Computation in the brain is realized in complicated, heterogeneous, and extremely large-scale network of neurons. About a hundred billion neurons communicate with each other by action potentials called “spike firings” that are delivered to thousands of other neurons from each. Repeated integration and networking of these spike trains in the network finally form the substance of our cognition, perception, planning, and motor control. Beyond conventional views of neural network mechanisms, recent rapid advances in both experimental and theoretical neuroscience unveil that the brain is a dynamical system to actively treat environmental information rather passively process it. The brain utilizes internal dynamics to realize our resilient and efficient perception and behavior. In this paper, by considering similarities and differences of the brain and information networks, we discuss a possibility of information networks with brain-like continuing internal dynamics. We expect that the proposed networks efficiently realize context-dependent in-network processing. By introducing recent findings of neuroscience about dynamics of the brain, we argue validity and clues for implementation of the proposal.

Support of incoming traffic differentiation and Quality of Service (QoS) assurance is very important for the development of high performance packet switches, capable of separating traffic flows. In our previous paper, we proposed the implementation of two buffers at each crosspoint of a crossbar fabric that leads to the Dual Crosspoint Queued (DCQ) switch. Inside DCQ switch, one buffer is used to store the real-time traffic and the other for the non-real-time traffic. We also showed that the static priority algorithms can provide the QoS only for the real-time traffic due to their greedy nature that gives the absolute priority to that type of traffic. In order to overcome this problem, in our paper we propose the DCQ switch with the Largest Weighted Occupancy First scheduling algorithm that provides the desired QoS support for both traffic flows. Detailed analysis of the simulation results confirms the validity of proposed solution.

Recently, a malicious user attacks a web browser through a malicious page that exploits the vulnerability of the browser and that executes malicious code. To prevent this attack, some methods have been devised such as DEP (Data Execution Prevention) that prevents data in stack frame or heap region from being executed. However, to evade these defense techniques, return-oriented programming (ROP) is introduced. ROP executes arbitrary code indirectly using gadget, which is group of instructions including ret instruction in a module that doesn't apply ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization). In this paper, we propose a static approach to detect ROP payload in a network irrespective of the environment of the system under attack. Most studies have tried to detect ROP attacks using dynamic analysis, because ROP has various addresses of gadgets according to loaded modules. These methods have a limitation that must consider the environment of system to operate ROP, such as the version of OS and modules including gadgets. To overcome this limitation, our method detects ROP payload using static analysis without preliminary knowledge about the environment. We extract five characteristics of ROP and then propose a novel algorithm, STROP, to detect ROP in payload without execution. Our idea is as follows: STROP makes stack frame using input payload statically. It extracts addresses suspected as indicating gadgets and makes groups using the addresses. And then, STROP determine whether the payload includes ROP based on static characteristics. We implement a prototype using snort (network-based intrusion system) and evaluate it. Experiments show that our technique can detect ROP payload with a low number of false alarms. False positive (FP) is 1.3% for 2,239 benign files and 0.05-0.51% for 1GB packet dump file. Among 68 ROP payloads, STROP detects 51 payloads. This research can be applied to existing systems that collect malicious codes, such as Honeypot.

Maximum radiation efficiency has been derived for homogeneous electrically small antennas. The spherical wave expansion is utilized to express the radiated field and the current distribution on an antenna, and the radiation efficiency is represented by the current, which is expressed in the spherical wave expansion coefficients and the nonradiating current. By using a concept of the nonradiating current, it is shown that the maximum radiation efficiency is achieved if the antenna shape is spherical. The radiation efficiency of a spherical antenna is maximized by varying the expansion coefficients. This radiation efficiency is compared with that of the antenna which achieves the maximum gain and those of linear antennas. The comparison indicates the validity of our proposed upper limit of the radiation efficiency.

We propose a novel phased array-fed dual-reflector antenna that reduces performance degradation caused by multiple reflection. The marked feature of the proposed configuration is that different reflector profiles are employed for the two orthogonal directions. The reflector profile in the beam-scanning section (vertical section) is set to an imaging reflector configuration, while the profile in the orthogonal non-beam-scanning section (horizontal section) is set to a ring-focus Cassegrain antenna configuration. In order to compare the proposed antenna with the conventional antenna in which multiple reflection was problematic, we designed a prototype antenna of the same size, and verified the validity of the proposed antenna. The results of the verification were that the gain in the designed central frequency increased by 0.4 dB, and the ripple of the gain frequency properties that was produced by multiple reflection was decreased by 1.1,dB. These results demonstrated the validity of the proposed antenna.

