1,342 research outputs found
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
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