Explore the vast range of titles available.

In last years, there has been an increasing effort to leverage distributed ledger technology (DLT), including blockchain. One of the main topics of interest, given its importance, is the research and development of privacy mechanisms, as for example is the case of zero knowledge proofs (ZKP). ZKP is a cryptographic technique that can be used to hide information that is put into the ledger, while still allowing to perform validation of this data. In this work we describe different strategies to construct zero knowledge range proofs (ZKRP), as for example the scheme proposed by Boudot (in: Bart (ed) Advances in cryptology—EUROCRYPT 2000, Springer, Berlin, 2000 ) in 2001; the one proposed by Camenisch et al. (in: Josef (ed) Advances in cryptology—ASIACRYPT 2008, Springer, Berlin, 2008 ), and bulletproofs (Bünz et al., in: 2018 IEEE symposium on security and privacy (SP), 2018 ), proposed in 2017. We also compare these strategies and discuss possible use cases. Since bulletproofs (Bünz et al. 2018 ) is the most efficient construction, we will give a detailed description of its algorithms and optimizations. Bulletproofs is not only more efficient than previous schemes, but also avoids the trusted setup, which is a requirement that is not desirable in the context of DLT and blockchain. In case of cryptocurrencies, if the setup phase is compromised, it would be possible to generate money out of thin air. Interestingly, bulletproofs can also be used to construct generic ZKP, in the sense that it can be used to prove generic statements, and thus it is not only restricted to ZKRP, but it can be used for any kind of proof of knowledge. Hence Bulletproofs leads to a more powerful tool to provide privacy for DLT. Here we describe in detail the algorithms involved in Bulletproofs protocol for ZKRP. Also, we present our implementation, which was open sourced (Morais et al., in: Zero knowledge range proof implementation, 2018 . https://github.com/ing-bank/zkrangeproof ).

Wireless Sensor Networks have been often used in the context of Greenhouse architectures. In this paper, an architecture is proposed for two Greenhouses based on Networked Control Systems. This architecture is IoT-based and built on top of switched Ethernet and Wi-Fi. Some sensors in the proposed architecture require a one-second real-time deadline. Riverbed simulations prove that there is zero packet loss and no over-delayed packets. An important contribution of this work is the design of a channel allocation scheme that prevents interference in this relatively large Greenhouse system. Another contribution of this work is the introduction of fault tolerance at the controller level. If one controller fails in one of the Greenhouses, the other controller automatically takes over the entire operation of the two-Greenhouse system. Riverbed simulations again show that this fault-tolerant system does not suffer any packet loss or over-delayed packets. Continuous Time Markov Chains are then developed to calculate the reliability as well as the steady state availability of the two-Greenhouse system. The Coverage parameter is taken into account. Finally, a case study is presented to quantitatively assess the advantage of fault tolerance in terms of downtime reduction; this is expected to be attractive especially in developing countries.

The system-on-chip (SoC) is an integration of millions of electronic components, there is always a chance for faults to occur due to manufacturing defects. In order to solve this problem, it is essential to test the manufactured chips. The time spent on testing increases the testing cost which reflects on the cost of the chip. While testing the SoC, core accessibility and testing time are the main issues to be considered. In order to reduce the testing time, test scheduling has to be performed in an effective manner. In this article ACO, Modified ACO, ABC, Modified ABC, Firefly and Modified Firefly test scheduling algorithms were tested on two SoC benchmark circuits. Experimental results show that the Modified ABC algorithm performs better than the other algorithms used in test scheduling. When compared with ACO, Modified ACO, ABC, Firefly and Modified Firefly algorithms, the Modified ABC algorithm’s testing time has been reduced by 82%, 69%, 25%, 43% and 48% for d695 SoC and 80%, 73%, 20%, 41% and 47% for p22810 SoC benchmark circuits respectively.

This paper provides a review of the state-of-the-art of major Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) based devices along with their security concerns. It discusses, mainly, the threats and vulnerabilities of PLCs and associated field devices—including local industrial networks. As PLC-BS are becoming more integrated and interconnected with other complex systems and open source solutions, they are becoming more vulnerable to critical threats and exploitations. Little attention and progress have been made in securing such devices if compared to that of securing overall Industrial Control Systems. This review shows the fact that major PLC based devices have several vulnerabilities and are insecure by design—firmware, code, or hardware. This paper suggests policies, recommendations, and countermeasures to secure PLC-BS. Securing PLC-BS is vital and crucial since a compromised PLC-BS would lead to significant financial loss and safety risks that could endanger human lives or the environment.

