Search

The development of sepsis can lead to many organ dysfunction and even death. Myocardial injury is one of the serious complications of sepsis leading to death. New evidence suggests that microRNAs (miRNAs) play a critical role in infection myocardial injury. However, the mechanism which miR-208a-5p regulates sepsis-induced myocardial injury remains unclear. To mimic sepsis-induced myocardial injury in vitro , rat primary cardiomyocytes were treated with LPS. Cell viability and apoptosis were tested by CCK-8 and flow cytometry, respectively. The secretion of inflammatory factors was analyzed by ELISA. mRNA and protein levels were detected by RT-qPCR and Western blotting. The interaction among SP1, XIAP and miR-208a-5p was detected using dual luciferase report assay. Ultrasonic analysis and HE staining was performed to observe the effect of miR-208a-5p in sepsis-induced rats. Our findings indicated that miR-208a-5p expression in primary rat cardiomyocytes was increased by LPS. MiR-208a-5p inhibitor reversed LPS-induced cardiomyocytes injury through inhibiting the apoptosis. Furthermore, the inflammatory injury in cardiomyocytes was induced by LPS, which was rescued by miR-208a-5p inhibitor. In addition, downregulation of miR-208a-5p improved LPS-induced sepsis myocardial injury in vivo. Mechanistically, XIAP might be a target gene of miR-208a-5p. SP1 promoted transcription of miR-208a by binding to the miR-208a promoter region. Moreover, silencing of XIAP reversed the regulatory of miR-208a-5p inhibitor on cardiomyocytes injury. To sum up, those findings revealed silencing of miR-208a-5p could alleviate sepsis-induced myocardial injury, which would grant a new process for the treatment of sepsis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Connected vehicular cloud computing (CVCC) and the VANET can realize real-time monitoring and intelligent adjustment of traffic conditions. With the data collected by vehicles and the guidance provided by cloud computing platforms, the current traffic is facing new opportunities. CVCC is a mobile computing model, which extends the fixed nodes of traditional cloud infrastructure into mobile nodes composed of vehicles. Thus, compared to the traditional cloud infrastructures, CVCC requires a more complex mechanism to ensure the secure and efficient information transmission in both cloud platform-to-vehicle communication and vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Channel capacity, as the key parameter to measure the channel utilization, plays an important role in ensuring the reliability of CVCC service and the integrity of transmission data. In recent decades, the existing calculation methods could not solve the channel capacities problem in multi-participant VANETs. Different from the traditional calculation methods, we propose a novel calculation method in this article, which combines the core concepts of game theory and information theory, to calculate the channel capacities of multiple vehicular networks. The proposed method refreshes the concept of communication, which has potential applications in different services of CVCC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the growing number of vehicles and popularity of various services in vehicular cloud computing (VCC), message exchanging among vehicles under traffic conditions and in emergency situations is one of the most pressing demands, and has attracted significant attention. However, it is an important challenge to authenticate the legitimate sources of broadcast messages and achieve fine-grained message access control. In this work, we propose SmartVeh, a secure and efficient message access control and authentication scheme in VCC. A hierarchical, attribute-based encryption technique is utilized to achieve fine-grained and flexible message sharing, which ensures that vehicles whose persistent or dynamic attributes satisfy the access policies can access the broadcast message with equipped on-board units (OBUs). Message authentication is enforced by integrating an attribute-based signature, which achieves message authentication and maintains the anonymity of the vehicles. In order to reduce the computations of the OBUs in the vehicles, we outsource the heavy computations of encryption, decryption and signing to a cloud server and road-side units. The theoretical analysis and simulation results reveal that our secure and efficient scheme is suitable for VCC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security confrontation is the second cornerstone of the General Theory of Security. And it can be divided into two categories: blind confrontation and nonblind confrontation between attackers and defenders. In this paper, we study the nonblind confrontation by some well-known games. We show the probability of winning and losing between the attackers and defenders from the perspective of channel capacity. We establish channel models and find that the attacker or the defender wining one time is equivalent to one bit transmitted successfully in the channel. This paper also gives unified solutions for all the nonblind confrontations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel dual emissive fluorescent probe SFQ was designed and synthesized by linking dicyanisophorone and thiophene aldehyde units to carbazole groups. The probe SFQ has high selectivity and sensitivity toward ClO−. Upon addition of ClO− to the solution of probe SFQ resulted in a noticeable color changed from orange to pink under natural light. Meanwhile, SFQ could make a ratiometric fluorescence response to ClO− at two different excitation wavelengths, with the change of color from orange-red fluorescence to cyan fluorescence under the 365 nm UV lamp. The detection limit was 1.4 × 10−7 mol/L under ratiometric conditions. The study on the reaction mechanism showed that when SFQ reacted with ClO−, the cyano group disappeared and the cyclic ketone SFQ -O came into being. Furthermore, probe SFQ was successfully used to monitor ClO− in HepG2 cells and detect ClO− in actual environmental water samples. [Display omitted] • A novel probe SFQ for colorimetric and ratiometric identification of ClO− was prepared. • SFQ can respond instantly to ClO− (<5 s) and has a large Stokes shift (145 nm). • SFQ was successfully used to monitor ClO− in HepG2 cells and detect ClO− in actual environmental water samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the problems of current distributed