Extra Communications Research Articles

Towards Efficient and Privacy-Preserving User-Defined Skyline Query Over Single Cloud

Skyline queries, especially those variants that allow users to define their own query criteria, are very promising and practical techniques in multi-criteria decision making applications. Meanwhile, the growing data volume drives the service providers to outsource their data to the cloud for reaping economic benefits. However, privacy concerns compel the outsourced data to be encrypted and require to perform the skyline queries over encrypted data. To achieve the privacy-preserving skyline queries, many schemes were proposed in the literature. However, those existing solutions cannot fully support the user-defined query criteria in skyline queries, and most of them employ a two-server model to support skyline queries over ciphertexts, which needs multi-round communications between the deployed two servers. In this article, we propose a privacy-preserving user-defined skyline query scheme in a single-server model, which eliminates extra communications. Specifically, we first formally define the user-defined skyline query. Then, based on the idea of converting order relations into computing the inner products of two multi-dimensional points, we design three predicate encryption schemes. Finally, we adopt these predicate encryption schemes to construct our proposed scheme. Detailed security analysis shows that these predicate encryption schemes are selectively secure, and the proposed user-defined skyline query scheme is privacy-preserving. In addition, extensive experiments are conducted, and the results show that our proposed scheme outperforms the alternative scheme by up to an order of magnitude in terms of computational costs when performing user-defined skyline queries.

Lazy Aggregation for Heterogeneous Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed neural network training paradigm with privacy protection. With the premise of ensuring that local data isn’t leaked, multi-device cooperation trains the model and improves its normalization. Unlike centralized training, FL is susceptible to heterogeneous data, biased gradient estimations hinder convergence of the global model, and traditional sampling techniques cannot apply FL due to privacy constraints. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel FL framework, federated lazy aggregation (FedLA), which reduces aggregation frequency to obtain high-quality gradients and improve robustness in non-IID. To judge the aggregating timings, the change rate of the models’ weight divergence (WDR) is introduced to FL. Furthermore, the collected gradients also facilitate FL walking out of the saddle point without extra communications. The cross-device momentum (CDM) mechanism could significantly improve the upper limit performance of the global model in non-IID. We evaluate the performance of several popular algorithms, including FedLA and FedLA with momentum (FedLAM). The results show that FedLAM achieves the best performance in most scenarios and the performance of the global model can also be improved in IID scenarios.

ARiana: Augmented Reality Based In-Situ Annotation of Assembly Videos

Annotated videos are commonly produced for documenting assembly and maintenance processes in the manufacturing industry. However, according to a semi-structured interview we conducted with industrial experts, the current process of creating annotated assembly videos, in which the annotator annotates the video capturing the expert’s demonstration of assembly and maintenance process, is cumbersome and time-consuming. The key challenges include three key problems in annotation: (1) unnecessary extra communications between field workers and annotators, (2) lack of suitable camera gear, and (3) wasting time in the manual removal of non-informative portions of captured videos. Because annotation always follows video capture, the problem 1 remains out of scope for state-of-the-art video annotation tools. And making the assumption of a perfect captured video, which covers no occlusion and contains only relevant assembly or maintenance information, causes problem 2 and 3. As a result, we have developed ARiana, a wearable augmented reality-based in-situ video annotation tool that guides field experts to create annotations efficiently while conducting the assembly or maintenance tasks. ARiana has three key features that include context-awareness enabled by hand-object interaction, multimodal interaction for annotation on the fly, and real-time audiovisual guidance enabled by edge offloading. We have implemented ARiana on Android-based smart glasses, equipped with first-person camera and microphone. In a usability test based on attempting to assemble a toy model and to annotate the recorded video simultaneously, ARiana demonstrated higher efficiency and effectiveness compared to one of the state-of-the-art video annotation tools, in which the assembling process is followed by the annotation process. In particular, ARiana helps users finish annotation tasks four times faster, and increase the annotation accuracy by 23%.

