6315809
On the performance of group key agreement protocols
Group key agreement is a fundamental building block for secure peer group communication systems. Several group key management techniques were proposed in the last decade, all assuming the existence of an underlying group communication infrastructure to provide reliable and ordered message delivery as well as group membership information. Despite analysis, implementation, and deployment of some of these techniques, the actual costs associated with group key management have been poorly understood so far. This resulted in an undesirable tendency: on the one hand, adopting suboptimal security for reliable group communication, while, on the other hand, constructing excessively costly group key management protocols.This paper presents a thorough performance evaluation of five notable distributed key management techniques (for collaborative peer groups) integrated with a reliable group communication system. An in-depth comparison and analysis of the five techniques is presented based on experimental results obtained in actual local- and wide-area networks. The extensive performance measurement experiments conducted for all methods offer insights into their scalability and practicality. Furthermore, our analysis of the experimental results highlights several observations that are not obvious from the theoretical analysis.
284019
Simple and fault-tolerant key agreement for dynamic collaborative groups
Secure group communication is an increasingly popular research area having received much attention in recent years. The fundamental challenge revolves around secure and efcient group key management. While centralized methods are often appropriate for key distribution in large groups, many collaborative group settings require distributed key agreement techniques. This work investigates a novel approach to group key agreement by blending binary key trees with DiAEe-Hellman key exchange. The resultant protocol suite is very simple, secure and fault-tolerant. Moreover, its eAEciency surpasses that of prior art.
1181632
Group key agreement efficient in communication
In recent years, collaborative and group-oriented applications and protocols have gained popularity. These applications typically involve communication over open networks; security thus is naturally an important requirement. Group key management is one of the basic building blocks in securing group communication. Most prior research in group key management focused on minimizing computation overhead, in particular minimizing expensive cryptographic operations. However, continued advances in computing power have not been matched by a decrease in network communication delay. Thus, communication latency, especially in high-delay long-haul networks, increasingly dominates the key setup latency, replacing computation delay as the main latency contributor. Hence, there is a need to minimize the size of messages and, especially, the number of rounds in cryptographic protocols. Since most previously proposed group key management techniques optimize computational (cryptographic) overhead, they are particularly impacted by high communication delay. In this work, we discuss and analyze a specific group key agreement technique which supports dynamic group membership and handles network failures, such as group partitions and merges. This technique is very communication-efficient and provably secure against hostile eavesdroppers as well as various other attacks specific to group settings. Furthermore, it is simple, fault-tolerant, and well-suited for high-delay networks.
95258
Exploring robustness in group key agreement
Secure group communication is crucial for building distributed applications that work in dynamic environments and communicate over unsecured networks (e.g. the Internet). Key agreement is a critical part of providing security services for group communication systems. Most of the current contributory key agreement protocols are not designed to tolerate failures and membership changes during execution. In particular, nested or cascaded group membership events (such as partitions) are not accommodated. We present the first robust contributory key agreement protocols, resilient to any sequence of events while preserving the group communication membership and ordering guarantees.
1232413
Secure group services for storage area networks
Storage Area Networks, with their ability to offer high data availability, reliability and scalability, are a promising solution for the large scale storage needs of many enterprises. As with any distributed storage system, a major design challenge for a Storage Area Network (SAN) is to provide data integrity and confidentiality. In this paper we propose a solution which addresses these core security requirements. In particular, we focus on mechanisms that enable efficient key distribution to allow scalable data sharing. Our scheme uses strong cryptographic techniques to achieve data security and integrity. Further, we delegate the bulk of the cryptographic processing to the SAN entities (e.g., switches, routers or other network elements), thereby removing bottlenecks at the disks and causing minimal inconvenience to the hosts. By recognizing the peer nature of the group of SAN entities, we propose efficient group key mechanisms that do not involve any centralized key distribution servers. This allows our scheme to be scalable and be free from any single point of failure or attack.
