With the phenomenal explosion in online services, social networks are becoming an emerging ubiquitous platform for numerous services where service consumers require the selection of trustworthy service providers before invoking services with the help of other intermediate participants. Under this circumstance, evaluation of the trustworthiness of the service provider along the social trust paths from the service consumer to the service provider is required and to this end, selection of the optimal social trust path (OSTP) that can yield the most trustworthy evaluation result is a pre-requisite. OSTP selection with multiple quality of trust (QoT) constraints has been proven to be NP-Complete. Heuristic algorithms with polynomial and pseudo-polynomial-time complexities are often used to deal with this problem. However, existing solutions cannot guarantee the search efficiency, that is, they have difficulty in avoiding suboptimal solutions during the search process. Quantum annealing uses delocalization and tunneling to avoid local minima without sacrificing execution time. Several recent studies have proven that it is a promising way to tackle many optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a novel quantum annealing based OSTP selection algorithm (QA_OSTP) for large-scale complex social networks. Experiments show that QA_OSTP has better performance than its heuristic counterparts.

We present a hierarchical replicated state machine (H-RSM) and its corresponding consensus protocol D-Paxos for replication across multiple data centers in the cloud. Our H-RSM is based on the idea of parallel processing and aims to improve resource utilization. We detail D-Paxos and theoretically prove that D-Paxos implements an H-RSM. With batching and logical pipelining, D-Paxos efficiently utilizes the idle time caused by high-latency message transmission in a wide-area network and available bandwidth in a local-area network. Experiments show that D-Paxos provides higher throughput and better scalability than other Paxos variants for replication across multiple data centers. To predict the optimal batch sizes when D-Paxos reaches its maximum throughput, an analytical model is developed theoretically and validated experimentally.

We propose a recursive algorithm to reduce the computational complexity of the r-order nonlinearity of n-variable Boolean functions. Applying the algorithm and using the sufficient and necessary condition put forward by [1] to cut the vast majority of useless search branches, we show that the covering radius of the Reed-Muller Code R(3, 7) in R(5, 7) is 20.

In this letter, we propose a new secure and efficient certificateless aggregate signature scheme which has the advantages of both certificateless public key cryptosystem and aggregate signature. Based on the computational Diffie-Hellman problem, our scheme can be proven existentially unforgeable against adaptive chosen-message attacks. Most importantly, our scheme requires short group elements for aggregate signature and constant pairing computations for aggregate verification, which leads to high efficiency due to no relations with the number of signers.