Traffic-Aware Erasure-Coded Archival Schemes for In-Memory Stores

Redundancy schemes are introduced to in-memory stores to provide fault tolerance. To achieve good trade-off between access performance and memory efficiency, it is appropriate to adopt replication and erasure coding to keep popular and unpopular data, respectively. Within such a hybrid-redundancy in-memory store, an issue of redundancy transition from replication to erasure coding (a.k.a., erasure-coded archival) should be addressed for unpopular in-memory datasets, since caching workloads exhibit long-tail distributions and most in-memory data are unpopular. If data replicas are distributed across nodes in randomly-selected racks, then subsequent data-block-replica retrieval for erasure-coded archival will create cross-rack traffic, and final parity-block relocation will cause extra cross-rack communications. In this article, we propose an encoding-oriented replica placement policy - ERP - by incorporating an interleaved declustering mechanism. We design two traffic-aware erasure-coded archival schemes -TEA-TL and TEA-SL - for ERP-powered in-memory stores by taking into account temporal locality and spatial locality, respectively. With ERP in place, both TEA-TL and TEA-SL schemes embrace the following three salient features: (i) they alleviate cross-rack traffic raised by retrieving required data-block replicas; (ii) they improve rack-level load balancing by distributing replicas via load-aware primary-rack-selection approach; and (iii) they mitigate block-relocation operations launched to sustain rack-level and node-level fault-tolerance. We conduct quantitative performance evaluations using the YCSB benchmark. The empirical results show that both TEA-TL and TEA-SL schemes not only bring forth lower cross-rack traffic than the four candidate encoding schemes, but also exhibit superb archival-throughput and rack-level-balancing performance. In particular, within a group of comparative tests using the baseline configurations, TEA-TL and TEA-SL accelerate archival throughput by at least 36.3 and 70.8 percent, respectively; both TEA-TL and TEA-SL schemes improve rack-level load-balancing by a factor of more than 1.45x relative to the four candidate encoding schemes.

Novel Framework for Secure Handover Authentication Protocol for 5G Mobile Network

This paper presents a comprehensive solution for secret key generation and user authentication for 5G mobile networks. Our solution exploits the integration between physical layer and cryptographic security primitives. The presented secure secret key generation and authentication protocol based on exploiting physical layer attributes Angle of Arrival (AoA) and merges between cryptography and non-cryptography techniques (physical layer security) to obtain secure and fast handover in 5G mobile network. Huge increasing of the exchanging data and the lack of the current usable spectrum (several hundred megahertz and a few gigahertz) led to the adoption of millimeter wave (mmWave) 5G mobile networks. The opportunity of the un usable spectrum in the millimeter wave (mmwave) range from 30~300 GHz mandates the utility of small cells with base stations (BS) equipped with large numbers of antennas massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO). This new architecture achieves better spectral and energy efficiencies, meanwhile, it also brings new challenges in security provisioning and new stringent latency requirements and potential risk of some security attacks. Impersonation and man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks are examples of security vulnerabilities originated from the probable recurrent handovers and authentication processes in small cells architecture and Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets). The assessment and simulation for the proposed protocol has been proved using AVISPA tool against (MitM) attack and MATLAB tool against impersonation attack. The proposed protocol has the ability to mitigate these attacks with no extra communications overhead, yet, with tolerable delay of estimation process.

Web-based patient portal access in an orthopedic adult reconstruction patient population.

BackgroundWe surveyed patients in an adult reconstruction practice as to their use of the Web-based portal provided by our electronic health record, seeking to reveal patterns of use and helpfulness.MethodsA total of 150 completed surveys were received. The survey queried demographics, the number of clinic visits, Internet access, portal activation, portal use frequency, and portal information questions and how patients answered them. Helpfulness was rated from 1 (not helpful) to 5 (very helpful). Statistical analysis included bivariate analysis and logistic regression, with odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) reported.ResultsThe mean age was 67.6 years. Most were females (n = 97, 65.1%). Most (68.7%) patients used the portal. Younger age (OR, 0.94; CI, 0.90-0.99) and access to Internet (OR, 31.8; CI, 8.5-119.4) predicted portal use (P < .005), whereas gender and number of clinic visits did not (P > .373). Of all, 47.5% of patients were unclear about online chart information. Older age indicated being unclear of portal information (68.5 vs 66, P = .0002). Of those who clarified doubts regarding information (n = 67), 23 used the Internet (34.3%), 32 (47.7%) called the physician, and 12 (17.9%) asked a friend and/or family member. Most (90.3%) patients felt the portal was helpful in gathering health information.ConclusionsAge and Internet access affected portal usage; ability to understand chart information decreased with age. Most patients used the Internet or a family member to clarify doubts regarding portal information. The use of portal data resulted in 32 extra communications to the physician.

