Built based on the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics, Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) enables secure communication for distant parties. Entanglement-based protocols are a type of QKD protocol that uses the phenomenon of entanglement for detecting eavesdroppers between two communicating parties. In this paper, a novel QKD protocol is devised that uses the concept of superdense coding and padding bits to share the one-time pad, i.e., the key. The super dense coding is achieved by sharing a pre-existing entangled pair of qubits by leveraging the beautiful property of entanglement. The communicating parties can share a one-time pad using this protocol securely. This paper will demonstrate this phenomenon using the proposed protocol by showing the experimental results which has been surfaced with IBM Qiskit simulator, and the simulation establishes the applicability of the protocol and shows its effectiveness in detecting eavesdropping attempts while being simple to implement.

Data security in cryptographic systems is highly dependent on the strength of the hashing algorithm. One of the most commonly used hashing structures is Merkle-Damgård, which converts the compression function into a fixed-size hashing function. The padding technique in this structure plays an important role in determining the bit distribution, entropy, and the probability of collision in the hash results. This study aims to analyze and compare three padding methods, namely 1 & 0 bit padding, repeating pattern padding (0xAA), and 1 bit padding (0xFF), based on bit distribution parameters, Shannon entropy, hash collision, and processing time. The results show that 1 bit padding (0xFF) has the highest Shannon entropy value (0.9940), indicating a better level of randomness compared to other methods. In terms of bit distribution, this padding also produces better balance than other paddings. However, the hash collision rate (74.90%) is still relatively high, indicating that the padding method alone is not enough to significantly reduce the probability of collision. In terms of time efficiency, padding bits 1 & 0 have the fastest execution time (0.000132 seconds), while padding bit 1 (0xFF) has the longest processing time (0.000177 seconds). With these results, it can be concluded that the padding method affects the hash characteristics, but does not significantly reduce the collision probability. Therefore, further optimization is needed to improve the security of Merkle-Damgård-based hashing.

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for military as well as civilian applications such as search and rescue operations, disaster management, parcel delivery and agriculture, is becoming increasingly popular, mainly due to their versatile nature and relatively inexpensive operating costs. However, one of the most significant barriers in the widespread adoption of UAVs for the aforementioned applications is the increasing concern for wireless communication security within the network. Unfortunately, the nodes that comprise these networks are extremely constrained in terms of storage space, processing power and battery life, which require light-weight security protocols that align with these limitations. The current standards for message authentication and verification predominantly rely on lightweight cryptographic techniques. However, there is continual scope for improvement, particularly in the realm of computational efficiency, to better align with the constraints inherent to UAVs. This paper explores data hiding in a multi-UAV environment, to form a light-weight message verification scheme to confirm the identity of the transmitting node. First, five venues having the potential to hide data are analyzed. Based on the analysis of bit error rate obtained from the simulated multi-UAV environment, both cyclic prefix and padding bits are selected. Next, a codeword is generated for each transmission and it is embedded along with the unique ID key, κ\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$\\kappa $$\\end{document} of the transmitting node into each venue respectively, and the output is transmitted as Hello packets. Subsequently, the receiving node extracts and decodes the codeword in order to verify the authenticity of the transmitting node. An evaluation of the proposed scheme has been conducted by using a simulated UAV environment. In the best case scenario, the proposed authentication scheme can achieve a successful verification rate of at least 80% at a maximum hop-count of 10 hops. Through computational cost analysis, in comparison to the conventional methods, the proposed scheme was found to have a significantly lower total execution time of 1.7μs\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$1.7\\mu s$$\\end{document}. In addition, the security analysis shows that when the proposed scheme is paired with physical unclonable functions (PUFs), it is able to resist common security attacks, including man-in-the-middle, replay and cloning attacks.