This paper proposes a speech watermarking method based on the concept of formant tuning. The characteristic that formant tuning can improve the sound quality of synthesized speech was employed to achieve inaudibility for watermarking. In the proposed method, formants were firstly extracted with linear prediction (LP) analysis and then embedded with watermarks by symmetrically controlling a pair of line spectral frequencies (LSFs) as formant tuning. We evaluated the proposed method by two kinds of experiments regarding inaudibility and robustness compared with other methods. Inaudibility was evaluated with objective and subjective tests and robustness was evaluated with speech codecs and speech processing. The results revealed that the proposed method could satisfy both inaudibility and robustness that required for speech watermarking.

An important issue of fragile watermarking for image is to locate and restore the tampered pixels individually and accurately. This issue is resolved for concentrated tampering. In contrast, for diverse tampering, only localization is realized. This paper presents a restoration method for the most accurate scheme tolerant against diverse tampering. We analyze the error probability and experimentally confirm that the proposed method accurately restores the tampered pixels. We also show two variations based on the fact that the authentication data used for deriving the watermark is a maximum length sequence code.

Yajima et al. proposed a method based on amplitude and phase coding of audio signals. This method has relatively high sound quality because human auditory property is considered for embedding. However, in this method, the tolerance to attacks tends to be weak. Hence, we propose a high-tolerance watermarking method using BCH code which is one of error correcting code. This paper evaluates whether our method preserves the sound quality while ensuring high tolerance.

For a large-sized touch screen, we designed and evaluated a real-time touch microarchitecture using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). A high-speed hardware accelerator based on a parallel touch algorithm is suggested and implemented in this letter. The touch controller also has a timing control unit and an analog digital convert (ADC) control unit for analog touch sensing circuits. Measurement results of processing time showed that the touch controller with its proposed microarchitecture is five times faster than the 32-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processor without the touch accelerator.

In this paper, we consider synchronization phenomena in coupled systems of piecewise constant oscillators. Both in-phase and anti-phase synchronization phenomena are observed in the oscillators, which are coupled by a voltage controlled current source (VCCS) with Signum-like characteristic. On the other hand, their co-existence is observed in the oscillators coupled by a VCCS with hysteresis characteristic. We analyze the stability of the synchronization phenomena in the coupled systems by using a fast calculation algorithm for the rigorous solutions. And we clarify the parameter regions of in-phase and anti-phase synchronization by deriving correlation coefficients. We suggest that the synchronization phenomena of the proposed systems qualitatively correspond to one of van der Pol oscillators coupled by passive elements. Some theoretical results are verified in the experimental circuits.

This paper reviews several trials of re-designing conventional communication medium, i.e., characters, for enriching their functions by using data-embedding techniques. For example, characters are re-designed to have better machine-readability even under various geometric distortions by embedding a geometric invariant into each character image to represent class label of the character. Another example is to embed various information into handwriting trajectory by using a new pen device, called a data-embedding pen. An experimental result showed that we can embed 32-bit information into a handwritten line of 5 cm length by using the pen device. In addition to those applications, we also discuss the relationship between data-embedding and pattern recognition in a theoretical point of view. Several theories tell that if we have appropriate supplementary information by data-embedding, we can enhance pattern recognition performance up to 100%.

This paper proposes a disaster recovery method for transport networks. In a scenario of recovery from a disaster, a network is repaired through multiple restoration stages because repair resources are limited. In a practical case, a network should provide the reachability of important traffic in transient stages, even as service interruption risks and/or operational overheads caused by transport paths switching are suppressed. Then, we define the multi-objective optimization problem: maximizing the traffic recovery ratio and minimizing the number of switched transport paths at each stage. We formulate our problem as linear programming, and show that it yields pareto-optimal solutions of traffic recovery versus the number of switched paths. We also propose a heuristic algorithm for applying to networks consisting of a few hundred nodes, and show that it can produce sub-optimal solutions that differ only slightly from optimal solutions.

A monolithic frequency synthesizer with wide tuning range, low phase noise and spurs was realized in 0.13,$mu$m CMOS technology. It consists of an analog PLL, a harmonic-rejection mixer and injection-locked frequency doublers to cover the whole 6--18,GHz frequency range. To achieve a low phase noise performance, a sub-sampling PLL with non-dividers was employed. The synthesizer can achieve phase noise $-$113.7,dBc/Hz@100,kHz in the best case and the reference spur is below $-$60,dBc. The core of the synthesizer consumes about 110,mA*1.2,V.

In this letter, an iterative carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation approach is presented which finds a new CFO vector based on first order Taylor series expansion of the one initially given for interleaved orthogonal frequency division multiple access uplink systems. The problem of finding the new CFO vector is formulated as the closed form of a generalized eigenvalue problem, which allows one to readily solve it. The proposed estimator combined center-symmetric trimmed correlation matrix and orthogonal projection technique, which doesn't require eigenvalue decomposition and it only needs single data block.

