9,838 research outputs found
Improving estimates of the number of fake leptons and other mis-reconstructed objects in hadron collider events: BoB's your UNCLE. (Previously "The Matrix Method Reloaded")
We consider current and alternative approaches to setting limits on new
physics signals having backgrounds from misidentified objects; for example jets
misidentified as leptons, b-jets or photons. Many ATLAS and CMS analyses have
used a heuristic matrix method for estimating the background contribution from
such sources. We demonstrate that the matrix method suffers from statistical
shortcomings that can adversely affect its ability to set robust limits. A
rigorous alternative method is discussed, and is seen to produce fake rate
estimates and limits with better qualities, but is found to be too costly to
use. Having investigated the nature of the approximations used to derive the
matrix method, we propose a third strategy that is seen to marry the speed of
the matrix method to the performance and physicality of the more rigorous
approach.Comment: v1 :11 pages, 5 figures. v2: title change requested by referee, and
other corrections/clarifications found during review. v3: final tweaks
suggested during review + move from revtex to jhep styl
Finding Safety in Numbers with Secure Allegation Escrows
For fear of retribution, the victim of a crime may be willing to report it
only if other victims of the same perpetrator also step forward. Common
examples include 1) identifying oneself as the victim of sexual harassment,
especially by a person in a position of authority or 2) accusing an influential
politician, an authoritarian government, or ones own employer of corruption. To
handle such situations, legal literature has proposed the concept of an
allegation escrow: a neutral third-party that collects allegations anonymously,
matches them against each other, and de-anonymizes allegers only after
de-anonymity thresholds (in terms of number of co-allegers), pre-specified by
the allegers, are reached.
An allegation escrow can be realized as a single trusted third party;
however, this party must be trusted to keep the identity of the alleger and
content of the allegation private. To address this problem, this paper
introduces Secure Allegation Escrows (SAE, pronounced "say"). A SAE is a group
of parties with independent interests and motives, acting jointly as an escrow
for collecting allegations from individuals, matching the allegations, and
de-anonymizing the allegations when designated thresholds are reached. By
design, SAEs provide a very strong property: No less than a majority of parties
constituting a SAE can de-anonymize or disclose the content of an allegation
without a sufficient number of matching allegations (even in collusion with any
number of other allegers). Once a sufficient number of matching allegations
exist, the join escrow discloses the allegation with the allegers' identities.
We describe how SAEs can be constructed using a novel authentication protocol
and a novel allegation matching and bucketing algorithm, provide formal proofs
of the security of our constructions, and evaluate a prototype implementation,
demonstrating feasibility in practice.Comment: To appear in NDSS 2020. New version includes improvements to writing
and proof. The protocol is unchange
Privacy-Preserving Secret Shared Computations using MapReduce
Data outsourcing allows data owners to keep their data at \emph{untrusted}
clouds that do not ensure the privacy of data and/or computations. One useful
framework for fault-tolerant data processing in a distributed fashion is
MapReduce, which was developed for \emph{trusted} private clouds. This paper
presents algorithms for data outsourcing based on Shamir's secret-sharing
scheme and for executing privacy-preserving SQL queries such as count,
selection including range selection, projection, and join while using MapReduce
as an underlying programming model. Our proposed algorithms prevent an
adversary from knowing the database or the query while also preventing
output-size and access-pattern attacks. Interestingly, our algorithms do not
involve the database owner, which only creates and distributes secret-shares
once, in answering any query, and hence, the database owner also cannot learn
the query. Logically and experimentally, we evaluate the efficiency of the
algorithms on the following parameters: (\textit{i}) the number of
communication rounds (between a user and a server), (\textit{ii}) the total
amount of bit flow (between a user and a server), and (\textit{iii}) the
computational load at the user and the server.\BComment: IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Accepted 01
Aug. 201
CYCLOSA: Decentralizing Private Web Search Through SGX-Based Browser Extensions
By regularly querying Web search engines, users (unconsciously) disclose
large amounts of their personal data as part of their search queries, among
which some might reveal sensitive information (e.g. health issues, sexual,
political or religious preferences). Several solutions exist to allow users
querying search engines while improving privacy protection. However, these
solutions suffer from a number of limitations: some are subject to user
re-identification attacks, while others lack scalability or are unable to
provide accurate results. This paper presents CYCLOSA, a secure, scalable and
accurate private Web search solution. CYCLOSA improves security by relying on
trusted execution environments (TEEs) as provided by Intel SGX. Further,
CYCLOSA proposes a novel adaptive privacy protection solution that reduces the
risk of user re- identification. CYCLOSA sends fake queries to the search
engine and dynamically adapts their count according to the sensitivity of the
user query. In addition, CYCLOSA meets scalability as it is fully
decentralized, spreading the load for distributing fake queries among other
nodes. Finally, CYCLOSA achieves accuracy of Web search as it handles the real
query and the fake queries separately, in contrast to other existing solutions
that mix fake and real query results
Arithmetic fake projective spaces and arithmetic fake grassmannians
We show that if n>5, PU(n-1,1) does not contain a cocompact arithmetic
subgroup with the same Euler-Poincare characteristic (in the sense of C.T.C.
Wall) as the complex projective space of dimension n-1, and show that if n=5,
there are at least four such subgroups, which are in fact torsion-free. This,
in particular, leads to examples of a fake projective space of dimension 4.
Analogous results for arithmetic fake grassmannians Gr(m,n) with n>3 odd are
also obtained.Comment: 20 pages, the exposition has been improve
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