Modern information communications use cryptography to keep the contents of communications confidential. RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) cryptography and elliptic curve cryptography, which are public-key cryptosystems, are widely used cryptographic schemes. However, it is known that these cryptographic schemes can be deciphered in a very short time by Shor's algorithm when a quantum computer is put into practical use. Therefore, several methods have been proposed for quantum computer-resistant cryptosystems that cannot be cracked even by a quantum computer. A simple implementation of LWE-based lattice cryptography based on the LWE (Learning With Errors) problem requires a key length of $O(n^2)$ to ensure the same level of security as existing public-key cryptography schemes such as RSA and elliptic curve cryptography. In this paper, we attacked the Ring-LWE (RLWE) scheme, which can be implemented with a short key length, with a modified LLL (Lenstra-Lenstra-Lov\'asz) basis reduction algorithm and investigated the trend in the degree of field extension required to generate a secure and small key. Results showed that the lattice-based cryptography may be strengthened by employing Cullen or Mersenne prime numbers as the degree of field extension.
Physical layer security is a field of study that continues to gain importance over time. It encompasses a range of algorithms applicable to various aspects of communication systems. While research in the physical layer has predominantly focused on secrecy capacity, which involves logical and digital manipulations to achieve secure communication, there is limited exploration of directly manipulating electromagnetic fields to enhance security against eavesdroppers. In this paper, we propose a novel system that utilizes the Mueller calculation to establish a theoretical framework for manipulating electromagnetic fields in the context of physical layer security. We develop fundamental expressions and introduce new metrics to analyze the system's performance analytically. Additionally, we present three techniques that leverage polarization to enhance physical layer security.
Audio has become an increasingly crucial biometric modality due to its ability to provide an intuitive way for humans to interact with machines. It is currently being used for a range of applications, including person authentication to banking to virtual assistants. Research has shown that these systems are also susceptible to spoofing and attacks. Therefore, protecting audio processing systems against fraudulent activities, such as identity theft, financial fraud, and spreading misinformation, is of paramount importance. This paper reviews the current state-of-the-art techniques for detecting audio spoofing and discusses the current challenges along with open research problems. The paper further highlights the importance of considering the ethical and privacy implications of audio spoofing detection systems. Lastly, the work aims to accentuate the need for building more robust and generalizable methods, the integration of automatic speaker verification and countermeasure systems, and better evaluation protocols.
Blockchain (BC) and Computer Vision (CV) are the two emerging fields with the potential to transform various sectors.The ability of BC can help in offering decentralized and secure data storage, while CV allows machines to learn and understand visual data. This integration of the two technologies holds massive promise for developing innovative applications that can provide solutions to the challenges in various sectors such as supply chain management, healthcare, smart cities, and defense. This review explores a comprehensive analysis of the integration of BC and CV by examining their combination and potential applications. It also provides a detailed analysis of the fundamental concepts of both technologies, highlighting their strengths and limitations. This paper also explores current research efforts that make use of the benefits offered by this combination. The effort includes how BC can be used as an added layer of security in CV systems and also ensure data integrity, enabling decentralized image and video analytics using BC. The challenges and open issues associated with this integration are also identified, and appropriate potential future directions are also proposed.
In this paper, we investigate the impact of numerical instability on the reliability of sampling, density evaluation, and evidence lower bound (ELBO) estimation in variational flows. We first empirically demonstrate that common flows can exhibit a catastrophic accumulation of error: the numerical flow map deviates significantly from the exact map -- which affects sampling -- and the numerical inverse flow map does not accurately recover the initial input -- which affects density and ELBO computations. Surprisingly though, we find that results produced by flows are often accurate enough for applications despite the presence of serious numerical instability. In this work, we treat variational flows as dynamical systems, and leverage shadowing theory to elucidate this behavior via theoretical guarantees on the error of sampling, density evaluation, and ELBO estimation. Finally, we develop and empirically test a diagnostic procedure that can be used to validate results produced by numerically unstable flows in practice.
Can social power endow social robots with the capacity to persuade? This paper represents our recent endeavor to design persuasive social robots. We have designed and run three different user studies to investigate the effectiveness of different bases of social power (inspired by French and Raven's theory) on peoples' compliance to the requests of social robots. The results show that robotic persuaders that exert social power (specifically from expert, reward, and coercion bases) demonstrate increased ability to influence humans. The first study provides a positive answer and shows that under the same circumstances, people with different personalities prefer robots using a specific social power base. In addition, social rewards can be useful in persuading individuals. The second study suggests that by employing social power, social robots are capable of persuading people objectively to select a less desirable choice among others. Finally, the third study shows that the effect of power on persuasion does not decay over time and might strengthen under specific circumstances. Moreover, exerting stronger social power does not necessarily lead to higher persuasion. Overall, we argue that the results of these studies are relevant for designing human--robot-interaction scenarios especially the ones aiming at behavioral change.
