Practical Countermeasures Research Articles

Synchronous Real-Time Sampling Technique for Side-Channel Analysis Against Randomly Varying Clock-Based Countermeasures

Power analysis attacks pose a significant threat to the security of cryptographic devices as they can reveal a secret key. Performing cryptographic operations based on a randomly varying clock (RVC) is a practical countermeasure against such attacks. The countermeasure makes it difficult to align power traces, which is a prerequisite for power analysis attacks to succeed. This paper introduces a synchronous real-time sampling (SRTS) technique as an advanced hardware-implemented approach to collect traces for a power analysis attack that negates countermeasures involving practical RVCs. By recovering the RVC, the leakage signal corresponding to the recovered clock edge is synchronously sampled in real time. We propose an analog-based hardware system implemented with two circuit blocks for SRTS operations, namely, a clock recovery block and an analog signal-processing block. The target of the power analysis attack is an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-128 software-implemented smart card operated at 20 MHz, which is varied in the range of 30% by the RVC countermeasure. The traces captured by the SRTS show that the suboperations of the AES encryption are distinct in contrast to the indistinguishable waveforms captured at a fixed sample rate. The results of the power analysis attack demonstrate that the correct key is successfully extracted with a high correlation coefficient at the S-box output of the AES. The proposed SRTS method improves the relative distinguishing margin by 191.4% and reduces the required number of traces to 2.75% compared with the conventional correlation power analysis attack with a fixed sample clock.

Interpreting and Mitigating Leakage-Abuse Attacks in Searchable Symmetric Encryption

Searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) enables users to make confidential queries over always encrypted data while confining information disclosure to pre-defined leakage profiles. Despite the well-understood performance and potentially broad applications of SSE, recent leakage-abuse attacks (LAAs) are questioning its real-world security implications. They show that a passive adversary with certain prior information of a database can recover queries by exploiting the legitimately admitted leakage. While several countermeasures have been proposed, they are insufficient for either security, i.e., handling only specific leakage like query volume, or efficiency, i.e., incurring large storage and bandwidth overhead. We aim to fill this gap by advancing the understanding of LAAs from a fundamental algebraic perspective. Our investigation starts by revealing that the index matrices of a plaintext database and its encrypted image can be linked by linear transformation. The invariant characteristics preserved under the transformation encompass and surpass the information exploited by previous LAAs. They allow one to unambiguously link encrypted queries with corresponding keywords, even with only partial knowledge of the database. Accordingly, we devise a new powerful attack and conduct a series of experiments to show its effectiveness. In response, we propose a new security notion to thwart LAAs in general, inspired by the principle of local differential privacy (LDP). Under the notion, we further develop a practical countermeasure with tunable privacy and efficiency guarantee. Experiment results on representative real-world datasets show that our countermeasure can reduce the query recovery rate of LAAs, including our own.

Hard-rock TBM jamming subject to adverse geological conditions: Influencing factor, hazard mode and a case study of Gaoligongshan Tunnel

Adverse geological conditions, the major challenge of tunnel construction, affect the excavation rate and even cause the hard-rock tunnel boring machine (TBM) jamming. Firstly, 121 cases of TBM jamming are analyzed in this study (detailed information can be found in Appendix A). The influencing factors of TBM jamming are studied and the hazard modes are classified into six categories. The selection of shield TBM takes up 77.69% of the 121 cases, occurring in 94 cases. In terms of adverse geological conditions, the fractured zone is one of the most commonly met adverse geological conditions for TBM jamming cases. In addition, groundwater often plays an indirect catalytic role in jamming hazards. It is found that collapse of surrounding rocks is the most common hazard mode for TBM jamming, appearing in 52 cases. Secondly, Gaoligongshan Tunnel, one of the longest railway tunnels in China, is presented as a representative case. The possibility, geological conditions and locations of TBM jamming occurring in the Gaoligongshan Tunnel are studied in site, which verifies the results of case statistics and the geological laws proposed above. The specific steps to predict and control TBM jamming in Gaoligongshan Tunnel are proposed. Finally, the lessons learned are summarized, and the countermeasures for TBM jamming are developed regarding three stages of TBM tunnel construction. The results of this study provide a reference for the mechanism of TBM jamming and share certain practical countermeasures to ensure a safe and efficient TBM excavation in adverse geological conditions.

