EFFICIENT HARDWARE PRIMITIVES FOR SECURING LIGHTWEIGHT SYSTEMS

In the era of IoT and ubiquitous computing, the collection and communication of sensitive data is increasingly being handled by lightweight Integrated Circuits. Efficient hardware implementations of crytographic primitives for resource constrained applications have become critical, especially block ciphers which perform fundamental operations such as encryption, decryption, and even hashing. We study the efficiency of block ciphers under different implementation styles. For low latency applications that use unrolled block cipher implementations, we design a glitch filter to reduce energy consumption. For lightweight applications, we design a novel architecture for the widely used AES cipher. The design eliminates inefficiencies in data movement and clock activity, thereby significantly improving energy efficiency over state-of-the-art architectures. Apart from efficiency, vulnerability to implementation attacks are a concern, which we mitigate by our randomization capable lightweight AES architecture. We fabricate our designs in a commercial 16nm FinFET technology and present measured testchip data on energy consumption and side channel resistance. Finally, we address the problem of supply chain security by using image processing techniques to extract fingerprints from surface texture of plastic IC packages for IC authentication and counterfeit prevention. Collectively these works present efficient and cost effective solutions to secure lightweight systems

Multi-functional, self-sensing and automated real-time non-contact liquid dispensing system

Liquid dispensing in the order of pico-liter has become more and more important in biology, electronics and micro-electronic-mechanical-system (MEMS) during the past two decades due to the rapid progress of researches on the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) microarray, compact and low-cost direct write technology (DWT), organic semiconductors and nano-particles. The existing approaches, commercialized or experimental, to liquid dispensing in minute amounts have one common shortcoming: open loop control, i.e., they have no direct control on the quality of dispensed liquid. In contrast, the SmartPin has intrinsic self-sensing capability to not only control the process of liquid dispensing, but also the results of the dispensed liquid in real time. The dual purpose fiber optics sensor/plunger is able to detect the status of liquid morphology under dispensing, in real time, by the internal light sensor and control both the amount and the manner of liquid dispensing by its plunger-like movements. This dissertation work has implemented, with the SmartPin technology, a frilly automated DNA microarrayer based on the first generation prototype developed at NJIT\u27s Real Time Control Laboratory. This new DNA microarrayer fulfills all requirements in each step of DNA microarray fabrication, such as thorough cleaning to avoid cross contamination and clogging, aspiration of tiny amount of DNA samples, spotting on multiple slides, and flexible in stream change of DNA samples. Experiment results shows that this DNA microarrayer compares favorably with its commercialized counterpart OmniGrid 100 with SMP3 pins. As a verification of robust implementation and on-the-fly control of spot morphology, high volume of spots (120 K) have been made, from which the corresponding experiment data has been obtained, categorized and normalized as template database. In addition, this dissertation research explores the patterned microline-drawing capability of the SmartPin. Two approaches, spot sequence and liquid-column sweeping, are proposed and implemented. Experiment results show that the SmartPin is promising in the area of patterning of large area organic electronics. Besides the experimental research, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of the liquid dispensing process has been done by utilizing GAMBIT and FLUENT, which are state-of-the-art computer programs for modeling fluid flow and heat transfer in complex geometries. The CFD simulation results, validated by experimental results, offer a guide to the design of control system for different tasks of liquid dispensation, such as fabrication of protein microarray

Machine Learning-Based Anomaly Detection in Cloud Virtual Machine Resource Usage

Anomaly detection is an important activity in cloud computing systems because it aids in the identification of odd behaviours or actions that may result in software glitch, security breaches, and performance difficulties. Detecting aberrant resource utilization trends in virtual machines is a typical application of anomaly detection in cloud computing (VMs). Currently, the most serious cyber threat is distributed denial-of-service attacks. The afflicted server\u27s resources and internet traffic resources, such as bandwidth and buffer size, are slowed down by restricting the server\u27s capacity to give resources to legitimate customers. To recognize attacks and common occurrences, machine learning techniques such as Quadratic Support Vector Machines (QSVM), Random Forest, and neural network models such as MLP and Autoencoders are employed. Various machine learning algorithms are used on the optimised NSL-KDD dataset to provide an efficient and accurate predictor of network intrusions. In this research, we propose a neural network based model and experiment on various central and spiral rearrangements of the features for distinguishing between different types of attacks and support our approach of better preservation of feature structure with image representations. The results are analysed and compared to existing models and prior research. The outcomes of this study have practical implications for improving the security and performance of cloud computing systems, specifically in the area of identifying and mitigating network intrusions