architecture intrusion detection systems (DIDS), a new online distributed intrusion detection model based on cellular neural network (CNN) was proposed, in which discrete-time CNN (DTCNN) was used as weak classifier in each local node and state-controlled CNN (SCCNN) was used as global detection method, respectively. We further proposed a new method for design template parameters of SCCNN via solving Linear Matrix Inequality. Experimental results based on KDD CUP 99 dataset show its feasibility and effectiveness. Emerging evidence has indicated that this new approach is affordable to parallelism and analog very large scale integration (VLSI) implementation which allows the distributed intrusion detection to be performed better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a notion of postfix automata and apply it to finite automata constructions. We give a compact method for constructing smaller nondeterministic finite automata (NFAs) from given regular expressions. There are four steps in our method. First, we convert one or more given regular expressions into postfix form, better known as Reverse Polish notation, and call it a postfix regular expression . Second, we construct a syntax tree for the postfix regular expression. Next, we code the syntax tree using a specific algorithm and finally, we construct an NFA based on the coded syntax tree. Using our method we can obtain smaller NFAs, called postfix automata , with only one starting state and one final state. In this paper, we prove several notions and present a classical example to compare the size of a postfix automaton with the NFAs created by several classical construction methods. We also derive the efficiency in reducing the size of the NFA through general theoretical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid development of the power industry has resulted in a significant amount of electric porcelain solid waste. To address the challenges of small‐scale utilization and low added value associated with the current utilization of porcelain solid waste, a new high‐temperature resistant material was successfully developed using waste electric porcelain with varying particle sizes as the primary raw material. The dependence of composition, structure, and mechanical properties on fine particle size and sintering temperature was explored. The research has determined that the most effective particle size for the synthesis of refractory materials using waste electric porcelain is 120 mesh, and the optimal temperature is 1600°C. When the temperature exceeds 1500°C, the expansion generated by the decomposition of sillimanite will counteract the shrinkage of the liquid phase reaction, thereby maintaining the morphology of the sample. This process forms a unique interwoven mullite morphology through the decomposition of sillimanite, thereby enhancing the strength of the material. As a result, the optimal bending strength of 74 MPa and the optimal compression strength of 207 MPa were obtained. The realization of high‐temperature resistant materials based on discarded electric porcelain has shown foreseeable potential in large‐scale high‐value utilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: In a short signature scheme, the length of signature is much smaller than that of the general signature. Short signatures are widely used in low‐computation, low‐storage, and low‐bandwidth communication environments. The proof of security of all certificateless short signature schemes currently known is given in the random oracle model. In this paper, a new certificateless short signature scheme is constructed, and it is proved to be unforgeable in the standard model. Taken into account the computation costs, the scheme performs only one pairing operation, so it is more efficient than previous ones. In this paper, we propose a new certificateless short signature scheme with the following features: It is the first provably secure CLSS scheme in the standard model.It is secure against strong Type I/II adversary. Namely, if the Type I/II adversary replaced the public key of a user, then he may get the valid signatures from the user after he submits the new secret value.It needs only one pairing operation, so it is more efficient than previous ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community mining for complex social networks with link and attribute information plays an important role according to different application needs. In this paper, based on our proposed general non-negative matrix factorization (GNMF) algorithm without dimension matching constraints in our previous work, we propose the joint GNMF with graph Laplacian (LJGNMF) to implement community mining of complex social networks with link and attribute information according to different application needs. Theoretical derivation result shows that the proposed LJGNMF is fully compatible with previous methods of integrating traditional NMF and symmetric NMF. In addition, experimental results show that the proposed LJGNMF can meet the needs of different community minings by adjusting its parameters, and the effect is better than traditional NMF in the community vertices attributes entropy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel paradigm where many of the objects that surround us can be connected to the internet. Since IoT is always related to user's personal information, it raises lot of data security and privacy issues. In this paper, we present a secure and fine-grained data access control scheme for constrained IoT devices and cloud computing based on hierarchical attribute-based encryption, which reduces the key management by introducing hierarchical attribute authorities. In order to relieve local computation burden, we propose an outsourced encryption and decryption construction by delegating most of laborious operations to gateway and cloud server. Further, our scheme achieves efficient policy updating, which allows the sender device to update access policies without retrieving and re-encrypting the data. The security and performance analysis results show that our scheme is secure and efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • LL2 is a novel multifunctional fluorescent probe, which can work as a colorimetric probe for Cu2+ also selectively recognize Cu2+ via ratiometric fluorescence signal. • The probe LL2 has been successfully applied to live HepG2 cells ratiometric fluorescence monitoring and the visual