Architecting a One-to-many Traffic-Aware and Secure Millimeter-Wave Wireless Network-in-Package Interconnect for Multichip Systems

With the aggressive scaling of device geometries, the yield of complex Multi Core Single Chip(MCSC) systems with many cores will decrease due to the higher probability of manufacturing defects especially, in dies with a large area. Disintegration of large System-on-Chips(SoCs) into smaller chips called chiplets has shown to improve the yield and cost of complex systems. Therefore, platform-based computing modules such as embedded systems and micro-servers have already adopted Multi Core Multi Chip (MCMC) architectures overMCSC architectures. Due to the scaling of memory intensive parallel applications in such systems, data is more likely to be shared among various cores residing in different chips resulting in a significant increase in chip-to-chip traffic, especially one-to-many traffic. This one-to-many traffic is originated mainly to maintain cache-coherence between many cores residing in multiple chips. Besides, one-to-many traffics are also exploited by many parallel programming models, system-level synchronization mechanisms, and control signals. How-ever, state-of-the-art Network-on-Chip (NoC)-based wired interconnection architectures do not provide enough support as they handle such one-to-many traffic as multiple unicast trafficusing a multi-hop MCMC communication fabric. As a result, even a small portion of such one-to-many traffic can significantly reduce system performance as traditional NoC-basedinterconnect cannot mask the high latency and energy consumption caused by chip-to-chipwired I/Os. Moreover, with the increase in memory intensive applications and scaling of MCMC systems, traditional NoC-based wired interconnects fail to provide a scalable inter-connection solution required to support the increased cache-coherence and synchronization generated one-to-many traffic in future MCMC-based High-Performance Computing (HPC) nodes. Therefore, these computation and memory intensive MCMC systems need an energy-efficient, low latency, and scalable one-to-many (broadcast/multicast) traffic-aware interconnection infrastructure to ensure high-performance. Research in recent years has shown that Wireless Network-in-Package (WiNiP) architectures with CMOS compatible Millimeter-Wave (mm-wave) transceivers can provide a scalable, low latency, and energy-efficient interconnect solution for on and off-chip communication. In this dissertation, a one-to-many traffic-aware WiNiP interconnection architecture with a starvation-free hybrid Medium Access Control (MAC), an asymmetric topology, and a novel flow control has been proposed. The different components of the proposed architecture are individually one-to-many traffic-aware and as a system, they collaborate with each other to provide required support for one-to-many traffic communication in a MCMC environment. It has been shown that such interconnection architecture can reduce energy consumption and average packet latency by 46.96% and 47.08% respectively for MCMC systems. Despite providing performance enhancements, wireless channel, being an unguided medium, is vulnerable to various security attacks such as jamming induced Denial-of-Service (DoS), eavesdropping, and spoofing. Further, to minimize the time-to-market and design costs, modern SoCs often use Third Party IPs (3PIPs) from untrusted organizations. An adversary either at the foundry or at the 3PIP design house can introduce a malicious circuitry, to jeopardize an SoC. Such malicious circuitry is known as a Hardware Trojan (HT). An HTplanted in the WiNiP from a vulnerable design or manufacturing process can compromise a Wireless Interface (WI) to enable illegitimate transmission through the infected WI resulting in a potential DoS attack for other WIs in the MCMC system. Moreover, HTs can be used for various other malicious purposes, including battery exhaustion, functionality subversion, and information leakage. This information when leaked to a malicious external attackercan reveals important information regarding the application suites running on the system, thereby compromising the user profile. To address persistent jamming-based DoS attack in WiNiP, in this dissertation, a secure WiNiP interconnection architecture for MCMC systems has been proposed that re-uses the one-to-many traffic-aware MAC and existing Design for Testability (DFT) hardware along with Machine Learning (ML) approach. Furthermore, a novel Simulated Annealing (SA)-based routing obfuscation mechanism was also proposed toprotect against an HT-assisted novel traffic analysis attack. Simulation results show that,the ML classifiers can achieve an accuracy of 99.87% for DoS attack detection while SA-basedrouting obfuscation could reduce application detection accuracy to only 15% for HT-assistedtraffic analysis attack and hence, secure the WiNiP fabric from age-old and emerging attacks

Strategies for the Detection of ET Probes Within Our Own Solar System

Arguments are reviewed in support of the hypothesis that ET would more likely send physical probes to surveil our Solar System and communicate with Earth than to communicate from afar with interstellar radio, infrared or laser beacons. Although the standard SETI practice of targeting individual stars or galaxies with powerful telescopes might detect a foreground local probe by serendipity, an intentional hunt for those probes would entail a different set of strategies, most notably sacrificing sensitivity (needed to detect a very faint and very distant signal) in exchange for a widened field-of-view (because a local signal can be reasonably hypothesized to be relatively bright). This paper suggests a number of strategies to detect local ET probes.Comment: Accepted for publication in JBIS: Journal of the British Interplanetary Societ