Decentralized Control of Multi-Parallel Grid-Forming DGs in Islanded Microgrids for Enhanced Transient Performance

This paper proposes a novel decentralized control strategy for multiparallel grid-forming distributed generations (DGs) in an islanded microgrid. Different from most existing droop-based hierarchical control methods, the proposed scheme imposes a fixed system frequency that is independent of the load conditions. Additionally, a proper point of common coupling (PCC) voltage amplitude maintaining and proportional power sharing can be simultaneously achieved when dealing with variations in the load and DGs plug in/off. The transient performance of the system, as well as the power supply reliability, can be improved, as no extra restoration control layer or communications between the inverters are needed. Furthermore, the power-sharing ratio among the DG units can be changed online without affecting the voltage regulation performance, which enhances the power management flexibility. The PCC voltage regulation and the power-sharing performance of the proposed control strategy are ensured via the Lyapunov method. Finally, the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed approach are verified through real-time simulations and hardware experimental tests.

Communication Pattern Based Key Establishment Scheme in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose a symmetric key establishment scheme for wireless sensor networks which tries to minimize the resource usage while satisfying the security requirements. This is accomplished by taking advantage of the communication pattern of wireless sensor networks and adopting heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. By considering the unique communication pattern of wireless sensor networks due to the nature of information gathering from the physical world, the number of keys to be established is minimized and, consequently, the overhead spent for establishing keys decreases. With heterogeneous wireless sensor networks, we can build a hybrid scheme where a small number of powerful nodes do more works than a large number of resource-constrained nodes to provide enhanced security service such as broadcast authentication and reduce the burden of resource-limited nodes. In addition, an on-demand key establishment scheme is introduced to support extra communications and optimize the resource usage. Our performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is very efficient and highly scalable in terms of storage, communication and computation overhead. Furthermore, our proposed scheme not only satisfies the security requirements but also provides resilience to several attacks.

Oral Microbiome: Contributions to Local and Systemic Infections

The recent revolution of diagnostic methods emphasizing non-culture techniques has redefined the oral microbiota, its “Dual Citizenship”, recognizing oral flora inhabitants of eight dispersed locations are colonized by over 700 species, equal in bacteria (16S) and fungi (18S). Either prefers the attached biofilm phenotype, biotic or abiotic surfaces, its extra polymeric substance (EPS) protected environment promoting horizontal gene transfer (HGT), and gene amplified resistance. The biofilm growth pattern mimics that of solid tumors and a four-stage lifestyle (I–IV) catalyzing the term biotumor, emphasizing dispersal via metastasis. The molecular methods are now multitiered system platforms employing: PCR, mass spectrometry, fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH), highlighted by matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF), and IBIS or microarray gene sequencing providing inexpensive rapid results complementing the Human Genome Project unmasking a rich, diverse oral microbiota and mycobiota. The emerging head-neck oral diseases now emphasize medical devices [endotracheal tube (ETT) and voice boxes], dentures, and links with cognition [Alzheimer’s disease (AD)] and NOMA, while systemic manifestations highlight extra oral communications via inflammation, microbial presence (metastasis), or both, recently consolidated by the new Yin Yang hypothesis. These migrating oral microbiota-associated diseases include rheumatoid arthritis (RA), perio-arthritis, child-mother birth issues [adverse pregnancy outcomes (APO)], gestational diabetes (GDM), and liver consequences [non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD)/non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH)], all inter-related using a four-quadrant microbial clock. New interventions employ the disarm/replace hypothesis, avoiding “kill” focusing on therapeutic bacteria (probiotics), recognizing untoured consequences of antibiotics, and a need for a balanced oral microbiota. Most importantly is the recognition that the disconnect between dentistry and medicine is no longer tenable, and oral health and systemic health are integrated by the human oral microbiota, which is part of the host Dual Citizenship.