detection of test paper, which has a good practical application value. • The probe LL2 can target both lipid droplets and lysosomes. A novel multifunctional fluorescent probe LL2 was prepared via a one-step condensation reaction between 3-formyl- N -butylcarbazole and 2-Hydroxy-1-naphthylhydrazone. LL2 can work as a colorimetric probe for Cu2+, and can also selectively recognize Cu2+ via ratiometric fluorescence signal. After the addition of Cu2+, the probe LL2 responded rapidly within 5 s and reached stability within 30 s. In natural light, when Cu2+ were added to the solution, the color of probe LL2 changed from yellowish to colorless, while there was a discernible fluorescence changed from green to blue under a 365 nm UV lamp. The ratiometric fluorescence intensity (F 449 /F 510) showed a good linear relationship (R2 = 0.9902) with Cu2+ concentration in the concentration range of 0–5 μmol/L, and the minimum detection limit was 1.96 μM. Cell imaging experiments showed that LL2 could capture fluorescence signals in the green and blue channels of HepG2 cells through fluorescence confocal microscope, and successfully recognize exogenous Cu2+ in HepG2 cells. In addition, fluorescence co-localization experiments showed that LL2 could target both lipid droplets and lysosomes. Meanwhile, LL2 could be applied to filter paper strip assay and detection of Cu2+ in actual water samples. These results indicated that probe LL2 has a good capability for monitoring Cu2+ in environment and living cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, the nonlocal quantum orthogonal product state (OPB) is first used to design a multi-party private comparison protocol, where multiple participants could securely compare the size of their private inputs. The ring topology is adopted for participants communicating with each other, which can significantly reduce the amount of information that the third party needs to process. But compared with the star topology, the ring topology is more vulnerable to the threat of participant attacks. Using the nonlocal OPB as the transmitted states can deal with this problem well, which prevents dishonest participants from obtaining valuable information related to the transmitted state. Vector coding, decoy particles, and random numbers are also used to promise the security of the protocol. In addition, this work requires less quantum capability. Compared with entangled states, nonlocal OPB is easier to prepare, and the operations that the participants need to perform are simple. The pre-shared key is not required, which consumes fewer quantum resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel fluorescent probe, LCH, based on dicyanisophorone and carbazole, was prepared for the visual detection of Cu2+. The probe LCH could recognize Cu2+ by fluorescence quenching in EtOH/H2O (1/4, v/v) solution, which could be easily identified under the 365 nm UV lamp, and the detection limit was as low as 0.785 μM. The recognition mechanism of probe LCH with Cu2+ was determined by combining 1H NMR titration, MS, and theoretical calculations. Practical application experiments showed that probe LCH could be used to detect Cu2+ in the test strip experiments. Cell imaging experiments showed that the probe LCH owned good cell permeability and could be applied to the imaging of Cu2+ in HepG2 cells. In addition, fluorescence colocalization experiments showed that LCH could target lipid droplets. These results indicate that the probe LCH will have a good application prospect in environmental detection and clinical medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Message security and the sender's identity authentication for communication in the open channel is a basic and important technology of the internet. For keeping the message confidential and unforgeable, the sender can use a digital signature algorithm with his private key to sign the message, and then encrypts the signature on the message. Signcryption which was proposed by Zheng et. al in 1997 is a novel cryptographic primitive that simultaneously provides the authentication and encryption in a single logic step and at lower computational costs and communication overheads than the above sign-then-encrypt way. Since then, there are many signcryption schemes proposed. Only recently, a formal security proof model is formalized providing security proof for Zheng's signcryption in the random oracle model. In the ID-based cryptography, the complexity of the managing certificate is reduced. In this work, by combining a multisignature with an ID-based signcryption scheme, we build a security model of multi-signcryption to define confidentiality and unforgeability of the ID-based signcryption scheme and have proposed an ID-based multi-signcryption scheme based on the bilinear pairings to adapt to a multi-user setting. Given a message m, a receiver's identity IDB, and n sender's identities IDA1, IDA2, ... , IDAn, for each sender Ai, it executes the followings steps: randomly pick xi ε Zq to compute Ri = xiP and ωi = xiQIDB; send (Ri, ωi) to the other senders by a secure channel; (3)after receiving the other senders (Ri, ωi), Ai computes ω = e(Ppub, Σωj) to set c = H2(ω)≈m and R = ΣRj; compute Si = xiH4(m) + H3(R,ω)SIDAi, where SIDAi is the private key of sender Ai. Then the resulting ciphertext is (c,S,R). To unsigcrypt the ciphertext (c,S,R) in the sender list L = (IDA1, IDA2, ... , IDAn), the receiver with identity IDB can compute the following steps to recover and verify the message validity. compute ω = e(R,SIDB) and m = H2(ω)≈c, where SIDB is private key of the receiver; accept the message if and only if the following equation holds [image omitted] By security analysis, we show that our scheme satisfies the two important properties of signcryption: confidentiality and unforgeability, and is proven to have been secure in the random oracle model. The security of the scheme is closely related to the Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption and the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption. Finally, by analyzing the efficiency of the scheme, we show that our scheme is very efficient, and only one pairing computation is needed in the signcryption phase, three pairing operators are needed in the unsigncrytion phase, and the ciphertext size is about 420 bits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coupling map lattice is an efficient mathematical model for studying complex