Related-key rectangle attack on 36 rounds of the XTEA block cipher

XTEA is a 64-round block cipher with a 64-bit block size and a 128-bit user key, which was designed as a short C program that would run safely on most computers. In this paper, we present a related-key rectangle attack on a series of inner 36 rounds of XTEA without making a weak key assumption, and a related-key rectangle attack on the first 36 rounds of XTEA under certain weak key assumptions. These are better than any previously published cryptanalytic results on XTEA in terms of the numbers of attacked rounds.

Quasi-commutative watermarking and encryption for secure media content distribution

Commutative Watermarking and Encryption (CWE) provides a solution for interoperation between watermarking and encryption. It realizes the challenging operation that embeds a watermark into the encrypted multimedia data directly, which avoids the decryption–watermarking–encryption triples. Till now, few CWE schemes have been reported. They often obtain the commutative property by partitioning multimedia data into independent parts (i.e., the encryption part and the watermarking part). Since the two parts are isolated, it can not keep secure enough against replacement attacks. To avoid the disadvantage, a novel quasi-commutative watermarking and encryption (QCWE) scheme based on quasi-commutative operations is proposed in this paper. In the proposed scheme, the encryption operation and watermarking operation are applied to the same data part. Since the two operations are homogenous with commutative properties, their orders can be commutated. As an example, the scheme for MPEG2 video encryption and watermarking is presented. In this example, the DCs in intra macroblocks are encrypted or watermarked based on random module addition, while the DCs in other macroblocks and all the ACs’ signs are encrypted with a stream cipher or block cipher. Analysis and experiments show that the scheme obtains high perceptual security and time efficiency, and the watermarking and encryption operations can be commutated. These properties make the scheme a suitable choice for efficient media content distribution. Additionally, the paper shows the availability of constructing the commutative watermarking and encryption scheme with homogenous operations, which is expected to activate the new research topic.

A comparison of two optimization methods for mesh quality improvement

We compare inexact Newton and block coordinate descent optimization methods for improving the quality of a mesh by repositioning the vertices, where the overall quality is measured by the harmonic mean of the mean-ratio metric. The effects of problem size, element size heterogeneity, and various vertex displacement schemes on the performance of these algorithms are assessed for a series of tetrahedral meshes.

An improved block size selection method based on macroblock movement characteristic

The H.264 video compression standard supports seven variable block sizes ranging from 4 × 4 to 16 × 16 for one Macro Block (MB) with 16 × 16 size to conduct motion estimation (ME) and compensation. This new feature achieves significant coding gain at the cost of huge computation complexity. Dozens of fast mode decision algorithms with fast block size selection have been proposed to reduce complexity. In this paper, we propose an improved fast block size selection method based on MB movement characteristic. The Motion Vector (MV) and block residual are employed to analyze the movement characteristic of one MB novelly. Then the movement characteristic is used to decide whether and how to merge or split the MB for encoding. Experimental results show that this method speeds up mode decision procedure dramatically with negligible compression performance degradation.

Using trust assumptions with security requirements

Assumptions are frequently made during requirements analysis of a system about the trustworthiness of its various components (including human components). These trust assumptions, whether implicit or explicit, affect the scope of the analysis, derivation of security requirements, and in some cases how functionality is realized. This paper presents trust assumptions in the context of analysis of security requirements. A running example shows how trust assumptions can be used by a requirements engineer to help define and limit the scope of analysis and to document the decisions made during the process. The paper concludes with a case study examining the impact of trust assumptions on software that uses the secure electronic transaction specification.

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Connecting the family with awareness systems

Awareness systems have attracted significant research interest for their potential to support interpersonal relationships. Investigations of awareness systems for the domestic environment have suggested that such systems can help individuals stay in touch with dear friends or family and provide affective benefits to their users. Our research provides empirical evidence to refine and substantiate such suggestions. We report our experience with designing and evaluating the ASTRA awareness system, for connecting households and mobile family members. We introduce the concept of connectedness and its measurement through the Affective Benefits and Costs of communication questionnaire (ABC-Q). We inform results that testify the benefits of sharing experiences at the moment they happen without interrupting potential receivers. Finally, we document the role that lightweight, picture-based communication can play in the range of communication media available.

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The 2007 IEEE CEC simulated car racing competition

This paper describes the simulated car racing competition that was arranged as part of the 2007 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. Both the game that was used as the domain for the competition, the controllers submitted as entries to the competition and its results are presented. With this paper, we hope to provide some insight into the efficacy of various computational intelligence methods on a well-defined game task, as well as an example of one way of running a competition. In the process, we provide a set of reference results for those who wish to use the simplerace game to benchmark their own algorithms. The paper is co-authored by the organizers and participants of the competition.

