Secure outsourcing of sequence comparisons
Internet computing technologies, like grid computing, enable a weak computational device connected to such a grid to be less limited by its inadequate local computational, storage, and bandwidth resources. However, such a weak computational device (PDA, smartcard, sensor, etc.) often cannot avail itself of the abundant resources available on the network because its data are sensitive. This motivates the design of techniques for computational outsourcing in a privacy-preserving manner, i.e., without revealing to the remote agents whose computational power is being used either one’s data or the outcome of the computation. This paper investigates such secure outsourcing for widely applicable sequence comparison problems and gives an efficient protocol for a customer to securely outsource sequence comparisons to two remote agents. The local computations done by the customer are linear in the size of the sequences, and the computational cost and amount of communication done by the external agents are close to the time complexity of the best known algorithm for solving the problem on a single machine.

title: A Construction for General and Efficient Oblivious Commitment Based Envelope Protocols
abstract: The notion of Oblivious Commitment Based Envelope (OCBE) was recently proposed; it enables attribute-based access control without revealing any information about the attributes. Previous OCBE protocols are designed by taking zero-knowledge proof protocols that prove a committed value satisfies some property and changing the protocols so that instead of one party proving to the other party, the two parties compute two keys that agree if and only if the committed value indeed satisfy the property. In this paper, we introduce a more general approach for designing OCBE protocols that uses zero-knowledge proof protocols in a black-box fashion. We present a construction such that given a zero-knowledge proof protocol that proves a committed value satisfies a predicate, we have an OCBE protocol for that predicate with constant additional cost. Compared with previous OCBE protocols, our construction is more general, more efficient, and has wide applicability.

title: OACerts: Oblivious Attribute Certificates
abstract: We propose oblivious attribute certificates (OACerts), an attribute certificate scheme in which a certificate holder can select which attributes to use and how to use them. In particular, a user can use attribute values stored in an OACert obliviously, i.e., the user obtains a service if and only if the attribute values satisfy the policy of the service provider, yet the service provider learns nothing about these attribute values. This way, the service provider's access control policy is enforced in an oblivious fashion. To enable the oblivious access control using OACerts, we propose a new cryptographic primitive called oblivious commitment-based envelope (OCBE). In an OCBE scheme, Bob has an attribute value committed to Alice and Alice runs a protocol with Bob to send an envelope (encrypted message) to Bob such that: 1) Bob can open the envelope if and only if his committed attribute value satisfies a predicate chosen by Alice and 2) Alice learns nothing about Bob's attribute value. We develop provably secure and efficient OCBE protocols for the Pedersen commitment scheme and comparison predicates as well as logical combinations of them

title: Universal Accumulators with Efficient Nonmembership Proofs
abstract: Based on the notion of accumulators, we propose a new cryptographic scheme called universal accumulators. This scheme enables one to commit to a set of values using a short accumulator and to efficiently compute a membership witness of any value that has been accumulated. Unlike traditional accumulators, this scheme also enables one to efficiently compute a nonmembership witness of any value that has not been accumulated. We give a construction for universal accumulators and prove its security based on the strong RSA assumption. We further present a construction for dynamic universal accumulators; this construction allows one to dynamically add and delete inputs with constant computational cost. Our construction directly builds upon Camenisch and Lysyanskaya's dynamic accumulator scheme. Universal accumulators can be seen as an extension to dynamic accumulators with support of nonmembership witness. We also give an efficient zero-knowledge proof protocol for proving that a committed value is not in the accumulator. Our dynamic universal accumulator construction enables efficient membership revocation in an anonymous fashion.

title: Trust Negotiation with Hidden Credentials, Hidden Policies, and Policy Cycles
abstract: In an open environment such as the Internet, the decision to collaborate with a stranger (e.g., by granting access to a resource) is often based on the characteristics (rather than the identity) of the requester, via digital credentials: Access is granted if Alice’s credentials satisfy Bob’s access policy. The literature contains many examples where protecting the credentials and the access control policies is useful, and there are numerous protocols that achieve this. In many of these schemes, the server does not learn whether the client obtained access (e.g., to a message, or a service via an eticket). A consequence of this property is that the client can use all of her credentials without fear of “probing” attacks by the server, because the server cannot glean information about which credentials the client has (when this property is lacking, the literature uses a framework where the very use of a credential is subject to a policy specific to that credential). The main result of this paper is a protocol for negotiating trust between Alice and Bob without revealing either credentials or policies, when each credential has its own access policy associated with it (e.g., “a top-secret clearance credential can only be used when the other party is a government employee and has a top-secret clearance”). Our protocol carries out this privacy-preserving trust negotiation between Alice and Bob, while enforcing each credential’s policy (thereby protecting sensitive credentials). Note that there can be a deep nesting of dependencies between credential policies, and that there can be (possibly overlapping) policy cycles of these dependencies. Our result is not achieved through the routine use of standard techniques to implement, in this framework, one of the known strategies for trust negotiations (such as the “eager strategy”). Rather, this paper uses novel techniques to implement a non-standard trust negotiation strategy specifically suited to this framework (and in fact unusable outside of this framework, as will become clear). Our work is therefore Portions of this work were supported by Grants IIS-0325345, IIS0219560, IIS-0312357, and IIS-0242421 from the National Science Foundation, Contract N00014-02-1-0364 from the Office of Naval Research, by sponsors of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security, and by Purdue Discovery Park’s e-enterprise Center. a substantial extension of the state-of-the-art in privacypreserving trust negotiations.

