Biblio

Data security has become an issue of increasing importance, especially for Web applications and distributed databases. One solution is using cryptographic algorithms whose improvement has become a constant concern. The increasing complexity of these algorithms involves higher execution times, leading to an application performance decrease. This paper presents a comparison of execution times for three algorithms using asymmetric keys, depending on the size of the encryption/decryption keys: RSA, ElGamal, and ECIES. For this algorithms comparison, a benchmark using Java APIs and an application for testing them on a test database was created.

The advancement in technology has changed how people work and what software and hardware people use. From conventional personal computer to GPU, hardware technology and capability have dramatically improved so does the operating systems that come along. Unfortunately, current industry practice to compare OS is performed with single perspective. It is either benchmark the hardware level performance or performs penetration testing to check the security features of an OS. This rigid method of benchmarking does not really reflect the true performance of an OS as the performance analysis is not comprehensive and conclusive. To illustrate this deficiency, the study performed hardware level and operational level benchmarking on Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8 and the results indicate that there are instances where Windows XP excels over its newer counterparts. Overall, the research shows Windows 8 is a superior OS in comparison to its predecessors running on the same hardware. Furthermore, the findings also show that the automated benchmarking tools are proved less efficient benchmark systems that run on Windows XP and older OS as they do not support DirectX 11 and other advanced features that the hardware supports. There lies the need to have a unified benchmarking approach to compare other aspects of OS such as user oriented tasks and security parameters to provide a complete comparison. Therefore, this paper is proposing a unified approach for Operating System (OS) comparisons with the help of a Windows OS case study. This unified approach includes comparison of OS from three aspects which are; hardware level, operational level performance and security tests.

NoSQL databases have become popular with enterprises due to their scalable and flexible storage management of big data. Nevertheless, their popularity also brings up security concerns. Most NoSQL databases lacked secure data encryption, relying on developers to implement cryptographic methods at application level or middleware layer as a wrapper around the database. While this approach protects the integrity of data, it increases the difficulty of executing queries. We were motivated to design a system that not only provides NoSQL databases with the necessary data security, but also supports the execution of query over encrypted data. Furthermore, how to exploit the distributed fashion of NoSQL databases to deliver high performance and scalability with massive client accesses is another important challenge. In this research, we introduce Crypt-NoSQL, the first prototype to support execution of query over encrypted data on NoSQL databases with high performance. Three different models of Crypt-NoSQL were proposed and performance was evaluated with Yahoo! Cloud Service Benchmark (YCSB) considering an enormous number of clients. Our experimental results show that Crypt-NoSQL can process queries over encrypted data with high performance and scalability. A guidance of establishing service level agreement (SLA) for Crypt-NoSQL as a cloud service is also proposed.

HDFS has been widely used for storing massive scale data which is vulnerable to site disaster. The file system backup is an important strategy for data retention. In this paper, we present an efficient, easy- to-use Backup and Disaster Recovery System for HDFS. The system includes a client based on HDFS with additional feature of remote backup, and a remote server with a HDFS cluster to keep the backup data. It supports full backup and regularly incremental backup to the server with very low cost and high throughout. In our experiment, the average speed of backup and recovery is up to 95 MB/s, approaching the theoretical maximum speed of gigabit Ethernet.

Energy efficient High-Performance Computing (HPC) is becoming increasingly important. Recent ventures into this space have introduced an unlikely candidate to achieve exascale scientific computing hardware with a small energy footprint. ARM processors and embedded GPU accelerators originally developed for energy efficiency in mobile devices, where battery life is critical, are being repurposed and deployed in the next generation of supercomputers. Unfortunately, the performance of executing scientific workloads on many of these devices is largely unknown, yet the bulk of computation required in high-performance supercomputers is scientific. We present an analysis of one such scientific code, in the form of Gaussian Elimination, and evaluate both execution time and energy used on a range of embedded accelerator SoCs. These include three ARM CPUs and two mobile GPUs. Understanding how these low power devices perform on scientific workloads will be critical in the selection of appropriate hardware for these supercomputers, for how can we estimate the performance of tens of thousands of these chips if the performance of one is largely unknown?

Information security management is time-consuming and error-prone. Apart from day-to-day operations, organizations need to comply with industrial regulations or government directives. Thus, organizations are looking for security tools to automate security management tasks and daily operations. Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) is a suite of specifications that help to automate security management tasks such as vulnerability measurement and policy compliance evaluation. SCAP benchmark provides detailed guidance on setting the security configuration of network devices, operating systems, and applications. Organizations can use SCAP benchmark to perform automated configuration compliance assessment on network devices, operating systems, and applications. This paper discusses SCAP benchmark components and the development of a SCAP benchmark for automating Cisco router security configuration compliance.