Reactive Jamming and Attack Mitigation over Cross-Technology Communication Links

Recently, Cross-Technology Communication (CTC), allowing the direct communication among heterogeneous devices with incompatible physical layers, has attracted much research attention. Many efficient CTC protocols have been proposed to demonstrate its promise in IoT applications. However, the applications built upon CTC will be significantly impaired when CTC suffers from malicious attacks such as jamming or sniffing. In this article, we implement a reactive jamming system, JamCloak, that can attack most existing CTC protocols. To this end, we first propose a taxonomy of the existing CTC protocols. Then based on the taxonomy, we extract essential features to train a CTC detection model, and estimate the parameters that can efficiently jam CTC links. Experimental results show that JamCloak consistently achieves 94.7% of classification accuracy on average in both Line-of-Sight and Non-Line-of-Sight scenarios. We also apply JamCloak to attack three existing CTC protocols: WiZig, Esense and EMF. Results show that JamCloak can significantly reduce PDR (packet delivery ratio) by 80.8% on average in practical environments. In the meantime, JamCloak’s jamming gain is more than 1.78× higher than the existing reactive jammer. In addition, we propose a practical countermeasure against reactive jamming attacks over CTC links like JamCloak. Results show that our approach significantly improves the jamming detection accuracy by 91.2% on average than the existing approach, and effectively decreases the reduction in packet delivery ratio to 1.7%.

Innovation and Practice of Composite Engineering Teaching for New Engineering

At present, the material engineering industry is developing rapidly. As one of the most widely used materials in the market, composites are more and more widely used in the field of present production and construction applications. In the new engineering era, it is necessary to cultivate more innovative talents who can adapt to the composite engineering market, so as to promote the better development of composite engineering. Taking composite engineering teaching as an example, this paper introduces the necessity of innovation and reform of composite engineering teaching in the new engineering era, and analyzes the effective innovation and practical countermeasures of composite engineering teaching.

Research on the Practice and Reform of Ideological and Political Teaching in the Course of Electronic Circuit Design and Plate Making Technology

The course of electronic circuit design and plate making technology is one of the core courses of electronic technology specialty. The teaching goal of this course is to guide students to understand the composition of circuit board, grasp the relevant design steps and concepts, and master the effective application of electronic software, so as to be able to skillfully draw relevant circuit board design drawings, and lay a solid foundation for students' future electronic circuit design, plate making design and production related to the basis of the work. This paper introduces the relationship between electronic circuit design and plate making technology course as well as ideological and political course teaching. It also analyzes the current situation of ideological and political construction of electronic circuit design and plate making technology course, and studies the effective practical countermeasures of ideological and political teaching of electronic circuit design and plate making technology course.

A study on Practical Countermeasures of Copyright Appraisal with the Amendment of Civil Procedure Act in 2015

A study on Practical Countermeasures of Copyright Appraisal with the Amendment of Civil Procedure Act in 2015

Discussion and Research on Audit Internal Control and PracticeConstruction Based on Risk Management

With the rapid development of the market economy in China, how to strengthen audit risk management and enable enterprises to improve the internal audit control system to cope with complex and severe market risks has become the focus of current social concern. In foreign countries, although audit internal control and risk management-based practice construction are relatively mature, China’s construction of a risk-oriented internal audit control system has just begun, and needs to be further improved. Therefore, strengthening audit internal control and practice construction based on risk management is urgent for Chinese enterprises. This article starts with the connotation of internal audit control and risk management, expounds the relationship between risk management and internal audit control, and discusses the internal control of audit and practice construction based on risk management. In addition, it also analyzes the current situation of China’s construction, and puts forward practical countermeasures to strengthen the internal control of China’s corporate auditing.

