Recently, Choi et al. proposed an ID-based authenticated group key agreement with bilinear maps. Subsequently, Zhang and Chen showed that the protocol does not provide authenticity as claimed by replaying transcripts of the past session. To prevent those replay attacks, they suggest adding a time parameter to the message being signed. However, despite of such a modification, we show that the protocol is still insecure against insider colluding attacks without replaying transcripts of the past session.

We propose a new construct, the Text-Graphics Character (TGC) CAPTCHA, for preventing dictionary attacks against password authentication systems allowing remote access via dumb terminals. Password authentication is commonly used for computer access control. But password authentication systems are prone to dictionary attacks, in which attackers repeatedly attempt to gain access using the entries in a list of frequently-used passwords. CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are currently being used to prevent automated "bots" from registering for email accounts. They have also been suggested as a means for preventing dictionary attacks. However, current CAPTCHAs are unsuitable for text-based remote access. TGC CAPTCHAs fill this gap. In this paper, we define two TGC CAPTCHAs and incorporate one of them in a prototype based on the SSH (Secure Shell) protocol suite. We also prove that, if a TGC CAPTCHA is easy for humans and hard for machines, then the resulting CAPTCHA is secure. We provide empirical evidence that our TGC CAPTCHAs are indeed easy for humans and hard for machines through a series of experiments. We believe that a system exploiting a TGC CAPTCHA will not only help improve the security of servers allowing remote terminal access, but also encourage a healthy spirit of competition in the fields of pattern recognition, computer graphics, and psychology.

In the past twenty years, there were only a few constructions for Boolean functions with nonlinearity exceeding the quadratic bound 2n-1-2(n-1)/2 when n is odd (we shall call them Boolean functions with very high nonlinearity). The first basic construction was by Patterson and Wiedemann in 1983, which produced unbalanced function with very high nonlinearity. But for cryptographic applications, we need balanced Boolean functions. Therefore in 1993, Seberry, Zhang and Zheng proposed a secondary construction for balanced functions with very high nonlinearity by taking the direct sum of a modified bent function with the Patterson-Wiedemann function. Later in 2000, Sarkar and Maitra constructed such functions by taking the direct sum of a bent function with a modified Patterson-Wiedemann function. In this paper, we propose a new secondary construction for balanced Boolean functions with very high nonlinearity by recursively composing balanced functions with very high nonlinearity with quadratic functions. This is the first construction for balanced function with very high nonlinearity not based on the direct sum approach. Our construction also have other desirable properties like high algebraic degree and large linear span.

It is known that for any general access structure, a secret sharing scheme (SSS) can be constructed from an (m,m)-threshold scheme by using the so-called cumulative map or from a (t,m)-threshold SSS by a modified cumulative map. However, such constructed SSSs are not efficient generally. In this paper, a new method is proposed to construct a SSS from a (t,m)-threshold scheme for any given general access structure. In the proposed method, integer programming is used to derive the optimal (t,m)-threshold scheme and the optimal distribution of the shares to minimize the average or maximum size of the distributed shares to participants. From the optimality, it can always attain lower coding rate than the cumulative maps because the cumulative maps cannot attain the optimal distribution in many cases. The same method is also applied to construct SSSs for incomplete access structures and/or ramp access structures.

This paper proposes a new countermeasure, Random Switching Logic (RSL), against DPA (Differential Power Analysis) and Second-Order DPA at the logic level. RSL makes a signal transition uniform at each gate and suppresses the propagation of glitch to allow power consumption to be independent of predictable data. Furthermore, we implement basic logic circuits on the FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) by using RSL, and evaluate the effectiveness. As a result, we confirm the fact that the secure circuit can be structured against DPA and Second-Order DPA.

This paper presents a scalable FPGA/ASIC implementation architecture for high-speed parallel table-lookup-coding using multi-ported content addressable memory, aiming at facilitating effective table-lookup-coding solutions. The multi-ported CAM adopts a Flexible Multi-ported Content Addressable Memory (FMCAM) technology, which represents an effective parallel processing architecture and was previously reported in [1]. To achieve a high-speed parallel table-lookup-coding solution, FMCAM is improved by additional schemes for a single search mode and counting value setting mode, so that it permits fast parallel table-lookup-coding operations. Evaluation results for Huffman encoding within the JPEG application show that a synthesized semi-custom ASIC implementation of the proposed architecture can already reduce the required clock-cycle number by 93% in comparison to a conventional DSP. Furthermore, the performance per area unit, measured in MOPS/mm2, can be improved by a factor of 3.8 in comparison to parallel operated DSPs. Consequently, the proposed architecture is very suitable for FPGA/ASIC implementation, and is a promising solution for small area integrated realization of real-time table-lookup-coding applications.