In this paper, we propose a novel ranking method called VisualTextualRank which ranks media data according to the relevance between the data and specified keywords. We apply our method to the system of video shot ranking which aims to automatically obtain video shots corresponding to given action keywords from Web videos. The keywords can be any type of action such as “surfing wave” (sport action) or “brushing teeth” (daily activity). Top ranked video shots are expected to be relevant to the keywords. While our baseline exploits only visual features of the data, the proposed method employs both textual information (tags) and visual features. Our method is based on random walks over a bipartite graph to integrate visual information of video shots and tag information of Web videos effectively. Note that instead of treating the textual information as an additional feature for shot ranking, we explore the mutual reinforcement between shots and textual information of their corresponding videos to improve shot ranking. We validated our framework on a database which was used by the baseline. Experiments showed that our proposed ranking method, VisualTextualRank, improved significantly the performance of the system of video shot extraction over the baseline.

How to reduce communication complexity is a common important issue to design cryptographic protocols. This paper focuses on authenticated key exchange (AKE). Several AKE schemes have been studied, which satisfy strong security such as exposure-resilience in the standard model (StdM). However, there is a large gap on communication costs between schemes in the StdM and in the random oracle model. In this paper, we show a generic construction that is significantly compact (i.e., small communication cost) and secure in the StdM. We follow an existing generic construction from key encapsulated mechanism (KEM). Our main technique is to use a bounded chosen-ciphertext secure KEM instead of an ordinary chosen-ciphertext secure KEM. The communication cost can be reduced to half by this technique, and we achieve the most compact AKE scheme in the StdM. Moreover, our construction has instantiations under wider classes of hardness assumptions (e.g., subset-sum problems and multi-variate quadratic systems) than existing constructions. This work pioneers the first meaningful application of bounded chosen-ciphertext secure KEM.

Although password-only authenticated key exchange (PAKE) in the three-party setting has been widely studied in recent years, it remains a challenging area of research. A key challenge in designing three-party PAKE protocols is to prevent insider dictionary attacks, as evidenced by the flaws discovered in many published protocols. In this letter, we revisit Abdalla and Pointcheval's three-party PAKE protocol from FC 2005 and demonstrate that this protocol, named 3PAKE, is vulnerable to a previously unpublished insider offline dictionary attack. Our attack is dependant on the composition of 3PAKE and the higher-level protocol that uses the established session key.

RC4 is a widely-used stream cipher, adopted in many standard protocols, such as WEP, WPA and SSL/TLS, as a standard encryption algorithm. Isobe et al. proposed a plaintext recovery attack on RC4 in the broadcast setting, where the same plaintext is encrypted with different secret keys. Their attack is able to recover the first 257bytes by exploiting the biases of the initial bytes of a keystream. In this paper, we propose two types of full plaintext recovery attacks that are able to recover all the bytes, even after the 258th byte, of a plaintext, unlike Isobe et al.'s attack. To achieve this, we combine the use of multiple keystream biases appropriately. The first attack utilizes the initial byte biases and Mantin's long-term bias. This attack can recover the first 1000 terabytes of a plaintext from 234 ciphertexts with a probability of almost one. The second attack is based on two long-term biases. Since this attack does not rely on the biases of the initial bytes of the RC4 keystream, it can recover any byte of a plaintext, even if the initial bytes are disregarded. Given 235 ciphertexts encrypted by different keys, any byte of a target plaintext can be recovered with a probability close to one.

Information networks are an important infrastructure and their resources are shared by many users. In order to utilize their resources efficiently, they should be controlled to prevent synchronization of user traffic. In addition, fairness among users must be assured. This paper discusses the framework of transmission rate control based on chaos. There are two different characteristics that coexist in chaos. One is that the state in the future is extremely sensitive to the initial condition. This makes it impossible to predict the future state at a fine level of detail. The other is the structural stability of macroscopic dynamics. Even if the state is uncertain on the microscopic scale, state dynamics on the macroscopic scale are stable. This paper proposes a novel framework of distributed hierarchical control of transmission rate by interpreting the coexistence of chaos as microscopic fairness of users and macroscopic stable utilization of networks.

For estimating user's location, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is very useful. Especially, Global Positioning System (GPS) by USA is very popular. A GPS receiver needs multiple satellites (usually 4 and more satellites). Propagation to the satellites needs line-of-sight. However, in urban area, there are many buildings. Received signals tend to become bad quality. Such signals are often called as non-line-of-sight (NLOS) or multipath signals. The problem is that the receiver cannot get line-of-sight signals from adequate number of the satellites coinstantaneously. This case leads to degradation of estimation quality or impossibility of estimation. In this paper, we will introduce a novel estimation algorithm, which can estimate own position with as low number of satellites as possible. The proposal achieves the estimation by only two satellites. The proposal also uses a traveling distance sensor which is often equipped on vehicles. By recorded satellite data, we will confirm our effectiveness.