MEASUREMENT OF DYNAMIC PRESSURE GRADIENTS ON THE SURFACE OF SHORT CYLINDERS

As a result of military testing and training around the United States, the property potentially containing military weapons in underwater environments exceeds 10 million acres. The weapons, called munitions, are difficult to locate, can move suddenly, and are a danger to marine life and the public. Before safe and cost-effective munition recovery efforts can be developed, a better understanding of their mobility in underwater environments is needed. Specifically, this research looks to resolve the role of dynamic pressure gradients surrounding the munition that can impact its position or orientation. To do so, a pressure-mapped model munition (PMM) has been designed, fabricated, and tested in laboratory and field settings. The PMM is an untethered instrument, containing all electronics necessary to retrieve, time, and store data. The PMM is capable of detecting and measuring surface pressure gradients and orientation and positional changes and uses an acoustic tracker for retrieval purposes after a deployment. The surface pressure mapping was accomplished with an array of 16 small diaphragm pressure sensors. The instrument also contains an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to record orientation changes. All data is stored to an on-board microSD card and recorded on the same time stamp. After wiring and constructing the PMM, the instrument was evaluated through several laboratory experiments to determine its accuracy in detecting hydrostatic pressure changes, orientation changes, passing waves, and environment changes, such as being submerged in a sand bed. The diaphragm pressure sensors were sampled at 13 Hz with battery and disk storage of up to 3 days. Individual pressure sensors can experience drift up to 1 mbar/hour, which is the hydrostatic equivalent of 1 cm of water per hour, and showed offsets of up to 50 mbar, or 50 cm of hydrostatic pressure. The rolling experiment and the overnight drift experiment proved that a reference pressure sensor, in combination with the orientation data from the IMU on board the instrument, can be used to recreate the steady state pressures. While the pressure sensors have an internal temperature measurement, a reference temperature sensor installed on the surface would allow for better characterization of the instrument’s response to environment changes. The pressure sensors accurately recorded changes in pressure due to hydrostatic changes and passing waves with a noise rms of only 0.25 mbar, or 2.5 mm of hydrostatic pressure. This result was promising for this research because the interest is in recording dynamic pressure gradients due to passing waves and local vortices. The instrument resolved wave motions as accurately as standard field instruments. Horizontal pressure gradients across the PMM were in phase with the local acceleration as measured with an acoustic Doppler velocimeter as would be predicted by linear wave theory. However, the pressure gradients across the munition were larger than the local acceleration, providing evidence for the influence of vortex shedding. Additional evidence for vortex shedding was evident in the local deviations of pressure surrounding the munition during a passing wave. The observations show that during 100% exposure, the offshore face of the munition experiences a magnified signal as the crest passes, while the onshore side experiences a pressure deficit. Moreover, spectra of the PMM pressure observations showed significant energy at the first harmonic frequency that was not present in the nearby free stream pressure measured by the Vector. The largest KC value for the flow in the laboratory experiments was 3.1, meaning that, if the cylinder were in the freestream, there would be vortices shedding twice a wave period. However, comparisons with theory are challenging due to vortex growth limitations due to the percent exposure of the short cylinder. The laboratory experiments have demonstrated the current PMM’s capabilities to capture passing waves or vortex shedding schemes causing dynamic pressure gradients on the surface of the cylinder. To date, full scale laboratory and field conditions have been limited to wave environments that do not exceed the threshold for momentary liquefaction. Planned field studies will provide for observations in the higher energy conditions that can lead to significant positional state change of the short cylinder. This instrument will allow for quantitative measurements of vortices in controlled, laboratory experiments and in nearshore environments, improving the understanding of fluid around a cylinder

Platformization of Urban Life: Towards a Technocapitalist Transformation of European Cities

The increasing platformization of urban life needs critical perspectives to examine changing everyday practices and power shifts brought about by the expansion of digital platforms mediating care-services, housing, and mobility. This book addresses new modes of producing urban spaces and societies. It brings both platform researchers and activists from various fields related to critical urban studies and labour activism into dialogue. The contributors engage with the socio-spatial and normative implications of platform-mediated urban everyday life and urban futures, going beyond a rigid techno-dystopian stance in order to include an understanding of platforms as sites of social creativity and exchange

Platformization of Urban Life

The increasing platformization of urban life needs critical perspectives to examine changing everyday practices and power shifts brought about by the expansion of digital platforms mediating care-services, housing, and mobility. This book addresses new modes of producing urban spaces and societies. It brings both platform researchers and activists from various fields related to critical urban studies and labour activism into dialogue. The contributors engage with the socio-spatial and normative implications of platform-mediated urban everyday life and urban futures, going beyond a rigid techno-dystopian stance in order to include an understanding of platforms as sites of social creativity and exchange

