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Iran stands out as a significant center of genetic diversity for alfalfa (Medicago sativa) worldwide, harboring diverse types of this plant. Ensuring the authenticity of alfalfa populations and varieties is crucial for farmers and seed producers, as the genetic makeup of this species directly influences forage and seed yield quality. In this study, we developed a method to identify and differentiate key Iranian cultivated alfalfa populations using microsatellite markers. We collected random samples, each containing 100 seeds, from various alfalfa accessions. Nine microsatellite loci were screened and employed to differentiate these populations based on specific allelic genotypes. Notably, the MTIC233, BI90, ACT009, TC7, MTIC183, MS30, MTIC238, and AFCA11 markers exhibited the highest differentiation ability. The genetic distance analysis revealed that 5-B and foreign accessions, as well as 29-N and foreign accessions, were the most distant from each other. Conversely, 27-G, 9-H, and 21-R exhibited the closest genetic similarity. The results revealed that, accessions 9-H, 21-R, 27-G, 25-B, 5-B, and 2-G shared a common genetic background, suggesting their close relatedness. Our proposed method allows straightforward identification of target alfalfa accessions within a short timeframe (one to two days) without the need for DNA extraction from leaves.

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Oblivious transfer (OT) is a basic building block in many cryptographic protocols. A common approach in designing secure multiparty computation protocols is to assume that messages of the protocol are being transmitted over an authenticated channel, where entities have been authenticated to each other before the actual flows of the protocol. However, the mentioned aspect leads to some restrictions in design and development of secure multiparty computations. In this paper, we exploit some well-known authenticated Diffie-Hellman-based key exchange protocols to build three authenticated 1-out-of-2 oblivious transfer protocols. As a result, our schemes incorporate the authentication within the oblivious transfer protocol itself, instead of performing authentication via a separate sub-protocol. We show that the proposed protocols are secure in the semi-honest model. We also compare our new schemes with the previous methods (performing authentication via a separate sub-protocol) which illustrates that our schemes decrease computational and communication complexity for both sender and receiver.