Biblio

We address energy-efficient placement of data and analytics components of composite analytics services on a wireless network to minimize execution-time energy consumption (computation and communication) subject to compute, storage and network resource constraints. We introduce an expressive analytics service hypergraph model for representing k-ary composability relationships (k ≥ 2) between various analytics and data components and leverage binary quadratic programming (BQP) to minimize the total energy consumption of a given placement of the analytics hypergraph nodes on the network subject to resource availability constraints. Then, after defining a potential energy functional Φ(·) to model the affinities of analytics components and network resources using analogs of attractive and repulsive forces in physics, we propose a decentralized Metropolis Monte Carlo (MMC) sampling method which seeks to minimize Φ by moving analytics and data on the network. Although Φ is non-convex, using a potential game formulation, we identify conditions under which the algorithm provably converges to a local minimum energy equilibrium placement configuration. Trace-based simulations of the placement of a deep-neural-network analytics service on a realistic wireless network show that for smaller problem instances our MMC algorithm yields placements with total energy within a small factor of BQP and more balanced workload distributions; for larger problems, it yields low-energy configurations while the BQP approach fails.

With the increasingly extensive use of diver and unmanned underwater vehicle in military, it has posed a serious threat to the security of the national coastal area. In order to prevent the underwater diver's impact on the safety of water area, it is of great significance to identify underwater small targets in time to make early warning for it. In this paper, convolutional neural network is applied to underwater small target recognition. The recognition targets are diver, whale and dolphin. Due to the time-frequency spectrum can reflect the essential features of underwater target, convolutional neural network can learn a variety of features of the acoustic signal through the image processed by the time-frequency spectrum, time-frequency image is input to convolutional neural network to recognize the underwater small targets. According to the study of learning rate and pooling mode, the network parameters and structure suitable for underwater small target recognition in this paper are selected. The results of data processing show that the method can identify underwater small targets accurately.

Designing an authentication method is a crucial component to secure privacy in information systems. Virtual Reality (VR) is a new interaction platform, in which the users can interact with natural behaviours (e.g. hand, gaze, head, etc.). In this work, we propose a novel authentication method in which user can perform hand motion in an eyes-free manner. We evaluate the usability and security between eyes-engage and eyes-free input with a pilot study. The initial result revealed our purposed method can achieve a trade-off between usability and security, showing a new way to behaviour-based authentication in VR.

Face capturing is a task to capture and store the "best" face of each person passing by the monitor. To some extent, it is similar to face tracking, but uses a different criterion and requires a valuable (i.e., high-quality and recognizable) face selection procedure. Face capturing systems play a critical role in public security. When deployed on edge devices, it is capable of reducing redundant storage in data center and speeding up retrieval of a certain person. However, high computation complexity and high repetition rate caused by ID switch errors are major challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to constructing a real-time low-repetition face capturing system on chips. First, we propose a two-stage association algorithm for memory-efficient and accurate face tracking. Second, we propose a fast and reliable face quality estimation algorithm for valuable face selection. Our pipeline runs at over 20fps on Hisiv 3559A SoC with a single NNIE device for neural network inference, while achieving over 95% recall and less than 0.4 repetition rate in real world surveillance videos.

Video sharing from closed-circuit television video recording or in social media interaction requires self-authentication for responsible and reliable data sharing. Similarly, surveillance video recording is a powerful method of deterring unlawful activities. A Solution-by-Design can be helpful in terms of making a captured video immutable, as such recordings cannot become a piece of evidence until proven to be unaltered. This paper presents a computationally inexpensive method of preserving a chain-of-evidence in surveillance videos using steganography and hashing. The method conforms to the data protection regulations which are increasingly adopted by governments, and is applicable to network edge storage. Security credentials are stored in a hardware wallet independently of the video capture device itself, while evidential information is stored within video frames themselves, independently of the content. The proposed method has turned out to not only preserve the integrity of the stored video data but also results in very limited degradation of the video data due to steganography. Despite the presence of steganographic information, video frames are still available for common image processing tasks such as tracking and classification.