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Shape Metrics Based on Elastic Deformations

Deformations of shapes and distances between shapes are an active research topic in computer vision. We propose an energy of infinitesimal deformations of continuous 1- and 2-dimensional shapes that is based on the elastic energy of deformed objects. This energy defines a shape metric which is inherently invariant with respect to Euclidean transformations and yields very natural deformations which preserve details. We compute shortest paths between planar shapes based on elastic deformations and apply our approach to the modeling of 2-dimensional shapes.

Multimodal support to group dynamics

The complexity of group dynamics occurring in small group interactions often hinders the performance of teams. The availability of rich multimodal information about what is going on during the meeting makes it possible to explore the possibility of providing support to dysfunctional teams from facilitation to training sessions addressing both the individuals and the group as a whole. A necessary step in this direction is that of capturing and understanding group dynamics. In this paper, we discuss a particular scenario, in which meeting participants receive multimedia feedback on their relational behaviour, as a first step towards increasing self-awareness. We describe the background and the motivation for a coding scheme for annotating meeting recordings partially inspired by the Bales’ Interaction Process Analysis. This coding scheme was aimed at identifying suitable observable behavioural sequences. The study is complemented with an experimental investigation on the acceptability of such a service.

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ONTRACK: Dynamically adapting music playback to support navigation

Listening to music on personal, digital devices whilst mobile is an enjoyable, everyday activity. We explore a scheme for exploiting this practice to immerse listeners in navigation cues. Our prototype, ONTRACK, continuously adapts audio, modifying the spatial balance and volume to lead listeners to their target destination. First we report on an initial lab-based evaluation that demonstrated the approach’s efficacy: users were able to complete tasks within a reasonable time and their subjective feedback was positive. Encouraged by these results we constructed a handheld prototype. Here, we discuss this implementation and the results of field-trials. These indicate that even with a low-fidelity realisation of the concept, users can quite effectively navigate complicated routes.

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Interacting with mobile services: an evaluation of camera-phones and visual tags

We present a study of using camera-phones and visual-tags to access mobile services. Firstly, a user-experience study is described in which participants were both observed learning to interact with a prototype mobile service and interviewed about their experiences. Secondly, a pointing-device task is presented in which quantitative data was gathered regarding the speed and accuracy with which participants aimed and clicked on visual-tags using camera-phones. We found that participants’ attitudes to visual-tag-based applications were broadly positive, although they had several important reservations about camera-phone technology more generally. Data from our pointing-device task demonstrated that novice users were able to aim and click on visual-tags quickly (well under 3 s per pointing-device trial on average) and accurately (almost all meeting our defined speed/accuracy tradeoff of 6% error-rate). Based on our findings, design lessons for camera-phone and visual-tag applications are presented.

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Ethical regulations on robotics in Europe

There are only a few ethical regulations that deal explicitly with robots, in contrast to a vast number of regulations, which may be applied. We will focus on ethical issues with regard to “responsibility and autonomous robots”, “machines as a replacement for humans”, and “tele-presence”. Furthermore we will examine examples from special fields of application (medicine and healthcare, armed forces, and entertainment). We do not claim to present a complete list of ethical issue nor of regulations in the field of robotics, but we will demonstrate that there are legal challenges with regard to these issues.

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An improved variable-size block-matching algorithm

In this paper, we proposed an improved “bottom–up” variable-size block matching method. Different from previous work, the proposed method does not need any threshold during the matching, and we just keep all the motion vectors leading to the minimum matching error. A Marco-block mode prediction method is put forward to speed up the motion estimation procedure without introducing any loss to the prediction precision. The improved variable-size block matching algorithm can achieve exactly the same prediction precision as full-search based fixed-size block matching algorithm. In order to reduce the effect of illumination change on mode selection, we proposed an illumination removal method, which acts as a post-processing step to prevent the macro-blocks from over-splitting. Experiments show its encouraging performance.

Methods for quantitative usability requirements: a case study on the development of the user interface of a mobile phone

Quantitative usability requirements are a critical but challenging, and hence an often neglected aspect of a usability engineering process. A case study is described where quantitative usability requirements played a key role in the development of a new user interface of a mobile phone. Within the practical constraints of the project, existing methods for determining usability requirements and evaluating the extent to which these are met, could not be applied as such, therefore tailored methods had to be developed. These methods and their applications are discussed.

