Capacity-Achieving Coding Mechanisms: Spatial Coupling and Group Symmetries

The broad theme of this work is in constructing optimal transmission mechanisms for a wide variety of communication systems. In particular, this dissertation provides a proof of threshold saturation for spatially-coupled codes, low-complexity capacity-achieving coding schemes for side-information problems, a proof that Reed-Muller and primitive narrow-sense BCH codes achieve capacity on erasure channels, and a mathematical framework to design delay sensitive communication systems. Spatially-coupled codes are a class of codes on graphs that are shown to achieve capacity universally over binary symmetric memoryless channels (BMS) under belief-propagation decoder. The underlying phenomenon behind spatial coupling, known as “threshold saturation via spatial coupling”, turns out to be general and this technique has been applied to a wide variety of systems. In this work, a proof of the threshold saturation phenomenon is provided for irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) and low-density generator-matrix (LDGM) ensembles on BMS channels. This proof is far simpler than published alternative proofs and it remains as the only technique to handle irregular and LDGM codes. Also, low-complexity capacity-achieving codes are constructed for three coding problems via spatial coupling: 1) rate distortion with side-information, 2) channel coding with side-information, and 3) write-once memory system. All these schemes are based on spatially coupling compound LDGM/LDPC ensembles. Reed-Muller and Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquengham (BCH) are well-known algebraic codes introduced more than 50 years ago. While these codes are studied extensively in the literature it wasn’t known whether these codes achieve capacity. This work introduces a technique to show that Reed-Muller and primitive narrow-sense BCH codes achieve capacity on erasure channels under maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoding. Instead of relying on the weight enumerators or other precise details of these codes, this technique requires that these codes have highly symmetric permutation groups. In fact, any sequence of linear codes with increasing blocklengths whose rates converge to a number between 0 and 1, and whose permutation groups are doubly transitive achieve capacity on erasure channels under bit-MAP decoding. This pro-vides a rare example in information theory where symmetry alone is sufficient to achieve capacity. While the channel capacity provides a useful benchmark for practical design, communication systems of the day also demand small latency and other link layer metrics. Such delay sensitive communication systems are studied in this work, where a mathematical framework is developed to provide insights into the optimal design of these systems

The 1991 3rd NASA Symposium on VLSI Design

Papers from the symposium are presented from the following sessions: (1) featured presentations 1; (2) very large scale integration (VLSI) circuit design; (3) VLSI architecture 1; (4) featured presentations 2; (5) neural networks; (6) VLSI architectures 2; (7) featured presentations 3; (8) verification 1; (9) analog design; (10) verification 2; (11) design innovations 1; (12) asynchronous design; and (13) design innovations 2

Providing Private and Fast Data Access for Cloud Systems

Cloud storage and computing systems have become the backbone of many applications such as streaming (Netflix, YouTube), storage (Dropbox, Google Drive), and computing (Amazon Elastic Computing, Microsoft Azure). To address the ever growing demand for storage and computing requirements of these applications, cloud services are typically im-plemented over a large-scale distributed data storage system. Cloud systems are expected to provide the following two pivotal services for the users: 1) private content access and 2) fast content access. The goal of this thesis is to understand and address some of the challenges that need to be overcome to provide these two services. The first part of this thesis focuses on private data access in distributed systems. In particular, we contribute to the areas of Private Information Retrieval (PIR) and Private Computation (PC). In the PIR problem, there is a user who wishes to privately retrieve a subset of files belonging to a database stored on a single or multiple remote server(s). In the PC problem, the user wants to privately compute functions of a subset of files in the database. The PIR and PC problems seek the most efficient solutions with the minimum download cost that enable the user to retrieve or compute what it wants privately. We establish fundamental bounds on the minimum download cost required for guaran-teeing the privacy requirement in some practical and realistic settings of the PIR and PC problems and develop novel and efficient privacy-preserving algorithms for these settings. In particular, we study the single-server and multi-server settings of PIR in which the user initially has a random linear combination of a subset of files in the database as side in-formation, referred to as PIR with coded side information. We also study the multi-server setting of the PC in which the user wants to privately compute multiple linear combinations of a subset of files in the database, referred to as Private Linear Transformation. The second part of this thesis focuses on fast content access in distributed systems. In particular, we study the use of erasure coding to handle data access requests in distributed storage and computing systems. Service rate region is an important performance metric for coded distributed systems, which expresses the set of all data access request rates that can be simultaneously served by the system. In this context, two classes of problems arise: 1) characterizing the service rate region of a given storage scheme and finding the optimal request allocation, and 2) designing the underlying erasure code to handle a given desired service rate region. As contributions along the first class of problems, we characterize the service rate region of systems with some common coding schemes such as Simplex codes and Reed-Muller codes by introducing two novel techniques: 1) fractional matching and vertex cover on graph representation of codes, and 2) geometric representations of codes. Moreover, along the second class of code design, we establish some lower bounds on the minimum storage required to handle a desired service rate region for a coded distributed system and in some regimes, we design efficient storage schemes that provide the desired service rate region while minimizing the storage requirements

