70,518 research outputs found
Keeping Authorities "Honest or Bust" with Decentralized Witness Cosigning
The secret keys of critical network authorities - such as time, name,
certificate, and software update services - represent high-value targets for
hackers, criminals, and spy agencies wishing to use these keys secretly to
compromise other hosts. To protect authorities and their clients proactively
from undetected exploits and misuse, we introduce CoSi, a scalable witness
cosigning protocol ensuring that every authoritative statement is validated and
publicly logged by a diverse group of witnesses before any client will accept
it. A statement S collectively signed by W witnesses assures clients that S has
been seen, and not immediately found erroneous, by those W observers. Even if S
is compromised in a fashion not readily detectable by the witnesses, CoSi still
guarantees S's exposure to public scrutiny, forcing secrecy-minded attackers to
risk that the compromise will soon be detected by one of the W witnesses.
Because clients can verify collective signatures efficiently without
communication, CoSi protects clients' privacy, and offers the first
transparency mechanism effective against persistent man-in-the-middle attackers
who control a victim's Internet access, the authority's secret key, and several
witnesses' secret keys. CoSi builds on existing cryptographic multisignature
methods, scaling them to support thousands of witnesses via signature
aggregation over efficient communication trees. A working prototype
demonstrates CoSi in the context of timestamping and logging authorities,
enabling groups of over 8,000 distributed witnesses to cosign authoritative
statements in under two seconds.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure
The U.S. Response to Human Trafficking: An Unbalanced Approach
The United States' anti-trafficking efforts formally began with the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000. Since then, the U.S. Government has poured billions of dollars into prevention efforts overseas and prosecution and protection efforts at home. In many ways it provides a model to other countries that are trying to address human trafficking. This report is focused on the United States' efforts to protect trafficked persons found in the United States. Under the TVPA, protections, services and benefits are only offered to trafficked persons who are witnesses assisting law enforcement. This system presents its own challenges in accessing benefits and services, particularly due to law enforcement's anipulation of the system. This is not a case of unforeseen implementation struggles that can be fixed. Instead, at issue is the entire conceptual framework of trafficking as a law enforcement issue and only a law enforcement issue. The results of six years of this approach are becoming startlingly clear -- few trafficked persons coming forward to work with law enforcement. Those who are discovered by law enforcement but refuse or are unable to recount their experiences are not offered any protections and are instead deported. This is an acute problem in particular for trafficked children. The Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children (Women's Commission) believes that this is an unbalanced approach and that the consequences are grave. While prosecuting traffickers is a just and necessary goal, it should not be accomplished at the expense of the trafficked person. Both objectives can be achieved successfully by adopting a rights-based approach, which entails providing protections to all trafficked persons. It is increasingly acknowledged and recognized even among law enforcement officials that a trafficked person who receives assistance is more likely, willing and able to work with law enforcement. Another issue throwing trafficking protections off balance is the United States' policy which focuses government trafficking efforts on eradicating prostitution, which it conflates with sex trafficking. Efforts at addressing contributing factors to trafficking are laudable but should not be pursued to the exclusion of other efforts. There is a need for immigration and labor reform that would yield dramatic results in protections for trafficked and exploited persons in the informal economy
Generalized qudit Choi maps
Following the linear programming prescription of Ref. \cite{PRA72}, the
Bell diagonal entanglement witnesses are provided. By using
Jamiolkowski isomorphism, it is shown that the corresponding positive maps are
the generalized qudit Choi maps. Also by manipulating particular
Bell diagonal separable states and constructing corresponding bound entangled
states, it is shown that thus obtained BDEW's (consequently qudit
Choi maps) are non-decomposable in certain range of their parameters.Comment: 22 page
Efficient Optimally Lazy Algorithms for Minimal-Interval Semantics
Minimal-interval semantics associates with each query over a document a set
of intervals, called witnesses, that are incomparable with respect to inclusion
(i.e., they form an antichain): witnesses define the minimal regions of the
document satisfying the query. Minimal-interval semantics makes it easy to
define and compute several sophisticated proximity operators, provides snippets
for user presentation, and can be used to rank documents. In this paper we
provide algorithms for computing conjunction and disjunction that are linear in
the number of intervals and logarithmic in the number of operands; for
additional operators, such as ordered conjunction and Brouwerian difference, we
provide linear algorithms. In all cases, space is linear in the number of
operands. More importantly, we define a formal notion of optimal laziness, and
either prove it, or prove its impossibility, for each algorithm. We cast our
results in a general framework of antichains of intervals on total orders,
making our algorithms directly applicable to other domains.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures. A preliminary (now outdated) version was
presented at SPIRE 200
Facial structures for various notions of positivity and applications to the theory of entanglement
In this expository note, we explain facial structures for the convex cones
consisting of positive linear maps, completely positive linear maps,
decomposable positive linear maps between matrix algebras, respectively. These
will be applied to study the notions of entangled edge states with positive
partial transposes and optimality of entanglement witnesses.Comment: An expository note. Section 7 and Section 8 have been enlarge
Disentanglement in Bipartite Continuous-Variable Systems
Entanglement in bipartite continuous-variable systems is investigated in the
presence of partial losses, such as those introduced by a realistic quantum
communication channel, e.g. by propagation in an optical fiber. We find that
entanglement can vanish completely for partial losses, in a situa- tion
reminiscent of so-called entanglement sudden death. Even states with extreme
squeezing may become separable after propagation in lossy channels. Having in
mind the potential applications of such entangled light beams to optical
communications, we investigate the conditions under which entanglement can
survive for all partial losses. Different loss scenarios are examined and we
derive criteria to test the robustness of entangled states. These criteria are
necessary and sufficient for Gaussian states. Our study provides a framework to
investigate the robustness of continuous-variable entanglement in more complex
multipartite systems.Comment: Phys. Rev. A (in press
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