A Process Evaluation Protocol for Examining the Impact of Instructions for Correct Use of Child Car Seats Designed through a Consumer-Driven Process and Evaluated in a Field-Based Randomised Controlled Trial.

The incorrect use of child car seats is common, with significant negative effects on crash protection for child passengers. There is currently little evidence for effective, practical countermeasures for incorrect use. The provision of clear and comprehensible materials on correct use supplied with restraints at the point of sale could be highly cost-effective and achieve similar benefits to restraint-fitting services or hands-on training; however, routinely supplied instructions in their current form are frequently difficult to understand. We are conducting a randomised controlled trial of the consumer-driven redesign of instructional materials, consisting of an instruction sheet, swing tags and online training videos. This paper presents the protocol that will be used in an innovate process evaluation that will use the primary outcome of overall serious misuse assessed at six months, together with a survey and semi-structured interviews to determine fidelity, dose and outcomes for all intervention participants. The study will assess intervention delivery and external factors that may impact the effectiveness of the intervention, including experience, health literacy, confidence and attitudes. When it has been conducted, this process evaluation will provide enhanced understanding of the mechanisms through which the intervention works or not, aspects of the implementation process key to success of the intervention and insight into how external factors influence the success of the intervention.

Security of Microfluidic Biochip

With the advancement of system miniaturization and automation, Lab-on-a-Chip (LoC) technology has revolutionized traditional experimental procedures. Microfluidic Biochip (MFB) is an emerging branch of LoC with wide medical applications such as DNA sequencing, drug delivery, and point of care diagnostics. Due to the critical usage of MFBs, their security is of great importance. In this article, we exploit the vulnerabilities of two types of MFBs: Flow-based Microfluidic Biochip (FMFB) and Digital Microfluidic Biochip (DMFB). We propose a systematic framework for applying Reverse Engineering (RE) attacks and Hardware Trojan (HT) attacks on MFBs as well as for practical countermeasures against the proposed attacks. We evaluate the attacks and defense on various benchmarks where experimental results prove the effectiveness of our methods. Security metrics are defined to quantify the vulnerability of MFBs. The overhead and performance of the proposed attacks as well as countermeasures are also discussed.

Research on the Influencing Factors of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Practice of Higher Vocational College Students Under the Background of Regional Development

Taking the students in the higher vocational colleges as an example, based on the regional development background, the students' attitudes toward the innovation and entrepreneurship, project selection and obstacles were investigated by questionnaires, and the influencing factors of students' entrepreneurial innovation practice in higher vocational colleges were analyzed. The study finds that under the background of regional development, the factors influencing students' entrepreneurial innovation practice in higher vocational colleges mainly include students' own factors, regional development environmental factors, regional talent cultivation environmental factors and regional policy factors. Based on these factors, this paper puts forward the practical countermeasures of innovation and entrepreneurship of higher vocational college students in the context of regional development.

Analysis of agricultural trade in China based on the theory of factor endowment

Purpose. The purpose of the paper is to present the results of the study of agricultural trade in China based on the theory of factor endowment and to develop a policy recommendation for the intensification of agricultural trade based on technological progress.
 Methodology / approach. This paper uses the methods of economic theory and comparative analysis to study the development of agricultural products trade in China; analysis the advantages of developing agricultural products trade in China by using comparative advantage theory; and econometric analysis to study the relationship between volume of agrarian trade and agricultural labor force, capital and land resources.
 Results. This paper uses time series data to analyze the three elements of capital, labor and land, and the development of agricultural trade in China. According to the established data model, it is obviously that China’s agricultural production of land factor endowment constraints are obvious, labor factor endowment is abundant but also facing the problem of increasing costs, labor personnel gradually decline. In this case, technological progress is more critical to the cultivation and maintenance of comparative advantage of agricultural products. The government should guide the direction of technological changes, technical support, capital support (material capital and human capital); and promote the rapid development of China’s agricultural trade.
 Originality / scientific novelty. Author’s developed econometric model is very useful in empirical assessment for the China agricultural products trade development, and it also provides new decisions for China to develop agricultural trade. Accordingly, the proposed method can provide an answer to the question of how to develop traditional agriculture in the context of rapid economic changes, and put forward more practical countermeasures.
 Practical value / significance. The main proposals can be used by the Government of China to formulate better agricultural trade policies and achieve rapid economic growth and increasing farmer incomes.