11689182
Decentralized Authentication Mechanisms for Object-based Storage Devices
Network-attached object-based storage separates data-path from control-path and enables direct interaction between clients and the storage devices. Clients interact with the file manager only to acquire the meta-data information and some cryptographic primitives, for example, access keys. Most of the current schemes rely on a centralized file manager to support these activities. This paper presents security mechanisms for decentralized authentication for object-based storage. The schemes are novel in several ways. First of all, they reduce the load on the file manager and free the system from central point of failure and denial of service attacks. We exploit Role-based Access Control (RBAC) to provide scalability and design authentication schemes that efficiently utilize RBAC. In most of the cases, the client needs to acquire only one access key from the file manager, which can be used by the client to further derive role-keys for the roles that he/she is permitted to play within an organization. Further, the number of cryptographic keys required for the purpose of authentication in these schemes is less as compared to the existing schemes. Finally, we also present two simple schemes that enable the clients to access objects stored on any device on the network using a single identity key.
30845722
Accurate exploration of timing and area trade-offs in arithmetic optimization using carry-save-adders
Timing and area of circuits are two of the most important design criteria to be optimized in data path synthesis. In addition, carry-save-adder (CSA) has been proven to be one of the most efficient implementation units in optimizing timing and/or area of arithmetic circuits. However, the existing approaches are restricted in using CSAs, i.e., optimizing operation trees separately without any interaction between them, resulting in a locally optimized CSA circuit. To overcome this limitation, we propose a practically efficient solution to the problem of an accurate exploration of timing and area trade-offs in optimizing arithmetic circuits in the presence of multiple operation trees using CSAs. The application of our approach is able to find a best CSA implementation of circuit in terms of timing and area.
21112002
A backward approach in list scheduling algorithms for multi-machine tardiness problems
Abstract List scheduling algorithms are commonly used for multi-machine scheduling problems, especially for those with precedence relationships among operations. In most list scheduling algorithms, operations are scheduled forward. In this paper, we suggest a backward approach in which the operations are scheduled backward. We discuss some details that must be considered when applying the backward approach to problems with due dates and suggest several methods of defining parameters needed in the backward approach. Performance of this approach is tested on job shop problems and identical machine problems with several types of precedence constaints.
37111410
Performance Comparison Between Backpropagation, Neuro-Fuzzy Network, and SVM
In this study, we compare the performance of well-known neural networks, namely, back-propagation (BP) algorithm, Neuro-Fuzzy network and Support Vector Machine (SVM) using the standard three database sets: Wisconsin breast cancer, Iris and wine data. Since such database have been useful for evaluating performance of a group of machine learning algorithms, a series of experiments have been carried out for three algorithms using the cross validation method. Results suggest that SVM outperforms the others and the Neuro-Fuzzy network is better than the BP algorithm for this data set.
14647313
Energy-efficient disk replacement and file placement techniques for mobile systems with hard disks
Mobile systems have usually used hard disks as the secondary storage devices because of their high capacity per cost and high I/O throughput. However, their high power consumption is the main limiting factor for extending their adoptions in mobile systems. In this paper, we propose enhanced file placement techniques for mobile platforms with multiple smaller disks (instead of a single large disk). We investigate that how many smaller disks are necessary to obtain energy saving while maintaining the required performance using both a simplified energy model and a realistic trace-based simulator under the proposed multiple disk configurations. We also propose energy-efficient file placement techniques, which aggregate files with common attributes the same set of disks. By skewing I/O operations, the proposed techniques achieve additional energy saving. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques can reduce the energy consumption by up to 43% when eight 1" disks are used instead of a single 2.5" disk with an acceptable increase in the average response time.
7564297
Problem-Independent Schema Synthesis for Genetic Algorithms
As a preprocessing for genetic algorithms, static reordering helps genetic algorithms effectively create and preserve high-quality schemata, and consequently improves the performance of genetic algorithms. In this paper, we propose a static reordering method independent of problem-specific knowledge. One of the novel features of our reordering method is that it is applicable to any problem with no information about the problem. The proposed method constructs a weighted complete graph from the gene distances calculated from solutions with relatively high fitnesses, transforms them into a gene-interaction graph, and finds a gene rearrangement. Extensive experimental results showed significant improvement for a number of applications.