Ensuring secure transmission over the communication channel is a fundamental responsibility to achieve the implementation objective of universal internet of vehicles (UIoV) efficiently. Characteristics like highly dynamic topology and scalability of UIoV makes it more vulnerable to different types of privacy and security attacks. Considerable scope of improvement in terms of time complexity and performance can be observed within the existing schemes that address the privacy and security aspects of UIoV. In this paper, we present an improvised authentication and lightweight batch verification method for security and privacy in UIoV. The suggested method reduces the message loss rate, which occurred due to the response time delay by implementing some low-cost cryptographic operations like one-way hash function, concatenation, XOR, and bilinear map. Furthermore, the performance analysis proves that the proposed method is more reliable that reduces the computational delay and has a better performance in the delay-sensitive network as compared to the existing schemes. The experimental results are obtained by implementing the proposed scheme on a desktop-based configuration as well as Raspberry Pi 4.

Design for trust approaches can protect an MPSoC system from hardware Trojan attack due to the high penetration of third-party intellectual property. However, this incurs significant design cost by purchasing IP cores from various IP vendors, and the IP vendors providing particular IP are always limited, making these approaches unable to be performed in practice. This paper treats IP vendor as constraint, and tasks are scheduled with a minimized security constraint violations, furthermore, the area of MPSoC is also optimized during scheduling. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm, by reducing 0.37% security constraint violations.

Fog computing architecture allows the end-user devices of an Internet of Things (IoT) application to meet their latency and computation requirements by offloading tasks to a fog node in proximity. This fog node in turn may offload the task to a neighboring fog node or the cloud-based on an optimal node selection policy. Several such node selection policies have been proposed that facilitate the selection of an optimal node, minimizing delay and energy consumption. However, one crucial assumption of these schemes is that all the networked fog nodes are authorized part of the fog network. This assumption is not valid, especially in a cooperative fog computing environment like a smart city, where fog nodes of multiple applications cooperate to meet their latency and computation requirements. In this paper, we propose a secure task-offloading framework for a distributed fog computing environment based on smart-contracts on the blockchain. The proposed framework allows a fog-node to securely offload tasks to a neighboring fog node, even if no prior trust-relation exists. The security analysis of the proposed framework shows how non-authenticated fog nodes are prevented from taking up offloading tasks.

The trust of a robot in its human partner is a significant issue in human-robot interaction, which is seldom explored in the field of robotics. This study addresses a critical issue of robots' trust in humans during the human-robot collaboration process based on the data of human motions, past interactions of the human-robot pair, and the human's current performance in the co-carry task. The trust level is evaluated dynamically throughout the collaborative task that allows the trust level to change if the human performs false positive actions, which can help the robot avoid making unpredictable movements and causing injury to the human. Experimental results showed that the robot effectively assisted the human in collaborative tasks through the proposed computational trust model.

Hardening is the process of configuring IT systems to ensure the security of the systems' components and data they process or store. The complexity of contemporary IT infrastructures, however, renders manual security hardening and maintenance a daunting task. In many organizations, security-configuration guides expressed in the SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol) are used as a basis for hardening, but these guides by themselves provide no means for automatically implementing the required configurations. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically extract the relevant information from publicly available security-configuration guides for Windows operating systems using natural language processing. In a second step, the extracted information is verified using the information of available settings stored in the Windows Administrative Template files, in which the majority of Windows configuration settings is defined. We show that our implementation of this approach can extract and implement 83% of the rules without any manual effort and 96% with minimal manual effort. Furthermore, we conduct a study with 12 state-of-the-art guides consisting of 2014 rules with automatic checks and show that our tooling can implement at least 97% of them correctly. We have thus significantly reduced the effort of securing systems based on existing security-configuration guides. In many organizations, security-configuration guides expressed in the SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol) are used as a basis for hardening, but these guides by themselves provide no means for automatically implementing the required configurations. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically extract the relevant information from publicly available security-configuration guides for Windows operating systems using natural language processing. In a second step, the extracted information is verified using the information of available settings stored in the Windows Administrative Template files, in which the majority of Windows configuration settings is defined. We show that our implementation of this approach can extract and implement 83% of the rules without any manual effort and 96% with minimal manual effort. Furthermore, we conduct a study with 12 state-of-the-art guides consisting of 2014 rules with automatic checks and show that our tooling can implement at least 97% of them correctly. We have thus significantly reduced the effort of securing systems based on existing security-configuration guides. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically extract the relevant information from publicly available security-configuration guides for Windows operating systems using natural language processing. In a second step, the extracted information is verified using the information of available settings stored in the Windows Administrative Template files, in which the majority of Windows configuration settings is defined. We show that our implementation of this approach can extract and implement 83% of the rules without any manual effort and 96% with minimal manual effort. Furthermore, we conduct a study with 12 state-of-the-art guides consisting of 2014 rules with automatic checks and show that our tooling can implement at least 97% of them correctly. We have thus significantly reduced the effort of securing systems based on existing security-configuration guides. We show that our implementation of this approach can extract and implement 83% of the rules without any manual effort and 96% with minimal manual effort. Furthermore, we conduct a study with 12 state-of-the-art guides consisting of 2014 rules with automatic checks and show that our tooling can implement at least 97% of them correctly. We have thus significantly reduced the effort of securing systems based on existing security-configuration guides.