Content-based image retrieval in homomorphic encryption domain.

In this paper, we propose a secure implementation of a content-based image retrieval (CBIR) method that makes possible diagnosis aid systems to work in externalized environment and with outsourced data as in cloud computing. This one works with homomorphic encrypted images from which it extracts wavelet based image features next used for subsequent image comparison. By doing so, our system allows a physician to retrieve the most similar images to a query image in an outsourced database while preserving data confidentiality. Our Secure CBIR is the first one that proposes to work with global image features extracted from encrypted images and does not induce extra communications in-between the client and the server. Experimental results show it achieves retrieval performance as good as if images were processed non-encrypted.

A Novel Information Exchange Model in IT Infrastructure of Smart Grid

Smart grid is a combination of power, communication and information infrastructures which support the evolution of conventional electrical power systems toward active, flexible and automatic troubleshooter energy networks. This study presents a novel architectural model based on holonic multi-agent system to establish powerful connection model for software entities in IT infrastructure of smart grid. The Information Technology (IT) infrastructure is one of the most important structural perspectives in smart power grid. Along with developments in power systems infrastructure, there are some challenges in smart grid from IT perspective such as data exchange problem which is dealing with high volume of information. So, it is necessary to define an effective IT architecture to solve data exchange problem in smart grid. This study presents a holonic approach which prevents from extra communications and unnecessary information exchange. The proposed model derives a benefit from holonic architecture features such as flexibility, high tolerability and scalability. In addition, it provides a secure communication model using localization of data in the smart grid domains and considering a communication interface for each domain. Finally, by applying the proposed model on the smart grid, the contribution of new software entities could be easily obtained.

A new strong multiple designated verifiers signature

A Strong Multiple Designated Verifiers Signature (SMDVS) enables a signer to convince a set of verifiers by generating one signature, of which the verification needs the private key of a verifier. After a brief survey of the current SMDVS schemes and attacks, we found that there were reported or applicable attacks on many schemes, and some schemes needed group communications in the signature verification algorithm. We propose a new SMDVS scheme which is secure against current attacks and needs no extra group communications in the verification algorithm. The scheme is proven secure in the random oracle model.

Mobile Filter: Exploring Filter Migration for Error-Bounded Continuous Sensor Data Collection

In wireless sensor networks, filters that suppress data update reports within predefined error bounds effectively reduce the traffic volume for continuous data collection. All prior filter designs, however, are stationary in the sense that each filter is attached to a specific sensor node and remains stationary over its lifetime. In this paper, we propose a mobile filter, i.e., a novel design that explores the migration of filters to maximize overall traffic reduction. A mobile filter moves upstream along the data-collection path, with its residual size being updated according to the collected data. Intuitively, this migration extracts and relays unused filters, leading to more proactive suppression of update reports. While extra communications are needed to move filters, we show through probabilistic analysis that the overhead is outrun by the gain from suppressing more data updates. We present an optimal filter-migration algorithm for a chain topology. The algorithm is then extended to general multichain and tree topologies. Extensive simulations demonstrate that, for both synthetic and real data traces, the mobile filtering scheme significantly reduces data traffic and extends network lifetime against a state-of-the-art stationary filtering scheme. Such results are also observed from experiments over a Mica-2 sensor network testbed.

Trusted-HB: A Low-Cost Version of HB$^+$ Secure Against Man-in-the-Middle Attacks

HB <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">+</sup> is a lightweight protocol secure against active attacks but only in a detection based model. Since its introduction at Crypto'05 by Juels and Weis, many workers have tried to enhance its security. We here propose a new approach to achieve resistance against man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. Our requirements - in terms of extra communications and hardware - are surprisingly low.