Drug prescription patterns and factors associated with polypharmacy in >1 million older adults in Tokyo.

To determine the patterns of concomitant drug use for chronic diseases and examine the risk factors of polypharmacy in older outpatients. Data were extracted from an anonymized health insurance claims database of a public insurance program for older adults in Tokyo, Japan. We analyzed individuals aged ≥75 years who had visited an outpatient clinic, and were regularly prescribed orally administered drugs for chronic diseases for ≥14 days between May and August 2014. The prescription patterns for 16 main drug types were studied using exploratory factor analysis, and the risk factors of polypharmacy, defined as the concomitant prescription of five or more drugs, were identified using multivariate logistic regression models. A total of 1 094 199 outpatients were analyzed (mean age 81.8 years, 38.4% men). We identified five prescription patterns that explained almost 40% of all observed variance: edema/heart failure/atrial fibrillation-related drugs, insomnia/anxiety-related drugs, pain-related drugs, lifestyle disease-related drugs and dementia-related drugs. The significant risk factors of polypharmacy included men, octogenarians and nonagenarians, higher number of medical institutions visited, use of physician home visits, and hospitalization during the study period. The main drug types most strongly associated with polypharmacy were analgesics, diuretics and antidiabetics. Polypharmacy was found to be prevalent in older outpatients aged ≥75 years in Tokyo. These findings might provide useful evidence that can contribute to the development of practical countermeasures against adverse events associated with polypharmacy in clinical practice. Geriatr Gerontol Int 2020; 20: 304-311.

The Practical Logic and Countermeasures of Community Home-based Elderly Care Service Under the Dimension of Innovative Big Data

Under the background of accelerating the integrative development of big data technology, fiscal finance, and public services to the community home-based care industry model, with the continuous acceleration of China’s social aging process, the government uses public finance to provide a basic community home care services for elderly residents. This paper analyzes the development status of community home care services, analyzes the root sources of the problems on insufficient supply, imbalance and unequalization of care services caused by China's financial system, and proposes a reasonable division of financial and administrative rights for community home care services, optimize the expenditure structure of public finance for community home-based elderly care, improve the use efficiency of financial funds for community home-based elderly care services, effectively supervise financial transfer payments, introduce the market mechanism to cultivate the policies and suggestions of the market main body of community home-based elderly care services. The state formulates fiscal policies and laws and regulations to strongly support the construction of community home-based care services. Promote the fiscal system reform of community elderly care service industry and cultivate the market main body of community home-based elderly care service. Develop a professional, branded and chained community home-based care service system, accelerate the healthy development of community home-based elderly care, and achieve good elderly care.

公务员聘任制的实践困境及对策

公务员聘任制的实践困境及对策

The fluctuations of China’s economic growth since the reform and opening up and the rational countermeasures

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the four large and two small fluctuations in China’s economic growth since the reform and opening up, which can be further divided into five periods of economic upturn and six periods of economic downturn. Design/methodology/approach This paper also analyzes the performance, causes and practical countermeasures of these fluctuations and summarizes the experience and lessons from the eight aspects of dealing with economic downturn and stabilizing growth since the reform and opening up. Findings At last, the paper puts forward some measures to cope with economic downturn and stabilize growth under the new normal in the new era. Originality/value Any country’s economic growth is a tortuous process with many fluctuations. The rate of economic growth cannot rise or go down straight for a long time, and China’s economic growth is no exception. The drastic fluctuations of economic growth can lead to serious overproduction, waste of resources, increased unemployment, decreased income or supply shortages, rising prices and decline of living standards.