Social networking sites have become an integral part of everyday life, where people interact, cooperate and quarrel with each other. Social media also encourages them to express their opinions and share their comments about their lives’ events or about the product they use. Opinions can be direct without any comparison (I like ABC phone) or they can be comparative (X-phone’s camera is better than Y-phone). Comparative opinions are useful in many applications, e.g. marketing intelligence, product benchmarking, and e-commerce. The automatic mining of comparative opinions is an important text mining problem and an area of increasing interest for different languages. This paper focuses on identification of comparative sentence from non-comparative ones in Arabic texts. A corpus was developed consisting of YouTube comments. This paper describes research experiments that aimed to apply data/text mining algorithms, natural language processing and linguistic classification for Arabic comparative text discovery. The results of these experiments along with the analysis are also presented. The results were promising reaching to 91% accuracy for the detection of comparative opinions.

Mobile Device Management (MDM) in companies becomes more and more important due to security reasons. Since a mobile device—as the term expresses—is mobile, it cannot be controlled by a company and local administrators like stationary equipment. Most of today’s mobiles are operated by an Android system. Current MDM-solutions, as well as their implementation and impact on change management, will be discussed. This paper will not provide any recommendations for or against any MDM-system. Instead, the goal is to provide a general How-To, to illustrate what an MDM-system is capable of, especially when implemented as a cloud-based solution and how to make the best use of it for your company. As an example, one commercial and two open-source systems will be discussed.

Methods of information presentation in the automotive space have been evolving continuously in recent years. As technology pushes forward the boundaries of what is possible, automobile manufacturers are trying to keep up with the current trends. Traditionally, the often-long development and quality control cycles of the automotive sector ensured slow yet steady progress. However, the exponential advancement in the mobile and hand-held computing space seen in the last 10 years has put immense pressure on automobile manufacturers to try to catch up. For this reason, we now see manufacturers trying to explore new techniques for in-vehicle interaction (IVI), which were ignored in the past. However, recent attempts have either simply extended the interaction model already used in mobile or handheld computing devices or increased visual-only presentation-of-information with limited expansion to other modalities (i.e. audio or haptics). This is also true for system interaction which generally happens within complex driving environments, making the primary task of a driver (driving) even more challenging. Essentially, there is an inherent need to design and research IVI systems that complement and natively support a multimodal interaction approach, providing all the necessary information without increasing driver’s cognitive load or at a bare minimum his/her visual load. In this research we focus on the key elements of IVI system: touchscreen interaction by developing prototype devices that can complement the conventional visual and auditory modalities in a simple and natural manner. Instead of adding primitive touch feedback cues to increase redundancy or complexity, we approach the issue by looking at the current requirements of interaction and complementing the existing system with natural and intuitive input and output methods, which are less affected by environmental noise than traditional multimodal systems.

A public key cryptosystem and signature scheme based on a proposed key exchange algorithm are introduced. The key exchange algorithm is based on the difficulty of calculating the n th partial sum of infinite numerical series where no exponentiation computation is required to share a secret key between two parties as in the Diffie–Hellman algorithm. With the proposed public key cryptosystem ciphering and deciphering of messages, online signing documents and verifying signatures do not require exponentiation computation while providing higher security level than the state-of-the-art cryptosystems that depend on the difficulty of discrete logarithmic problem or factorizing large prime numbers. The proposed cryptosystem and signature scheme do not depend on elliptic curve cryptography or RSA cryptography that are computationally too slow, this makes the proposed cryptosystem and signature scheme computationally faster, easier to implement and more practical to be used in online transactions. It also provides a higher level of security as it provides forward secrecy and using large size symmetric keys to encrypt and decrypt messages in a significantly short time. Moreover, the proposed signature scheme can be used as a cryptographic hash function as the hash value significantly changes when a single letter in the document is changed. In comparison with the state-of-the art the experimental results show the superiority of the proposed key exchange algorithm and public key cryptosystem.

The inter-generations dual connectivity (DC) between the 4G and 5G, named as LTE-NR, has got a lot of attention in 3GPP Release 15 because such integration may help to guarantee 5G dedicated demands concerning high throughput, reliability, retainability and availability. This paper gives an overview on the DC technology coupling LTE and new radio in evolved packet system and focuses on some problems concerning the SgNB initiated SgNB release due to user inactivity reasons.

In this paper, we have implemented, using Matlab Simulink an analog artificial neural network for breast cancer classification. Simulated results with ideal building blocks exhibit a total error of classification of 2.6%. Thanks to this value, we have modified Simulink models of the building blocks (i.e. multiplier, activation function and its derivative) in order to take into account their non-idealities. This study allows to determine their influence on the classification quality and to extract some specifications of these building blocks.