Under the broadband-ubiquitous environment, digital content creation/distribution will be the key factor to activating new industries. This paper first describes the impact of a broadband-ubiquitous environment on digital content creation/distribution; then it proposes new models for digital content creation/distribution businesses. In a broadband-ubiquitous environment, the key is creation of moving picture content; thus the paper describes a system that allows non-CG experts to make CG movies easily.

This letter presents a 900 MHz ZigBee RF transmitter front-end with on-chip LO suppression circuit at the output. To suppress the LO leakage at the RF output, a novel LO suppression circuit is adopted at the up-conversion mixer. The RF transmitter implemented in 0.18 µm CMOS shows more than 28 dB of LO suppression over a wide range of the baseband signal power variation.

This paper presents two hardware-friendly low-power oriented fast motion estimation (ME) algorithms and their VLSI implementations. The basic idea of the proposed partial distortion sorting (PDS) algorithm is to disable the search points which have larger partial distortions during the ME process, and only keep those search points with smaller ones. To further reduce the computation overhead, a simplified local PDS (LPDS) algorithm is also presented. Experiments show that the PDS and LPDS algorithms can provide almost the same image quality as full search only with 36.7% computation complexity. The proposed two algorithms can be integrated into different FSBMA architectures to save power consumption. In this paper, the 1-D inter ME architecture [12] is used as an detailed example. Under the worst working conditions (1.62 V, 125) and 166 MHz clock frequency, the PDS algorithm can reduce 33.3% power consumption with 4.05 K gates extra hardware cost, and the LPDS can reduce 37.8% power consumption with 1.73 K gates overhead.

We develop an enrichment protocol, called a 2-hop Path Selection Protocol (2PSP) for a set of nodes, in which data can be sent faster using adaptive rate control capability of IEEE 802.11a/b/g MAC protocol via a relaying concept than via a direct connection. The main objective of this protocol is to build upon opportunistic rate adaptation in order to assist a sender, a relay node, and a receiver to reach a higher rate data transmission through Medium Access Control (MAC) layer relaying. We propose a relay mechanism to further improve the performance of 2PSP protocol. In the relay mechanism, new contention window, called a Short Backoff Internal (SBI) is applied for a set of relay nodes. A potential node that succeeds as a relay is allowed to send a Ready-To-Relay (RTR) message. In this paper, two collision resolution algorithms are proposed to deal with the case when the potential relay node is more than one. Simulation results indicate that the proposed 2PSP protocol can achieve high reduction of delay and power consumption and also an improvement in the throughput compared to both Receiving-based Auto Rate (RBAR) and Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocols.

A broadband microstrip-to-waveguide transition is developed in the millimeter-wave band. No additional parts and complicated structures are needed to extend the frequency bandwidth. Only the simple and novel geometrical features are added in the printed pattern on the substrate. The proposed transition operates over a quite broad frequency bandwidth due to its double resonance. The two resonant frequencies are controlled by adjusting dimensions of the structure according to the required bandwidth, the reflection level and the center frequency. Two versions of the transition are designed and reliability is confirmed by experiments in the millimeter-wave band. The design frequency is 76.5 GHz. Bandwidth 12.9 GHz (16.8%) is obtained where the reflection level is lower than -30 dB. In the other design for broadband, the bandwidth for reflection level lower than -20 dB results in 24.9 GHz (32.5%). Furthermore, it is confirmed in the experiment and simulation that the center frequency is controlled from 75.3 GHz to 78.7 GHz by changing the geometry of the printed pattern.

The letter describes a phase perturbation attack to the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) and Phase Shift Keying (PSK) based watermarking scheme which is proposed in [3]. In that paper the watermark information is embedded in the phase of the DFT coefficients. But this kind of PSK based watermarking scheme is very vulnerable to the phase perturbation attack, when some noise is added on the phase of the DFT coefficients, the watermark can't be correctly extracted anymore, while the quality degradation of the attacked watermarked image is visually acceptable.

In this paper, we propose new models for directly evaluating DPA leakage from logic information in CMOS circuits. These models are based on the transition probability for each gate, and are naturally applicable to various actual devices for simulating power analysis. Furthermore, we demonstrate the weakness of previously known hardware countermeasures for both our model and FPGA and suggest secure conditions for the hardware countermeasure.

