Assume that Alice, Bob, and Carol, each of whom privately holds a one-bit input, want to learn the output of some Boolean function, say the majority function, of their inputs without revealing more of their own secret inputs than necessary. In this paper, we show that such a secure three-input function evaluation can be performed with a deck of real cards; specifically, the three players can learn only the output of the function using eight physical cards — four black and four red cards — with identical backs.

This work investigates the physical layer security for three cooperative automatic-repeat-request (CARQ) protocols, including the decode-and-forward (DF) CARQ, opportunistic DF (ODF) CARQ, and the distributed space-time code (DSTC) CARQ. Assuming that there is no instantaneous channel state information (CSI) of legitimate users' channel and eavesdropper's channel at the transmitter, the connection outage performance and secrecy outage performance are derived to evaluate the reliability and security of each CARQ protocol. Then, we redefine the concept of the secrecy throughput to evaluate the overall efficiency of the system in terms of maintaining both reliable and secure transmission. Furthermore, through an asymptotic analysis in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, the direct relationship between reliability and security is established via the reliability-security tradeoff (RST). Numerical results verify the analysis and show the efficiency of the CARQ protocols in terms of the improvement on the secrecy throughput. More interestingly, increasing the transmit SNR and the maximum number of transmissions of the ARQ protocols may not achieve a security performance gain. In addition, the RST results underline the importance of determining how to balance the reliability vs. security, and show the superiority of ODF CARQ in terms of RST.

Topic features are useful in improving text summarization. However, independency among topics is a strong restriction on most topic models, and alleviating this restriction can deeply capture text structure. This paper proposes a hybrid topic model to generate multi-document summaries using a combination of the Hidden Topic Markov Model (HTMM), the surface texture model and the topic transition model. Based on the topic transition model, regular topic transition probability is used during generating summary. This approach eliminates the topic independence assumption in the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model. Meanwhile, the results of experiments show the advantage of the combination of the three kinds of models. This paper includes alleviating topic independency, and integrating surface texture and shallow semantic in documents to improve summarization. In short, this paper attempts to realize an advanced summarization system.

To enhance the privacy of vehicle owners, combinatorial certificate management schemes assign each certificate to a large enough group of vehicles so that it will be difficult to link a certificate to any particular vehicle. When an innocent vehicle shares a certificate with a misbehaving vehicle and the certificate on the misbehaving vehicle has been revoked, the certificate on the innocent vehicle also becomes invalid and is said to be covered. When a group of misbehaving vehicles collectively share all the certificates assigned to an innocent vehicle and these certificates are revoked, the innocent vehicle is said to be covered. We point out that the previous analysis of the vehicle cover probability is not correct and then provide a new and exact analysis of the vehicle cover probability.

This letter presents a method to adaptively counter false data injection attacks (FDIAs) in wireless sensor networks, in which a fuzzy rule-based system detects FDIAs and chooses the most appropriate countermeasures. The method does not require en-route verification processes and manual parameter settings. The effectiveness of the method is shown with simulation results.

We measure neutron-induced Single Event Upsets (SEUs) and Multiple Cell Upsets (MCUs) on Flip-Flops (FFs) in a 65-nm bulk CMOS process in order to evaluate dependence of MCUs on cell distance and well-contact density using four different shift registers. Measurement results by accelerated tests show that MCU/SEU is up to 23.4% and it is exponentially decreased by the distance between latches on FFs. MCU rates can be drastically reduced by inserting well-contact arrays between FFs. The number of MCUs is reduced from 110 to 1 by inserting well-contact arrays under power and ground rails.

It is important to reduce the power consumption of complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) logic circuits, especially those used in mobile devices. A CMOS logic circuit consists of metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs), which consume electrical power dynamically when they charge and discharge load capacitance that is connected to their output. Load capacitance mainly exists in wiring or buses, and transitions between logic 0 and logic 1 cause these charges and discharges. Many methods have been proposed to reduce these transitions. One novel method (called segmentation coding) has recently been proposed that reduces power consumption of CMOS buses carrying band-limited signals, such as audio data. It improves performance by employing dedicated encoders for the upper and lower bits of transmitted data, in which the transition characteristics of band-limited signals are utilized. However, it uses a conventional majority voting circuit in the encoder for lower bits, and the circuit uses many adders to count the number of 1s to calculate the Hamming distance between the transmitted data. This paper proposes segmentation coding with pseudo-majority voting. The proposed pseudo-majority voting circuit counts the number of 1s with fewer circuit resources than the conventional circuit by further utilizing the transition characteristics of band-limited signals. The effectiveness of the proposed method was demonstrated through computer simulations and experiments.

