On Privacy of Encrypted Speech Communications

Silence suppression, an essential feature of speech communications over the Internet, saves bandwidth by disabling voice packet transmissions when silence is detected. However, silence suppression enables an adversary to recover talk patterns from packet timing. In this paper, we investigate privacy leakage through the silence suppression feature. More specifically, we propose a new class of traffic analysis attacks to encrypted speech communications with the goal of detecting speakers of encrypted speech communications. These attacks are based on packet timing information only and the attacks can detect speakers of speech communications made with different codecs. We evaluate the proposed attacks with extensive experiments over different type of networks including commercial anonymity networks and campus networks. The experiments show that the proposed traffic analysis attacks can detect speakers of encrypted speech communications with high accuracy based on traces of 15 minutes long on average

Comprehensive Credit Risk Management of Policy Export Credit Insurance Institutions

In the context of the turbulent international political situation, the uneven development of social development and the stagnation of economic development in recent years, China's promotion of foreign trade and economic transformation and upgrading and the “Belt and Road” strategy are necessary to pay more attention to the research and control of export credit risks, so policy exports is particularly urgent and important for credit insurance institutions to conduct research on credit risk control activities in support of the “going out” process of Chinese goods and capital. At the same time, unlike general commercial financial institutions, the starting point and foothold of credit risk management of policy financial institutions should be “maximizing social benefits” rather than the “maximum economic benefits” of traditional risk management theories. The target set of the risk management system of the export credit insurance institution is repositioned. Therefore, this paper attempts to sort out the research results of the existing policy-oriented export credit institutions, and from the perspective of comprehensive risk management, through the analysis of the characteristics and difficulties of the credit risk management of policy-oriented export credit insurance institutions, the company builds a comprehensive credit risk management system. The ideas and structure are discussed, and preliminary suggestions are put forward on the basis of this, in order to provide reference for the company to further improve the comprehensive risk management system

Association of brain morphology and phenotypic profile in patients with unruptured intracranial aneurysm

IntroductionStudies have found a varying degree of cognitive, psychosocial, and functional impairments in patients with unruptured intracranial aneurysms (UIAs), whereas the neural correlates underlying these impairments remain unknown.MethodsTo examine the brain morphological alterations and white matter lesions in patients with UIA, we performed a range of structural analyses to examine the brain morphological alterations in patients with UIA compared with healthy controls (HCs). Twenty-one patients with UIA and 23 HCs were prospectively enrolled into this study. Study assessment consisted of a brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan with high-resolution T1-weighted and T2-weighted imaging data, a Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), and laboratory tests including blood inflammatory markers and serum lipids. Brain MRI data were processed for cortical thickness, local gyrification index (LGI), volume and shape of subcortical nuclei, and white matter lesions.ResultsCompared to the HCs, patients with UIA showed no significant differences in cortical thickness but decreased LGI values in the right posterior cingulate cortex, retrosplenial cortex, cuneus, and lingual gyrus. In addition, decreased LGI values correlated with decreased MoCA score (r = 0.498, p = 0.021) and increased white matter lesion scores (r = −0.497, p = 0.022). The LGI values were correlated with laboratory values such as inflammatory markers and serum lipids. Patients with UIA also showed significant regional atrophy in bilateral thalami as compared to the HCs. Moreover, the LGI values were significantly correlated with thalamic volume in the HCs (r = 0.4728, p = 0.0227) but not in the patients with UIA (r = 0.11, p = 0.6350).DiscussionThe decreased cortical gyrification, increased white matter lesions, and regional thalamic atrophy in patients with UIA might be potential neural correlates of cognitive changes in UIA

A Modified Hyaluronic Acid–Based Dissolving Microneedle Loaded With Daphnetin Improved the Treatment of Psoriasis

Psoriasis is a common chronic immune-inflammatory disease. Challenges exist in the present treatment of psoriasis, such as difficulties in transdermal drug administration and severe side effects. We hope to achieve a better therapeutic outcome for psoriasis treatment. By using modified soluble microneedles (MNs) loaded with daphnetin, the psoriasis symptoms of mice, the abnormal proliferation of keratinocytes, and the secretion of inflammatory factors were significantly reduced. In vitro, daphnetin is proven to inhibit the NF-κB signaling pathway and to inhibit the proliferation of HaCaT cells and the release of inflammatory factors, especially CCL20. This research showed that the modified microneedle loaded with daphnetin optimized transdermal drug delivery and relieved the symptoms of psoriasis more effectively. The novel route of Daph administration provides a future research direction for the treatment of psoriasis

A Phytophthora sojae Glycoside Hydrolase 12 Protein Is a Major Virulence Factor during Soybean Infection and Is Recognized as a PAMP

We identified a glycoside hydrolase family 12 (GH12) protein, XEG1, produced by the soybean pathogen Phytophthora sojae that exhibits xyloglucanase and β-glucanase activity. It acts as an important virulence factor during P. sojae infection but also acts as a pathogen-associated molecular pattern (PAMP) in soybean (Glycine max) and solanaceous species, where it can trigger defense responses including cell death. GH12 proteins occur widely across microbial taxa, and many of these GH12 proteins induce cell death in Nicotiana benthamiana. The PAMP activity of XEG1 is independent of its xyloglucanase activity. XEG1 can induce plant defense responses in a BAK1-dependent manner. The perception of XEG1 occurs independently of the perception of ethylene-inducing xylanase. XEG1 is strongly induced in P. sojae within 30 min of infection of soybean and then slowly declines. Both silencing and overexpression of XEG1 in P. sojae severely reduced virulence. Many P. sojae RXLR effectors could suppress defense responses induced by XEG1, including several that are expressed within 30 min of infection. Therefore, our data suggest that PsXEG1 contributes to P. sojae virulence, but soybean recognizes PsXEG1 to induce immune responses, which in turn can be suppressed by RXLR effectors. XEG1 thus represents an apoplastic effector that is recognized via the plant’s PAMP recognition machinery.This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the American Society of Plant Biologists and can be found at: http://www.plantcell.org/content/27/7/205

Base station power model and application for energy efficient LTE

Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-A researchers are deploying variety of techniques such as Multiple Inputs Multiple Outputs (MIMO) to achieve the higher throughput, while paying little attention to power consumption. In this paper, meticulous base station power consumption model is proposed, while more significantly, the model is calibrated. Then the relations between system parameters and power consumption of each sub-components is established, this energy consumption model and LTE system level simulation platform are integrated as a system level power consumption simulation platform. Two different base station energy saving technology applications are verified. Result shows 1.7 times EE improvement on average day utilizing the two schemes, while maximum EE increase per hour is 4.3 times. ? 2013 IEEE.EI