Study on Community Ethnic Work in Chengdu City under the Perspective of Modern Governance

The floating population of ethnic minorities is the key to national work in Chengdu, the city national success mainly depends on the work of Minority Floating Population. Chengdu as a multi-ethnic and multicultural city, this paper will select Yi floating population as the research object, Including the life employment situation, cultural rights, and the city of Chengdu ethnic work policy, system construction, the problem of grassroots community ethnic work, restricting factors. The paper puts forward the targeted and practical countermeasures and suggestions, and expectations of the government and social organizations to provide a reference for decision-making, to promote the development of Chengdu ethnic work.

Bullwhip effect in the oil and gas supply chain: A multiple-case study

The bullwhip effect has been extensively studied in the retail, wholesale and manufacturing industries. However, it has been rarely explored in the context of resource extraction industries such as oil and gas, despite their economic impact and distinct features. This paper investigates the factors that impact the bullwhip effect in the oil and gas supply chain using case study evidence from six companies in North America, which cover refining and marketing, exploration and production, integrated oil and gas, and drilling. For each type of company studied, the operational causes of the bullwhip effect proposed in the literature and other factors of influence are examined. The findings indicate that the existing theories of the bullwhip effect have limitations in explaining the phenomenon in the oil and gas industry. Information sharing, a widely advocated countermeasure of the bullwhip effect may not be relevant in the integrated oil and gas company. Regarding the factors that drive or mitigate the bullwhip effect in different types of companies in the oil and gas supply chain, seven propositions are developed and several additional findings are obtained. All of these results enable better understandings of the bullwhip effect in academia, oil and gas organisations and related industries, and may provide guidance for potential countermeasures in practice.

The ANT Executive Control Index: No Evidence for Temporal Decrement.

This study tested whether indices of executive control, alertness, and orienting measured with Attention Network Test (ANT) are vulnerable to temporal decrement in performance. Developing the resource theory of sustained attention requires identifying neurocognitive processes vulnerable to decrement. Executive control processes may be prone to impairment in fatigue states. Such processes are also highlighted in alternative theories. Determining the role of executive control in vigilance can both advance theory and contribute to practical countermeasures for decrement in human factors contexts. In Study 1, 80 participants performed the standard ANT for an extended duration of about 55 to 60 min. Study 2 (160 participants) introduced manipulations of trial blocking and stimulus degradation intended to increase resource depletion. Reaction time and accuracy measures were analyzed. Subjective stress and workload were assessed in both studies. In both studies, the ANT induced levels of subjective workload and task disengagement consistent with previous sustained attention studies. No systematic decrement in any performance measure was observed. Executive control assessed by the ANT is not highly vulnerable to temporal decrement, even when task demands are elevated. Future work should differentiate executive control processes; proactive control may be more implicated in sustained attention decrement than in reactive control. Designing systems and interfaces to reduce executive control demands may be generally beneficial but will not directly mitigate temporal performance decrement. Enhancing design guidelines and neuroergonomic methods for monitoring operator attention requires further work to identify key neurocognitive processes for decrement.

Stress corrosion cracking fracture mechanism of cold-drawn high-carbon cable bolts

Premature failures of cable bolts due to stress corrosion cracking (SCC) in underground reinforcement systems are universal issues with limited practical countermeasures at present. To determine the SCC fracture mechanism which is an essential step to develop the potential solutions, the environment conditions leading to SCC failures were examined using four-point bend tests. Fractographic features of both serviced-failed and laboratory-failed cable bolts were investigated and compared. It was identified that the fracture surfaces of cable wires were characterised by step-shape fracture mode. The highly-oriented wavy lamellae microstructures of cable wires, produced during cold-drawn manufacturing process, have significant effects on the direction and path of crack propagation. Hydrogen-assisted SCC was suggested as the dominant fracture mechanism in cable bolt failures. SCC only occurred in the environmental conditions that promoted the diffusion of hydrogen diffusion into the cable wires, and crack growth rates were determined by the hydrogen diffusion rates. This study provided fundamental knowledge on fracture mechanism of cable bolts which can be applied to further study in identifying potential countermeasures against the SCC of cold-drawn high-carbon cable bolts.