Secure and Efficient Comparisons between Untrusted Parties

A vast number of online services is based on users contributing their personal information. Examples are manifold, including social networks, electronic commerce, sharing websites, lodging platforms, and genealogy. In all cases user privacy depends on a collective trust upon all involved intermediaries, like service providers, operators, administrators or even help desk staff. A single adversarial party in the whole chain of trust voids user privacy. Even more, the number of intermediaries is ever growing. Thus, user privacy must be preserved at every time and stage, independent of the intrinsic goals any involved party. Furthermore, next to these new services, traditional offline analytic systems are replaced by online services run in large data centers. Centralized processing of electronic medical records, genomic data or other health-related information is anticipated due to advances in medical research, better analytic results based on large amounts of medical information and lowered costs. In these scenarios privacy is of utmost concern due to the large amount of personal information contained within the centralized data. We focus on the challenge of privacy-preserving processing on genomic data, specifically comparing genomic sequences. The problem that arises is how to efficiently compare private sequences of two parties while preserving confidentiality of the compared data. It follows that the privacy of the data owner must be preserved, which means that as little information as possible must be leaked to any party participating in the comparison. Leakage can happen at several points during a comparison. The secured inputs for the comparing party might leak some information about the original input, or the output might leak information about the inputs. In the latter case, results of several comparisons can be combined to infer information about the confidential input of the party under observation. Genomic sequences serve as a use-case, but the proposed solutions are more general and can be applied to the generic field of privacy-preserving comparison of sequences. The solution should be efficient such that performing a comparison yields runtimes linear in the length of the input sequences and thus producing acceptable costs for a typical use-case. To tackle the problem of efficient, privacy-preserving sequence comparisons, we propose a framework consisting of three main parts. a) The basic protocol presents an efficient sequence comparison algorithm, which transforms a sequence into a set representation, allowing to approximate distance measures over input sequences using distance measures over sets. The sets are then represented by an efficient data structure - the Bloom filter -, which allows evaluation of certain set operations without storing the actual elements of the possibly large set. This representation yields low distortion for comparing similar sequences. Operations upon the set representation are carried out using efficient, partially homomorphic cryptographic systems for data confidentiality of the inputs. The output can be adjusted to either return the actual approximated distance or the result of an in-range check of the approximated distance. b) Building upon this efficient basic protocol we introduce the first mechanism to reduce the success of inference attacks by detecting and rejecting similar queries in a privacy-preserving way. This is achieved by generating generalized commitments for inputs. This generalization is done by treating inputs as messages received from a noise channel, upon which error-correction from coding theory is applied. This way similar inputs are defined as inputs having a hamming distance of their generalized inputs below a certain predefined threshold. We present a protocol to perform a zero-knowledge proof to assess if the generalized input is indeed a generalization of the actual input. Furthermore, we generalize a very efficient inference attack on privacy-preserving sequence comparison protocols and use it to evaluate our inference-control mechanism. c) The third part of the framework lightens the computational load of the client taking part in the comparison protocol by presenting a compression mechanism for partially homomorphic cryptographic schemes. It reduces the transmission and storage overhead induced by the semantically secure homomorphic encryption schemes, as well as encryption latency. The compression is achieved by constructing an asymmetric stream cipher such that the generated ciphertext can be converted into a ciphertext of an associated homomorphic encryption scheme without revealing any information about the plaintext. This is the first compression scheme available for partially homomorphic encryption schemes. Compression of ciphertexts of fully homomorphic encryption schemes are several orders of magnitude slower at the conversion from the transmission ciphertext to the homomorphically encrypted ciphertext. Indeed our compression scheme achieves optimal conversion performance. It further allows to generate keystreams offline and thus supports offloading to trusted devices. This way transmission-, storage- and power-efficiency is improved. We give security proofs for all relevant parts of the proposed protocols and algorithms to evaluate their security. A performance evaluation of the core components demonstrates the practicability of our proposed solutions including a theoretical analysis and practical experiments to show the accuracy as well as efficiency of approximations and probabilistic algorithms. Several variations and configurations to detect similar inputs are studied during an in-depth discussion of the inference-control mechanism. A human mitochondrial genome database is used for the practical evaluation to compare genomic sequences and detect similar inputs as described by the use-case. In summary we show that it is indeed possible to construct an efficient and privacy-preserving (genomic) sequences comparison, while being able to control the amount of information that leaves the comparison. To the best of our knowledge we also contribute to the field by proposing the first efficient privacy-preserving inference detection and control mechanism, as well as the first ciphertext compression system for partially homomorphic cryptographic systems

