A Radio Frequency Non-reciprocal Network Based on Switched Low-loss Acoustic Delay Lines

This work demonstrates the first non-reciprocal network based on switched low-loss acoustic delay lines. A 21 dB non-reciprocal contrast between insertion loss (IL=6.7 dB) and isolation (28.3 dB) has been achieved over a fractional bandwidth of 8.8% at a center frequency 155MHz, using a record low switching frequency of 877.22 kHz. The 4-port circulator is built upon a newly reported framework by the authors, but using two in-house fabricated low-loss, wide-band lithium niobate (LiNbO3) delay lines with single-phase unidirectional transducers (SPUDT) and commercial available switches. Such a system can potentially lead to future wide-band, low-loss chip-scale nonreciprocal RF systems with unprecedented programmability.Comment: 4 pages, 7 figure

Secure Key Exchange Protocol based on Virtual Proof of Reality

Securely sharing the same secret key among multiple parties is the main concern in symmetric cryptography that is the workhorse of modern cryptography due to its simplicity and fast speed. Typically asymmetric cryptography is used to set up a shared secret between parties, after which the switch to symmetric cryptography can be made. In this paper, we introduce a novel key exchange protocol based on physical hardware implementation to establish a shared secret between parties rather than relying on mathematical implementation of asymmetric cryptography. In particular, the key exchange is dependent on a new security concept named as virtual proof of reality or simply virtual proof (VP) that enables proof of a physical statement over untrusted digital communication channels between two parties (a prover and a verifier) residing in two separate local systems. We firstly exploit the VP to secure key exchange and further prove it by using experimental data. The key transferred in this protocol is only seen by the prover and hidden from not only the adversary but also the verifier. While only the verifier can successfully discover it

Smoothed and Average-Case Approximation Ratios of Mechanisms: Beyond the Worst-Case Analysis

The approximation ratio has become one of the dominant measures in mechanism design problems. In light of analysis of algorithms, we define the smoothed approximation ratio to compare the performance of the optimal mechanism and a truthful mechanism when the inputs are subject to random perturbations of the worst-case inputs, and define the average-case approximation ratio to compare the performance of these two mechanisms when the inputs follow a distribution. For the one-sided matching problem, Filos-Ratsikas et al. [2014] show that, amongst all truthful mechanisms, random priority achieves the tight approximation ratio bound of Theta(sqrt{n}). We prove that, despite of this worst-case bound, random priority has a constant smoothed approximation ratio. This is, to our limited knowledge, the first work that asymptotically differentiates the smoothed approximation ratio from the worst-case approximation ratio for mechanism design problems. For the average-case, we show that our approximation ratio can be improved to 1+e. These results partially explain why random priority has been successfully used in practice, although in the worst case the optimal social welfare is Theta(sqrt{n}) times of what random priority achieves. These results also pave the way for further studies of smoothed and average-case analysis for approximate mechanism design problems, beyond the worst-case analysis

SecuCode: Intrinsic PUF Entangled Secure Wireless Code Dissemination for Computational RFID Devices

The simplicity of deployment and perpetual operation of energy harvesting devices provides a compelling proposition for a new class of edge devices for the Internet of Things. In particular, Computational Radio Frequency Identification (CRFID) devices are an emerging class of battery-free, computational, sensing enhanced devices that harvest all of their energy for operation. Despite wireless connectivity and powering, secure wireless firmware updates remains an open challenge for CRFID devices due to: intermittent powering, limited computational capabilities, and the absence of a supervisory operating system. We present, for the first time, a secure wireless code dissemination (SecuCode) mechanism for CRFIDs by entangling a device intrinsic hardware security primitive Static Random Access Memory Physical Unclonable Function (SRAM PUF) to a firmware update protocol. The design of SecuCode: i) overcomes the resource-constrained and intermittently powered nature of the CRFID devices; ii) is fully compatible with existing communication protocols employed by CRFID devices in particular, ISO-18000-6C protocol; and ii) is built upon a standard and industry compliant firmware compilation and update method realized by extending a recent framework for firmware updates provided by Texas Instruments. We build an end-to-end SecuCode implementation and conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate standards compliance, evaluate performance and security.Comment: Accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computin