White Mirror: Leaking Sensitive Information from Interactive Netflix Movies using Encrypted Traffic Analysis

Privacy leaks from Netflix videos/movies is well researched. Current state-of-the-art works have been able to obtain coarse-grained information such as the genre and the title of videos by passive observation of encrypted traffic. However, leakage of fine-grained information from encrypted traffic has not been studied so far. Such information can be used to build behavioural profiles of viewers. On 28th December 2018, Netflix released the first mainstream interactive movie called 'Black Mirror: Bandersnatch'. In this work, we use this movie as a case-study to show for the first time that fine-grained information (i.e., choices made by users) can be revealed from encrypted traffic. We use the state information exchanged between the viewer's browser and Netflix as the side-channel. To evaluate our proposed technique, we built the first interactive video traffic dataset of 100 viewers; which we will be releasing. Preliminary results indicate that the choices made by a user can be revealed 96% of the time in the worst case.Comment: 2 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl

Assessment of Tsunami Preparedness in East Coast of India through Mock drill conducted on 26 September, 2015

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami resulted in catastrophic losses of life and property and demonstrated how destructive the tsunamis can be. In India, the tsunami took away nearly 16,000 lives of the people living in the coastal areas and caused lot of damage to the property. The reason for such a great loss to lives and property is due to lack of awareness and preparedness to tsunamis. Keeping this in view and to avoid further future losses, the Government of India has established the Indian Tsunami Early Warning System at INCOIS, Hyderabad under the Ministry of Earth Sciences. While a tsunami cannot be prevented, its impact can be mitigated through community and emergency preparedness, timely warnings, effective response, and public education. The Tsunami drills evaluates the ability of warning centre and disaster offices to respond to a tsunami. The drills not only emphasize the testing of communications from warning centre to its stakeholders, but also provide an opportunity for testing national/state/local chains of command and decision-making, including the alerting and evacuation of people from selected coastal communitie

The admissible tsunamigenic source region of 24 September 2013 land-based earthquake application of backward ray tracing technique

A minor tsunami of about 50 cm was generated along the coast of Qurayat near Makran subduction zone in the Arabian Sea due to the 24 September 2013 Pakistan earthquake of magnitude 7.6 Mw(mB),although its source was ~200 km far inland of the Makran trench. The real time sea level observation network in the Arabian Sea recorded minor tsunami arrivals. In an attempt to explain the mechanism of this unusual tsunami, we use backward ray tracing technique to map the admissible region of tsunamigenic source. Basically, in this technique the ray equations are integrated starting from the specific locations of tsunami observations, in all possible directions. The known travel time of the initial waves to the respective tide gauges and tsunami buoys is used in this method. Backward wave front is constructed by joining all endpoints of the rays from each of the locations. The region where the envelope of all backward wave fronts converges is considered as the source of the tsunami, which is ~470 km from the earthquake epicentre with the location at 24.8 N and 61.5E. The admissible region identified is an undersea section between Chabahar and Gwadar, where a mud island had appeared subsequent to this earthquake. Convergence of the tsunami source zone and location of the mud island suggest that the sudden uplift must have caused the tsunam

Non-linear microwave impedance of short and long Josephson Junctions

The non-linear dependence on applied $ac$ field ($b_{\omega}$) or current ($i_{\omega}$) of the microwave (ac) impedance $R_{\omega}+iX_{\omega}$ of both short and long Josephson junctions is calculated under a variety of excitation conditions. The dependence on the junction width is studied, for both field symmetric (current anti-symmetric) and field anti-symmetric (current symmetric) excitation configurations.The resistance shows step-like features every time a fluxon (soliton) enters the junction, with a corresponding phase slip seen in the reactance. For finite widths the interference of fluxons leads to some interesting effects which are described. Many of these calculated results are observed in microwave impedance measurements on intrinsic and fabricated Josephson junctions in the high temperature superconductors, and new effects are suggested. When a $$ field ($b_{dc}$) or current ($i_{dc}$) is applied, interesting phase locking effects are observed in the ac impedance $Z_{\omega}$. In particular an almost periodic dependence on the dc bias is seen similar to that observed in microwave experiments at very low dc field bias. These results are generic to all systems with a $\cos (\phi)$ potential in the overdamped limit and subjected to an ac drive.Comment: 7 pages, 11 figure

A chitotetrose specific lectin from Luffa acutangula: physico-chemical properties and the assignment of orientation of sugars in the lectin binding site