Blockchain-based decentralized security using Crypto-Proof of Stake for securing sensitive personal health care records

Recently, visible light communication (VLC) has become a promising option for secure data transmission in industrial Internet of Things (IIoTs). In IIoT-VLC systems, small attocells are adopted to achieve higher spatial reuse rate, and the transmission of data, control and feedback bursts often requires high efficiency and real-time feature. Conventionally, multi-field (MF) frames are used in VLC systems which consists of sync header, channel training sequence, check field, etc. in addition to data payload. However, for short burst transmission, MF frames could result in efficiency loss and latency increase due to useless padding bits. In this paper, a novel coding scheme named integrated frame code (IFC) in physical layer to realize efficient and real-time transmission simultaneously is presented. IFC scheme reduces latency by simplifying transmission procedure and decreases overhead redundancy by integrated design. Specifically, we propose a joint soft-decision criterion for receiving without separate synchronization and channel estimation and then analyze its error performance. After that, we present IFC construction criterion and two design examples. At last, simulation results confirm that for short burst transmission, IFC achieves better efficiency and robustness than MF especially in moving process.

The key scheduling phase (KSP) of a stream cipher expands the uniformly chosen key (K) and initialization vector (IV) to a larger uniform looking state. The existence of non-randomness in KSP results in a non-randomness in the final keystream. In this paper, we observe a non-randomness in the KSP of the nonlinear feedback-based stream ciphers Grain-v1, Grain-128AEAD and Fountain-v1 of reduced round R. However, we could not exploit the non-randomness into an attack. It can be claimed that if the KSP generates a pseudorandom state, then the probability of generating a valid state T (i.e., in the range set of KSP function) of a cipher must be $$2^{-\delta }$$ , where $$\delta$$ is the length of padding bits. We show that a new valid state can be constructed by flipping a few bits of a given state of the cipher with a probability higher than $$2^{-\delta }$$ . We show that the non-randomness happens for $$R \le 129$$ , $$R\le 208$$ and $$R \le 193$$ rounds of KSP of Grain-v1, Grain-128AEAD, and Fountain-v1, respectively. Further, in the case of Grain-v1 and Grain-128AEAD, we also found non-randomness in some key, IV bits from the experiment.

Recently, many platforms have outsourced tasks to numerous smartphone devices known as Mobile Crowd-sourcing System (MCS). The data is collected and transferred to the platform for further analysis and processing. These data needs to maintain confidentiality while moving from smartphones to the platform. Moreover, the limitations of computation resources in smartphones need to be addressed to balance the confidentiality of the data and the capabilities of the devices. For this reason, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is accepted, widespread, and suitable for use in limited resources environments such as smartphone devices. ECC reduces energy consumption and maximizes devices’ efficiency by using small crypto keys with the same strength of the required cryptography of other cryptosystems. Thus, ECC is the preferred approach for many environments, including the MCS, Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Many implementations of ECC increase the process of encryption and/or increase the space overhead by, for instance, incorrectly mapping points to EC with extra padding bits. Moreover, the wrong mapping method used in ECC results in increasing the computation efforts. This study provides comprehensive details about the mapping techniques used in the ECC mapping phase, and presents performance results about widely used elliptic curves. In addition, it suggests an optimal enhanced mapping method and size of padding bit to secure communications that guarantee the successful mapping of points to EC and reduce the size of padding bits.

This study proposes a chaos‐based security model applied to the physical (PHY) layer of visible light communication (VLC) systems in accordance with the IEEE 802.15.7 standard. The proposed model employs a chaotic signal generated by a Colpitts oscillator to encrypt the header of IEEE 802.15.7 VLC frames in the PHY layer to prevent eavesdropping, traffic analysis and error function attacks. The encryption method employed here is chaotic inclusion or embedding, which is known as one of the most secure chaos‐based approaches. Thus, the essential information pertaining to the employed chaotic oscillator, i.e. its structure, parameter set, the utilised modulation and synchronisation methods is not visible or traceable to the eavesdropper. Moreover, the unencrypted payload is extended by an additional number of random padding bits which can only be determined by decrypting the header of the VLC frame hence the payload is unrecognisable to eavesdroppers though it has not been encrypted. At the legitimate receiver side, the received IEEE 802.15.7 frames are successfully recovered by removing the chaotic wave using chaotic synchronisation techniques. The simulation results show that the encrypted header and the unencrypted payload of the IEEE 802.15.7 frames are well protected and successfully recovered by legitimate receivers.

