an effective balance between security and efficiency in terms of computation and communication overhead, along with provable security under the EUF-CMA notion.

Daanish Aleem Qureshi, Khemraj Shukla, Vikas Srivastava

Accurate modeling of drug release is essential for designing and developing controlled-release systems. Classical models (Fick, Higuchi, Peppas) rely on simplifying assumptions that limit their accuracy in complex geometries and release mechanisms. Here, we propose a novel approach using Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) and Bayesian PINNs (BPINNs) for predicting release from planar, 1D-wrinkled, and 2D-crumpled films. This approach uniquely integrates Fick's diffusion law with limited experimental data to enable accurate long-term predictions from short-term measurements, and is systematically benchmarked against classical drug release models. We embedded Fick's second law into PINN as loss with 10,000 Latin-hypercube collocation points and utilized previously published experimental datasets to assess drug release performance through mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE), considering noisy conditions and limited-data scenarios. Our approach reduced mean error by up to 40% relative to classical baselines across all film types. The PINN formulation achieved RMSE <0.05 utilizing only the first 6% of the release time data (reducing 94% of release time required for the experiments) for the planar film. For wrinkled and crumpled films, the PINN reached RMSE <0.05 in 33% of the release time data. BPINNs provide tighter and more reliable uncertainty quantification under noise. By combining physical laws with experimental data, the proposed framework yields highly accurate long-term release predictions from short-term measurements, offering a practical route for accelerated characterization and more efficient early-stage drug release system formulation.