Recent Advances in Signal Processing

The signal processing task is a very critical issue in the majority of new technological inventions and challenges in a variety of applications in both science and engineering fields. Classical signal processing techniques have largely worked with mathematical models that are linear, local, stationary, and Gaussian. They have always favored closed-form tractability over real-world accuracy. These constraints were imposed by the lack of powerful computing tools. During the last few decades, signal processing theories, developments, and applications have matured rapidly and now include tools from many areas of mathematics, computer science, physics, and engineering. This book is targeted primarily toward both students and researchers who want to be exposed to a wide variety of signal processing techniques and algorithms. It includes 27 chapters that can be categorized into five different areas depending on the application at hand. These five categories are ordered to address image processing, speech processing, communication systems, time-series analysis, and educational packages respectively. The book has the advantage of providing a collection of applications that are completely independent and self-contained; thus, the interested reader can choose any chapter and skip to another without losing continuity

Cryptanalysis of some self-synchronous chaotic stream ciphers and their improved schemes

In this paper, a cryptanalysis method that combines a chosen-ciphertext attack with a divide-and-conquer attack by traversing multiple non-zero component initial conditions (DCA- TMNCIC) is proposed. The method is used for security analysis of n-D (n=3,4,5,6,7,8) self- synchronous chaotic stream ciphers that employ a product of two chaotic variables and three chaotic variables (n-D SCSC-2 and n-D SCSC-3), taking 3-D SCSC-2 as a typical example for cryptanalysis. For resisting the combinational effect of the chosen-ciphertext attack and DCA- TMNCIC, several improved chaotic cipher schemes are designed, including 3-D SCSC based on a nonlinear nominal system (3-D SCSC-NNS) and n-D SCSC based on sinusoidal modulation (n-D SCSC-SM (n=3,4,5,6,7,8)). Theoretical security analysis validates the improved schemes

Security and Privacy for IoT Ecosystems

Smart devices have become an integral part of our everyday life. In contrast to smartphones and laptops, Internet of Things (IoT) devices are typically managed by the vendor. They allow little or no user-driven customization. Users need to use and trust IoT devices as they are, including the ecosystems involved in the processing and sharing of personal data. Ensuring that an IoT device does not leak private data is imperative. This thesis analyzes security practices in popular IoT ecosystems across several price segments. Our results show a gap between real-world implementations and state-of-the-art security measures. The process of responsible disclosure with the vendors revealed further practical challenges. Do they want to support backward compatibility with the same app and infrastructure over multiple IoT device generations? To which extent can they trust their supply chains in rolling out keys? Mature vendors have a budget for security and are aware of its demands. Despite this goodwill, developers sometimes fail at securing the concrete implementations in those complex ecosystems. Our analysis of real-world products reveals the actual efforts made by vendors to secure their products. Our responsible disclosure processes and publications of design recommendations not only increase security in existing products but also help connected ecosystem manufacturers to develop secure products. Moreover, we enable users to take control of their connected devices with firmware binary patching. If a vendor decides to no longer offer cloud services, bootstrapping a vendor-independent ecosystem is the only way to revive bricked devices. Binary patching is not only useful in the IoT context but also opens up these devices as research platforms. We are the first to publish tools for Bluetooth firmware and lower-layer analysis and uncover a security issue in Broadcom chips affecting hundreds of millions of devices manufactured by Apple, Samsung, Google, and more. Although we informed Broadcom and customers of their technologies of the weaknesses identified, some of these devices no longer receive official updates. For these, our binary patching framework is capable of building vendor-independent patches and retrofit security. Connected device vendors depend on standards; they rarely implement lower-layer communication schemes from scratch. Standards enable communication between devices of different vendors, which is crucial in many IoT setups. Secure standards help making products secure by design and, thus, need to be analyzed as early as possible. One possibility to integrate security into a lower-layer standard is Physical-Layer Security (PLS). PLS establishes security on the Physical Layer (PHY) of wireless transmissions. With new wireless technologies emerging, physical properties change. We analyze how suitable PLS techniques are in the domain of mmWave and Visible Light Communication (VLC). Despite VLC being commonly believed to be very secure due to its limited range, we show that using VLC instead for PLS is less secure than using it with Radio Frequency (RF) communication. The work in this thesis is applied to mature products as well as upcoming standards. We consider security for the whole product life cycle to make connected devices and IoT ecosystems more secure in the long term

Optical Communication

Optical communication is very much useful in telecommunication systems, data processing and networking. It consists of a transmitter that encodes a message into an optical signal, a channel that carries the signal to its desired destination, and a receiver that reproduces the message from the received optical signal. It presents up to date results on communication systems, along with the explanations of their relevance, from leading researchers in this field. The chapters cover general concepts of optical communication, components, systems, networks, signal processing and MIMO systems. In recent years, optical components and other enhanced signal processing functions are also considered in depth for optical communications systems. The researcher has also concentrated on optical devices, networking, signal processing, and MIMO systems and other enhanced functions for optical communication. This book is targeted at research, development and design engineers from the teams in manufacturing industry, academia and telecommunication industries

Dynamical Systems

Complex systems are pervasive in many areas of science integrated in our daily lives. Examples include financial markets, highway transportation networks, telecommunication networks, world and country economies, social networks, immunological systems, living organisms, computational systems and electrical and mechanical structures. Complex systems are often composed of a large number of interconnected and interacting entities, exhibiting much richer global scale dynamics than the properties and behavior of individual entities. Complex systems are studied in many areas of natural sciences, social sciences, engineering and mathematical sciences. This special issue therefore intends to contribute towards the dissemination of the multifaceted concepts in accepted use by the scientific community. We hope readers enjoy this pertinent selection of papers which represents relevant examples of the state of the art in present day research. [...