Conflict Checkable and Decodable Codes and Their Applications

Let $C$ be an error-correcting code over a large alphabet $q$ of block length $n$, and assume that, a possibly corrupted, codeword $c$ is distributively stored among $n$ servers where the $i$th entry is being held by the $i$th server. Suppose that every pair of servers publicly announce whether the corresponding coordinates are ``consistent\u27\u27 with some legal codeword or ``conflicted\u27\u27. What type of information about $c$ can be inferred from this consistency graph? Can we check whether errors occurred and if so, can we find the error locations and effectively decode? We initiate the study of conflict-checkable and conflict-decodable codes and prove the following main results: (1) (Almost-MDS conflict-checkable codes:) For every distance $d\leq n$, there exists a code that supports conflict-based error-detection whose dimension $k$ almost achieves the singleton bound, i.e., $k\geq n-d+0.99$. Interestingly, the code is non-linear, and we give some evidence that suggests that this is inherent. Combinatorially, this yields an $n$-partite graph over $[q]^n$ that contains $q^k$ cliques of size $n$ whose pair-wise intersection is at most $n-d\leq k-0.99$ vertices, generalizing a construction of Alon (Random Struct. Algorithms, \u2702) that achieves a similar result for the special case of triangles ($n=3$). (2) (Conflict Decodable Codes below half-distance:) For every distance $d\leq n$ there exists a linear code that supports conflict-based error-decoding up to half of the distance. The code\u27s dimension $k$ ``half-meets\u27\u27 the singleton bound, i.e., $k=(n-d+2)/2$, and we prove that this bound is tight for a natural class of such codes. The construction is based on symmetric bivariate polynomials and is rooted in the literature on verifiable secret sharing (Ben-Or, Goldwasser and Wigderson, STOC \u2788; Cramer, Damgård, and Maurer, EUROCRYPT \u2700). (3) (Robust Conflict Decodable Codes:) We show that the above construction also satisfies a non-trivial notion of robust decoding/detection even when the number of errors is unbounded and up to $d/2$ of the servers are Byzantine and may lie about their conflicts. The resulting conflict-decoder runs in exponential time in this case, and we present an alternative construction that achieves quasipolynomial complexity at the expense of degrading the dimension to $k=(n-d+3)/3$. Our construction is based on trilinear polynomials, and the algorithmic result follows by showing that the induced conflict graph is structured enough to allow efficient recovery of a maximal vertex cover. As an application of the last result, we present the first polynomial-time statistical two-round Verifiable Secret Sharing (resp., three-round general MPC protocol) that remains secure in the presence of an active adversary that corrupts up to $t<n/3.001$ of the parties. We can upgrade the resiliency threshold to $n/3$, which is known to be optimal in this setting, at the expense of increasing the computational complexity to be quasipolynomial. Previous solutions (Applebaum, Kachlon, and Patra, TCC\u2720) suffered from an exponential-time complexity even when the adversary corrupts only $n/4$ of the parties

LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volum

Software for Exascale Computing - SPPEXA 2016-2019

This open access book summarizes the research done and results obtained in the second funding phase of the Priority Program 1648 "Software for Exascale Computing" (SPPEXA) of the German Research Foundation (DFG) presented at the SPPEXA Symposium in Dresden during October 21-23, 2019. In that respect, it both represents a continuation of Vol. 113 in Springer’s series Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, the corresponding report of SPPEXA’s first funding phase, and provides an overview of SPPEXA’s contributions towards exascale computing in today's sumpercomputer technology. The individual chapters address one or more of the research directions (1) computational algorithms, (2) system software, (3) application software, (4) data management and exploration, (5) programming, and (6) software tools. The book has an interdisciplinary appeal: scholars from computational sub-fields in computer science, mathematics, physics, or engineering will find it of particular interest