Cryptanalysis and improvement of the YAK protocol with formal security proof and security verification via Scyther

Hao proposed the YAK as a robust key agreement based on public‐key authentication, and the author claimed that the YAK protocol withstands all known attacks and therefore is secure against an extremely strong adversary. However, Toorani showed the security flaws in the YAK protocol. This paper shows that the YAK protocol cannot withstand the known key security attack, and its consequences lead us to introduce a new key compromise impersonation attack, where an adversary is allowed to reveal both the shared static secret key between two‐party participation and the ephemeral private key of the initiator party in order to mount this attack. In addition, we present a new security model that covers these attacks against an extremely strong adversary. Moreover, we propose an improved YAK protocol to remedy these attacks and the previous attacks mentioned by Toorani on the YAK protocol, and the proposed protocol uses a verification mechanism in its block design that provides entity authentication and key confirmation. Meanwhile, we show that the proposed protocol is secure in the proposed formal security model under the gap Diffie‐Hellman assumption and the random oracle assumption. Moreover, we verify the security of the proposed protocol and YAK protocol by using an automatic verification method such as the Scyther tool, and the verification result shows that the security claims of the proposed protocol are proven, in contrast to those of the YAK protocol, which are not proven. The security and performance comparisons show that the improved YAK protocol outperforms previous related protocols.     

A hardware/software prototyping system for driving assistance investigations

A holistic design and verification environment to investigate driving assistance systems is presented, with an emphasis on system-on-chip architectures for video applications. Starting with an executable specification of a driving assistance application, subsequent transformations are performed across different levels of abstraction until the final implementation is achieved. The hardware/software partitioning is facilitated through the integration of OpenCV and SystemC in the same design environment, as well as OpenCV and Linux in the run-time system. We built a rapid prototyping, FPGA-based camera system, which allows designs to be explored and evaluated in realistic conditions. Using lane departure and the corresponding performance speedup, we show that our platform reduces the design time, while improving the verification efforts.     

Design and Implementation of the Security Subsystem in Payroll Management System

［1］D. E. Denning. Cryptography and Data Security. AddisonWesley Publishing Company, 1983 ［2］L. Olson,A. Marshall. Computer access Control Policy Choices. Computers ＆ Security,1990, 9(8) ［3］D. E. Bell. Lattices, Policies, and Implementations. In:Proc.13t     

A New Reward System Based on Human Demonstrations for Hard Exploration Games

The main idea of reinforcement learning is evaluating the chosen action depending on the current reward. According to this concept, many algorithms achieved proper performance on classic Atari 2600 games. The main challenge is when the reward is sparse or missing. Such environments are complex exploration environments like Montezuma’s Revenge, Pitfall, and Private Eye games. Approaches built to deal with such challenges were very demanding. This work introduced a different reward system that enables the simple classical algorithm to learn fast and achieve high performance in hard exploration environments. Moreover, we added some simple enhancements to several hyperparameters, such as the number of actions and the sampling ratio that helped improve performance. We include the extra reward within the human demonstrations. After that, we used Prioritized Double Deep Q-Networks (Prioritized DDQN) to learning from these demonstrations. Our approach enabled the Prioritized DDQN with a short learning time to finish the first level of Montezuma’s Revenge game and to perform well in both Pitfall and Private Eye. We used the same games to compare our results with several baselines, such as the Rainbow and Deep Q-learning from demonstrations (DQfD) algorithm. The results showed that the new rewards system enabled Prioritized DDQN to out-perform the baselines in the hard exploration games with short learning time.     

Temperature dependence on the mass susceptibility and mass magnetization of superparamagnetic Mn–Zn–ferrite nanoparticles as contrast agents for magnetic imaging of oil and gas reservoirs

The mass susceptibility (χ_mass) and mass magnetization (M_mass) were determined for a series of ternary manganese and zinc ferrite nanoparticles (Mn–Zn ferrite NPs, Mn_xZn_1?xFe₂O₄) with different Mn:Zn ratios (0.08 ≤ x ≤ 4.67), prepared by the thermal decomposition reaction of the appropriate metal acetylacetonate complexes, and for the binary homologs (M_xFe_3?xO₄, where M = Mn or Zn). Alteration of the Mn:Zn ratio in Mn–Zn ferrite NPs does not significantly affect the particle size. At room temperature and low applied field strength the mass susceptibility increases sharply as the Mn:Zn ratio increases, but above a ratio of 0.4 further increase in the amount of manganese results in the mass susceptibility decreasing slightly, reaching a plateau above Mn:Zn ≈ 2. The compositional dependence of the mass magnetization shows less of a variation at room temperature and high applied fields. The temperature dependence of the mass magnetization of Mn–Zn ferrite NPs is significantly less for Mn-rich compositions making them more suitable for downhole imaging at higher temperatures (>100 °C). For non-shale reservoirs, replacement of nMag by Mn-rich Mn–Zn ferrites will allow for significant signal-to-noise enhancement of 6.5× over NP magnetite.     

Analysis of molecular oxygen formation in irradiated glasses: a Raman depth profile study

Depth profiles experiments have been performed by Raman spectroscopy on three alkali (Na, Li, K) borosilicate glasses irradiated with 1.8 MeV electrons at 1 and 3 GGy. These experiments show that molecular oxygen produced under β irradiation is concentrated near the glass surface according to a depth depending on the irradiation dose. Moreover, we observed that the polymerisation increase is the same in the entire volume sample. The average Si–O–Si angle decrease under irradiation is also homogeneous in the whole irradiated glass volume. From all results, we demonstrate that oxygen migrates up to the glass surface during irradiation without strong interaction with the glass network. Migration of oxygen and probably alkalis takes place through percolation channels with a possible departure of oxygen in some cases.     

Soft Computing Algorithm to Data Validation in Aerospace Systems Using Parity Space Approach

This paper deals with the problem of data validation of an instrumentation system applied in the aerospace area. The fault diagnosis method used for the validation is based on the principle of the parity space approach. Residuals are generated thanks to the analytical redundancy relations given by the model and the important number of sensors. Indeed, we propose a procedure, which permits us to compute systematically all the redundancy equations for the residual generation phase. The additional concept, called residuals structuration, is necessary to isolate the detected faults. Finally, the data validation task consists in isolating the failing data and in sending only the valid information to a control system. An application to an aerospace system illustrates the proposed algorithm.     

Pulsed-laser crossed-beam thermal lens spectrometry for detection in a microchannel: influence of the size of the excitation beam waist

Crossed-beam thermal lens spectrometry is especially designed for the detection of very small samples in capillary tubes and more generally in microfluidic devices. In this work, the effect of the size of the excitation beam with respect to the size of the sample microchannel has been investigated. Although the signal is inversely proportional to the size of the excitation waist into the sample, the use of large waists may provide greater sensitivities when short-pulse excitation lasers are used and allows easier optimization of the optical design. On the contrary, the use of small beam waists reduces the edge effects that can arise depending on the nature and thickness of the walls of the sample holder. Moreover, small beams provide better spatial resolution and have allowed the measurement of flow velocities as low as 1 mm s(-1).     

Practical data mining and machine learning for optics applications: introduction to the feature issue

Data mining algorithms utilize search techniques to explore hidden patterns and correlations in the data, which otherwise require a tremendous amount of human time to explore. This feature issue explores the use of such techniques to help understand the data, build better simulators, explain outlier behavior, and build better predictive models. We hope that this issue will spur discussions and expose a set of tools that can be useful to the optics community.