Anomaly detection is critically important for intelligent surveillance systems to detect in a timely manner any malicious activities. Many video anomaly detection approaches using deep learning methods focus on a single camera video stream with a fixed scenario. These deep learning methods use large-scale training data with large complexity. As a solution, in this paper, we show how to use pre-trained convolutional neural net models to perform feature extraction and context mining, and then use denoising autoencoder with relatively low model complexity to provide efficient and accurate surveillance anomaly detection, which can be useful for the resource-constrained devices such as edge devices of the Internet of Things (IoT). Our anomaly detection model makes decisions based on the high-level features derived from the selected embedded computer vision models such as object classification and object detection. Additionally, we derive contextual properties from the high-level features to further improve the performance of our video anomaly detection method. We use two UCSD datasets to demonstrate that our approach with relatively low model complexity can achieve comparable performance compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.

In STOC 1988, Ben-Or, Goldwasser, and Wigderson (BGW) established an important milestone in the fields of cryptography and distributed computing by showing that every functionality can be computed with perfect (information-theoretic and error-free) security at the presence of an active (aka Byzantine) rushing adversary that controls up to n/3 of the parties. We study the round complexity of general secure multiparty computation in the BGW model. Our main result shows that every functionality can be realized in only four rounds of interaction, and that some functionalities cannot be computed in three rounds. This completely settles the round-complexity of perfect actively-secure optimally-resilient MPC, resolving a long line of research. Our lower-bound is based on a novel round-reduction technique that allows us to lift existing three-round lower-bounds for verifiable secret sharing to four-round lower-bounds for general MPC. To prove the upper-bound, we develop new round-efficient protocols for computing degree-2 functionalities over large fields, and establish the completeness of such functionalities. The latter result extends the recent completeness theorem of Applebaum, Brakerski and Tsabary (TCC 2018, Eurocrypt 2019) that was limited to the binary field.

In order to significantly improve the reliable interaction and fast processing when TT&C(Tracking, Telemetry and Command) Resource Scheduling and Management System (TRSMS) communicate with external systems which are diverse, multiple directional and high concurrent, this paper designs and implements a highly concurrent and secure middleware for TT&C Resource Automatic Scheduling Interface (TRASI). The middleware designs memory pool, data pool, thread pool and task pool to improve the efficiency of concurrent processing, uses the rule dictionary, communication handshake and wait retransmission mechanism to ensure the data interaction security and reliability. This middleware can effectively meet the requirements of TRASI for data exchange with external users and system, significantly improve the data processing speed and efficiency, and promote the information technology and automation level of Aerospace TT&C Network Management Center (TNMC).

There has been tremendous progress in the past few decades towards developing applications that receive data and send data concurrently. In such a day and age, there is a requirement for a language that can perform optimally in such environments. Currently, the two most popular languages in that respect are Go and Java. In this paper, we look to analyze the concurrency features of Go and Java through a complete programming language performance analysis, looking at their compile time, run time, binary sizes and the language's unique concurrency features. This is done by experimenting with the two languages using the matrix multiplication and PageRank algorithms. To the extent of our knowledge, this is the first work which used PageRank algorithm to analyse concurrency. Considering the results of this paper, application developers and researchers can hypothesize on an appropriate language to use for their concurrent programming activity.Results of this paper show that Go performs better for fewer number of computation but is soon taken over by Java as the number of computations drastically increase. This trend is shown to be the opposite when thread creation and management is considered where Java performs better with fewer computation but Go does better later on. Regarding concurrency features both Java with its Executor Service library and Go had their own advantages that made them better for specific applications.