systems. This paper studies the topology identification of coupled map lattice (CML) under the sparsity condition. We convert the identification problem into the problem of solving the underdetermined linear equations. The l1 norm method is used to solve the underdetermined equations. The requirement of data characters and sampling times are discussed in detail. We find that the high entropy and small coupling coefficient data are suitable for the identification. When the measurement time is more than 2.86 times sparsity, the accuracy of identification can reach an acceptable level. And when the measurement time reaches 4 times sparsity, we can receive a fairly good accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The session initiation protocol (SIP) is a powerful application-layer protocol which is used as a signaling one for establishing, modifying, and terminating sessions among participants. Authentication is becoming an increasingly crucial issue when a user asks to access SIP services. Hitherto, many authentication schemes have been proposed to enhance the security of SIP. In 2014, Arshad and Nikooghadam proposed an enhanced authentication and key agreement scheme for SIP and claimed that their scheme could withstand various attacks. However, in this paper, we show that Arshad and Nikooghadam’s authentication scheme is still susceptible to key-compromise impersonation and trace attacks and does not provide proper mutual authentication. To conquer the flaws, we propose a secure and efficient ECC-based authentication scheme for SIP. Through the informal and formal security analyses, we demonstrate that our scheme is resilient to possible known attacks including the attacks found in Arshad et al.’s scheme. In addition, the performance analysis shows that our scheme has similar or better efficiency in comparison with other existing ECC-based authentication schemes for SIP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Locally repairable codes (LRCs) are important for distributed storage systems due to their efficient repairing ability of the failed storage nodes. A $q$ -ary optimal $(n,k,r)$ -LRC is an $[n,k,d]$ linear code over $\mathbb {F}_{q}$ such that every code symbol has locality $r$ , and the minimum distance attains the well-known Singleton-like bound. In this paper, we study the maximal code length, code constructions and weight distributions of $q$ -ary optimal LRCs with locality 2 and distance 5, which are of both practical and theoretical interest. Firstly, it is proved that when the code dimension is even or odd, corresponding maximal code lengths of such $q$ -ary optimal LRCs are $3 \cdot \lfloor \frac {q+1}{3} \rfloor $ and $3 \cdot \left \lfloor{ \frac {q-1}{3} }\right \rfloor +5$ , respectively. Up to the equivalence of linear codes, we propose constructions of all the possible $q$ -ary optimal LRCs with locality 2, distance 5 and maximal code length. Then, by characterizing the weight type hierarchy of codewords, we show that the weight distribution of any $q$ -ary optimal LRC with locality 2, distance 5 and even code dimension can be uniquely determined and explicit expression of the weight distribution is given. Moreover, it is shown that all $q$ -ary optimal LRCs with locality 2, distance 5 and even code dimension are maximally recoverable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a special type of factorization of finite groups, logarithmic signature (LS) is used as the main component of cryptographic keys for secret key cryptosystems such as PGM and public key cryptosystems like $$MST_1, MST_2$$ and $$MST_3$$ . An LS with the shortest length is called a minimal logarithmic signature (MLS) that is highly favourable to be used for cryptographic constructions. The MLS conjecture states that every finite simple group has an MLS. Recently, Nikhil Singhi et al. proved the MLS conjecture to be true for some families of simple groups. In this paper, we firstly prove the existence of MLSs for the exceptional groups of Lie type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Proportional delay is a kind of unbounded time-varying delay, which is different from unbounded distributed delays. In this paper, asymptotic stability of the equilibrium point of cellular neural networks with multiple proportional delays is presented. Sufficient conditions for delay-dependent global asymptotic stability and delay-independent uniform asymptotic stability of the system are obtained by employing matrix theory and constructing Lyapunov functional. Two examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the obtained results and less conservative than previously existing results. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper presents a Bell-dual-basis-based quantum watermarking protocol composed of three major algorithms: watermark embedding and extracting and the intercepting test. The first two are completed by using the entanglement swapping property of Bell dual basis and the test is accomplished through IBF protocol to guarantee its bottom security. The watermarking protocol is mainly designed for the protection of digital copyright in the existence of classical information. This design finds that the quality of digital contents is not damaged with its zero-watermark attributes when embedding watermarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hat problem has been investigated in plenty of papers and has become a hot mathematical topic. In this paper, we will investigate the hat problem by employing quantum stabilizer code and classical Hamming code. On the one hand, a new strategy is proposed in this paper by utilizing higher-dimensional quantum stabilizer code, which, to the best of our knowledge, can be considered as a new approach to work around that problem for the first time. The solvability of the hat problem is no longer a matter of a hat game for each participant. However, it is simplified into a question about the information detected and corrected through the quantum network. On the other hand, we have performed a detailed feasibility analysis through a series of theorems in quantum space and established the implementation process with an example. Furthermore, our strategy can be applied to a variant of the more general hat problem and approximated to the optimal winning probability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a cyclic preparation scheme is proposed. In our scheme, Alice, Bob and