An Optimized Combination of a Large Grid Connected PV System along with Battery Cells and a Diesel Generator

Environmental, economical and technical benefits of photovoltaic (PV) systems make them to be used in many countries. The main characteristic of PV systems is the fluctuations of their output power. Hence, high penetration of PV systems into electric network could be detrimental to overall system performance. Furthermore, the fluctuations in the output power of PV systems make it difficult to predict their output, and to consider them in generation planning of the units. The main objective of this paper is to propose a hybrid method which can be used to control and reduce the power fluctuations generated from large grid- connected PV systems. The proposed method focuses on using a suitable storage battery along with curtailment of the generated power by operating the PV system below the maximum power point (MPP) and deployment of a diesel generator. These methods are analyzed to investigate the impacts of implementing them on the economical benefits that the PV system owner could gain. To maximize the revenues, an optimization problem is solved

Key agreement for heterogeneous mobile ad-hoc groups

Security of various group-oriented applications for mobile ad-hoc groups requires a group secret shared between all participants. Contributory Group Key Agreement (CGKA) protocols can be used in mobile ad-hoc scenarios due to the absence of any trusted central authority (group manager) that actively participates in the computation of the group key. Members of spontaneously formed mobile ad-hoc groups are usually equipped with different kinds of mobile devices with varying performance capabilities. This heterogeneity opens new ways for the design of CGKA protocols and states additional security requirements with regard to the trustworthiness of the devices. In this paper we propose a CGKA protocol for mobile ad hoc groups that fairly distributes the computation costs amongst mobile devices by taking into account their performance limitations and preventing possible cheating through Trusted Computing techniques

Software Grand Exposure: SGX Cache Attacks Are Practical

Side-channel information leakage is a known limitation of SGX. Researchers have demonstrated that secret-dependent information can be extracted from enclave execution through page-fault access patterns. Consequently, various recent research efforts are actively seeking countermeasures to SGX side-channel attacks. It is widely assumed that SGX may be vulnerable to other side channels, such as cache access pattern monitoring, as well. However, prior to our work, the practicality and the extent of such information leakage was not studied. In this paper we demonstrate that cache-based attacks are indeed a serious threat to the confidentiality of SGX-protected programs. Our goal was to design an attack that is hard to mitigate using known defenses, and therefore we mount our attack without interrupting enclave execution. This approach has major technical challenges, since the existing cache monitoring techniques experience significant noise if the victim process is not interrupted. We designed and implemented novel attack techniques to reduce this noise by leveraging the capabilities of the privileged adversary. Our attacks are able to recover confidential information from SGX enclaves, which we illustrate in two example cases: extraction of an entire RSA-2048 key during RSA decryption, and detection of specific human genome sequences during genomic indexing. We show that our attacks are more effective than previous cache attacks and harder to mitigate than previous SGX side-channel attacks

Execution Integrity with In-Place Encryption

Instruction set randomization (ISR) was initially proposed with the main goal of countering code-injection attacks. However, ISR seems to have lost its appeal since code-injection attacks became less attractive because protection mechanisms such as data execution prevention (DEP) as well as code-reuse attacks became more prevalent. In this paper, we show that ISR can be extended to also protect against code-reuse attacks while at the same time offering security guarantees similar to those of software diversity, control-flow integrity, and information hiding. We present Scylla, a scheme that deploys a new technique for in-place code encryption to hide the code layout of a randomized binary, and restricts the control flow to a benign execution path. This allows us to i) implicitly restrict control-flow targets to basic block entries without requiring the extraction of a control-flow graph, ii) achieve execution integrity within legitimate basic blocks, and iii) hide the underlying code layout under malicious read access to the program. Our analysis demonstrates that Scylla is capable of preventing state-of-the-art attacks such as just-in-time return-oriented programming (JIT-ROP) and crash-resistant oriented programming (CROP). We extensively evaluate our prototype implementation of Scylla and show feasible performance overhead. We also provide details on how this overhead can be significantly reduced with dedicated hardware support

The impact of social approval and respect model criteria on social relations

Background: Social relations are a complex process and originate from the interaction of a person with the environment. People have an inherent need to establish social relations to have the approval and respect of the others. The current study was conducted to design a model of approval and respect in the social relations of the people of Quchan. Methods: The research philosophy was in the realm of pragmatism and the research method was mixed. Also, the research strategy in the qualitative part was foundational data theorizing, and in the quantitative part, the survey. To analyze the data of this research, in the qualitative part, MAXQDA software was used, and in the quantitative part, SPSS software (version 22) and PLS software were used. Results: The results obtained from the analysis of qualitative data show that the model of approval and respect in the social relations of the people of Quchan includes 19 open codes, of which 5 codes are related to the category of causal factors, 2 codes are related to the central category, 2 codes related to the strategy category, 4 codes related to the consequences category, 3 codes related to the context category, and 3 codes related to the intervention category. Also, in the quantitative part, the results of the data showed that the mentioned model has the required validity. Conclusion: It can be concluded that social relations imply desirable learned behaviors that enable people to have effective relationships with others and avoid unreasonable social reactions

ARM2GC: Succinct Garbled Processor for Secure Computation

We present ARM2GC, a novel secure computation framework based on Yao's Garbled Circuit (GC) protocol and the ARM processor. It allows users to develop privacy-preserving applications using standard high-level programming languages (e.g., C) and compile them using off-the-shelf ARM compilers (e.g., gcc-arm). The main enabler of this framework is the introduction of SkipGate, an algorithm that dynamically omits the communication and encryption cost of the gates whose outputs are independent of the private data. SkipGate greatly enhances the performance of ARM2GC by omitting costs of the gates associated with the instructions of the compiled binary, which is known by both parties involved in the computation. Our evaluation on benchmark functions demonstrates that ARM2GC not only outperforms the current GC frameworks that support high-level languages, it also achieves efficiency comparable to the best prior solutions based on hardware description languages. Moreover, in contrast to previous high-level frameworks with domain-specific languages and customized compilers, ARM2GC relies on standard ARM compiler which is rigorously verified and supports programs written in the standard syntax.Comment: 13 page

How Far Removed Are You? Scalable Privacy-Preserving Estimation of Social Path Length with Social PaL

Social relationships are a natural basis on which humans make trust decisions. Online Social Networks (OSNs) are increasingly often used to let users base trust decisions on the existence and the strength of social relationships. While most OSNs allow users to discover the length of the social path to other users, they do so in a centralized way, thus requiring them to rely on the service provider and reveal their interest in each other. This paper presents Social PaL, a system supporting the privacy-preserving discovery of arbitrary-length social paths between any two social network users. We overcome the bootstrapping problem encountered in all related prior work, demonstrating that Social PaL allows its users to find all paths of length two and to discover a significant fraction of longer paths, even when only a small fraction of OSN users is in the Social PaL system - e.g., discovering 70% of all paths with only 40% of the users. We implement Social PaL using a scalable server-side architecture and a modular Android client library, allowing developers to seamlessly integrate it into their apps.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper appears in ACM WiSec 2015. This is the full versio