Communication Reliability in Network on Chip Designs

The performance of low latency Network on Chip (NoC) architectures, which incorporate fast bypass paths to reduce communication latency, is limited by crosstalk induced skewing of signal transitions on link wires. As a result of crosstalk interactions between wires, signal transitions belonging to the same flit or bit vector arrive at the destination at different times and are likely to violate setup and hold time constraints for the design. This thesis proposes a two-step technique: TransSync- RecSync, to dynamically eliminate packet errors resulting from inter-bit-line transition skew. The proposed approach adds minimally to router complexity and involves no wire overhead. The actual throughput of NoC designs with asynchronous bypass designs is evaluated and the benefits of augmenting such schemes with the proposed design are studied. The TransSync, TransSync-2-lines and RecSync schemes described here are found to improve the average communication latency by 26%, 20% and 38% respectively in a 7X7 mesh NoC with asynchronous bypass channel. This work also evaluates the bit-error ratio (BER) performance of several existing crosstalk avoidance and error correcting schemes and compares them to that of the proposed schemes. Both TransSync and RecSync scheme are dynamic in nature and can be switched on and off on-the-fly. The proposed schemes can therefore be employed to impart unequal error protection (UEP) against intra-flit skewing on NoC links. In the UEP, a larger fraction of the energy budget is spent in providing protection to those parts of the data being transmitted on the link which have a higher priority, while expending smaller effort in protecting relatively less important parts of the data. This allows us to achieve the prescribed level of performance with lower levels of power. The benefits of the presented technique are illustrated using an H.264 video decoder system-on-chip (SoC) employing NoC architecture. We show that for Akyio test streams transmitted over 3mm long link wires, the power consumption can be reduced by as much as 20% at the cost of an acceptable degradation in average peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) with UEP

Platformization of Urban Life

The increasing platformization of urban life needs critical perspectives to examine changing everyday practices and power shifts brought about by the expansion of digital platforms mediating care-services, housing, and mobility. This book addresses new modes of producing urban spaces and societies. It brings both platform researchers and activists from various fields related to critical urban studies and labour activism into dialogue. The contributors engage with the socio-spatial and normative implications of platform-mediated urban everyday life and urban futures, going beyond a rigid techno-dystopian stance in order to include an understanding of platforms as sites of social creativity and exchange

National surveillance using mobile systems for health monitoring: complexity, functionality and feasibility.

BACKGROUND: Although the use of technology viz. mobile phones, personalised digital assistants, smartphones, notebook and tablets to monitor health and health care (mHealth) is mushrooming, only small, localised studies have described their use as a data collection tool. This paper describes the complexity, functionality and feasibility of mHealth for large scale surveillance at national and sub-national levels in South Africa, a high HIV-prevalence setting. METHODS: In 2010, 2011-12 and 2012-13 three nationally representative surveys were conducted amongst infants attending 580 facilities across all 51 districts, within all nine provinces of South Africa, to monitor the effectiveness of the programme to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT). In all three surveys a technical protocol and iterative system for mobile data collection was developed. In 2012-13 the system included automated folders to store information about upcoming interviews. Paper questionnaires were used as a back-up, in case of mHealth failure. These included written instructions per question on limits, skips and compulsory questions. Data collectors were trained on both systems. RESULTS: In the 2010, 2011-12 and 2012-2013 surveys respectively, data from 10,554, 10,071, and 10,536 interviews, and approximately 186 variables per survey were successfully uploaded to 151 mobile phones collecting data from 580 health facilities in 51 districts, across all nine provinces of South Africa. A technician, costing approximately U$D20 000 p.a. was appointed to support field-based staff. Two percent of data were gathered using paper- questionnaires. The time needed for mHealth interviews was approximately 1,5 times less than the time needed for paper questionnaires 30-45 min versus approximately 120 min (including 60-70 min for the interview with an additional 45 min for data capture). In 2012-13, 1172 data errors were identified via the web-based console. There was a four-week delay in resolving data errors from paper-based surveys compared with a 3-day turnaround time following direct capture on mobile phones. CONCLUSION: Our experiences demonstrate the feasibility of using mHealth during large-scale national surveys, in the presence of a supportive data management team. mHealth systems reduced data collection time by almost 1.5 times, thus reduced data collector costs and time needed for data management