Charlie can cyclic prepare two-qubit state with the control of David. Firstly, the quantum channel can be constructed by using H, Z and CNOT operations. And we give the circuit diagram of the construction of the quantum channel and the processing of the scheme. Secondly, the participants perform a single-qubit measurement and three two-qubit measurements through appropriate measurement bases. Moreover, the prepared state can be recovered deterministically and all recovery operations are given. Thirdly, we consider our scheme in two noisy environments (amplitude-damping and phase-damping noisy environment). The fidelities of output states are calculated and the effect factors are discussed. Finally, we give some discussions with other schemes. Our scheme has better communication efficiency because it improves the number of quantum state particles transmitted without increasing the classical communication consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we build a family of chameleon hash functions and strongly unforgeable one-time signature schemes based on the intractability assumption of the discrete logarithm problem (DLP) over inner automorphism groups. Since the DLP assumption over inner automorphism groups does not admit sub-exponential attacks, thus the sizes of the working parameters used in our constructions are shorten significantly. This leads to remarkable gains for our proposals both in running time and in storage space. In addition, as far as we know, this is the first time to build CHF and OTS based on noncommutative groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel local-world model of wireless sensor networks (WSN) with two kinds of nodes: sensor nodes and sink nodes, which is different from other models with identical nodes and links. The model balances energy consumption by limiting the connectivity of sink nodes to prolong the life of the network. How the proportion of sink nodes, different energy distribution and the local-world scale would affect the topological structure and network performance are investigated. We find that, using mean-field theory, the degree distribution is obtained as an integral with respect to the proportion of sink nodes and energy distribution. We also show that, the model exhibits a mixed connectivity correlation which is greatly distinct from general networks. Moreover, from the perspective of the efficiency and the average hops for data processing, we find some suitable range of the proportion of sink nodes would make the network model have optimal performance for data processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents an improved impossible differential cryptanalysis of SAFER ciphers, which uses the miss-in-the-middle technique developed by Biham et al. We analyze 3.75-round SAFER SK-64, [1] (In this paper, the number in the name of the ciphers indicates the key length). 1 using chosen plaintexts, bytes memory and half round computations. Furthermore, the new impossible differential attack on 3.75-round SAFER+/128 uses chosen plaintexts, half round computations and bytes memory. And attack on 3.75-round SAFER++/128 uses data, time, and memory. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper investigates an important problem concerning the complexity of three-layer binary neural networks (BNNs) with one hidden layer. The neuron in the studied BNNs employs a hard limiter activation function with only integer weights and an integer threshold. The studies are focused on implementations of arbitrary Boolean functions which map from {0,1}n into {0,1}. A deterministic algorithm called set covering algorithm (SCA) is proposed for the construction of a three-layer BNN to implement an arbitrary Boolean function. The SCA is based on a unit sphere covering (USC) of the Hamming space (HS) which is chosen in advance. It is proved that for the implementation of an arbitrary Boolean function of n-variables (n≥3) by using SCA, ⌊3L/2⌋ hidden neurons are necessary and sufficient, where L is the number of unit spheres contained in the chosen USC of the n-dimensional HS. It is shown that by using SCA, the number of hidden neurons required is much less than that by using a two-parallel hyperplane method. In order to indicate the potential ability of three-layer BNNs, a lower bound on the required number of hidden neurons which is derived by using the method of estimating the Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension is also given. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs), registered users submit their reviews for visited point-of-interests (POIs) to the system providers (SPs). The SPs anonymously publish submitted reviews to build reputations for POIs. Unfortunately, the user profile and trajectory contained in reviews can be easily obtained by adversaries who SPs has compromised with. Even worse, existing techniques, such as cryptography and generalization, etc., are infeasible due to the necessity of public publication of reviews and the facticity of reviews. Inspired by pseudonym techniques, we propose an approach to exchanging reviews before users submit reviews to SPs. In our approach, we introduce two attacks, namely review-based location correlation attack (RLCA) and semantic-based long-term statistical attack (SLSA). RLCA can be exploited to link the real user by reconstructing the trajectory, and SLSA can be launched to establish a connection between locations and users through the difference of semantic frequency. To resist RLCA, we design a method named User Selection to Resist RLCA (USR-RLCA) to exchange reviews. We propose a metric to measure the correlation between a user and a trajectory. Based on the metric, USR-RLCA can select reviews resisting RLCA to exchange by suppressing the number of locations on each reconstructed trajectory below the correlation. However, USR-RLCA fails to resist SLSA because of ignoring the essential semantics. Hence, we design an enhanced USR-RLCA named User Selection to Resist SLSA (USR-SLSA). We first propose a metric to measure the indistinguishability of locations concerning the difference of semantic frequency in a long term. Then, USR-SLSA can select reviews resisting SLSA to exchange by allowing two reviews whose indistinguishability is below the probability difference after the exchange to be exchanged. Evaluation results verify the effectiveness of our approach in terms of privacy and utility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compressed sensing is an emerging theory of signal processing and it has wide applications in many frontier fields. The construction of the measurement matrices is still a central problem in compressed sensing. In this paper, two types of deterministic constructions of binary measurement matrices are presented via unitary geometry. Then, the lower bounds of the spark of unitary geometry measurement matrices are theoretically analyzed, and an asymptotic comparison between unitary geometry measurement matrices and projective geometry measurement matrices is given via the worst-case recovery capability. After that, a clipping-embedding operation is proposed for binary matrices to generate measurement matrices with more sizes, which can strongly extend the applicability of the deterministic binary matrices in practice. