Cryptography during the French and American Wars in Vietnam

After Vietnam’s Declaration of Independence on 2 September 1945, the country had to suffer through two long, brutal wars, first against the French and then against the Americans, before finally becoming a unified country free of colonial domination in 1975. The authors’ purpose is to examine the role of cryptography in those two wars. Despite the far greater technological resources of their opponents, the communications intelligence specialists of the Vi?t Minh, the National Liberation Front, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had considerable success in both protecting Vietnamese communications and acquiring tactical and strategic secrets from the enemy. Perhaps surprisingly, in both wars there was a balance between the sides. Generally speaking, cryptographic knowledge and protocol design were at a high level at the central commands, but deployment for tactical communications in the field was difficult, and there were many failures on all sides.     

Unsupervised joint face alignment with gradient correlation coefficient

This work proposes an unsupervised joint alignment framework, referred to as “Gradient Correlation Congealing,” which aligns an image ensemble by maximizing a sum of gradient correlation coefficient function defined over all images. We, respectively, develop two different formulations to optimize the objective function regarding the role of “template.” While most existing face alignment methods suffer from outliers, e.g., occlusions, the proposed algorithms are able to align faces undergoing partial occlusions. Moreover, our algorithms can cope with nonuniform illumination changes (even extremely difficult ones), and also, they do not require any predefined templates. We test the novel approaches against four typical joint alignment methods including Least-Squares Congealing, Learned-Miller Congealing, Lucas–Kanade entropy Congealing, and RASL using three challenging face databases: AR, Yale B, and LFW. Experimental results prove the efficiency of our approaches under different conditions, especially when faces are partially occluded, and the proposed algorithms perform much better than all considered methods.     

Nonthermal plasma for pesticide and microbial elimination on fruits and vegetables: an overview

Nonthermal plasma (NTP) is defined in terms of partly ionised gas which overall temperature is quite low because the stored energy is mostly in free electrons. Applications of NTP have been expanded to new areas of food applications such as the microbial inactivation and also the elimination of pesticide and toxic chemical residues in food such as fruits and vegetables while nutritional content and key characteristics are still preserved. Plasma treatment has successfully decreased the concentrations of pesticides by about 45‐71%. In this article, NTP technologies as well as investigations about applying of NTP for removing pesticide residues and improving microbial safety in fresh produce are described. Potential applications of NTP in food processing together with some of their challenges and limitations are also discussed.     

Optimum design of cold-formed steel portal frame buildings including joint effects and secondary members

In steel portal frames, cold-formed steel channel sections are increasingly used as the primary framing components, in addition to the secondary members e.g. purlins and side rails. For such framing systems, the stiffness of the joints at the eaves and apex affects the bending moment distribution, as well as the frame deflections. This paper investigates the influence of two joint configurations having full rigidity and semi-rigidity, respectively, on the optimum design of cold-formed steel portal frames. A real-coded genetic algorithm is used to search for the most cost-effective design. It is shown that through incorporating joint effects explicitly into the design process, a more appropriate balance between the joints and the member properties can be obtained, thus optimizing material use. The study then investigates the effect of secondary members on the optimum design. It is shown that incorporating the secondary members is important for portal frames having spans shorter than 12 m. For example, for a frame spacing less than 6 m, the material cost of the primary members can be reduced by up to 15%.     

Mac-A-Mal: macOS malware analysis framework resistant to anti evasion techniques

Journal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques - With macOS increasing popularity, the number, and variety of macOS malware are rising as well. Yet, very few tools exist for dynamic analysis...     

Cache-aided full-duplex: delivery time analysis and optimization

Edge caching has received much attention as a promising technique to overcome the stringent latency and data-hungry challenges in the future generation wireless networks. Meanwhile, full-duplex (FD) transmission can potentially double the spectral efficiency by allowing a node to receive and transmit at the same frequency band simultaneously. In this paper, we investigate the delivery time performance of a cache-aided FD system, in which an edge node, operates in FD mode, serves users via wireless channels and is equipped with a cache memory. Firstly, we derive a closed-form expression for the average delivery time by taking into account the uncertainties of both backhaul and access wireless channels. The derived analysis allows the examination of the impact of key parameters, e.g., cache size and transmit power. Secondly, a power optimization problem is formulated to minimize the average delivery time. To deal with the non-convexity of the formulated problem, we propose an iterative optimization algorithm based on the bisection method. Finally, numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. A significant delivery time reduction is achieved by the proposed optimization compared to the FD reference and half-duplex counterpart.

     

Influence of Cr3+ on yellowish-green UC emission and energy transfer of Er3+/Cr3+/Yb3+ tri-doped zinc silicate glasses

In this paper, we study the influence of Cr³⁺ on yellowish-green upconversion (UC) emission and the energy transfer (ET) of Er³⁺/Cr³⁺/Yb³⁺ tri-doped in SiO₂–ZnO–Na₂O–La₂O₃ (SZNL) zinc silicate glasses under excitation of the 980 nm laser diode (LD). The influence of Cr³⁺ on enhancing the red UC emission of Er³⁺/Cr³⁺/Yb³⁺ tri-doped in SiO₂–ZnO–Na₂O–La₂O₃ zinc silicate glasses under the excitation of 980nm LD was also investigated. The ET processes between Yb³⁺, Cr^3+, and Er³⁺, together with the combination of Yb³⁺-Cr³⁺-Er³⁺, which led to the green UC emission intensity of Er³⁺/Cr³⁺/Yb³⁺ tri-doped in SiO₂–ZnO–Na₂O–La₂O₃ zinc silicate glasses bands centered at ~546 nm have been significantly enhanced. By increasing the concentration of Cr³⁺ from 0 up to 5 mol.%, we can locate the Commission Internationale de l'éclairage (CIE) 1931 (x; y) chromaticity coordinates for UC emissions of Er³⁺/Cr³⁺/Yb³⁺ tri-doped in the central position of the yellowish-green color region of CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram. Besides, the ET processes between the Yb³⁺, Cr³⁺, and Er³⁺ are also proposed and discussed.