Broadband power line communication (PLC) is used as a communication technique for advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) in Korea. High-speed (HS) PLC specified in ISO/IEC12139-1 and HomePlug Green PHY (HPGP) are deployed for remote metering. Recently, internet of things (IoT) PLC has been proposed for reliable communications on harsh power line channels. In this paper, the physical layer performance of IoT PLC, HPGP, and HS PLC is evaluated and compared. Three aspects of the performance are evaluated: the bit rate, power spectrum, and bit error rate (BER). An expression for the bit rate for IoT PLC and HPGP is derived while taking the padding bits and number of tones in use into consideration. The power spectrum is obtained through computer simulations. For the BER performance comparisons, the upper bound of the BER for each PLC standard is evaluated through computer simulations.

Although the convolutional neural network (CNN) has exhibited outstanding performance in various applications, the deployment of CNN on embedded and mobile devices is limited by the massive computations and memory footprint. To address these challenges, Courbariaux and co-workers put forward binarized neural network (BNN) which quantizes both the weights and activations to [Formula: see text]1. From the perspective of hardware, BNN can greatly simplify the computation and reduce the storage. In this work, we first present the algorithm optimizations to further binarize the first layer and the padding bits of BNN; then we propose a fully binarized CNN accelerator. With the Shuffle–Compute structure and the memory-aware computation schedule scheme, the proposed design can boost the performance for feature maps of different sizes and make full use of the memory bandwidth. To evaluate our design, we implement the accelerator on the Zynq ZC702 board, and the experiments on the SVHN and CIFAR-10 datasets show the state-of-the-art performance efficiency and resource efficiency.

Deploying long term evolution (LTE) system into unlicensed spectrum for offloading faces two challenges: 1) the metrics of instantaneous performance to characterize user satisfaction are no longer applicable due to non-contiguously available channel and 2) in a light traffic scenario, the channel utilization is low due to the added padding bits of simultaneously scheduled users. To tackle these two issues, dynamically configuring channel occupancy duration (COD) and flexibly allocating subcarriers are needed to design for the LTE system operating in unlicensed spectrum (LTE-U system). In this paper, the channel utilization in the COD and a unified user satisfaction are first defined to characterize the performance of LTE-U system. Then, a time-frequency two-dimention optimization problem is formulated to maximize the weighted sum of the two defined performance indexes. To achieve the tradeoff between the two performance indexes, a control factor is introduced. By using Lyapunov optimization and Dinkelback theory, an optimal time-frequency resource management algorithm is developed. The results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the baselines, as the algorithm can flexibly balance the two performance indexes of the LTE-U system for diverse applications.

LTE-A (Long Term Evolution-Advanced) is a 3GPP standard which is an advancement to Long Term Evolution (LTE) and a predecessor of 4G. The rapid development of LTE-A, with a growing base of users, makes it a potential and promising target for covert channels. In this paper, we propose a novel covert channel, called LaSPsteg, designed for LTE-A systems. This method leverages the SN (Sequence Number) field in the header of PDU (Packet Data Unit) to choose covert packets. Then the padding bits in the payload of PDU of chosen packets are used to carry secret information. Specifically, we utilize a pre-shared hash function and an independent variable parameter to achieve varying embedding rules thus ensure the flexibility of our proposed covert channel.

Exploiting variable-length padding bits for decoder performance improvement with its application to compressed video transmission

(DRC): Deterministic Rabin Cryptosystem

This paper analyzes the test memory requirements for core-based systems-on-a-chips and identifies useless test data as one of the contributors to the total amount of test data. The useless test data comprises the padding bits necessary to compensate for the difference between the lengths of different chains in multiple scan chain designs. Although useless test data does not represent any relevant test information, it is often unavoidable, and leads to the tradeoff between the test bus width and the volume of test data in multiple scan chain-based cores. Ultimately, this tradeoff influences the test access mechanism design algorithms leading to solutions that have either short test time or low volume of test data. Therefore, in this paper, a novel test methodology is proposed which, by dividing the wrapper scan chains (WSCs) into two or more partitions, and by exploiting automated test equipment memory management features, reduces the amount of useless test data. Extensive experimental results using ISCAS'89 and ITC'02 benchmark circuits are provided to analyze the implications of the number of WSCs in the partition, and the number of partitions on the proposed methodology.