This paper presents a motion-based boundary tracking method for a moving deformable object in an image sequence using a parametric active contour model. Deciding the local converging directions of the contour points is essential for correctly extracting the boundary of a moving deformable object. Thus, a new energy function for a parametric active contour model is proposed based on the addition of a directional energy term using a frame difference map to the greedy snake. The frame difference map is used to obtain motion information on an object with fast and non-rigid motion. Plus, updating rules for the frame difference map are also developed to encourage the stable convergence of the contour points. Experiments on a set of synthetic and real image sequences show that the proposed method could fully track a speedy deformable object while exactly extracting the boundary of the object in every frame.

It is well-known that one of the best wavelet-based image compression techniques, called Wavelet Difference Reduction-WDR, has both simple algorithm and comparative rate-distortion results comparing to other coders in the literature. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to enhance the performance of WDR coder in a very efficient way. The methodology is highly based on the context adaptive model. High-order statistical context modeling is used for significant coefficients prediction by scanning order adaptation of WDR. In binary mode, the coder is clearly better than Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT). A new conditional Arithmetic Coding (AC) using array of contexts is specifically designed for WDR-based coder. Based on our simulation results of all images in the test set which covers various types of images, it is apparent that our proposed coder in AC mode generates the rate-distortion results that are superior to those of all other WDR-based coders in the literature. Furthermore, it is very competitive to SPIHT-AC and JPEG2000, the best coders, at all bit rates.

Providing data availability in a high performance computing environment is very important, especially in this data-intensive world. Most clusters either equip with RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) devices or use redundant nodes to protect data from loss. However, neither of these can really solve the reliability problem incurred in a striped file system. Striping provides an efficient way to increase I/O throughput both in the distributed and parallel paradigms. But it also reduces the overall reliability of a disk system by N fold, where N is the number of independent disks in the system. Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS) is an open source parallel file system which has been widely used in the Linux environment. Its striping structure is good for performance but provides no fault tolerance. We implement Reliable Parallel File System (RPFS) based on PVFS but with reliability support. Our quantitative analysis shows that MTTF (Mean Time To Failure) of our RPFS is better than that of PVFS. Besides, we propose a parity cache table (PCT) to alleviate the penalty of parity updating. The evaluation of our RPFS shows that its read performance is almost the same as that of PVFS (2% to 13% degradation). As to the write performance, 28% to 45% improvement can be achieved depending on the behavior of the operations.

This paper presents the design and implementation of a hip range of motion (ROM) estimation method that is capable of fine-grained estimation during total hip replacement (THR) surgery. Our method is based on two acceleration strategies: (1) adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) for complexity reduction and (2) parallelization for further acceleration. On the assumption that the hip ROM is a single closed region, the AMR strategy reduces the complexity for N N N stance configurations from O(N3) to O(ND), where 2≤D≤3 and D is a data-dependent value that can be approximated by 2 in most cases. The parallelization strategy employs the master-worker paradigm with multiple task queues, reducing synchronization between processors with load balancing. The experimental results indicate that the implementation on a cluster of 64 PCs completes estimation of 360360180 stance configurations in 20 seconds, playing a key role in selecting and aligning the optimal combination of artificial joint components during THR surgery.

Wireless connections between computers and devices introduce a new problem called device migration, which is the dynamic switching of a connection between a computer and a device. This paper describes a new system called the Network Extended Device Management System (NextD), which enables users to continue using a device even if device migration occurs. NextD's functions are device tracking, remote device access, seamless switching, and providing services over network boundaries. The system supports many device types, including a human interface device (HID) and audio and voice devices over both wireless and wired connections. We have implemented NextD on Linux. Experimental results showed that NextD is capable of supporting HIDs, and audio and voice devices, and that its processing time for a device migration is sufficient enough for actual use.

The cascade of two baseline networks in tandem is a rearrangeable network. The cascade of two omega networks appended with a certain interconnection pattern is also rearrangeable. These belong to the general problem: for what banyan-type network (i.e., bit-permuting unique-routing network) is the tandem cascade a rearrangeable network? We relate the problem to the trace and guide of banyan-type networks. Let τ denote the trace permutation of a 2n2n banyan-type network and γ the guide permutation of it. This paper proves that rearrangeability of the tandem cascade of the network is solely determined by the transposition τγ-1. Such a permutation is said to be tandem rearrangeable when the tandem cascade is indeed rearrangeable. We identify a few tandem rearrangeable permutations, each implying the rearrangeability of the tandem cascade of a wide class of banyan-type networks.

Intelligent scissors is an interactive image segmentation algorithm which allows a user to select piece-wise globally optimal contour segment corresponding to a desired object boundary. However, the intelligent scissors is too sensitive to a noise and texture patterns in an image since it utilizes the gradient information concerning the pixel intensities. This paper describes a new intelligent scissors based on the concept of the separability in order to improve the object boundary extraction performance. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been confirmed by some experiments for actual images acquired by an ordinary digital camera.