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the performance of our measurement matrices is comparable to, sometimes even better than, that of the corresponding Gaussian random matrices under OMP and BP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we address the global asymptotic synchronization (GAS) problem of the master–slave fractional order multilinked memristive neural networks (FOMMNNs). Firstly, we propose the FOMMNNs which incorporate the fractional calculus into multilinked memristive neural networks (MMNNs) for the first time. Then, by utilizing the fractional differential inclusions and set‐valued mapping theories, the addressed FOMMNNs with discontinuous state switching at the right‐hand side and time‐varying delays are converted into the continuous FOMMNNs. Under the frameworks of fractional Caputo derivative and fractional Fillipov solution, by the way of building up appropriate Lyapunov functionals and utilizing some synchronous analysis technology, several sufficient criteria ensuring that the master–slave FOMMNNs can realize GAS under two different state‐feedback controllers are obtained. Finally, a numerical simulation is conducted to verify the effectiveness and correctness of the proposed theorems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lodging is a critical factor that impedes sugarcane growth and restricts the production of sucrose and refined ethanol. Considering bending properties of the stalk are highly associated with lodging resistance, there is currently no method for assessing them in a rapid and accurate manner, which limits the development of lodging-resistant varieties. In this study, a high-throughput phenotyping assay for sugarcane stalk bending strength (SBS) and flexural rigidity (EI) characterization was developed by combining partial least squares (PLS) and artificial neural networks (ANN) approaches via near-infrared spectrum calibration. Both strategies demonstrated high coefficient of determination (R 2 ) and ratio performance deviation (RPD) values during calibration, external validation, and internal cross-validation. Compared with the PSL, the ANN algorithm exhibited better performance for both two types of bending properties calibration, with the R 2 cv and RPD values as high as 0.94 and 4.18, respectively. Most importantly, these models exhibited consistently excellent predictive performance in successive multi-year phenotypic analyses, where the extreme genotypes could be successfully screened out from a large-scale sugarcane population. In conclusion, this study refines a high-throughput phenotyping approach for the determination of mechanical strength in sugarcane stalks that could be applied to the breeding of lodging resistant sugarcane varieties. ● Precise sugarcane stalk bending properties characterization assay was established. ● Diversity sugarcane germplasm was applied for NIRS modeling. ● ANN models exhibited more excellent prediction performance than PLS. ● Model-based NIRS application showed a consistently predictive capability. ● Stalk bending properties showed stable genetic characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A locally repairable code (LRC) is a linear code such that every code symbol can be recovered by accessing a small number of other code symbols. In this paper, we study bounds and constructions of LRCs from the viewpoint of parity-check matrices. Firstly, a simple and unified framework based on parity-check matrix to analyze the bounds of LRCs is proposed, and several new explicit bounds on the minimum distance of LRCs in terms of the field size are presented. In particular, we give an alternate proof of the Singleton-like bound for LRCs first proved by Gopalan et al. Some structural properties on optimal LRCs that achieve the Singleton-like bound are given. Then, we focus on constructions of optimal LRCs over the binary field. It is proved that there are only five classes of possible parameters with which optimal binary LRCs exist. Moreover, by employing the proposed parity-check matrix approach, we completely enumerate all these five classes of optimal binary LRCs attaining the Singleton-like bound in the sense of equivalence of linear codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we derive a new fixed-time stability theorem based on definite integral, variable substitution and some inequality techniques. The fixed-time stability criterion and the upper bound estimate formula for the settling time are different from those in the existing fixed-time stability theorems. Based on the new fixed-time stability theorem, the fixed-time synchronization of neural networks is investigated by designing feedback controller, and sufficient conditions are derived to guarantee the fixed-time synchronization of neural networks. To show the usability and superiority of the obtained theoretical results, we propose a secure communication scheme based on the fixed-time synchronization of neural networks. Numerical simulations illustrate that the new upper bound estimate formula for the settling time is much tighter than those in the existing fixed-time stability theorems. Moreover, the plaintext signals can be recovered according to the new fixed-time stability theorem, while the plaintext signals cannot be recovered according to the existing fixed-time stability theorems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 1-MHz half-bridge high-gain multi-CLLC bidirectional resonant converter with (gallium nitride) GaN field effect transistor (FETs) and integrated planar magnetics is proposed in this paper. It presents excellent gain