Biblio
In order to provide secure data communication in present cyber space world, a stronger encryption technique becomes a necessity that can help people to protect their sensitive information from cryptanalyst. This paper proposes a novel symmetric block cipher algorithm that uses multiple access circular queues (MACQs) of variable lengths for diffusion of information to a greater extent. The keys are randomly generated and will be of variable lengths depending upon the size of each MACQ.A number of iterations of circular rotations, swapping of elements and XORing the key with queue elements are performed on each MACQ. S-box is used so that the relationship between the key and the cipher text remains indeterminate or obscure. These operations together will help in transforming the cipher into a much more complex and secure block cipher. This paper attempt to propose an encryption algorithm that is secure and fast.
Today, cloud vendors host third party black-box services, whose developers usually provide only textual descriptions or purely syntactical interface specifications. Cloud vendors that give substantial support to other third party developers to integrate hosted services into new software solutions would have a unique selling feature over their competitors. However, to reliably determine if a service is reusable, comprehensive service specifications are needed. Characteristic for comprehensive in contrast to syntactical specifications are the formalization of ontological and behavioral semantics, homogeneity according to a global ontology, and a service grounding that links the abstract service description and its technical realization. Homogeneous, semantical specifications enable to reliably identify reusable services, whereas the service grounding is needed for the technical service integration. In general, comprehensive specifications are not available and have to be derived. Existing automatized approaches are restricted to certain characteristics of comprehensiveness. In my PhD, I consider an automatized approach to derive fully-fledged comprehensive specifications for black-box services. Ontological semantics are derived from syntactical interface specifications. Behavioral semantics are mined from call logs that cloud vendors create to monitor the hosted services. The specifications are harmonized over a global ontology. The service grounding is established using traceability information. The approach enables third party developers to compose services into complex systems and creates new sales channels for cloud and service providers.
Finding differences between programs with similar functionality is an important security problem as such differences can be used for fingerprinting or creating evasion attacks against security software like Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) which are designed to detect malicious inputs to web applications. In this paper, we present SFADIFF, a black-box differential testing framework based on Symbolic Finite Automata (SFA) learning. SFADIFF can automatically find differences between a set of programs with comparable functionality. Unlike existing differential testing techniques, instead of searching for each difference individually, SFADIFF infers SFA models of the target programs using black-box queries and systematically enumerates the differences between the inferred SFA models. All differences between the inferred models are checked against the corresponding programs. Any difference between the models, that does not result in a difference between the corresponding programs, is used as a counterexample for further refinement of the inferred models. SFADIFF's model-based approach, unlike existing differential testing tools, also support fully automated root cause analysis in a domain-independent manner. We evaluate SFADIFF in three different settings for finding discrepancies between: (i) three TCP implementations, (ii) four WAFs, and (iii) HTML/JavaScript parsing implementations in WAFs and web browsers. Our results demonstrate that SFADIFF is able to identify and enumerate the differences systematically and efficiently in all these settings. We show that SFADIFF is able to find differences not only between different WAFs but also between different versions of the same WAF. SFADIFF is also able to discover three previously-unknown differences between the HTML/JavaScript parsers of two popular WAFs (PHPIDS 0.7 and Expose 2.4.0) and the corresponding parsers of Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. We confirm that all these differences can be used to evade the WAFs and launch successful cross-site scripting attacks.
Processes to automate the selection of appropriate algorithms for various matrix computations are described. In particular, processes to check for, and certify, various matrix properties of black-box matrices are presented. These include sparsity patterns and structural properties that allow "superfast" algorithms to be used in place of black-box algorithms. Matrix properties that hold generically, and allow the use of matrix preconditioning to be reduced or eliminated, can also be checked for and certified –- notably including in the small-field case, where this presently has the greatest impact on the efficiency of the computation.
Tensors are a multi-linear generalization of matrices to their d-way counterparts, and are receiving intense interest recently due to their natural representation of high-dimensional data and the availability of fast tensor decomposition algorithms. Given the input-output data of a nonlinear system/circuit, this paper presents a nonlinear model identification and simulation framework built on top of Volterra series and its seamless integration with tensor arithmetic. By exploiting partially-symmetric polyadic decompositions of sparse Toeplitz tensors, the proposed framework permits a pleasantly scalable way to incorporate high-order Volterra kernels. Such an approach largely eludes the curse of dimensionality and allows computationally fast modeling and simulation beyond weakly nonlinear systems. The black-box nature of the model also hides structural information of the system/circuit and encapsulates it in terms of compact tensors. Numerical examples are given to verify the efficacy, efficiency and generality of this tensor-based modeling and simulation framework.