The field electron emission characteristics of a p-type Si emitter sharpened by a spirally scanned Ga focused-ion-beam milling process were investigated. Saturated Fowler--Nordheim (F--N) plots, which are unique phenomena of p-type semiconductor emitters, were observed. The slight increase of the emission current in the saturated F--N plots region was discussed in terms of the depletion layer width in which electron generation occurs. The temperature dependence of the field electron emission current was also discussed. The activation energy of carrier generation was determined to be 0.26,eV, ascribable to the surface states that accompany the defects introduced by the Ga ion beam. When the emitter was irradiated by a 650-nm-wavelength laser, the increase in the emission current, i.e., the photoexcited emission current, was observed in the saturated region of the F--N plots. The photoexcited emission current was proportional to the laser intensity.

Function speculation design with error recovery mechanisms is quite promising due to its high performance and low area overhead. Previous work has focused on two-stage function speculation and thus lacks a systematic way to address the challenge of the multistage function speculation approach. This paper proposes a multistage function speculation with adaptive predictors and applies it in a novel adder. We deduced the analytical performance and area models for the design and validated them in our experiments. Based on those models, a general methodology is presented to guide design optimization. Both analytical proofs and experimental results on the fabricated chips show that the proposed adder's delay and area have a logarithmic and linear relationship with its bit number, respectively. Compared with the DesignWare IP, the proposed adder provides the same performance with 6-17% area reduction under different bit lengths.

Wireless power transfer (WPT) based on electric coupled resonance can withstand a great level of variability in antenna separation. In this paper, we propose an independent electrical coupled resonance WPT system to further increase such systems' power transfer distance and ensure flexibility in the antenna location. The proposed system's power transfer function, critical coupling point, and resonance frequency splitting are investigated via the equivalent circuit, simulation, and experiment. Moreover, the input impedance characteristic of two electric coupled resonance antennas is also analyzed according to the transfer distance. In the region of under coupled, an appropriate impedance matching method is required to achieve effective power transfers. Here, we proposed a fixed configuration type matching loop with a series-connecting variable capacitance that can be added into both the source and load antennas. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed matching loop can convert the two electric coupled resonance antennas' input impedance to the feed port impedance very well at varying transfer distances; these results are in good agreement with the simulation results.

Many malware programs emerging from the Internet are compressed and/or encrypted by a wide variety of packers to deter code analysis, thus making it necessary to perform unpacking first. To do this task efficiently, Guo et al. proposed a generic unpacking system named Justin that provides original entry point (OEP) candidates. Justin executes a packed program, and then it extracts written-and-executed points caused by the decryption of the original binary until it determines the OEP has appeared, taking those points as candidates. However, for several types of packers, the system can provide comparatively large sets of candidates or fail to capture the OEP. For more effective generic unpacking, this paper presents a novel OEP detection method featuring two mechanisms. One identifies the decrypting routine by tracking relations between writing instructions and written areas. This is based on the fact that the decrypting routine is the generator for the original binary. In case our method fails to detect the OEP, the other mechanism sorts candidates based on the most likely candidate so that analysts can reach the correct one quickly. With experiments using a dataset of 753 samples packed by 25 packers, we confirm that our method can be more effective than Justin's heuristics, in terms of detecting OEPs and reducing candidates. After that, we also propose a method combining our method with one of Justin's heuristics.

TTFF (Time-To-First-Fix) is an important indicator of GPS receiver performance, and must be reduced as much as possible. Bit synchronization is the pre-condition of positioning, which affects TTFF. The frequency error leads to power loss, which makes it difficult to find the bit edge. The conventional bit synchronization methods only work well when there is no or very small frequency error. The bit synchronization process is generally carried out after the pull-in stage, where the carrier loop is already stable. In this paper, a new bit synchronization method based on frequency compensation is proposed. Through compensating the frequency error, the new method reduces the signal power loss caused by the accumulation of coherent integration. The performances of the new method in different frequency error scenarios are compared. The parameters in the proposed method are analyzed and optimized to reduce the computational complexity. Simulation results show that the new method has good performance when the frequency error is less than 25Hz. Test results show that the new method can tolerate dynamic frequency errors, and it is possible to move the bit synchronization to the pull-in process to reduce the TTFF.

An imbalance difference model has been developed to estimate the common-mode radiated emission of a PCB with an attached cable. This model, however, requires significant computation time for full-wave simulation, especially if the attached cable is long, even with a powerful computer configuration. To solve this problem, a method that approximates the imbalance difference model as an equivalent asymmetrical dipole antenna is proposed in this paper. The common-mode radiated emission can be predicted using a line integration of the common-mode current distribution which is directly estimated by the asymmetrical antenna model. Unlike existing methods, the proposed method avoids the circuit construction normally used to measure the common-mode current, and is still able to accurately predict the maximum common-mode radiation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by comparing the predicted results with the 3D full-wave simulation and the measured data gathered in an anechoic chamber.