Magnetic polarizability tensors (MPTs) provide an economical characterisation of conducting metallic objects and can aid in the solution of metal detection inverse problems, such as scrap metal sorting, searching for unexploded ordnance in areas of former conflict, and security screening at event venues and transport hubs. Previous work has established explicit formulae for their coefficients and a rigorous mathematical theory for the characterisation they provide. In order to assist with efficient computation of MPT spectral signatures of different objects to enable the construction of large dictionaries of characterisations for classification approaches, this work proposes a new, highly-efficient, strategy for predicting MPT coefficients. This is achieved by solving an eddy current type problem using hp-finite elements in combination with a proper orthogonal decomposition reduced order modelling (ROM) methodology and offers considerable computational savings over our previous approach. Furthermore, an adaptive approach is described for generating new frequency snapshots to further improve the accuracy of the ROM. To improve the resolution of highly conducting and magnetic objects, a recipe is proposed to choose the number and thicknesses of prismatic boundary layers for accurate resolution of thin skin depths in such problems. The paper includes a series of challenging examples to demonstrate the success of the proposed methodologies.
Sessions are a fundamental notion in message-passing systems. A session is an abstract notion of communication between parties where each one owns an endpoint. Session types are types that are assigned to the endpoints and that are used to statically and dynamically enforce some desired properties of the communications, such as the absence of deadlocks. Properties of concurrent systems are usually divided in safety and liveness ones and depending on the class it belongs to, a property is defined using different (dual) techniques. However, there exist some properties that require to mix both techniques and the challenges in defining them are exacerbated in proof assistants (e.g. Agda, Coq, . . . ), that is, tools that allow users to formally characterize and prove theorems. In particular, we mechanize the meta-theory of inference systems in Agda. Among the interesting properties that can be studied in the session-based context, we study fair termination which is the property of those sessions that can always eventually reach successful termination under a fairness assumption. Fair termination implies many desirable and well known properties, such as lock freedom. Moreover, a lock free session does not imply that other sessions are lock free as well. On the other hand, if we consider a session and we assume that all the other ones are fairly terminating, we can conclude that the one under analysis is fairly terminating as well.
We show how the basic Combinatory Homomorphic Automatic Differentiation (CHAD) algorithm can be optimised, using well-known methods, to yield a simple and generally applicable reverse-mode automatic differentiation (AD) technique that has the correct computational complexity that we would expect of a reverse AD algorithm. Specifically, we show that the standard optimisations of sparse vectors and state-passing style code (as well as defunctionalisation/closure conversion, for higher-order languages) give us a purely functional algorithm that is most of the way to the correct complexity, with (functional) mutable updates taking care of the final log-factors. We provide an Agda formalisation of our complexity proof. Finally, we discuss how the techniques apply to differentiating parallel functional programs: the key observations are 1) that all required mutability is (commutative, associative) accumulation, which lets us preserve task-parallelism and 2) that we can write down data-parallel derivatives for most data-parallel array primitives.
Classic machine learning methods are built on the $i.i.d.$ assumption that training and testing data are independent and identically distributed. However, in real scenarios, the $i.i.d.$ assumption can hardly be satisfied, rendering the sharp drop of classic machine learning algorithms' performances under distributional shifts, which indicates the significance of investigating the Out-of-Distribution generalization problem. Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization problem addresses the challenging setting where the testing distribution is unknown and different from the training. This paper serves as the first effort to systematically and comprehensively discuss the OOD generalization problem, from the definition, methodology, evaluation to the implications and future directions. Firstly, we provide the formal definition of the OOD generalization problem. Secondly, existing methods are categorized into three parts based on their positions in the whole learning pipeline, namely unsupervised representation learning, supervised model learning and optimization, and typical methods for each category are discussed in detail. We then demonstrate the theoretical connections of different categories, and introduce the commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we summarize the whole literature and raise some future directions for OOD generalization problem. The summary of OOD generalization methods reviewed in this survey can be found at //out-of-distribution-generalization.com.
Command, Control, Communication, and Intelligence (C3I) system is a kind of system-of-system that integrates computing machines, sensors, and communication networks. C3I systems are increasingly used in critical civil and military operations for achieving information superiority, assurance, and operational efficacy. C3I systems are no exception to the traditional systems facing widespread cyber-threats. However, the sensitive nature of the application domain (e.g., military operations) of C3I systems makes their security a critical concern. For instance, a cyber-attack on military installations can have detrimental impacts on national security. Therefore, in this paper, we review the state-of-the-art on the security of C3I systems. In particular, this paper aims to identify the security vulnerabilities, attack vectors, and countermeasures for C3I systems. We used the well-known systematic literature review method to select and review 77 studies on the security of C3I systems. Our review enabled us to identify 27 vulnerabilities, 22 attack vectors, and 62 countermeasures for C3I systems. This review has also revealed several areas for future research and identified key lessons with regards to C3I systems' security.