An improved two-party identity-based authenticated key agreement protocol using pairings

Two-party authenticated key agreement protocols using pairings have gained much attention in the cryptographic community. Several protocols of this type where proposed in the past of which many were found to be flawed. This resulted in attacks or the inability to conform to security attributes. In this paper, we propose an efficient identity-based authenticated key agreement protocol employing pairings which employs a variant of a signature scheme and conforms to security attributes. Additionally, existing competitive and the proposed protocol are compared regarding efficiency and security. The criteria for efficiency are defined in this paper, whereas the criteria for security are defined by the fulfilment of security attributes from literature.     

GPU Shape Grammars

GPU Shape Grammars provide a solution for interactive procedural generation, tuning and visualization of massive environment elements for both video games and production rendering. Our technique generates detailed models without explicit geometry storage. To this end we reformulate the grammar expansion for generation of detailed models at the tesselation control and geometry shader stages. Using the geometry generation capabilities of modern graphics hardware, our technique generated massive, highly detailed models. GPU Shape Grammars integrate within a scalable framework by introducing automatic generation of levels of detail at reduced cost. We apply our solution for interactive generation and rendering of scenes containing thousands of buildings and trees.     

Analysis for a class of singularly perturbed hybrid systems via averaging

A class of singularly perturbed hybrid dynamical systems is analyzed. The fast states are restricted to a compact set a priori. The continuous-time boundary layer dynamics produce solutions that are assumed to generate a well-defined average vector field for the slow dynamics. This average, the projection of the jump map in the direction of the slow states, and flow and jump sets from the original dynamics define the reduced, or average, hybrid dynamical system. Assumptions about the average system lead to conclusions about the original, higher-dimensional system. For example, forward pre-completeness for the average system leads to a result on closeness of solutions between the original and average system on compact time domains. In addition, global asymptotic stability for the average system implies semiglobal, practical asymptotic stability for the original system. We give examples to illustrate the averaging concept and to relate it to classical singular perturbation results as well as to other singular perturbation results that have appeared recently for hybrid systems. We also use an example to show that our results can be used as an analysis tool to design hybrid feedbacks for continuous-time plants implemented by fast but continuous actuators.     

Supervisory control synthesis of discrete-event systems using a coordination scheme

Supervisory control of distributed DES with a global specification and local supervisors is a difficult problem. For global specifications, the equivalent conditions for local control synthesis to equal global control synthesis may not be met. This paper formulates and solves a control synthesis problem for a generator with a global specification and with a combination of a coordinator and local controllers. Conditional controllability is proven to be an equivalent condition for the existence of such a coordinated controller. A procedure to compute the least restrictive solution within our coordination control architecture is provided and conditions under which the result coincides with the supremal controllable sublanguage are stated.     

A note on controllability of deterministic context-free systems

In this paper, we prove that the most important concept of supervisory control of discrete-event systems, the controllability property, is undecidable for two deterministic context-free languages $K$ and $L$, where $L$ is prefix closed, even though $K$ is a subset of $L$. If $K$ is not a subset of $L$, the undecidability follows from the work by Sreenivas. However, the case where $K$ is a subset of $L$ does not follow from that work because it is decidable whether $K$ and $L$ are equivalent as shown by Sénizergues. Thus, our result completes this study. The problem is also mentioned as open in the Ph.D. thesis by Griffin, who extended the supervisory control framework so that the specification language is modeled as a deterministic context-free language (compared to the classical approach where the specification is regular) and the plant language is regular. This approach is of interest because it brings an opportunity for more concise representations of the specification (as discussed, e.g., in the work by Geffert et al.) and, therefore, in some sense it treats the most interesting problem of current supervisory control theory, the state-space explosion problem.     

Influence of oxygen content on some properties of Nb3Sn tape used for superconducting transmission lines

The influence of the presence of oxygen in the Nb-Zr substrate upon some physical and mechanical properties of the Nb-ZrO₂ substrate and/or Nb₃Sn tape superconductor prepared from such a substrate has been studied. The results have shown that the Nb₃Sn grains are much finer in the case of Nb-ZrO₂, than those obtained on Nb-Zr substrate. As a result, both the electrical and mechanical properties have been substantially improved. The critical current at a field of 5 T increased by between 100 and 200 %, the alternating current losses decreased by about one order of magnitude, the tensile strength increased by about a factor of three and the microhardness value also increased by about a factor of three for oxygen contents in the range 0.03 to 0.70 wt%. The specific resistance of this substrate increased at the same time from 17 to 22 cm and the relative elongation decreased from 5 to 3 %.     

A programmable state machine architecture for packet processing

The Internet is expanding rapidly and constantly adding new protocols and features. To shorten the design cycle, many companies have adopted a common hardware platform for a variety of products. In these products, specialized packet processors tailored for packet processing handle multiple protocols and feature changes. A packet processor usually incorporates multiple RISC engines that are configurable as several instances of parallel processors, working simultaneously or in a pipelined fashion. In either approach, packet processors are complex and expensive. Packet processing has many levels of programmability requirements. Some tasks require only mild programmability and can't justify the use of a full-fledged packet processor. A finite scare machine (FSM), on the other hand, has high performance but cannot adapt to protocol changes. The solution is something in between: fast, programmable, but not as complicated as a packet processor. A programmable state machine (PSM) is such an idea.     

Simulation of Fuzzy-Logic-Based Intelligent Wheelchair Control System

Fuzzy logic control system for an intelligent wheelchair aimed for assistance by the severely handicapped persons is presented in the paper. It is based on a computer simulation of wheelchair navigation, in which fuzzy logic enables control priority to smoothly alternate between manual and automatic control of the wheelchair in the vicinity of obstacles. The main purpose of designing and simulating this control approach is to improve the safety of a wheelchair in the presence of obstacles. To analyze the success of the wheelchair control, a dynamic model of the wheelchair, together with the models of distance sensors, has been developed using Lagrange analysis.