Eavesdropping on GSM: state-of-affairs

In the almost 20 years since GSM was deployed several security problems have been found, both in the protocols and in the - originally secret - cryptography. However, practical exploits of these weaknesses are complicated because of all the signal processing involved and have not been seen much outside of their use by law enforcement agencies. This could change due to recently developed open-source equipment and software that can capture and digitize signals from the GSM frequencies. This might make practical attacks against GSM much simpler to perform. Indeed, several claims have recently appeared in the media on successfully eavesdropping on GSM. When looking at these claims in depth the conclusion is often that more is claimed than what they are actually capable of. However, it is undeniable that these claims herald the possibilities to eavesdrop on GSM using publicly available equipment. This paper evaluates the claims and practical possibilities when it comes to eavesdropping on GSM, using relatively cheap hardware and open source initiatives which have generated many headlines over the past year. The basis of the paper is extensive experiments with the USRP (Universal Software Radio Peripheral) and software projects for this hardware.Comment: 5th Benelux Workshop on Information and System Security (WISSec 2010), November 201

Partitioning A Graph In Alliances And Its Application To Data Clustering

Any reasonably large group of individuals, families, states, and parties exhibits the phenomenon of subgroup formations within the group such that the members of each group have a strong connection or bonding between each other. The reasons of the formation of these subgroups that we call alliances differ in different situations, such as, kinship and friendship (in the case of individuals), common economic interests (for both individuals and states), common political interests, and geographical proximity. This structure of alliances is not only prevalent in social networks, but it is also an important characteristic of similarity networks of natural and unnatural objects. (A similarity network defines the links between two objects based on their similarities). Discovery of such structure in a data set is called clustering or unsupervised learning and the ability to do it automatically is desirable for many applications in the areas of pattern recognition, computer vision, artificial intelligence, behavioral and social sciences, life sciences, earth sciences, medicine, and information theory. In this dissertation, we study a graph theoretical model of alliances where an alliance of the vertices of a graph is a set of vertices in the graph, such that every vertex in the set is adjacent to equal or more vertices inside the set than the vertices outside it. We study the problem of partitioning a graph into alliances and identify classes of graphs that have such a partition. We present results on the relationship between the existence of such a partition and other well known graph parameters, such as connectivity, subgraph structure, and degrees of vertices. We also present results on the computational complexity of finding such a partition. An alliance cover set is a set of vertices in a graph that contains at least one vertex from every alliance of the graph. The complement of an alliance cover set is an alliance free set, that is, a set that does not contain any alliance as a subset. We study the properties of these sets and present tight bounds on their cardinalities. In addition, we also characterize the graphs that can be partitioned into alliance free and alliance cover sets. Finally, we present an approximate algorithm to discover alliances in a given graph. At each step, the algorithm finds a partition of the vertices into two alliances such that the alliances are strongest among all such partitions. The strength of an alliance is defined as a real number p, such that every vertex in the alliance has at least p times more neighbors in the set than its total number of neighbors in the graph). We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm on standard data sets

On the Inducibility of Stackelberg Equilibrium for Security Games

Strong Stackelberg equilibrium (SSE) is the standard solution concept of Stackelberg security games. As opposed to the weak Stackelberg equilibrium (WSE), the SSE assumes that the follower breaks ties in favor of the leader and this is widely acknowledged and justified by the assertion that the defender can often induce the attacker to choose a preferred action by making an infinitesimal adjustment to her strategy. Unfortunately, in security games with resource assignment constraints, the assertion might not be valid; it is possible that the defender cannot induce the desired outcome. As a result, many results claimed in the literature may be overly optimistic. To remedy, we first formally define the utility guarantee of a defender strategy and provide examples to show that the utility of SSE can be higher than its utility guarantee. Second, inspired by the analysis of leader's payoff by Von Stengel and Zamir (2004), we provide the solution concept called the inducible Stackelberg equilibrium (ISE), which owns the highest utility guarantee and always exists. Third, we show the conditions when ISE coincides with SSE and the fact that in general case, SSE can be extremely worse with respect to utility guarantee. Moreover, introducing the ISE does not invalidate existing algorithmic results as the problem of computing an ISE polynomially reduces to that of computing an SSE. We also provide an algorithmic implementation for computing ISE, with which our experiments unveil the empirical advantage of the ISE over the SSE.Comment: The Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligenc

Improved light extraction in the bioluminescent lantern of a Photuris firefly (Lampyridae)

A common problem of light sources emitting from an homogeneous high-refractive index medium into air is the loss of photons by total internal reflection. Bioluminescent organisms, as well as artificial devices, have to face this problem. It is expected that life, with its mechanisms for evolution, would have selected appropriate optical structures to get around this problem, at least partially. The morphology of the lantern of a specific firefly in the genus Photuris has been examined. The optical properties of the different parts of this lantern have been modeled, in order to determine their positive or adverse effect with regard to the global light extraction. We conclude that the most efficient pieces of the lantern structure are the misfit of the external scales (which produce abrupt roughness in air) and the lowering of the refractive index at the level of the cluster of photocytes, where the bioluminescent production takes place.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, published in Optics Expres

Automating The Improvement Of Service Quality: The TELCO Case

The case under discussion presents a new and innovative framework for implementing preventive service systems that detect potential service malfunctions, attempt to automatically prevent them and notify customers about the results of these operations. Such automated systems may proactively avert service malfunctions and reduce the volume of customer complaints due to service outages. The presented framework is based on four major stages: continuous detection of service delivery infrastructure and equipment, prevention of identified service failures, notification of customers about service failures and follow-up activities. Telco is a major Israeli telecommunications operator that implemented the preventive service methodology and systems to improve the quality of its services to the satisfaction of its largest customers. The model presented in this paper can be utilized by a broad variety of firms and service providers as means for improving the quality of their services, the satisfaction and the loyalty of customers and the ability to retain them for longer periods in an increasingly competitive environment