characteristic and high power density, which is very suitable for a distributed energy storage system. The operation principle, topology features, and parameter design method of the converter are discussed in detail. The improved winding method of integrated planar magnetics is also elaborated. And then, a 400-W prototype is established and the corresponding experiments are carried out in 1 MHz. Finally, the accuracy and correctness of the theory are verified and the highest efficiency of the converter can reach 94.3%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of Lie theory, Lie groups have attained profound significance in several branches of Mathematics and Physics. In Lie theory, the matrix exponential plays a crucial role between Lie groups and Lie algebras. Meanwhile, as the finite analogue of Lie groups, finite groups of Lie type have potential applications in cryptography due to their unique mathematical structures. In this paper, we first put forward a novel idea of designing cryptosystems based on Lie theory. First of all, combing with discrete logarithm problem and group factorization problem, we proposed several new intractable assumptions based on the matrix exponential in finite groups of Lie type. Subsequently, in analog with Boyen's scheme (Asiacrypt 2007), we designed a public-key encryption scheme based on the non-abelian factorization problem in finite groups of Lie type. Finally, our proposal was proved to be indistinguishable against adaptively chosen-ciphertext attack in the random oracle model. It is encouraging that our scheme also has the potential to resist against Shor's quantum algorithm attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voice anti-spoofing is an important step for secure speaker verification in voice-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Most voice spoofing detection methods require significant computational costs and lack good generalization capability, making them unsuitable for deployment in IoT systems. To alleviate these problems, this work proposes a voice spoofing detection framework, which contains four parts, namely the compact model, the feature pyramid module (FPM), the feature aggregation module (FAM) and online knowledge distillation. FPM leverages multi-scale features from different layers of the compact model and then produces four embeddings with different resolutions. Instead of using frequently-used aggregation operations, FAM adaptively assigns weights for the four embeddings above and thus gains the high-quality soft embedding that can optimize the compact model in reverse. Moreover, the Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence is employed to minimize the difference between the embedding predicted by the compact model and the soft embedding, which enables the compact model to learn dark knowledge in an online manner. We carry out a series of experiments on LA and PA corpora of ASVspoof 2019 dataset. These comprehensive experiments show that the proposed framework gives better performance than other methods without sacrificing inference complexity, demonstrating the superiority of our framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the structure and the working mechanism of real neurons, a new mathematical model of the memristor-based switching networks (MSNs) with multiple links and time-varying delays is proposed. Further, we study the asymptotic and finite-time synchronizations of the proposed MSNs via adaptive controller and intermittent controller. Based on the stability theory and the linear matrix inequality theory, some effective asymptotic and finite-time synchronization criteria are derived to ensure the stability of the error system between the drive and response networks. Finally, numerical simulations show the effectiveness and the correctness of our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a new fixed-time stability theorem. Numerical simulations show that our upper bound estimate for the settling time is much smaller than those in the existing fixed-time stability theorems. Based on the new fixed-time stability theorem, we investigate the fixed-time synchronization of memristive neural networks (MNNs) by adopting a delay-dependent feedback controller. Numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the correctness of our theoretical results and the superiority of the new fixed-time stability theorem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are some traditional pooling methods in convolutional neural network, such as max-pooling, average pooling, stochastic pooling and so on, which determine the results of pooling based on the distribution of each activation in the pooling region. Zeiler and Fergus (Stochastic-pooling for regularization of deep convolutional neural networks, 2013) However, it is difficult for the feature mapping process to select a perfect activation representative of the pooling region, and can lead to the phenomenon of over-fitting. In this paper, the following theoretical basis comes out information theory (Shannon in Bell Syst. Tech. J. 27:379–423, 1948). First, we quantify the information entropy of each pooling region, and then propose an efficient pooling method by comparing the mutual information between activations and the pooling region which they are located in. Moreover, we assign different weights to different activations based on mutual information, and named it weighted-pooling. The main features of the weighted-pooling method are as follows: (1) The information quantity of the pooling region is quantified by information theory for the first time. (2) Also, each activation's contribution was quantified for the first time and these contributions eliminate the uncertainty of the pooling region which it is located in. (3) For choosing a representative in this pooling region, the weight of each activation obviously superiors to the value of activation. In the experimental part, we respectively use MNIST and CIFAR-10 (Krizhevsky in Learning multiple layers of featurs from tiny images, University of Toronto, 2009; LeCun in The MNIST database, 2012) data sets to compare different pooling methods. The results show that the weighted-pooling method has higher recognition accuracy than other pooling methods and reaches a new state-of-the-art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the emergence and widespread application of cloud computing, the use of cloud platforms to solve the