Stochastic Testing Simulator for Integrated Circuits and MEMS: Hierarchical and Sparse Techniques

Process variations are a major concern in today's chip design since they can significantly degrade chip performance. To predict such degradation, existing circuit and MEMS simulators rely on Monte Carlo algorithms, which are typically too slow. Therefore, novel fast stochastic simulators are highly desired. This paper first reviews our recently developed stochastic testing simulator that can achieve speedup factors of hundreds to thousands over Monte Carlo. Then, we develop a fast hierarchical stochastic spectral simulator to simulate a complex circuit or system consisting of several blocks. We further present a fast simulation approach based on anchored ANOVA (analysis of variance) for some design problems with many process variations. This approach can reduce the simulation cost and can identify which variation sources have strong impacts on the circuit's performance. The simulation results of some circuit and MEMS examples are reported to show the effectiveness of our simulatorComment: Accepted to IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference in June 2014. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1407.302

Efficient non-malleable commitment schemes

We present efficient non-malleable commitment schemes based on standard assumptions such as RSA and Discrete-Log, and under the condition that the network provides publicly available RSA or Discrete-Log parameters generated by a trusted party. Our protocols require only three rounds and a few modular exponentiations. We also discuss the difference between the notion of non-malleable commitment schemes used by Dolev, Dwork and Naor [DDN00] and the one given by Di Crescenzo, Ishai and Ostrovsky [DIO98]

Concurrent Knowledge-Extraction in the Public-Key Model

Knowledge extraction is a fundamental notion, modelling machine possession of values (witnesses) in a computational complexity sense. The notion provides an essential tool for cryptographic protocol design and analysis, enabling one to argue about the internal state of protocol players without ever looking at this supposedly secret state. However, when transactions are concurrent (e.g., over the Internet) with players possessing public-keys (as is common in cryptography), assuring that entities ``know'' what they claim to know, where adversaries may be well coordinated across different transactions, turns out to be much more subtle and in need of re-examination. Here, we investigate how to formally treat knowledge possession by parties (with registered public-keys) interacting over the Internet. Stated more technically, we look into the relative power of the notion of ``concurrent knowledge-extraction'' (CKE) in the concurrent zero-knowledge (CZK) bare public-key (BPK) model.Comment: 38 pages, 4 figure

Formal Verification of Security Protocol Implementations: A Survey

Automated formal verification of security protocols has been mostly focused on analyzing high-level abstract models which, however, are significantly different from real protocol implementations written in programming languages. Recently, some researchers have started investigating techniques that bring automated formal proofs closer to real implementations. This paper surveys these attempts, focusing on approaches that target the application code that implements protocol logic, rather than the libraries that implement cryptography. According to these approaches, libraries are assumed to correctly implement some models. The aim is to derive formal proofs that, under this assumption, give assurance about the application code that implements the protocol logic. The two main approaches of model extraction and code generation are presented, along with the main techniques adopted for each approac