Due to increased number of devices with limited resources in Internet of Things (IoT) has to serve time sensitive applications including health monitoring, emergency response, industrial applications and smart city etc. This has incurred the problem of solving the provisioning of limited computational resources of the devices to fulfill the requirement with reduced latency. With rapid increase of devices and heterogeneity characteristic the resource provisioning is crucial and leads to conflict of trusting among the devices requests. Trust is essential component in any context for communicating or sharing the resources in the network. The proposed work comprises of trusting and provisioning based on deadline. Trust quantity is measured with concept of game theory and optimal strategy decision among provider and customer and provision resources within deadline to execute the tasks is done by finding Nash equilibrium. Nash equilibrium (NE) is estimated by constructing the payoff matrix with choice of two player strategies. NE is obtained in the proposed work for the Trust- Respond (TR) strategy. The latency aware approach for avoiding resource contention due to limited resources of the edge devices, fog computing leverages the cloud services in a distributed way at the edge of the devices. The communication is established between edge devices-fog-cloud and provision of resources is performed based on scalar chain and Gang Plank theory of management to reduce latency and increase trust quantity. To test the performance of proposed work performance parameter considered are latency and computational time.

Coreference resolution is an important task in the field of natural language processing. Most existing methods usually utilize word-level representations, ignoring massive information from the texts. To address this issue, we investigate how to improve Chinese coreference resolution by using span-level semantic representations. Specifically, we propose a model which acquires word and character representations through pre-trained Skip-Gram embeddings and pre-trained BERT, then explicitly leverages span-level information by performing bidirectional LSTMs among above representations. Experiments on CoNLL-2012 shared task have demonstrated that the proposed model achieves 62.95% F1-score, outperforming our baseline methods.

Human action is naturally compositional: humans can easily recognize and perform actions with objects that are different from those used in training demonstrations. In this paper, we study the compositionality of action by looking into the dynamics of subject-object interactions. We propose a novel model which can explicitly reason about the geometric relations between constituent objects and an agent performing an action. To train our model, we collect dense object box annotations on the Something-Something dataset. We propose a novel compositional action recognition task where the training combinations of verbs and nouns do not overlap with the test set. The novel aspects of our model are applicable to activities with prominent object interaction dynamics and to objects which can be tracked using state-of-the-art approaches; for activities without clearly defined spatial object-agent interactions, we rely on baseline scene-level spatio-temporal representations. We show the effectiveness of our approach not only on the proposed compositional action recognition task but also in a few-shot compositional setting which requires the model to generalize across both object appearance and action category.

Language creates a compact representation of the world and allows the description of unlimited situations and objectives through compositionality. While these characterizations may foster instructing, conditioning or structuring interactive agent behavior, it remains an open-problem to correctly relate language understanding and reinforcement learning in even simple instruction following scenarios. This joint learning problem is alleviated through expert demonstrations, auxiliary losses, or neural inductive biases. In this paper, we propose an orthogonal approach called Hindsight Generation for Experience Replay (HIGhER) that extends the Hindsight Experience Replay approach to the language-conditioned policy setting. Whenever the agent does not fulfill its instruction, HIGhER learns to output a new directive that matches the agent trajectory, and it relabels the episode with a positive reward. To do so, HIGhER learns to map a state into an instruction by using past successful trajectories, which removes the need to have external expert interventions to relabel episodes as in vanilla HER. We show the efficiency of our approach in the BabyAI environment, and demonstrate how it complements other instruction following methods.

Visual reasoning between visual image and natural language description is a long-standing challenge in computer vision. While recent approaches offer a great promise by compositionality or relational computing, most of them are oppressed by the challenge of training with datasets containing only a limited number of images with ground-truth texts. Besides, it is extremely time-consuming and difficult to build a larger dataset by annotating millions of images with text descriptions that may very likely lead to a biased model. Inspired by the majority success of webly supervised learning, we utilize readily-available web images with its noisy annotations for learning a robust representation. Our key idea is to presume on web images and corresponding tags along with fully annotated datasets in learning with knowledge embedding. We present a two-stage approach for the task that can augment knowledge through an effective embedding model with weakly supervised web data. This approach learns not only knowledge-based embeddings derived from key-value memory networks to make joint and full use of textual and visual information but also exploits the knowledge to improve the performance with knowledge-based representation learning for applying other general reasoning tasks. Experimental results on two benchmarks show that the proposed approach significantly improves performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods and guarantees the robustness of our model against visual reasoning tasks and other reasoning tasks.

