An Evenhanded Certified Email System for Contract Signing
Certified email is a system which enables a sender to prove a receiver’s receipt of email. Such a system can be used for applications related to electronic commerce on the Internet. This paper considers a situation where a sender or a receiver wants to change his/her mind due to the change of mail content value (e.g., stock, auction, gambling) during the transaction. We point out that no traditional certified email systems have been designed for such a case, thus one of the participants can be at a disadvantage. To avoid this problem, we propose an evenhanded certified email system in which each participant can change his/her choice, either cancel or finish the transaction, at any time during the transaction.

title: Efficient Signature Validation Based on a New PKI
abstract: Digital signatures usually serve as irrefutable cryptographic evidence to support dispute resolution in electronic transactions. Trusted time-stamping and certificate revocation services, although very costly in practice, must be available to prevent big loss due to compromising of the signing key. In this paper, we employ a revocation-free public-key framework to improve the efficiency in maintaining the validity of digital signatures as non-repudiation evidence. The new PKI allows an end user to control the validity of his own public-key certificate and enables certificate verification without retrieving the revocation information from the CA. Based on this new PKI, we could validate generic digital signatures using a TSA only. Moreover, we could validate forward-secure digital signatures without the TTP’s involvement.

title: Non-Repudiation in Electronic Commerce
abstract: Electronic Commerce and Security. Repudiation and Dispute Resolution. Non-Repudiation and Network Security. Non-Repudiation in Message Handling Systems. Non-Repudiation in Electronic Payment Systems. Book Outline. Fundamentals of Non-Repudiation - Goals of Non-Repudiation. Non-Repudiation Services. Non-Repudiation Evidence. Roles of Trusted Third Parties. Phases of Non-Repudiation. Non-Repudiation Policy. Requirements for Non-Repudiation. Securing Digital Signatures for Non-Repudiation - Security Requirements on Digital Signatures. Time Stamps in Digital Signatures. Securing TTP's Digital Signatures. Time-Stamping Approach.  One-Way Sequential Link Approach.   Achieving Fair Non-Repudiation - Factors against Fair Non-Repudiation. Approaches for Fair Non-Repudiation.  Using Light-Weighted On-Line TTP.  Using Off-Line TTP without Timely Termination.  Using Off-Line TTP with Timely Termination.  Using In-Line TTP for Timely Delivery.  Related Work on Fair Non-Repudiation - Protocols Using In-Line TTP. Protocols Using On-Line TTP. Protocols Using Off-Line TTP. Protocols with Probablistic Fairness.  ISO's Non-Repudiation Mechanisms - Overview of ISO/IEC 13888. Mechanisms Using Symmetric Techniques. Mechanisms Using Asymmetric Techniques. Time-Stamping Evidence.  Case Studies - Non-Repudiation in Electronic Payment. Undeniable Billing in Mobile Communication.  Towards Formal Verification of Non-Repudiation - The SVO Logic. Formalization of Non-Repudiation. Verification of a Non-Repudiation Protocol.

title: Observations on Non-repudiation
abstract: This paper discusses non-repudiation services regarding the transfer of a message and classifies the roles of trusted third parties involved in non-repudiation services. We examine the selective receipt problem and the generation of time evidence, analyse the current state of the ISO/IEC 13888 drafts on non-repudiation mechanisms, and present a fair non-repudiation protocol including time evidence to promote the development of these drafts.

title: An intensive survey of fair non-repudiation protocols
abstract: With the phenomenal growth of the Internet and open networks in general, security services, such as non-repudiation, become crucial to many applications. Non-repudiation services must ensure that when Alice sends some information to Bob over a network, neither Alice nor Bob can deny having participated in a part or the whole of this communication. Therefore a fair non-repudiation protocol has to generate non-repudiation of origin evidences intended to Bob, and non-repudiation of receipt evidences destined to Alice. In this paper, we clearly define the properties a fair non-repudiation protocol must respect, and give a survey of the most important non-repudiation protocols without and with trusted third party (TTP). For the later ones we discuss the evolution of the TTP's involvement and, between others, describe the most recent protocol using a transparent TTP. We also discuss some ad-hoc problems related to the management of non-repudiation evidences.