Dynamic block encryption with self-authenticating key exchange

One of the greatest challenges facing cryptographers is the mechanism used for key exchange. When secret data is transmitted, the chances are that there may be an attacker who will try to intercept and decrypt the message. Having done so, he/she might just gain advantage over the information obtained, or attempt to tamper with the message, and thus, misguiding the recipient. Both cases are equally fatal and may cause great harm as a consequence. In cryptography, there are two commonly used methods of exchanging secret keys between parties. In the first method, symmetric cryptography, the key is sent in advance, over some secure channel, which only the intended recipient can read. The second method of key sharing is by using a public key exchange method, where each party has a private and public key, a public key is shared and a private key is kept locally. In both cases, keys are exchanged between two parties. In this thesis, we propose a method whereby the risk of exchanging keys is minimised. The key is embedded in the encrypted text using a process that we call `chirp coding', and recovered by the recipient using a process that is based on correlation. The `chirp coding parameters' are exchanged between users by employing a USB flash memory retained by each user. If the keys are compromised they are still not usable because an attacker can only have access to part of the key. Alternatively, the software can be configured to operate in a one time parameter mode, in this mode, the parameters are agreed upon in advance. There is no parameter exchange during file transmission, except, of course, the key embedded in ciphertext. The thesis also introduces a method of encryption which utilises dynamic blocks, where the block size is different for each block. Prime numbers are used to drive two random number generators: a Linear Congruential Generator (LCG) which takes in the seed and initialises the system and a Blum-Blum Shum (BBS) generator which is used to generate random streams to encrypt messages, images or video clips for example. In each case, the key created is text dependent and therefore will change as each message is sent. The scheme presented in this research is composed of five basic modules. The first module is the key generation module, where the key to be generated is message dependent. The second module, encryption module, performs data encryption. The third module, key exchange module, embeds the key into the encrypted text. Once this is done, the message is transmitted and the recipient uses the key extraction module to retrieve the key and finally the decryption module is executed to decrypt the message and authenticate it. In addition, the message may be compressed before encryption and decompressed by the recipient after decryption using standard compression tools

Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructures 2nd Volume

The second volume of the book contains the manuscripts that were accepted for publication in the MDPI Special Topic "Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure" after a rigorous peer-review process. Authors from academia, government and industry contributed their innovative solutions, consistent with the interdisciplinary nature of cybersecurity. The book contains 16 articles, including an editorial that explains the current challenges, innovative solutions and real-world experiences that include critical infrastructure and 15 original papers that present state-of-the-art innovative solutions to attacks on critical systems

Synthetic presentation of iterative asynchronous parallel algorithms.

Iterative asynchronous parallel methods are nowadays gaining renewed interest in the community of researchers interested in High Performance Computing (HPC), in the specific case of massive parallelism. This is because these methods avoid the deadlock phenomena and that moreover a rigorous load balancing is not necessary, which is not the case with synchronous methods. Such iterative asynchronous parallel methods are of great interest when there are many synchronizations between processors, which in the case of iterative methods is the case when convergence is slow. Indeed in iterative synchronous parallel methods, to respect the task sequence graph that defines in fact the logic of the algorithm used, processors must wait for the results they need and calculated by other processors; such expectations of the results emitted by concurrent processors therefore cause idle times for standby processors. It is to overcome this drawback that asynchronous parallel iterative methods have been introduced first for the resolution of large scale linear systems and then for the resolution of highly nonlinear algebraic systems of large size as well, where the solution may be subject to constraints. This kind of method has been widely studied worldwide by many authors. The purpose of this presentation is to present as broadly and pedagogically as possible the asynchronous parallel iterative methods as well as the issues related to their implementation and application in solving many problems arising from High Performance Computing. We will therefore try as much as possible to present the underlying concepts that allow a good understanding of these methods by avoiding as much as possible an overly rigorous mathematical formalism; references to the main pioneering work will also be made. After a general introduction we will present the basic concepts that allow to model asynchronous parallel iterative methods including as a particular case synchronous methods. We will then present the algorithmic extensions of these methods consisting of asynchronous sub-domain methods, asynchronous multisplitting methods as well as asynchronous parallel methods with flexible communications. In each case an analysis of the behavior of these methods will be presented. Note that the first kind of analysis allows to obtain an estimate of the asymptotic rate of convergence. The difficult problem of the stopping test of asynchronous parallel iterations will be also studied, both by computer sciences considerations and also by numerical aspects related to the mathematical analysis of the behavior of theses iterative parallel methods. The parallel asynchronous methods have been implemented on various architectures and we will present the main principles that made it possible to code them. These parallel asynchronous methods have been used for the resolution of several kind of mathematical problems and we will list the main applications processed. Finally we will try to specify in which cases and on which type of architecture these methods are efficient and interesting to use