Multiprocessor architecture becomes common on real-time systems as the workload of real-time systems increases. Recently new deadline-based (EDF-based) multiprocessor scheduling algorithms are devised, and comparative studies on the performance of these algorithms are necessary. In this paper, we compare EDZL, a hybrid of EDF and LLF, with other deadline-based scheduling algorithms such as EDF, EDF-US[m/(2m-1)], and fpEDF. We show EDZL schedules all task sets schedulable by EDF. The experimental results show that the number of preemptions of EDZL is comparable to that of EDF and the schedulable utilization bound of EDZL is higher than those of other algorithms we consider.

In this letter, we show that Fan-Chen-Yeh's blind signature scheme and Chien-Jan-Tseng's partially blind signature scheme are vulnerable to the chosen-plaintext attack. We also show that both schemes can be modified so that the chosen-plaintext attack is impossible. But, still Chien-Jan-Tseng's partially blind signature scheme is vulnerable. It fails to satisfy the partial blindness property.

In this letter, we present an efficient stream authentication scheme that is an improvement of SAIDA. It is shown that under the same communication overhead its verification probability is higher than that of SAIDA. Moreover, its computation cost is lower than that of SAIDA.

When an application code is downloaded from an unknown server to the mobile device, it is important to authenticate the code. Usually, code execution is overlapped with downloading to reduce transfer/invocation delay. In this letter, we present an efficient code authentication scheme that permits overlapping of execution and downloading when the sequence of code execution is determined during the execution time. The proposed scheme is based on authentication trees. Compared with the tree chaining scheme, the proposed scheme has lower communication overhead and shorter average verification delay. Also, the computation cost of the proposed scheme on the receiver is much smaller than that of the tree chaining scheme.

As the use of electronic voting systems and e-commerce systems increases, the efficient batch verification of digital signatures becomes more and more important. In this paper, we first propose a new method to identify bad signatures in batches efficiently for the case when the batch contains one bad signature. The method can find out the bad signature using smaller number of modular multiplications than the existing method. We also propose an extension to the proposed method to find out two or more bad signatures in a batch instance. Experimental results show that our method yields better performance than the existing method in terms of the number of modular multiplications.

Causal message logging has many benefits such as nonblocking message logging and no rollback propagation. In this paper, we consider the problem of the recovery in causally-logged distributed system and give a condition for consistent recovery. We then show that, based on the impossibility of the consensus, the consistent causal recovery cannot be solved in asynchronous systems.

This letter proves the finish time predictability of EDZL (Earliest Deadline Zero Laxity) scheduling algorithm for multiprocessor real-time systems, which is a variant of EDF. Based on the results, it also shows that EDZL can successfully schedule any periodic task set if its total utilization is not greater than (m+1)/2, where m is the number of processors.

In mobile broadcasting environments, an information server periodically broadcasts a set of data items to a large mobile client population at every broadcast cycle and mobile clients retrieve the data items they need upon arrival at the broadcast channel. In such environments, the cost of data delivery is independent of the number of clients. Many applications such as auctions and stock quotes perform read-only transactions that require the clients to read consistent and current data for accurate result. Previous concurrency control mechanisms designed for such environments ensure that the clients read consistent data, but they cannot ensure latest-bound currency which allows the clients to read the latest or most up-to-date data. In this paper, we propose an efficient concurrency control mechanism that ensures latest-bound currency as well as update consistency, which is appropriate for the mobile broadcasting environments. To ensure latest-bound currency, the server computes control information using "virtual" broadcast cycles. This control information is also used for checking update consistency. Thus, the proposed mechanism allows all data committed in current broadcast cycle to be broadcast. We have performed simulation experiments to measure transaction aborts in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism. The result confirms that the proposed mechanism produces no stale reads and also shows that the proposed mechanism generates less transaction aborts than previous mechanisms, which implies that we can get higher data currency without increasing data inconsistency.

We present an efficient stream authentication scheme using authentication stars. The computation overhead of the proposed scheme on the sender is almost the same as that of the scheme with the smallest overhead. On the receiver's side, the verification probability of the proposed scheme is much higher than that of any other scheme. To show this, we first conducted a mathematical analysis on the verification probability of our scheme and then performed simulation to compare the verification probability of our scheme with those of the previous schemes. Simulation results shows that when the packet loss rate is 50%, the verification probability of our scheme is 73% whereas those of the previous schemes are below 41%.

Forked checkpointing scheme is proposed to achieve low checkpoint overhead. When a process wants to take a checkpoint in the forked checkpointing scheme, it creates a child process and continues its normal computation. Two recovery models can be used for forked checkpointing when the parent process fails before the child process establishes the checkpoint. One is the pessimistic recovery model where the recovery process rolls back to the previous checkpoint state. The other is the optimistic recovery model where a recovery process waits for the checkpoint to be established by the child process. In this paper, we present the recovery models for forked checkpointing by deriving the expected execution time of a process with and without checkpointing and also show that the expected recovery time of the optimistic recovery model is smaller than that of the pessimistic recovery model.

In this letter we propose a new mode for block ciphers which uses an unknown random block as feedback. We show that the successful differential/linear cryptanalyses of DES under the mode require at least the complexity of the exhaustive key search. We also present the processing overhead of our scheme compared to that of ECB mode.