problem of secure multi-party computation has emerged as a new research direction. The traditional computation of a solid geometry is performed through mutual interactions between two parties, which is not suitable in an untrusted cloud computing environment. In this paper, we first design a basic protocol for a secure Euclidean distance calculation that is suitable for cloud platforms and can serve as a building block for other protocols on cloud platforms. Using the solution of the Euclidean distance problem as such a building block, we provide a new method that converts the problems of calculating solid triangular areas and solid tetrahedral volumes into the calculation of distances and determinants in three-dimensional space. Then, we discuss solid point-line distance calculations, which extent the idea of the spatial geometry security problem. We present protocols for the above problems and prove that the proposed protocols can resist conspiracy among users and the untrusted cloud platform so that they can effectively ensure the privacy of the users. We also analyze the performances of these solutions. The analysis results show that our scheme is more versatile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secure information exchange in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is a continuing issue since the resource-constrained sensors generally deployed over an unattended environment. To access the real-time data from the sensors, user authentication and key agreement as an important tool for secure communications in WSN plays a vital role. Recently, Das proposed an efficient biometrics based security scheme by only using lightweight symmetric-key primitives. Their scheme is efficient in computation, but we find the scheme of Das is not actually achieve the three-factor security, thus failing to prevent the user impersonation attack. Additionally, the failure of user anonymity also gives an opportunity for the adversary to mount impersonation attacks. With the purpose of mitigating all the problems in Das's scheme, we present an anonymous three-factor key agreement using Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Using the Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic to ensure the mutual authentication properties. Through the rigorous security analysis, we show that the proposed scheme withstands various attacks. In addition, Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVIPSA) tool is used to verify its security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper is concerned with the fixed-time synchronization control of inertial memristor-based neural networks with discrete delay. We design four different kinds of feedback controllers, under which the considered inertial memristor-based neural networks can realize fixed-time synchronization perfectly. Moreover, the obtained fixed-time synchronization criteria can be verified by algebraic operations. For any initial synchronization error, the settling time of fixed-time synchronization is bounded by a fixed constant, which can be calculated beforehand based on system parameters and controller parameters. Numerical simulations are given to illustrate the effectiveness of our theoretical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper focuses on the finite‐time synchronization issue of drive‐response memristor‐based bidirectional associative memory neural networks (MBAMNNs) with stochastic perturbations and time‐varying delays. Based on the mathematical model of memristor, definition of finite‐time stability for stochastic differential system and the drive‐response concept, some novel sufficient conditions are given to ensure the finite‐time synchronization of drive‐response MBAMNNs with stochastic perturbations and time‐varying delays. We design novel nonlinear feedback controllers to control the synchronization error to converge zero in a finite time, and the settling time for synchronization can be easily obtained. In addition, as two special cases, the finite‐time synchronization control criteria for bidirectional associative memory neural networks with stochastic perturbations and time‐varying delays and MBAMNNs without stochastic perturbations are also given. Finally, two numerical simulations are showed to demonstrate the correctness of main results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the promising information-centric networking (ICN) architectures, NDN has attracted tremendous research attention and effort in the past decade. In particular, security and privacy remain significant concerns and challenges due to the fact that most of the traditional cryptographic primitives are no longer suitable for NDN architecture. For example, the traditional cryptographic primitives aim to secure point-to-point communications, always requiring explicit descriptions of to where or whom the data packets are intended, while network addressing or locating in NDN becomes implicit. To deal with such issues, the recently developed cryptographic primitives such as ABE have been applied to NDN. Also, to efficiently solve the trust-roots problem and seamlessly deploy cryptographic infrastructures, the concept of SDN has been introduced to NDN as well. This tutorial is devoted to exploring the interesting integration between NDN, ABE, and SDN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a General Non-negative Matrix Factorization based on the left Semi-Tensor Product (lGNMF) and the General Non-negative Matrix Factorization based on the right Semi-Tensor Product (rGNMF), which factorize an input non-negative matrix into two non-negative matrices of lower ranks based on gradient method. In particular, the proposed models are able to remove the dimension matching constraints required by conventional NMF models. Both theoretical derivation and experimental results show that the conventional NMF is a special case of the proposed lGNMF and rGNMF. We find the method for the best efficacy of the image restoration in lGNMF and rGNMF by experiments on baboon and lenna images. Moreover, inspired by the Incremental Non-negative Matrix Factorization (INMF), we propose the Incremental lGNMF (IlGNMF) and Incremental rGNMF (IrGNMF), We also conduct the experiments on JAFFE database and ORL database, and find that IlGNMF and IrGNMF realize saving storage space and reducing computation time in incremental facial training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]