Keeping Authorities "Honest or Bust" with Decentralized Witness Cosigning

The secret keys of critical network authorities - such as time, name, certificate, and software update services - represent high-value targets for hackers, criminals, and spy agencies wishing to use these keys secretly to compromise other hosts. To protect authorities and their clients proactively from undetected exploits and misuse, we introduce CoSi, a scalable witness cosigning protocol ensuring that every authoritative statement is validated and publicly logged by a diverse group of witnesses before any client will accept it. A statement S collectively signed by W witnesses assures clients that S has been seen, and not immediately found erroneous, by those W observers. Even if S is compromised in a fashion not readily detectable by the witnesses, CoSi still guarantees S's exposure to public scrutiny, forcing secrecy-minded attackers to risk that the compromise will soon be detected by one of the W witnesses. Because clients can verify collective signatures efficiently without communication, CoSi protects clients' privacy, and offers the first transparency mechanism effective against persistent man-in-the-middle attackers who control a victim's Internet access, the authority's secret key, and several witnesses' secret keys. CoSi builds on existing cryptographic multisignature methods, scaling them to support thousands of witnesses via signature aggregation over efficient communication trees. A working prototype demonstrates CoSi in the context of timestamping and logging authorities, enabling groups of over 8,000 distributed witnesses to cosign authoritative statements in under two seconds.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure

Considerations for implementing electronic laboratory notebooks in an academic research environment

As research becomes predominantly digitalised, scientists have the option of using electronic laboratory notebooks to record and access entries. These systems can more readily meet volume, complexity, accessibility and preservation requirements than paper notebooks. Whilst the technology can yield many benefits these can only be realised by choosing a system that properly fulfils the requirements of a given context. This review explores the factors that should be considered when introducing electronic laboratory notebooks to an academically focused research group. We cite pertinent studies and discuss our own experience implementing a system within a multi-disciplinary research environment. We also consider how the required financial and time investment is shared between individuals and institutions. Finally, we discuss how electronic laboratory notebooks fit into the broader context of research data management. This article is not a product review; it provides a framework for both the initial consideration of an electronic laboratory notebook and the evaluation of specific software packages

The Syncline Model -- Analyzing the Impact of Time Synchronization in Sensor Fusion

The accuracy of sensor fusion algorithms are limited by either the intrinsic sensor noise, or by the quality of time synchronization of the sensors. While the intrinsic sensor noise only depends on the respective sensors, the error induced by quality of, or lack of, synchronization depends on the dynamics of the vehicles and robotic system and the magnitude of time synchronization errors. To meet their sensor fusion requirements, system designers must consider both which sensor to use and also how to synchronize them. This paper presents the Syncline model, a simple visual model of how time synchronization affects the accuracy of sensor fusion for different mobile robot platform. The model can serve as a simple tool to determine which synchronization mechanisms should be used.Comment: To be published in IEEE CCTA2022 Proceeding

A software cache management system

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1985.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERINGBibliography: leaves 49-50.by Jeffrey N. Eisen.M.S

Synchronization protocols and implementation issues in wireless sensor networks: A review

Time synchronization in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a topic that has been attracting the research community in the last decade. Most performance evaluations of the proposed solutions have been limited to theoretical analysis and simulation. They consequently ignored several practical aspects, e.g., packet handling jitters, clock drifting, packet loss, and mote limitations, which affect real implementation on sensor motes. Authors of some pragmatic solutions followed empirical approaches for the evaluation, where the proposed solutions have been implemented on real motes and evaluated in testbed experiments. This paper gives an insight on issues related to the implementation of synchronization protocols in WSN. The challenges related to WSN environment are presented; the importance of real implementation and testbed evaluation are motivated by some experiments we conducted. The most relevant implementations of the literature are then reviewed, discussed, and qualitatively compared. While there are several survey papers that present and compare the protocols from the conception perspectives, as well as others that deal with mathematical and signal processing issues of the estimators, a survey on practical aspects related to the implementation is missing. To our knowledge, this paper is the first one that takes into account the practical aspect of existing solutions