Physical interaction of robots with their environment is a challenging problem because of the exchanged forces. Hybrid position/force control schemes often exhibit problems during the contact phase, whereas impedance control appears to be more simple and reliable, especially when impedance is shaped to be energetically passive. Even if recent technologies enable shaping the impedance of a robot, how best to plan impedance parameters for task execution remains an open question. In this paper we present an optimization-based approach to plan not only the robot motion but also its desired end-effector mechanical impedance. We show how our methodology is able to take into account the transition from free motion to a contact condition, typical of physical interaction tasks. Results are presented for planar and three-dimensional open-chain manipulator arms. The compositionality of mechanical impedance is exploited to deal with kinematic redundancy and multi-arm manipulation.

Referring expression comprehension (REF) aims at identifying a particular object in a scene by a natural language expression. It requires joint reasoning over the textual and visual domains to solve the problem. Some popular referring expression datasets, however, fail to provide an ideal test bed for evaluating the reasoning ability of the models, mainly because 1) their expressions typically describe only some simple distinctive properties of the object and 2) their images contain limited distracting information. To bridge the gap, we propose a new dataset for visual reasoning in context of referring expression comprehension with two main features. First, we design a novel expression engine rendering various reasoning logics that can be flexibly combined with rich visual properties to generate expressions with varying compositionality. Second, to better exploit the full reasoning chain embodied in an expression, we propose a new test setting by adding additional distracting images containing objects sharing similar properties with the referent, thus minimising the success rate of reasoning-free cross-domain alignment. We evaluate several state-of-the-art REF models, but find none of them can achieve promising performance. A proposed modular hard mining strategy performs the best but still leaves substantial room for improvement.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) can benefit by the use of learning enabled components (LECs) such as deep neural networks (DNNs) for perception and decision making tasks. However, DNNs are typically non-transparent making reasoning about their predictions very difficult, and hence their application to safety-critical systems is very challenging. LECs could be integrated easier into CPS if their predictions could be complemented with a confidence measure that quantifies how much we trust their output. The paper presents an approach for computing confidence bounds based on Inductive Conformal Prediction (ICP). We train a Triplet Network architecture to learn representations of the input data that can be used to estimate the similarity between test examples and examples in the training data set. Then, these representations are used to estimate the confidence of set predictions from a classifier that is based on the neural network architecture used in the triplet. The approach is evaluated using a robotic navigation benchmark and the results show that we can computed trusted confidence bounds efficiently in real-time.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) have gained considerable interest in the last decade from both industry and academia. Such systems have proven particularly complex and provide considerable challenges to master their design and ensure their functionalities. In this paper, we intend to tackle some of these challenges related to the security and the resilience of CPS at the design level. We initiate a CPS modeling approach to specify such systems structure and behaviors, analyze their inherent properties and to overcome threats in terms of security and correctness. In this initiative, we consider a CPS as a network of entities that communicate through physical and logical channels, and which purpose is to achieve a set of tasks expressed as an ordered tree. Our modeling approach proposes a combination of the Coq theorem prover and the Maude rewriting system to ensure the soundness and correctness of CPS design. The introduced solution is illustrated through an automobile manufacturing case study.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) often rely on network boundary defence as a primary means of access control; therefore, the compromise of one device threatens the security of all devices within the boundary. Resource and real-time constraints, tight hardware/software coupling, and decades-long service lifetimes complicate efforts for more robust, host-based access control mechanisms. Distributed capability systems provide opportunities for restoring access control to resource-owning devices; however, such a protection model requires a capability-based architecture for CPS devices as well as task compartmentalisation to be effective.This paper demonstrates hardware enforcement of network bearer tokens using an efficient translation between CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions) architectural capabilities and Macaroon network tokens. While this method appears to generalise to any network-based access control problem, we specifically consider CPS, as our method is well-suited for controlling resources in the physical domain. We demonstrate the method in a distributed robotics application and in a hierarchical industrial control application, and discuss our plans to evaluate and extend the method.

In this paper, we examine algebraic attacks on the O'zDSt 1105:2009. We begin with a brief review of the meaning of algebraic cryptanalysis, followed by an algebraic cryptanalysis of O'zDSt 1105:2009. Primarily O'zDSt 1105:2009 encryption algorithm is decomposed and each transformation in it is algebraic described separately. Then input and output of each transformation are expressed with other transformation, encryption key, plaintext and cipher text. Created equations, unknowns on it and degree of unknowns are analyzed, and then overall result is given. Based on experimental results, it is impossible to save all system of equations that describes all transformations in O'zDSt 1105:2009 standard. Because, this task requires 273 bytes for the second round. For this reason, it is advisable to evaluate the parameters of the system of algebraic equations, representing the O'zDSt 1105:2009 standard, theoretically.