People expose their personal information on social network services (SNSs). This paper warns of the dangers of this practice by way of an example. We show that the residence registration numbers (RRNs) of many Koreans, which are very important and confidential personal information analogous to social security numbers in the United States, can be estimated solely from the information that they have made open to the public. In our study, we utilized machine learning algorithms to infer information that was then used to extract a part of the RRNs. Consequently, we were able to extract 45.5% of SNS users' RRNs using a machine learning algorithm and brute-force search that did not consume exorbitant amounts of resources.

We report the energy-efficient optical input interface using NbN superconducting nanowire-based optical-to-electrical (SN-OE) converters for a single-flux-quantum (SFQ) data processing system. The SN-OE converters with small active areas ranging from 1$, imes,$1 to 10$, imes,$10,$mu$m$^2$ were fabricated to improve the recovery time by reducing the kinetic inductance of the nanowire. The SN-OE with the smallest area of 1$, imes,$1 $mu$m$^2$ showed the recovery time of around 0.3 ns, while its detection efficiency for a single photon was reduced below 0.1% due to insufficient coupling efficiency with a single-mode optical fiber. However, the optical power dependence of the error rate of this device showed that the required optical power to achieve the error rate below $10^{-12}$ at 10 GHz operation is as large as 70 $mu$W, which is still one order of magnitude lower than semiconductor photo diodes. We also demonstrated the operation of the SN-OE converters combined with the SFQ readout circuit and confirmed the operating speed up to 77~MHz.

A new trigger circuit based on up/down counter is proposed. This trigger circuit consists of a up/down counter and a pulse conversion circuit. Compared with a trigger circuit based on 32-bit counter, the proposed trigger circuit occupies less circuit area and consumes less power consumption, while the trigger process can be inversed, increasing the controllability of the Trojan.

Users of wireless mobile devices need Internet access not only when they stay at home or office, but also when they travel. It may be desirable for such users to select a "longcut route" from their current location to his/her destination that has longer travel time than the shortest route, but provides a better mobile wireless environment. In this paper, we formulate the above situation as the optimization problem of “optimal longcut route selection”, which requires us to find the best route concerning the wireless environment subject to a travel time constraint. For this new problem, we show NP-hardness, propose two pseudo-polynomial time algorithms, and experimental evaluation of the algorithms.

A readout technique using single-flux-quantum (SFQ) circuits enables superconducting single photon detectors (SSPDs) to operate at further high-speed, where a mutually-coupled dc-to-SFQ (MC-dc/SFQ) converter is used as an interface between SSPDs and SFQ circuits. In this work, we investigated pulse response of the MC-dc/SFQ converter. We employed on-chip pulse generators to evaluate pulse response of the MC-dc/SFQ converter for various pulses. The MC-dc/SFQ converter correctly operated for the pulse current with the amplitude of 52,$mu$A and the width of 179,ps. In addition, we examined influence of the pulse amplitude and width to operation of the MC-dc/SFQ converter by numerical simulation. The simulation results indicated that the MC-dc/SFQ converter had wide operation margins for pulse current with amplitudes of 30--60,$mu$A irrespective of the pulse widths.

In mobile ad hoc networks, a malicious node can respond with a faked route reply (RREP) message to a source that explores a route in order to make the source establish a false route leading to the malicious node. Then, the malicious node can absorb all transmitted packets like a black hole. This paper proposes a totally secure defense against the black hole attack with low control overhead and high reliability. The proposed approach, named a bullet-proof verification (BPV) method, consists of a detection phase, in which a node detects a suspicious node by analyzing the data routing information of its neighbors and a verification phase, in which a node initiates the verification of a suspicious node conditionally only if it receives RREP from the suspicious node. The crux of this approach lies in using an encrypted verification message that goes straight to the destination through the path that may include some malicious nodes and also in using both destination sequence number and hop distance for verification. In addition, a distributed watchdog mechanism is employed to track down any malicious nodes. Simulation results show that the BPV approach reduces control overhead significantly and defends against black hole attack reliably.

During the investment process for enhancing the level of IT security, organizations typically rely on two kinds of security countermeasures, i.e., proactive security countermeasures (PSCs) and reactive security countermeasures (RSCs). The PSCs are known to prevent security incidents before their occurrence, while the RSCs identify security incidents and recover the damaged hardware and software during or after their occurrence. Some researchers studied the effect of the integration of PSCs and RSCs, and showed that the integration can control unwanted incidents better than a single type of security countermeasure. However, the studies were made mostly in a qualitative manner, not in a quantitative manner. In this paper, we focus on deriving a quantitative model that analyzes the influence of different conditions on the efficiency of the integrated security countermeasures. Using the proposed model, we analyze for the first time how vulnerability and the potential exploits resulting from such vulnerability can affect the efficiency of the integrated security countermeasures; furthermore, we analytically verify that as the efficiency of PSCs increases, the burden of RSCs decreases, and vice versa. Also, we describe how to select possibly optimal configurations of the integrated security countermeasures.