In the current IoT (Internet of Things) environment, more and more Things: devices, objects, sensors, and everyday items not usually considered computers, are connected to the Internet, and these Things affect and change our social life and economic activities. By using IoTs, service providers can collect and store personal information in the real world, and such providers can gain access to detailed behaviors of the user. Although service providers offer users new services and numerous benefits using their detailed information, most users have concerns about the privacy and security of their personal data. Thus, service providers need to take countermeasures to eliminate those concerns. To help eliminate those concerns, first we conduct a survey regarding users' privacy and security concerns about IoT services, and then we analyze data collected from the survey using structural equation modeling (SEM). Analysis of the results provide answers to issues of privacy and security concerns to service providers and their users. And we also analyze the effectiveness and effects of personal information management and protection functions in IoT services.

Since many cyber-physical systems (CPSs) manipulate security-sensitive data, enhancing the quality of security in a CPS is a critical and challenging issue in CPS design. Although there has been a large body of research on securing general purpose PCs, directly applying such techniques to a CPS can compromise the real-time property of CPSs since the timely execution of tasks in a CPS typically relies on real-time scheduling. Recognizing this property, previous works have proposed approaches to add a security constraint to the real-time properties to cope with the information leakage problem that can arise between real-time tasks with different security levels. However, conventional works have mainly focused on non-preemptive scheduling and have suggested a very naive approach for preemptive scheduling, which shows limited analytical capability. In this paper, we present a new preemptive fixed-priority scheduling algorithm incorporating a security constraint, called lowest security-level first (LSF) and its strong schedulability analysis to reduce the potential of information leakage. Our simulation results show that LSF schedulability analysis outperforms state-of-the-art FP analysis when the security constraint has reasonable timing penalties.

Buffer overflow is one of the main approaches to get control of vulnerable programs. This paper presents a protection technique called BFWindow for performance and resource sensitive embedded systems. By coloring data structure in memory with single associate property bit to each byte and extending the target memory block to a BFWindow(2), it validates each memory write by speculatively checking consistency of data properties within the extended buffer window. Property bits are generated by compiler statically and checked by hardware at runtime. They are transparent to users. Experimental results show that the proposed mechanism is effective to prevent sequential memory writes from crossing buffer boundaries which is the common scenario of buffer overflow exploitations. The performance overhead for practical protection mode across embedded system benchmarks is under 1%.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) plays a crucial role in IoT development. With the extensive use of RFID, the fact that a single RFID tag integrates multiple applications has become a mainstream. To facilitate users to use the multi-application RFID tag and revoke some applications in the tag securely and efficiently, a secure RFID application revocation scheme is proposed in this paper. In the scheme, each response for the challenge between tag and reader is different, and a group has the feature of many tags. Even if the group index number and corresponding group are revealed, a specific tag does not be precisely found and tracked. Users are anonymous completely. The scheme also allows users to set the validity period for an application or some applications. If the application contains the validity period and expires, the server will remove the validity period and revoke the application automatically in the tag when the RFID tag accesses server again. The proposed scheme cannot only be used in multi-application RFID tag but also be used in one-application RFID tag. Furthermore, compared with other existing schemes, the scheme provides a higher level of security and has an advantage of performance. Our scheme has the ability of mutual authentication and Anti-replay by adding a random number r2, and it is easy to against synchronization attack. Security proof is given in our paper and performance advantage are mainly reflected in the following points such as forward security, synchronization, storage complexity, computational complexity, etc. Finally, the proposed scheme can be used in multi-application RFID tag to promote the development of the IoT.

Oblivious RAM is a technique for hiding the access patterns between a client and an untrusted server. However, current ORAM algorithms incur large communication or storage overhead. We propose a novel ORAM construction using a matrix logical structure for server storage where a client downloads blocks from each row, choosing the column randomly to hide the access pattern. Both a normal construction and recursive construction, where a position map normally stored on the client is also stored on the server, are presented. We show our matrix ORAM achieves constant bandwidth cost for the normal construction, uses similar storage to the existing Path ORAM, and improves open the bandwidth cost compared to Path ORAM under certain conditions in the recursive construction.

With the increase of data quantity, people have begun to attach importance to cloud storage. However, numerous security accidents occurred to cloud servers recently, thus triggering thought about the security of traditional single cloud. In other words, traditional single cloud can't ensure the privacy of users' data to a certain extent. To solve those security issues, multi-cloud systems which spread data over multiple cloud storage servers emerged. They employ a series of erasure codes and other keyless dispersal algorithms to achieve high-level security. But non-systematic codes like RS require relatively complex arithmetic, and systematic codes have relatively weaker security. In terms of keyless dispersal algorithms, they avoid key management issues but not suit to complete parallel optimization or deduplication which is important to limited cloud storage resources. So in this paper, we design a new kind of XOR-based non-systematic erasure codes - Privacy Protecting Codes (PPC) and a SIMD encoding algorithm for better performance. To achieve higher-level security, we put forward a novel deduplication-friendly dispersal algorithm called Hash Cyclic Encryption-PPC (HCE-PPC) which can achieve complete parallelization. With these new technologies, we present a multi-cloud storage system called CloudS. For better user experience and the tradeoffs between security and performance, CloudS provides multiple levels of security by various combinations of compression, encryption and coding schemes. We implement CloudS as a web application which doesn't require users to perform complicated operations on local.