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Efficient video encryption scheme based on advanced video coding

A video encryption scheme combining with advanced video coding (AVC) is presented and analyzed in this paper, which is different from the ones used in MPEG1/2 video encryption. In the proposed scheme, the intra-prediction mode and motion vector difference are encrypted with the length-kept encryption algorithm (LKE) in order to keep the format compliance, and the residue data of the macroblocks are encrypted with the residue data encryption algorithm (RDE) in order to keep low cost. Additionally, a key distribution scheme is proposed to keep the robustness to transmission errors, which assigns sub-keys to different frames or slices independently. The encryption scheme’s security, time efficiency and error robustness are analyzed in detail. Experimental results show that the encryption scheme keeps file format unchanged, is secure against replacement attacks, is efficient in computing, and is robust to some transmission errors. These properties make it a suitable choice for real-time applications, such as secure IPTV, secure videoconference or mobile/wireless multimedia, etc.

LuxTrace: indoor positioning using building illumination

Tracking location is challenging due to the numerous constraints of practical systems including, but not limited to global cost, device volume and weight, scalability and accuracy; these constraints are typically more severe for systems that should be wearable and used indoors. We investigate the use of wearable solar cells to track changing light conditions (a concept that we named LuxTrace) as a source of user displacement and activity data. We evaluate constraints of this approach and present results from an experimental validation of displacement and activity estimation. The results indicate that a distance estimation accuracy of 21 cm (80% quantile) can be achieved. A simple method to combine LuxTrace with complementary absolute location estimation methods is also presented. We apply carpet-like distributed RFID tags to demonstrate online learning of new lighting environments.

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Inverse multi-objective robust evolutionary design

In this paper, we present an Inverse Multi-Objective Robust Evolutionary (IMORE) design methodology that handles the presence of uncertainty without making assumptions about the uncertainty structure. We model the clustering of uncertain events in families of nested sets using a multi-level optimization search. To reduce the high computational costs of the proposed methodology we proposed schemes for (1) adapting the step-size in estimating the uncertainty, and (2) trimming down the number of calls to the objective function in the nested search. Both offline and online adaptation strategies are considered in conjunction with the IMORE design algorithm. Design of Experiments (DOE) approaches further reduce the number of objective function calls in the online adaptive IMORE algorithm. Empirical studies conducted on a series of test functions having diverse complexities show that the proposed algorithms converge to a set of Pareto-optimal design solutions with non-dominated nominal and robustness performances efficiently.

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E-redesigning of society: towards experiential connectivity of generations in Lithuania

The paper reflects on the unique experience of social and technological development in Lithuania since the regaining of independence as a newly reshaped society constructing a distinctive competitive IST-based model at global level. This has presented Lithuanian pattern of how to integrate different experiences and relations between generations in implementing complex information society approaches. The resulting programme in general is linked to the Lisbon objectives of the European Union. The experience of transitional countries in Europe, each different but facing some common problems, may be useful to developing countries in Africa.

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An ensemble-based method for linear feature extraction for two-class problems

In this paper we propose three variants of a linear feature extraction technique based on Adaboost for two-class classification problems. Unlike other feature extraction techniques, we do not make any assumptions about the distribution of the data. At each boosting step we select from a pool of linear projections the one that minimizes the weighted error. We propose three different variants of the feature extraction algorithm, depending on the way the pool of individual projections is constructed. Using nine real and two artificial data sets of different original dimensionality and sample size we compare the performance of the three proposed techniques with three classical techniques for linear feature extraction: Fisher linear discriminant analysis (FLD), Nonparametric discriminant analysis (NDA) and a recently proposed feature extraction method for heteroscedastic data based on the Chernoff criterion. Our results show that for data sets of relatively low-original dimensionality FLD appears to be both the most accurate and the most economical feature extraction method (giving just one-dimension in the case of two classes). The techniques based on Adaboost fare better than the classical techniques for data sets of large original dimensionality.

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Designing a secure e-tender submission protocol

This paper investigates the fundamental difference between a simple e-tender box and a traditional physical tender box, and highlights a series of security traps created by the functional differences. Based on our findings, we have defined the security requirements for an e-tender submission protocol. We also discuss functional limitations of cryptographic technologies. As a result, two secure e-tender submission protocols are proposed which enable a secure e-tender submission. Protocols are assumed to run under the condition that all tendering parties (principal and tenderers) are dishonest players. Our informal and formal security analysis show that these protocols meet their security goals under well known collusion scenarios. Because security is a process not a product, our approach will have broad industry application for developing secure electronic business processes in areas other than e-tendering.