11050110
Communication-Efficient Group Key Agreement
Traditionally, research in secure group key agreement focuses on minimizing the computational overhead for cryptographic operations, and minimizing the communication overhead and the number of protocol rounds is of secondary concern. The dramatic increased in computation power that we witnessed during the past years exposed network delay in WANs as the primary culprit for a negative performance impact on key agreement protocols. The majority of previously proposed protocols optimize the cryptographic overhead of the protocol. However, high WAN delay negatively impacts their efficiency. The goal of this work is to construct a new protocol that trades off computation with communication efficiency. We resurrect a key agreement protocol previously proposed by Steer et al. We extend it to handle dynamic groups and network failures such as network partitions and merges. The resulting protocol suite is provably secure against passive adversaries and provides key independence, i.e. a passive adversary who knows any proper subset of group keys cannot discover any other group keys not included in the subset. Furthermore, the protocol is simple, fault-tolerant, and well suited for high-delay wide area network.
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.
14346631
Remote Software-Based Attestation for Wireless Sensors
Wireless sensor networks are envisioned to be deployed in mission-critical applications. Detecting a compromised sensor, whose memory contents have been tampered, is crucial in these settings, as the attacker can reprogram the sensor to act on his behalf. In the case of sensors, the task of verifying the integrity of memory contents is difficult as physical access to the sensors is often infeasible. In this paper, we propose a software-based approach to verify the integrity of the memory contents of the sensors over the network without requiring physical contact with the sensor. We describe the building blocks that can be used to build a program for attestation purposes, and build our attestation program based on these primitives. The success of our approach is not dependent on accurate measurements of the execution time of the attestation program. Further, we do not require any additional hardware support for performing remote attestation. Our attestation procedure is designed to detect even small memory changes and is designed to be resistant against modifications by the attacker.
6168983
Privacy Preserving Nearest Neighbor Search
Data mining is frequently obstructed by privacy concerns. In many cases data is distributed, and bringing the data together in one place for analysis is not possible due to privacy laws (e.g. HIPAA) or policies. Privacy preserving data mining techniques have been developed to address this issue by providing mechanisms to mine the data while giving certain privacy guarantees. In this work we address the issue of privacy preserving nearest neighbor search, which forms the kernel of many data mining applications. To this end, we present a novel algorithm based on secure multiparty computation primitives to compute the nearest neighbors of records in horizontally distributed data. We show how this algorithm can be used in three important data mining algorithms, namely LOF outlier detection, SNN clustering, and kNN classification
8456310
Detecting Phantom Nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks
In an adversarial environment, various kinds of security attacks become possible if malicious nodes could claim fake locations that are different from where they are physically located. In this paper, we propose a secure localization mechanism that detects the existence of these nodes, termed as phantom nodes, without relying on any trusted entities, an approach significantly different from the existing ones. The proposed mechanism enjoys a set of nice features. First, it does not have any central point of attack. All nodes play the role of verifier, by generating local map, i.e. a view constructed based on ranging information from its neighbors. Second, this distributed and localized construction results in quite strong results: even when the number of phantom nodes is greater than that of honest nodes, we can Alter out most phantom nodes. Our analysis and simulations under realistic noisy settings demonstrate our scheme is effective in the presence of a large number of phantom nodes.
7213506
Batch Verifications with ID-Based Signatures
An identity (ID)-based signature scheme allows any pair of users to verify each other’s signatures without exchanging public key certificates. With the advent of Bilinear maps, several ID-based signatures based on the discrete logarithm problem have been proposed. While these signatures have an advantage in the fact that the system secret can be shared by several parties using a threshold scheme (thereby overcoming the security problem of RSA-based ID-based signature schemes), they all share the same efficiency disadvantage. To overcome this, some schemes have focused on finding ways to verify multiple signatures at the same time (i.e. the batch verification problem). While they had some success in improving efficiency of verification, each had a slightly diversified definition of batch verification. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of batch verification against which we analyze security of well-known ID-based signature schemes. We also propose a new ID-based signature scheme that allows for all types of multiple signature batch verification, and prove its security in random oracle model.
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.
2304269
Lightweight logging and recovery for distributed shared memory over virtual interface architecture
As software Distributed Shared Memory(DSM) systems become attractive on larger clusters, the focus of attention moves toward improving the reliability of systems. In this paper, we propose a lightweight logging scheme, called remote logging, and a recovery protocol for home-based DSM. Remote logging stores coherence-related data to the volatile memory of a remote node. The logging overhead can be moderated with high-speed system area network and user-level DMA operations supported by modern communication protocols. Remote logging tolerates multiple failures if the backup nodes of failed nodes are alive. It makes the reliability of DSM grow much higher. Experimental results show that our fault-tolerant DSM has low overhead compared to conventional stable logging and it can be effectively recovered from some concurrent failures.
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.
5962475
Revisit of RTS/CTS exchange in high-speed IEEE 802.11 networks
IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC), called distributed coordination function (DCF), provides two different access modes, namely, 2-way (basic access) and 4-way (RTS/CTS) handshaking. The 4-way handshaking has been introduced in order to combat the hidden terminal phenomenon. It has been also proved that such a mechanism can be beneficial even in the absence of hidden terminals, because of the collision time reduction. We analyze the effectiveness of the RTS/CTS access mode, in current 802.11b and 802.11a networks. Since the rates employed for control frame transmissions can be much lower than the rate employed for data frames, the assumption on the basis of the 4-way handshaking introduction, i.e., a short transmission time for the RTS control frame, is no longer valid. As a consequence, the basic access mode results in the optimal access solution in most cases, even in heavy load conditions with hidden nodes. We compare the 2-way and 4-way access performances through both analytical and simulation tools. We also discuss the operating conditions at which the switch from one access mode to another is desired for the cases of uniform and heterogeneous data rates among the stations. We conclude that, for the heterogeneous data rate environments, the RTS/CTS threshold should be redefined as a frame transmission time rather than as a frame size.
19448510
A Genetic Approach for Gene Selection on Microarray Expression Data
Microarrays allow simultaneous measurement of the expression levels of thousands of genes in cells under different physiological or disease states. Because the number of genes exceeds the number of samples, class prediction on microarray expression data leads to an extreme “curse of dimensionality” problem. A principal goal of these studies is to identify a subset of informative genes for class prediction to reduce the curse of dimensionality. We propose a novel genetic approach that selects a subset of predictive genes for classification on the basis of gene expression data. Our genetic algorithm maximizes correlation between genes and classes and minimizes intercorrelation among genes. We tested the genetic algorithm on leukemia data sets and obtained improved results over previous results.