Side channel attacks (SCAs) on security devices have become a major concern for system security. Existing SCA countermeasures are costly in terms of area and power consumption. This paper presents a novel differential power analysis (DPA) countermeasure referred to as short-time three-phase single-rail precharge logic (STSPL). The proposed logic is based on a single-rail three-phase operation scheme providing effective DPA-resistance with low cost. In the scheme, a controller is inserted to discharge logic gates by reusing evaluation paths to achieve more balanced power consumption. This reduces the latency between different phases, increasing the difficult of the adversary to conduct DPA, compared with the state-of-the-art DPA-resistance logics. To verify the chip's power consumption in practice, a 4-bit ripple carry adder and a 4-bit inverter of AES-SBOX were implemented. The testing and simulation results of DPA attacks prove the security and efficiency of the proposed logic.

This paper presents an efficient secure auction protocol for M+1st price auction. In our proposed protocol, a bidding price of a player is represented as a binary expression, while in the previous protocol it is represented as an integer. Thus, when the number of players is m and the bidding price is an integer up to p, compared to the complexity of the previous protocol which is a polynomial of m and p, the complexity of our protocol is a polynomial of m and log p. We apply the Boneh-Goh-Nissim encryption to the mix-and-match protocol to reduce the computation costs.

FDTD (Finite-Difference Time-Domain) method has been widely used for the analysis of photonic devices consisting of sub-wavelength structures. In recent years, increasing efforts have been made to implement the FDTD on GPGPUs (General-Purpose Graphic Processing Units), to shorten simulation time. On the other hand, it is widely recognized that most of the middle- and low-end GPGPUs have difference of computational performance, between single-precision and double-precision type arithmetics. Therefore the type selection of single/double precision for electromagnetic field variables in FDTD becomes a key issue from the viewpoint of the total simulation performance. In this study we investigated the difference of results between the use of single-precision and double-precision. As a most fundamental sub-wavelength photonic structure, we focused on an alternating multilayer (one dimensional periodic structure). Obtained results indicate that significant difference appears for the amplitudes of higher order spatial harmonic waves.

An encountered-type haptic interface generates touch sensation only when a user's hand “encounters” virtual objects. This paper presents an effective encountered-type haptic interface that enables rendering of surfaces with variable curvature. The key idea is to systematically bend a thin elastic plate so as to create a curved surface with desired curvature, which becomes a contacting end effector that follows the user's finger and becomes an interface a user can touch when needed. The pose of the curvature is controlled in a way that it corresponds to the curved surfaces of virtual objects and user's finger position. The idea is realized by attaching two commercial haptic interfaces to both edges of a thin acryl plate and squeezing the plate. This setup allows us to generate a cylindrical object with curvature up to 0.035 mm-1 and gives 3DOF position control and 1DOF rotational control of the curved surface. Achievable workspace and curvature range are analyzed, and the feasibility and physical performance are demonstrated through a visuo-haptic grabbing scenario. In addition, a psychophysical experiment shows perceptual competence of the proposed system.

Digital phase shifters are widely used to achieve space scanning in phased array antenna, and beam pointing accuracy depends on the bit number and resolution of the digital phase shifter. This paper proposes a novel phase feeding method to reduce the phase quantization error effects. A linear formula for the beam pointing deviation of a linear uniform array in condition of phase quantization error is derived, and the linear programming algorithm is introduced to achieve the minimum beam pointing deviation. Simulations are based on the pattern of the phased array, which gives each element a certain quantization phase error to find the beam pointing deviation. The novel method is then compared with previous methods. Examples show that a 32-element uniform linear array with 5-bit phase shifters using the proposed method can achieve a higher beam-steering accuracy than the same array with 11-bit phase shifters.

To provide basic considerations for the realization of method for suppressing the EMI from differential-paired lines on flexible printed circuits (FPC), the characteristics of the SI performance and shielding effectiveness (SE) of shielded-flexible printed circuits for differential-signaling are investigated in this paper experimentally and by a numerical modeling. Firstly, transmission characteristics of TDR measurement and frequency response of |Sdd21| are discussed, from view point of signal integrity. Secondly, as the characteristics of the SE performance for EMI, frequency responses of magnetic field are investigated. Although placement of conductive shield near the paired-lines decreases characteristics impedance, |Sdd21| for the “with Cu 5.5 µm-thickness copper shield” is not deteriorated compared with “without shield” and sufficient SE performance for magnetic field can be established. But, thin-shield deteriorates SI as well as SE performances. The frequency response of |Sdd21| at higher frequencies for the “Ag 0.1 µm” case has the steep loss roll off. A reflection loss resulted from impedance-mismatching is not dominant factor of the losses. The dominant factor may be magnetic field leakage due to very thin-conductive shield.