SciTech News Volume 70, No. 1 (2016)

Columns and Reports From the Editor 3 SciTech News Call for Articles 3 Assistant Editor wanted 4 Division News Science-Technology Division 5 Chemistry Division 7 Engineering Division 12 Aerospace Section of the Engineering Division 13 Call for Nominations & Applications Sparks Award for Professional Development11 Reviews Sci-Tech Book News Reviews 1

Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems Technologies and Operations

As the quarter-century mark in the 21st Century nears, new aviation-related equipment has come to the forefront, both to help us and to haunt us. (Coutu, 2020) This is particularly the case with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These vehicles have grown in popularity and accessible to everyone. Of different shapes and sizes, they are widely available for purchase at relatively low prices. They have moved from the backyard recreation status to important tools for the military, intelligence agencies, and corporate organizations. New practical applications such as military equipment and weaponry are announced on a regular basis – globally. (Coutu, 2020) Every country seems to be announcing steps forward in this bludgeoning field. In our successful 2nd edition of Unmanned Aircraft Systems in the Cyber Domain: Protecting USA’s Advanced Air Assets (Nichols, et al., 2019), the authors addressed three factors influencing UAS phenomena. First, unmanned aircraft technology has seen an economic explosion in production, sales, testing, specialized designs, and friendly / hostile usages of deployed UAS / UAVs / Drones. There is a huge global growing market and entrepreneurs know it. Second, hostile use of UAS is on the forefront of DoD defense and offensive planners. They are especially concerned with SWARM behavior. Movies like “Angel has Fallen,” where drones in a SWARM use facial recognition technology to kill USSS agents protecting POTUS, have built the lore of UAS and brought the problem forefront to DHS. Third, UAS technology was exploding. UAS and Counter- UAS developments in navigation, weapons, surveillance, data transfer, fuel cells, stealth, weight distribution, tactics, GPS / GNSS elements, SCADA protections, privacy invasions, terrorist uses, specialized software, and security protocols has exploded. (Nichols, et al., 2019) Our team has followed / tracked joint ventures between military and corporate entities and specialized labs to build UAS countermeasures. As authors, we felt compelled to address at least the edge of some of the new C-UAS developments. It was clear that we would be lucky if we could cover a few of – the more interesting and priority technology updates – all in the UNCLASSIFIED and OPEN sphere. Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems: Technologies and Operations is the companion textbook to our 2nd edition. The civilian market is interesting and entrepreneurial, but the military and intelligence markets are of concern because the US does NOT lead the pack in C-UAS technologies. China does. China continues to execute its UAS proliferation along the New Silk Road Sea / Land routes (NSRL). It has maintained a 7% growth in military spending each year to support its buildup. (Nichols, et al., 2019) [Chapter 21]. They continue to innovate and have recently improved a solution for UAS flight endurance issues with the development of advanced hydrogen fuel cell. (Nichols, et al., 2019) Reed and Trubetskoy presented a terrifying map of countries in the Middle East with armed drones and their manufacturing origin. Guess who? China. (A.B. Tabriski & Justin, 2018, December) Our C-UAS textbook has as its primary mission to educate and train resources who will enter the UAS / C-UAS field and trust it will act as a call to arms for military and DHS planners.https://newprairiepress.org/ebooks/1031/thumbnail.jp