Caregiver Involvement in the Intensive Mental Health Program: Influence on Changes in Child Functioning

We examined behavioral markers of caregiver involvement and the ways in which family participation was related to treatment outcomes in 47 elementary school children with SED enrolled in a school-based intensive mental health program. Measures of caregiver involvement included therapeutic home visits, attendance at therapeutic meetings, completion of ratings on the daily point sheet, and extra communications with the therapeutic team on the point sheet. Greater initial impairment was associated with greater caregiver involvement. Greater caregiver involvement was linked to improvement in child thought processes, increased ability to provide emotional and social supports for the child, and greater overall child functioning at discharge. Our findings also reflected increased therapists’ attempts to provide additional in-home services in cases where caregivers demonstrated a decline in their ability to provide for their children’s physical and material needs, or in which therapists discovered that the family functioning was more impaired than what was initially assessed. We provide a case study that exemplifies many of these findings.

New Directions in Sensor Network Key Management

Sensor networks require efficient, low latency key management techniques that enable strong security and tolerance of node compromise. Conventional interactive approaches using public key certificate-based key management techniques are not communications efficient and are very time-consuming. Protocols that leverage elliptic curve cryptography reduce communications but still require considerable interactive exchange. Noninteractive techniques that leverage identity-based public-key cryptography show considerable promise, but these techniques are relatively immature and require considerable computations. Conversely, random key predistribution techniques reduce computations, but at the expense of many interactions. In this paper, we describe recent work in the cryptographic community that combines the benefits of both identity-based cryptography and random-key predistribution into a framework we call identity-based random-key predistribution (IBRKP). IBRKP establishes pair-wise keys with virtually no extra communications and provides security versus node memory trade-offs for the sensor network designer to engineer.

The nature and correlates of underachievement among elementary schoolchildren in Hong Kong.

This study investigated for the first time several characteristics of underachievement in a large sample of Hong Kong elementary schoolchildren. More males were identified as underachievers than females, but the ratio was substantially less than the two-to-one rate typically found in the American literature. The stability and persistence of underachievement increased during the elementary school years, and the stability of underachievement tended to be higher in subject matter that was relatively more difficult, which varied with gender. Underachievement became more specific to particular academic subjects rather than more general across the elementary grades. Parents and teachers, but not the children themselves, perceived that underachievers were more capable than same-grade nonunderachievers (who score lower on ability tests), although this awareness is more likely directed at male than female underachievers, which has been observed in other samples. In grades 1-4, teachers provided extra mentoring, communications, and support to underachievers. Thereafter, underachievers became more disruptive, impatient, and aggressive in school and perhaps at home. At that point, teachers became less supportive, offered less extra mentoring, and applied greater behavioral control over underachievers. Underachieving children also perceived that their parents became less supportive and used more discipline in grades 5-6 relative to grades 3-4. These correlates of underachievement suggests the existence of a syndrome of underachievement that separates underachievers from children who have the same grades but lower mental ability.

Efficient data sharing with conditional remote memory transfers

Remote memory transfers (RMTs) allow processors to access non-local memories without involving the remote processor. As the only interprocessor synchronization required is setting flags on the local and remote processors after the transfer is complete, RMTs do not entail the overhead due to the handshaking and buffering of message passing nor require the complex hardware of cache-coherent shared memory. The minimal synchronization of RMTs, however, necessiates extra remote communications to enforce common data sharing paradigms, such as producer/consumer. We propose a new hardware mechanism: the conditional RMT (CMRT). CRMTs succeed or fail depending on the state of the remote data. We describe potential CRMT hardware definitions, and illustrate their utility by presenting efficient software protocols for producer/consumer and check-in/check-out data sharing.

A METHOD OF TERMINATING ASYNCHRONOUS ITERATIVE ALGORITHMS ON MESSAGE PASSING SYSTEMS

A method of terminating asynchronous iterative algorithms on message passing architectures is presented. Asynchronous algorithms are slightly modified. The method is original, general, and requires few extra communications. A formal proof of validity of the proposed termination procedure is given.