title: Hidden access control policies with hidden credentials
abstract: In an open environment such as the Internet, the decision to collaborate with a stranger (e.g., by granting access to a resource) is often based on the characteristics (rather than the identity) of the requester, via digital credentials: Access is granted if Alice's credentials satisfy Bob's access policy. The literature contains many scenarios in which it is desirable to carry out such trust negotiations in a privacy-preserving manner, i.e., so as minimize the disclosure of credentials and/or of access policies. Elegant solutions were proposed for achieving various degrees of privacy-preservation through minimal disclosure. In this paper, we present an efficient protocol that protects both sensitive credentials and policies. That is, Alice gets the resource only if she satisfies Bob's policy, Bob does not learn anything about Alice's credentials (not even whether Alice got access or not), and Alice learns neither Bob's policy structure nor which credentials caused her to gain access.

title: Evolutionary Optimisation of Distributed Energy Resources
abstract: Genetic optimisation is used to minimise operational costs across a system of electrical loads and generators controlled by local intelligent agents and connected to the electricity grid at market rates. Experimental results in a simulated environment show that coordinated market-sensitive behaviours are achieved. A large network of 500 loads and generators, each characterised by different randomly selected parameters, was optimised using a two-stage genetic algorithm to achieve scalability.

title: Discovering and ranking important rules
abstract: Decision rules generated from reducts can fully describe a data set. We introduce a new method of evaluating rules by taking advantage of rough sets theory. We consider rules generated from the original data set as attributes in the new constructed decision table. Reducts generated from this new decision table contain essential attributes, which are the rules. Only important rules are contained in the reducts. Experiments on an artificial data set and a medical data set show that the "reduct rules" are more important, and this new method provides an automatic and effective way of ranking rules.

title: Applying Association Rules for Interesting Recommendations Using Rule Templates
abstract: In this paper, we propose a new method of applying association rules for recommendation systems. Association rule algorithms are used to discover associations among items in transaction datasets. However, applying association rule algorithms directly to make recommendations usually generates too many rules; thus, it is difficult to find interesting recommendations for users among so many rules. Rule templates define certain types of rules; therefore, they are one of the interestingness measures that reduce the number of rules that do not interest users. We describe a new method. By defining more appropriate rule templates, we are able to extract interesting rules for users in a recommendation system. Experimental results show that our method increases the accuracy of recommendations.

title: Direct incremental transmission of boundary representation
abstract: The real-time transmission of the boundary representation (B-rep) is necessitated by collaborative design. However, it is difficult since the B-rep is very complex and the current network bandwidth is limited. Incremental transmission, which can significantly decrease the data to be delivered, makes it possible to transmit the B-rep in real time during collaborative design.In this paper, we propose an approach to direct incremental transmission of the B-rep over Internet. The algorithm consists of three steps: Identify and encode the incremental model of the B-rep once a modeling operation is performed; Then, transmit the incremental model as well as the related geometric information to other remote site; Finally, decode the received codes of incremental model and directly embed the restored entities into the local B-rep. The traits of the approach lie in: (a) The incremental B-rep is identified, transmitted and restored completely based on the B-rep data structure without the support of any other auxiliary model; (b) Topological entity hierarchy chain is put forward to enable the simple and direct recovery of the transmitted incremental B-rep.

title: High-order Compact Schemes for Nonlinear Dispersive Waves
abstract: High-order compact finite difference schemes coupled with high-order low-pass filter and the classical fourth-order Runge–Kutta scheme are applied to simulate nonlinear dispersive wave propagation problems described the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV)-like equations, which involve a third derivative term. Several examples such as KdV equation, and KdV-Burgers equation are presented and the solutions obtained are compared with some other numerical methods. Computational results demonstrate that high-order compact schemes work very well for problems involving a third derivative term.