The detection of obstacles is a fundamental issue in autonomous navigation, as it is the main key for collision prevention. This paper presents a method for the segmentation of general obstacles by stereo vision with no need of dense disparity maps or assumptions about the scenario. A sparse set of points is selected according to a local spatial condition and then clustered in function of its neighborhood, disparity values and a cost associated with the possibility of each point being part of an obstacle. The method was evaluated in hand-labeled images from KITTI object detection benchmark and the precision and recall metrics were calculated. The quantitative and qualitative results showed satisfactory in scenarios with different types of objects.

Performance characterization of stereo methods is mandatory to decide which algorithm is useful for which application. Prevalent benchmarks mainly use the root mean squared error (RMS) with respect to ground truth disparity maps to quantify algorithm performance. We show that the RMS is of limited expressiveness for algorithm selection and introduce the HCI Stereo Metrics. These metrics assess stereo results by harnessing three semantic cues: depth discontinuities, planar surfaces, and fine geometric structures. For each cue, we extract the relevant set of pixels from existing ground truth. We then apply our evaluation functions to quantify characteristics such as edge fattening and surface smoothness. We demonstrate that our approach supports practitioners in selecting the most suitable algorithm for their application. Using the new Middlebury dataset, we show that rankings based on our metrics reveal specific algorithm strengths and weaknesses which are not quantified by existing metrics. We finally show how stacked bar charts and radar charts visually support multidimensional performance evaluation. An interactive stereo benchmark based on the proposed metrics and visualizations is available at: http://hci.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/stereometrics.

This paper presents a novel electrocardiogram (ECG) compression method for e-health applications by adapting an adaptive Fourier decomposition (AFD) algorithm hybridized with a symbol substitution (SS) technique. The compression consists of two stages: first stage AFD executes efficient lossy compression with high fidelity; second stage SS performs lossless compression enhancement and built-in data encryption, which is pivotal for e-health. Validated with 48 ECG records from MIT-BIH arrhythmia benchmark database, the proposed method achieves averaged compression ratio (CR) of 17.6-44.5 and percentage root mean square difference (PRD) of 0.8-2.0% with a highly linear and robust PRD-CR relationship, pushing forward the compression performance to an unexploited region. As such, this paper provides an attractive candidate of ECG compression method for pervasive e-health applications.
 

Trusted Platform Module (TPM) has gained its popularity in computing systems as a hardware security approach. TPM provides the boot time security by verifying the platform integrity including hardware and software. However, once the software is loaded, TPM can no longer protect the software execution. In this work, we propose a dynamic TPM design, which performs control flow checking to protect the program from runtime attacks. The control flow checker is integrated at the commit stage of the processor pipeline. The control flow of program is verified to defend the attacks such as stack smashing using buffer overflow and code reuse. We implement the proposed dynamic TPM design in FPGA to achieve high performance, low cost and flexibility for easy functionality upgrade based on FPGA. In our design, neither the source code nor the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) needs to be changed. The benchmark simulations demonstrate less than 1% of performance penalty on the processor, and an effective software protection from the attacks.

Mutation analysis generates tests that distinguish variations, or mutants, of an artifact from the original. Mutation analysis is widely considered to be a powerful approach to testing, and hence is often used to evaluate other test criteria in terms of mutation score, which is the fraction of mutants that are killed by a test set. But mutation analysis is also known to provide large numbers of redundant mutants, and these mutants can inflate the mutation score. While mutation approaches broadly characterized as reduced mutation try to eliminate redundant mutants, the literature lacks a theoretical result that articulates just how many mutants are needed in any given situation. Hence, there is, at present, no way to characterize the contribution of, for example, a particular approach to reduced mutation with respect to any theoretical minimal set of mutants. This paper's contribution is to provide such a theoretical foundation for mutant set minimization. The central theoretical result of the paper shows how to minimize efficiently mutant sets with respect to a set of test cases. We evaluate our method with a widely-used benchmark.

In this paper we present a secure and unclonable embedded system design that can target either an FPGA or an ASIC technology. The premise of the security is that the executed machine code and the executing environment (the embedded processor) will authenticate each other at a per-instruction basis using Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) that are built into the processor. The PUFs ensure that the execution of the binary code may only proceed if the binary is compiled with the correct intrinsic knowledge of the PUFs, and that such intrinsic knowledge is virtually unique to each processor and therefore unclonable. We will explain how to implement and integrate the PUFs into the processor's execution environment such that each instruction is authenticated and de-obfuscated on-demand and how to transform an ordinary binary executable into PUF-aware, obfuscated binaries. We will also present a prototype system on a Xilinx Spartan6-based FPGA board.

In this paper, we propose a decomposition based multiobjective evolutionary algorithm that extracts information from an external archive to guide the evolutionary search for continuous optimization problem. The proposed algorithm used a mechanism to identify the promising regions(subproblems) through learning information from the external archive to guide evolutionary search process. In order to demonstrate the performance of the algorithm, we conduct experiments to compare it with other decomposition based approaches. The results validate that our proposed algorithm is very competitive.