One important goal of black-box complexity theory is the development of complexity models allowing to derive meaningful lower bounds for whole classes of randomized search heuristics. Complementing classical runtime analysis, black-box models help us understand how algorithmic choices such as the population size, the variation operators, or the selection rules influence the optimization time. One example for such a result is the Ω(n log n) lower bound for unary unbiased algorithms on functions with a unique global optimum [Lehre/Witt, GECCO 2010], which tells us that higher arity operators or biased sampling strategies are needed when trying to beat this bound. In lack of analyzing techniques, almost no non-trivial bounds are known for other restricted models. Proving such bounds therefore remains to be one of the main challenges in black-box complexity theory. With this paper we contribute to our technical toolbox for lower bound computations by proposing a new type of information-theoretic argument. We regard the permutation- and bit-invariant version of LeadingOnes and prove that its (1+1) elitist black-box complexity is Ω(n2), a bound that is matched by (1+1)-type evolutionary algorithms. The (1+1) elitist complexity of LeadingOnes is thus considerably larger than its unrestricted one, which is known to be of order n log log n [Afshani et al., 2013].
While compilers offer a fair trade-off between productivity and executable performance in single-threaded execution, their optimizations remain fragile when addressing compute-intensive code for parallel architectures with deep memory hierarchies. Moreover, these optimizations operate as black boxes, impenetrable for the user, leaving them with no alternative to time-consuming and error-prone manual optimization in cases where an imprecise cost model or a weak analysis resulted in a bad optimization decision. To address this issue, we propose a technique allowing to automatically translate an arbitrary polyhedral optimization, used internally by loop-level optimization frameworks of several modern compilers, into a sequence of comprehensible syntactic transformations as long as this optimization focuses on scheduling loop iterations. This approach opens the black box of the polyhedral frameworks enabling users to examine, refine, replay and even design complex optimizations semi-automatically in partnership with the compiler.
Synchronous replication is critical for today's enterprise IT organization. It is mandatory by regulation in several countries for some types of organizations, including banks and insurance companies. The technology has been available for a long period of time, but due to speed of light and maximal latency limitations, it is usually limited to a distance of 50-100 miles. Flight data recorders, also known as black boxes, have long been used to record the last actions which happened in airplanes at times of disasters. We present an integration between an Enterprise Data Recorder and an asynchronous replication mechanism, which allows breaking the functional limits that light speed imposes on synchronous replication.
In classical runtime analysis it has been observed that certain working principles of an evolutionary algorithm cannot be understood by only looking at the asymptotic order of the runtime, but that more precise estimates are needed. In this work we demonstrate that the same observation applies to black-box complexity analysis. We prove that the unary unbiased black-box complexity of the classic OneMax function class is n ln(n) – cn ± o(n) for a constant c between 0.2539 and 0.2665. Our analysis yields a simple (1+1)-type algorithm achieving this runtime bound via a fitness-dependent mutation strength. When translated into a fixed-budget perspective, our algorithm with the same budget computes a solution that asymptotically is 13% closer to the optimum (given that the budget is at least 0.2675n).
Finding and proving lower bounds on black-box complexities is one of the hardest problems in theory of randomized search heuristics. Until recently, there were no general ways of doing this, except for information theoretic arguments similar to the one of Droste, Jansen and Wegener. In a recent paper by Buzdalov, Kever and Doerr, a theorem is proven which may yield tighter bounds on unrestricted black-box complexity using certain problem-specific information. To use this theorem, one should split the search process into a finite number of states, describe transitions between states, and for each state specify (and prove) the maximum number of different answers to any query. We augment these state constraints by one more kind of constraints on states, namely, the maximum number of different currently possible optima. An algorithm is presented for computing the lower bounds based on these constraints. We also empirically show improved lower bounds on black-box complexity of OneMax and Mastermind.