A chitooligosaccharide specific lectin (Luffa acutangula agglutinin) has been purified from the exudate of ridge gourd fruits by affinity chromatography on soybean agglutinin-glycopeptides coupled to Sepharose-6B. The affinity purified lectin was found homogeneous by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, in sodium dodecyl sulphate-polyacrylamide gels, by gel filtration on Sephadex G-100 and by sedimentation velocity experiments. The relative molecular weight of this lectin is determined to be 48,000±1,000 by gel chromatography and sedimentation equilibrium experiments. The sedimentation coefficient (S20, w) was obtained to be 4.06 S. The Stokes' radius of the protein was found to be 2.9 nm by gel filtration. In sodium dodecyl sulphate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis the lectin gave a molecular weight of 24,000 in the presence as well as absence of 2-mercaptoethanol. The subunits in this dimeric lectin are therefore held by non-covalent interactions alone. The lectin is not a glycoprotein and circular dichroism spectral studies indicate that this lectin has 31% α-helix and no β-sheet. The lectin is found to bind specifically to chitooligosaccharides and the affinity of the lectin increases with increasing oligosaccharide chain length as monitored by near ultra-violet-circular dichroism and intrinsic fluorescence titration. The values of ΔG, ΔH and ΔS for the binding process showed a pronounced dependence on the size of the oligosaccharide. The values for both ΔH and ΔS show a significant increase with increase in the oligosaccharide chain length showing that the binding of higher oligomers is progressively more favoured thermodynamically than chitobiose itself. The thermodynamic data is consistent with an extended binding site in the lectin which accommodates a tetrasaccharide. Based on the thermodynamic data, blue shifts and fluorescence enhancement, spatial orientation of chitooligosaccharides in the combining site of the lectin is assigned

MeLPUF: Memory in Logic PUF

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are used for securing electronic designs across the implementation spectrum ranging from lightweight FPGA to server-class ASIC designs. However, current PUF implementations are vulnerable to model-building attacks; they often incur significant design overheads and are challenging to configure based on application-specific requirements. These factors limit their application, primarily in the case of the system on chip (SoC) designs used in diverse applications. In this work, we propose MeL-PUF - Memory-in-Logic PUF, a low-overhead, distributed, and synthesizable PUF that takes advantage of existing logic gates in a design and transforms them to create cross-coupled inverters (i.e. memory cells) controlled by a PUF control signal. The power-up states of these memory cells are used as the source of entropy in the proposed PUF architecture. These on-demand memory cells can be distributed across the combinational logic of various intellectual property (IP) blocks in a system on chip (SoC) design. They can also be synthesized with a standard logic synthesis tool to meet the area,power, or performance constraints of a design. By aggregating the power-up states from multiple such memory cells, we can create a PUF signature or digital fingerprint of varying size. We evaluate the MeL-PUF signature quality with both circuit-level simulations as well as with measurements in FPGA devices. We show that MeL-PUF provides high-quality signatures in terms of uniqueness, randomness, and robustness, without incurring large overheads. We also suggest additional optimizations that can be leveraged to improve the performance of MeL-PUF.Comment: 5 pages, 16 figure

Exciton–polaron interactions in metal halide perovskite nanocrystals revealed via two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy

Metal halide perovskite nanocrystals have been under intense investigation for their promise in optoelectronic devices due to their remarkable physics, such as liquid/solid duality. This liquid/solid duality may give rise to their defect tolerance and other such useful properties. This duality means that the electronic states are fluctuating in time, on a distribution of timescales from femtoseconds to picoseconds. Hence, these lattice induced energy fluctuations that are connected to polaron formation are also connected to exciton formation and dynamics. We observe these correlations and dynamics in metal halide perovskite nanocrystals of CsPbI3 and CsPbBr3 using two-dimensional electronic (2DE) spectroscopy, with its unique ability to resolve dynamics in heterogeneously broadened systems. The 2DE spectra immediately reveal a previously unobserved excitonic splitting in these 15 nm NCs that may have a coarse excitonic structure. 2D lineshape dynamics reveal a glassy response on the 300 fs timescale due to polaron formation. The lighter Br system shows larger amplitude and faster timescale fluctuations that give rise to dynamic line broadening. The 2DE signals enable 1D transient absorption analysis of exciton cooling dynamics. Exciton cooling within this doublet is shown to take place on a slower timescale than within the excitonic continuum. The energy dissipation rates are the same for the I and Br systems for incoherent exciton cooling but are very different for the coherent dynamics that give rise to line broadening. Exciton cooling is shown to take place on the same timescale as polaron formation, revealing both as coupled many-body excitation

Organobentonite as an Efficient and Reusable Adsorbent for Cationic Dyes Removal from Aqueous Solution

80-86In the present study, cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) was used to modify raw bentonite (Ben) through the replacement of exchangeable cations to form CTAB modified bentonite (CTAB−Ben). Both Ben and CTAB−Ben were characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy and Brunauer-Emmet-Teller (BET) analysis. Adsorption potential of Ben and CTAB−Ben were explored for the removal of two cationic dyes i.e. Rhodamine B (RB) and Crystal violet (CV) from aqueous solutions. The maximum dye adsorption capacity of CTAB−Ben was found to be 93.15 and 14.76 mgg-1 for CV and RB, respectively. The adsorption data of both the adsorbents was better explained by Freundlich isotherm whereas the pseudo second order (PSO) model better fitted the kinetics data. Regeneration studies revealed that CTAB−Ben could be reused upto five adsorption-desorption cycles