A decision framework for placement of applications in clouds that minimizes their carbon footprint

Cloud computing gives users much freedom on where they host their computation and storage. However the CO2 emission of a job depends on the location and the energy efficiency of the data centers where it is run. We developed a decision framework that determines to move computation with accompanying data from a local to a greener remote data center for lower CO2 emissions. The model underlying the framework accounts for the energy consumption at the local and remote sites, as well as of networks among them. We showed that the type of network connecting the two sites has a significant impact on the total CO2 emission. Furthermore, the task’s complexity is a factor in deciding when and where to move computation

Hardware Trojan Side-Channels based on Physical Unclonable Functions

The separation design and fabrication process in the semiconductor industry leads to potential threats such as trojan side-channels (TSCs). In this paper we design a new family of TSCs from physical unclonable functions (PUFs). In particular, a dedicated attack on the PRESENT block cipher is described by using our PUF-based TSCs. Finally we analyze the performance of our PUF-based TSCs and discuss other potential applications

Flowchart description of security primitives for Controlled Physical Unclonable Functions

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are physical objects that are unique, practically unclonable and that behave like a random function when subjected to a challenge. Their use has been proposed for authentication tokens and anti-counterfeiting. A Controlled PUF (CPUF) consists of a PUF and a control layer that restricts a user’s access to the PUF input and output. CPUFs can be used for secure key storage, authentication, certified execution of programs, and certified measurements. In this paper we modify a number of protocols involving CPUFs in order to improve their security. Our modifications mainly consist of encryption of a larger portion of the message traffic, and additional restrictions on the CPUF accessibility which prevents some denial of service attacks. We simplify the description of CPUF protocols by using flowchart notation. Furthermore we explicitly show how the helper data for the PUFs is handled

Storage to Energy Calculator

Computational and storage tasks can nowadays be offloaded among data centers, in order to optimize costs and or performance. We set out to investigate what are the environmental effects, namely the total CO2 emission, of such offloading. We built models for the various components present in these offloading scenarios, and we incorporated these models into an online calculator available to users. Our online calculator determines the total CO2 emitted by performing computational or storage tasks at a local or remote data center, provided that the energy sources of the data centers and the network connecting them are known. The demonstration we propose will allow conference visitors to use our website/calculator to get a sense for the impact of offloading their storage and computational tasks

Entity models for trigger-reaction documents

We define the notion of an entity model for a special kind of document popular on the web: an article followed by a list of reactions on that article, usually by many authors, usually inverse chronologically ordered. We call these documents trigger-reactions pairs. The entity model describes which named entities (persons, organizations, locations, products, urls) are mentioned, their type, how often and where they are mentioned, and it lists all variants referring to the same entity. These models find applications in media-analysis, trend watching, entity tracking and marketing. The two main challenges for creating entity models are 1) detecting the entities and 2) normalizing all variants to the same correct canonical form. This task is particularly hard for user generated content on the web, of which our reactions are an example. We use an algorithm for named entity recognition and normalization (NEN) tailor-made for trigger-reaction documents. It achieves high recall and reasonable precision by using two simple facts: 1) incomplete entities in reactions often occur complete in the trigger and 2) entities mentioned in news-articles on the web often have a Wikipedia page. This article describes our experience in creating and using entity models on a corpus of 56,449 Dutch trigger-reaction documents, with a total of 616,715 reactions, collected from the web from November 11, 2006 to February 5, 2008. This paper accompanies an earlier article from our group in which the focus was on a systems-evaluation of the NEN algorithm

Efficient Implementation of the Orlandi Protocol

We present an efficient implementation of the Orlandi protocol which is the first implementation of a protocol for multiparty computation on arithmetic circuits, which is secure against up to n − 1 static, active adversaries. An efficient implementation of an actively secure self-trust protocol enables a number of multiparty computation where one or more of the parties only trust himself. Examples includes auctions, negotiations, and online gaming. The efficiency of the implementation is largely obtained through an efficient implementation of the Paillier cryptosystem, also described in this paper