This paper presents a new approach for circuit matching using signatures. We have defined a signature based on topology of the fanin cones of the circuit elements. Given two circuits, first we find all the circuit elements with unique signature between the two input circuits. After that, we try to expand the matching area by our expansion rules as much as possible. We iteratively find the unique matches and expand the matching area until no further matching is possible. Our experiments on IWLS2005 benchmark suite show that our method is able to find the perfect matching between two 160,000-gate IP in 5 minutes. In addition, our method is more than one order of magnitude faster than our previous signature-based matching method, while the size of the matched area is comparable or larger.

An efficient Monte Carlo (MC) method for the calculation of failure probability degradation of an SRAM cell due to negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) is proposed. In the proposed method, a particle filter is utilized to incrementally track temporal performance changes in an SRAM cell. The number of simulations required to obtain stable particle distribution is greatly reduced, by reusing the final distribution of the particles in the last time step as the initial distribution. Combining with the use of a binary classifier, with which an MC sample is quickly judged whether it causes a malfunction of the cell or not, the total number of simulations to capture the temporal change of failure probability is significantly reduced. The proposed method achieves 13.4× speed-up over the state-of-the-art method.

As semiconductor technologies have advanced, the reliability problem caused by soft-errors is becoming one of the serious issues in LSIs. Moreover, multiple component errors due to single soft-errors also have become a serious problem. In this paper, we propose a method to synthesize multiple component soft-error tolerant application-specific datapaths via high-level synthesis. The novel feature of our method is speculative resource sharing between the retry parts and the secondary parts for time overhead mitigation. A scheduling algorithm using a special priority function to maximize speculative resource sharing is also an important feature of this study. Our approach can reduce the latency (schedule length) in many applications without deterioration of reliability and chip area compared with conventional datapaths without speculative resource sharing. We also found that our method is more effective when a computation algorithm possesses higher parallelism and a smaller number of resources is available.

The 60 GHz band compact-range communication is very promising for short-time, short distance communication. Unfortunately, due to the short wavelengths in this frequency band the shadowing effects caused by human bodies, furniture, etc are severe and need to be modeled properly. The numerical methods like the finite-difference time-domain method (FDTD), the finite-element method (FEM), the method of moments (MoM) are unable to compute the field scattered by large objects due to their excessive time and memory requirements. Ray-based approaches like the geometrical theory of diffraction (GTD), uniform geometrical theory of diffraction (UTD), uniform asymptotic theory of diffraction (UAT) are effective and popular solutions but suffer from computation of corner-diffracted field, field at the caustics. Fresnel zone number (FZN) adopted modified edge representation (MER) equivalent edge current (EEC) is an accurate and fast high frequency diffraction technique which expresses the fields in terms of line integration. It adopts distances, rather than the angles used in GTD, UTD or UAT but still provides uniform and highly accurate fields everywhere including geometrical boundaries. Previous work verified this method for planar scatterers. In this work, FZN MER EEC is used to compute field distribution in the millimeter-wave compact range communication in the presence of three dimensional scatterers, where shadowing effects rather than multi-path dominate the radio environments. First, circular cylinder is disintegrated into rectangular plate and circular disks and then FZN MER is applied along with geodesic path loss. The dipole wave scattering from perfectly conducting circular cylinder is discussed as numerical examples.

The current high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard is developed to achieve greatly improved compression performance compared with the previous coding standard H.264/AVC. It adopts a quadtree based picture partition structure to flexibility signal various texture characteristics of images. However, this results in a dramatic increase in computational complexity, which obstructs HEVC in real-time application. To alleviate this problem, we propose a fast coding unit (CU) size decision algorithm in HEVC intra coding based on consideration of the depth level of neighboring CUs, distribution of rate distortion (RD) value and distribution of residual data. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve up to 60% time reduction with negligible RD performance loss.

Biphase periodic sequences having elements +1 or -1 with the two-level autocorrelation function are desirable in communications and radars. However, in case of the biphase orthogonal periodic sequences, Turyn has conjectured that there exist only sequences with period 4, i.e., there exist the circulant Hadamard matrices for order 4 only. In this paper, it is described that the conjecture is proved to be true by means of the isomorphic mapping, the Chinese remainder theorem, the linear algebra, etc.

The goal of software testing should go beyond simply finding defects. Ultimately, testing should be focused on increasing customer satisfaction. Defects that are detected in areas of the software that the customers are especially interested in can cause more customer dissatisfaction. If these defects accumulate, they can cause the software to be shunned in the marketplace. Therefore, it is important to focus on reducing defects in areas that customers consider valuable. This article proposes a value-driven V-model (V2 model) that deals with customer values and reflects them in the test design for increasing customer satisfaction and raising test efficiency.

Because wavelet transforms have the characteristic of decomposing signals that are similar to the human acoustic system, speech enhancement algorithms that are based on wavelet shrinkage are widely used. In this paper, we propose a new speech enhancement algorithm of hearing aids based on wavelet shrinkage. The algorithm has multi-band threshold value and a new wavelet shrinkage function for recursive noise reduction. We performed experiments using various types of authorized speech and noise signals, and our results show that the proposed algorithm achieves significantly better performances compared with other recently proposed speech enhancement algorithms using wavelet shrinkage.