title: Securing digital signatures for non-repudiation
abstract: Dispute of transactions is a common problem that could jeopardise business. Hence non-repudiation services are essential in business transactions which provide evidence to enable dispute resolution. To be eligible as non-repudiation evidence, the digital signature on an electronic document should remain valid until its expiry date which is specified by some non-repudiation policy. The conventional approaches are either inefficient or insecure to achieve non-repudiation in electronic commerce. This article presents a practical scheme to secure digital signatures as non-repudiation evidence with an adjustable degree of risk.

title: Improving scalability of wireless network simulation with bounded inaccuracies
abstract: Discrete event network simulators have emerged as popular tools for verification and performance evaluation of wireless networks. Nevertheless, the desire to model such networks at high fidelity implies high computational costs, limiting most researchers the ability to simulate networks with thousands of nodes. Previous attempts to optimize simulation of large-scale wireless networks have not appropriately modeled accumulation of weak interference, thereby suffering inaccuracies that may be further magnified in the evaluation of upper-layer protocols. This article presents a comprehensive analysis on the effects of common optimization techniques for large-scale wireless network simulation on the overall network performance. Based on the analysis, it formulates distance limit derivation and mobility update reduction that introduce bounded inaccuracy to the radio propagation simulation. It further proposes a novel technique, Lazy Event Scheduling with Corrective Retrospection, that reduces simulation events twenty-five fold without introducing any inaccuracy at all. The experimental results show that these optimizations can substantially improve the runtime performance of an already efficient wireless network simulator, by a factor of up to 55 for wireless networks with 3200 nodes without compromising the simulation's accuracy.

title: Recognition of handwritten numerals by Quantum Neural Network with fuzzy features
abstract: This paper describes a new kind of neural network – Quantum Neural Network (QNN) – and its application to the recognition of handwritten numerals. QNN combines the advantages of neural modelling and fuzzy theoretic principles. Novel experiments have been designed for in-depth studies of applying the QNN to both real data and confusing images synthesized by morphing. Tests on synthesized data examine QNN's fuzzy decision boundary with the intention to illustrate its mechanism and characteristics, while studies on real data prove its great potential as a handwritten numeral classifier and the special role it plays in multi-expert systems. An effective decision-fusion system is proposed and a high reliability of 99.10% has been achieved.

title: Toward automatic annotation of in situ mRNA expression patterns of drosophila embryos
abstract: The in situ mRNA hybridization gene expression pattern images of Drosophila melanogaster in the course of embryogenesis provide spatial-temporal information of the expression patterns of a target gene. This information is critical for understanding the roles of genes during the development of embryos. Currently, the annotation of these images is often done by manually assigning a subset of image ontology terms to the images. This approach is time consuming and depends heavily on the consistency of the experts. Alternatively, if the annotation process can be automated or semi-automated, efficiency and consistency are likely to be greatly enhanced. We formulate this task as a pattern classification problem, and present preliminary results. We consider both the template-based global matching and the multi-objective classification based on neural networks (e.g. multi-layer perceptron). We develop a method to combine them to optimize efficiency and accuracy. This method has been applied to the gene expression pattern image database generated by the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project.

title: Rule-base technique for component adaptation to support QoS-based reconfiguration
abstract: Many critical application systems require reconfigurability in order to adapt under changing environment. To achieve system reconfigurability, it is possible to use adaptation mechanisms that are external to components or to use parameterized components. This paper focuses on making components reconfigurable in terms of QoS tradeoffs. We propose a new component parameterization technique which can transform individual components to reconfigurable ones such that they can support various QoS tradeoffs to achieve overall system QoS requirements. The parameterized components can be used to develop both statically and dynamically reconfigurable systems. The proposed technique is rule based, which provides flexibility and extensibility to enhance and improve the technique. A tool set has been developed based on the proposed technique to achieve semi-automated component parameterization.

title: A software enhancement system for embedded software development
abstract: This paper proposes a rule-based expert system model to assist developers in enhancing the quality of embedded software. The expert system supports semi-automated source code enhancements from multiple perspectives including optimization, reconfiguration to achieve quality of service (QoS) trade-offs, conformance to coding standards, etc., by defining a rule base that is composed of modularized and extensible rule sets. The rule sets are composed of re-usable rules; the rules capture the in-depth knowledge of different software experts. The expert system also adopts a technique to support automated fact generation. This allows the expert system to support processing programs developed in different programming languages