Biblio
Originally implemented by Google, QUIC gathers a growing interest by providing, on top of UDP, the same service as the classical TCP/TLS/HTTP/2 stack. The IETF will finalise the QUIC specification in 2019. A key feature of QUIC is that almost all its packets, including most of its headers, are fully encrypted. This prevents eavesdropping and interferences caused by middleboxes. Thanks to this feature and its clean design, QUIC is easier to extend than TCP. In this paper, we revisit the reliable transmission mechanisms that are included in QUIC. More specifically, we design, implement and evaluate Forward Erasure Correction (FEC) extensions to QUIC. These extensions are mainly intended for high-delays and lossy communications such as In-Flight Communications. Our design includes a generic FEC frame and our implementation supports the XOR, Reed-Solomon and Convolutional RLC error-correcting codes. We also conservatively avoid hindering the loss-based congestion signal by distinguishing the packets that have been received from the packets that have been recovered by the FEC. We evaluate its performance by applying an experimental design covering a wide range of delay and packet loss conditions with reproducible experiments. These confirm that our modular design allows the protocol to adapt to the network conditions. For long data transfers or when the loss rate and delay are small, the FEC overhead negatively impacts the download completion time. However, with high packet loss rates and long delays or smaller files, FEC allows drastically reducing the download completion time by avoiding costly retransmission timeouts. These results show that there is a need to use FEC adaptively to the network conditions.
DNA synthesis has become increasingly common, and many synthetic DNA molecules are licensed intellectual property (IP). DNA samples are shared between academic labs, ordered from DNA synthesis companies and manipulated for a variety of different purposes, mostly to study their properties and improve upon them. However, it is not uncommon for a sample to change hands many times with very little accompanying information and no proof of origin. This poses significant challenges to the original inventor of a DNA molecule, trying to protect her IP rights. More importantly, following the anthrax attacks of 2001, there is an increased urgency to employ microbial forensic technologies to trace and track agent inventories. However, attribution of physical samples is next to impossible with existing technologies. In this paper, we describe our efforts to solve this problem by embedding digital signatures in DNA molecules synthesized in the laboratory. We encounter several challenges that we do not face in the digital world. These challenges arise primarily from the fact that changes to a physical DNA molecule can affect its properties, random mutations can accumulate in DNA samples over time, DNA sequencers can sequence (read) DNA erroneously and DNA sequencing is still relatively expensive (which means that laboratories would prefer not to read and re-read their DNA samples to get error-free sequences). We address these challenges and present a digital signature technology that can be applied to synthetic DNA molecules in living cells.
Robust Adaptive Secure Secret Sharing (RASSS) is a protocol for reconstructing secrets and information in distributed computing systems even in the presence of a large number of untrusted participants. Since the original Shamir's Secret Sharing scheme, there have been efforts to secure the technique against dishonest shareholders. Early on, researchers determined that the Reed-Solomon encoding property of the Shamir's share distribution equation and its decoding algorithm could tolerate cheaters up to one third of the total shareholders. However, if the number of cheaters grows beyond the error correcting capability (distance) of the Reed-Solomon codes, the reconstruction of the secret is hindered. Untrusted participants or cheaters could hide in the decoding procedure, or even frame up the honest parties. In this paper, we solve this challenge and propose a secure protocol that is no longer constrained by the limitations of the Reed-Solomon codes. As long as there are a minimum number of honest shareholders, the RASSS protocol is able to identify the cheaters and retrieve the correct secret or information in a distributed system with a probability close to 1 with less than 60% of hardware overhead. Furthermore, the adaptive nature of the protocol enables considerable hardware and timing resource savings and makes RASSS highly practical.
We propose secure RAID, i.e., low-complexity schemes to store information in a distributed manner that is resilient to node failures and resistant to node eavesdropping. We generalize the concept of systematic encoding to secure RAID and show that systematic schemes have significant advantages in the efficiencies of encoding, decoding and random access. For the practical high rate regime, we construct three XOR-based systematic secure RAID schemes with optimal encoding and decoding complexities, from the EVENODD codes and B codes, which are array codes widely used in the RAID architecture. These schemes optimally tolerate two node failures and two eavesdropping nodes. For more general parameters, we construct efficient systematic secure RAID schemes from Reed-Solomon codes. Our results suggest that building “keyless”, information-theoretic security into the RAID architecture is practical.
With the advent of QR readers and mobile phones the use of graphical codes like QR codes and data matrix code has become very popular. Despite the noise like appearance, it has the advantage of high data capacity, damage resistance and fast decoding robustness. The proposed system embeds the image chosen by the user to develop visually appealing QR codes with improved decoding robustness using BCH algorithm. The QR information bits are encoded into luminance value of the input image. The developed Picode can inspire perceptivity in multimedia applications and can ensure data security for instances like online payments. The system is implemented on Matlab and ARM cortex A8.
In this paper we analyse possibilities of application of post-quantum code based signature schemes for message authentication purposes. An error-correcting code based digital signature algorithm is presented. There also shown results of computer simulation for this algorithm in case of Reed-Solomon codes and the estimated efficiency of its software implementation. We consider perspectives of error-correcting codes for message authentication and outline further research directions.
To consider construction of strongly secure network coding scheme without universality, this paper focuses on properties of MDS(maximum distance separable) codes, especially, Reed-Solomon codes. Our scheme applies Reed-Solomon codes in coset coding scheme to achieve the security based on the classical underlying network coding. Comparing with the existing scheme, MRD(maximum rank distance) code and a necessary condition based on MRD are not required in the scheme. Furthermore, considering the conditions between the code for security and the underlying network code, the scheme could be applied for more situations on fields.
In this paper we investigate a secret sharing scheme based on a shortened systematic Reed-Solomon code. In the scheme L secrets S1, S2, ..., SLand n shares X1, X2, ..., Xn satisfy certain n - k + L linear equations. Security of such a ramp secret sharing scheme is analyzed in detail. We prove that this scheme realizes a (k; n)-threshold scheme for the case of L = 1 and a ramp (k, L, n)-threshold scheme for the case of 2 ≤ L ≤ k - 1 under a certain assumption on S1, S2, ..., SL.