Toward standardization of Quantum Key Distribution

Information security becomes an inseparable part of our everyday life. An encryption method widely used today is public-key encryption. The security of this method is based on a hard to solve mathematical problems against an adversary with limited computational power. Such an assumption could be broken as our understanding of the mathematics being improved or new computation tools being developed. One such tool that poses a threat to the public key encryption is a quantum computer. As a result, a new encryption method with a new security assumption is required. Quantum key distribution is a point-to-point symmetric key distribution method with security based on the law of physics. In theory, the key generated by QKD is informationtheoretic secured. However, in practice, physical devices could have flaws or possess some behaviors deviated from the theoretical model. These imperfections could open security loopholes for an adversary to exploit, compromising the security. Thus the security verification and system characterization of practical implementation of QKD are necessary. The necessity of this verification is further emphasized as several QKD systems are being commercialized and used in several discrete communication links today. To extend this new encryption system’s practical implementation on a wider network scale requires a set of standards or common practices for developers and service providers to follow. This set of rules is set to ensure the compatibility of different device models in the network and ensure the security of each component in the system, which would affect the security of the system as a whole. To fulfill standardization and certification criteria, a record of best practice on security analysis, system design, device characterization, and security verification of QKD implementation is required. The research projects throughout my Ph.D. study contribute toward this practice. These studies also address some issues and provide possible solutions to the development of a standard for QKD. This thesis is a collection of six experimental studies on performance evaluation and security verification of different components of practical quantum key distribution systems. The first study is a comparison between the performance of the QKD system with quantum dot (QD) as a single-photon source and the performance of QKD with weakcoherent pulsed (WCP) source. The result shows that the QKD with QD could generate the key at higher channel loss than WCP QKD using the same laser source. This result shows the potential of QKD with a single-photon source as a candidate for secret key distribution over high channel loss, such as up-link satellite-based QKD. The second study is a theoretical study on the method to characterize the QKD system against the Trojan-horse attack being considered as a standard for the QKD system. The result shows a possible loophole of this method against a more powerful adversary than assumed in the previously proposed model. An improved version of characterization against a more general form of Trojan-horse attack has been proposed. The third experiment is on the information leakage from a free-space QKD receiver due to detector backflash, a photon produced by the detector upon detection. The result shows that the backflash photons carry the information of the ’clicked’ detector that could be transmitted back to the channel and discriminated by Eve. An experimental demonstration of this attack has been performed. Countermeasure both in theory and practical setup has been proposed. The next experiment is on the effect of atmospheric turbulence on Eve’s spatial-mode detection efficiency mismatch attack on the free-space QKD system. We show that, by using a phase-only spatial light modulator (SLM) and hologram created by Zernike polynomials, atmospheric turbulence with various strength covered from sea level to upper atmosphere can be experimentally emulated in the lab environment. We then use that setup to show the limit of the distance that Eve’s attack is successful. The theoretical limit of the attack distance also shown. In the fifth study, we use the SLM and Zernike polynomial holograms to characterize a free-space QKD system against spatial mode attack. The result shows that, with higherorder spatial modes and finer control of wavefront intensity distribution, Eve could bypass the countermeasure proposed in our previous study. We proposed a more robust version of countermeasure against spatial mode attack. The new countermeasure is verified by the SLM setup. The last study is on the fake-state attack on the transition edge sensor (TES). The result shows that TES’s voltage response can be deterministically controlled by Eve using bright laser through the input channel. It also shows that the photon number result from TES can be controlled by Eve. An attack model exploiting this imperfection has been shown. In addition to the contribution to the standardization of the QKD system, I hope that the result of this thesis would emphasize the necessity of security verification of the QKD system and the verification of countermeasure and characterization method against more general attack model. Although the unconditional security, promised in theory, could not yet be achieved, this loop of hacking and patching should provide us information and insight on which security level could be claimed from the practical QKD devices implementing today

Synthesis of silver nanoparticles and their impact on the sperm of sea urchin Arbacia lixula

Primjena umjetno proizvedenih nanočestica raste svake godine u širokom rasponu područja kao što su: medicina, kozmetika, proizvodnja hardverskih dijelova,poljoprivreda, prehrambeni dodatci, itd. Na taj se način povećava i vjerojatnost da će nanočestice završiti u različitim dijelovima okoliša, poput: slatkovodnih sustava, tla, estuarija ili morske vode. Danas se nanočestice srebra koriste kao: optički pojačivači, toplinski i električni vodiči, antibakterijski premazi, biosenzori itd. Upravo zbog toga, studije o njihovoj okolišnoj sudbini, uzrocima toksičnosti, bioakumulaciji i upijanju, od ključne su važnosti kako bi se spriječili negativni učinci na ljude i ostale organizme.As the use of synthesized nanoparticles grows every year in a broad range of fields like: medicine, cosmetics, hardware parts manufacturing, agriculture, dietarysupplements, etc. So does the possibility that such nanoparticles finish into various environmental media such as freshwater systems, soil, estuarine or marine waters. Recently, silver nanoparticles have been used as optical enhancers, thermal and electrical conductors, antibacterial coatings, biosensors, etc. Therefore studies about their environmental fate, toxicity patterns, bioaccumulation and uptake are of pivotal importance to prevent negative effects on humans and other keystone species

NASA Space Engineering Research Center for utilization of local planetary resources

Reports covering the period from 1 Nov. 1991 to 31 Oct. 1992 and documenting progress at the NASA Space Engineering Research Center are included. Topics covered include: (1) processing of propellants, volatiles, and metals; (2) production of structural and refractory materials; (3) system optimization discovery and characterization; (4) system automation and optimization; and (5) database development