Sharif Digital Repository

Many smart grid applications need broadcast communications. Because of the critical role of the broadcasted messages in these applications, their authentication is very important to prevent message forgery attacks. Smart grid consists of plenty of low-resource devices such as smart meters or phasor measurement units (PMUs) that are located in physically unprotected environments. Therefore, the storage and computational constraints of these devices as well as their security against physical attacks must be considered in designing broadcast authentication schemes. In this paper, we consider two communication models based on the resources of the broadcasters and receivers and propose a physical... 

The objective of this work is making comparison between thermodynamic models and data-driven techniques accuracy in prediction of hydrate formation pressure as a function of temperature and composition of gas mixtures. The Peng-Robinson (PR) and Patel-Teja (PT) equations of state are used for thermodynamic modeling and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) are used as data-driven models. The capability of each method is evaluated by comparison with the experimental data collected from literature. It is shown that there is a good agreement between thermodynamic modeling and the experimental data in most of the cases; however, the prediction... 

Temporary keyword search on confidential data in a cloud environment is the main focus of this research. The cloud providers are not fully trusted. So, it is necessary to outsource data in the encrypted form. In the attribute-based keyword search (ABKS) schemes, the authorized users can generate some search tokens and send them to the cloud for running the search operation. These search tokens can be used to extract all the ciphertexts which are produced at any time and contain the corresponding keyword. Since this may lead to some information leakage, it is more secure to propose a scheme in which the search tokens can only extract the ciphertexts generated in a specified time interval. To... 

Temporary keyword search on confidential data in a cloud environment is the main focus of this research. The cloud providers are not fully trusted. So, it is necessary to outsource data in the encrypted form. In the attribute-based keyword search (ABKS) schemes, the authorized users can generate some search tokens and send them to the cloud for running the search operation. These search tokens can be used to extract all the ciphertexts which are produced at any time and contain the corresponding keyword. Since this may lead to some information leakage, it is more secure to propose a scheme in which the search tokens can only extract the ciphertexts generated in a specified time interval. To... 

In this paper, the performance of an internal combustion engine is evaluated at the steady-state condition by application of energy and exergy analysis using the experimental test results. The energy and exergy balances are calculated at different engine speeds. The results show that the heat rejection of energy and exergy flow increases with increasing engine speed. The exergy efficiencies are slightly higher than the corresponding energy efficiencies. The results of this study have revealed that the most important source of the system inefficiency is the destruction of exergy by irreversible processes, mostly by the combustion. One can conclude that the use of a combined energy and exergy... 

One of the most used types of auctions in the smart grid is the double auction, in which both buyers and sellers can respectively submit their bids and asks to participate in the auction. In recent years, many schemes have been designed to propose a double auction mechanism for the smart grids; however, few of these schemes consider the information security aspects and users’ privacy. In this paper, we propose a protocol that helps different double auction mechanisms be implemented securely in the smart grids. This protocol not only can satisfy the security requirements of a double auction scheme but is also compatible with the smart grid technologies. In this scheme, in order to preserve... 

A 6-bit passive phase shifter for S frequency band has been designed in a standard HEMT technology. A new switched-network topology has been proposed for implementing the 5.625 phase shift step which these digital bits are series with each other. We used Advanced Design System (ADS2010) to perform simulations. These digital bits will produce 64 different mode phase shift of -177.15 to +177.15 degree. In all cases simulation obtained less than 1 % error  

A blind semi-invertible quantization based data hiding scheme, which reconstructs the original signal with high precision has been proposed. In order to produce correlated quantization yielding reversibility of the quantization based approach, a new transform domain has been introduced. In decoder, by compensating the quantization error and using the iterative technique, the original signal is recovered; then the watermarked signal is compared with the reconstructed original signal and hidden data is retrieved. Simulation results show that the proposed method in comparison with other reversible methods imposes less distortion and thus a higher Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) is achieved. © 2009... 

This paper proposes a novel combinational Adaptive Noise Canceller (ANC), which is suitable for non stationary noise environments. Pre-filter bank structure improves the convergence rate leading to less error in real-time applications. During our investigations, we have found out adaptive algorithms have better performance for low frequency subbands. Thus, by using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) in each subband, a simplified version of variable step-size algorithms has been employed in low frequency subbands; while for high frequency subbands, some conventional techniques have been used. Simulation results show that combination of adaptive and conventional methods have better performance... 

In this paper, we propose an efficient secure data aggregation scheme for the smart grid, which supports both lossy and lossless data aggregation. In order to reduce the computational overhead of the control center, our proposed model includes a number of entities, called gateways, which act as intermediaries between the users and the control center. At the end of each measurement interval, each user generates a report which is encrypted using the Paillier cryptosystem and contains the user's consumption amount during the previous measurement interval as well as his or her prediction of consumption during another interval in the future. After receiving the user's reports, gateways perform... 

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) provides 2-way communications between the utility and the smart meters. Developing authenticated key exchange (AKE) and broadcast authentication (BA) protocols is essential to provide secure communications in AMI. The security of all existing cryptographic protocols is based on the assumption that secret information is stored in the nonvolatile memories. In the AMI, the attackers can obtain some or all of the stored secret information from memories by a great variety of inexpensive and fast side-channel attacks. Thus, all existing AKE and BA protocols are no longer secure. In this paper, we investigate how to develop secure AKE and BA protocols in the... 

In recent years, determining the common information privately and efficiently between two mutually mistrusting parties have become an important issue in social networks. Many Private set intersection (PSI) protocols have been introduced to address this issue. By applying these protocols, two parties can compute the intersection between their sets without disclosing any information about components that are not in the intersection. Due to the broad range of computational resources that the cloud can provide for its users, determining the set intersection by cloud may decrease the computational cost of the users. The proposed protocol by Abadi et al. is one of the introduced protocols in this... 

In this paper a self-oscillating mixer is presented fundamental signal generated by the oscillator subcircuit in the mixing process. The oscillator core consumes 3mA of current from a 1.8 V DC supply and results in an output power of -0.867 dBm per oscillator, and a measured phase noise of -91, -102 and -108 dBc/Hz at 100 KHz, 600 KHz and 1 MHz from the carrier, respectively. In the mixing process the proposed mixer achieved IIP3 of 0 dBm with conversation gain of 1.93 dB. The circuit was designed and simulated in 0.18-μm CMOS technology by ADS2010  

This study is aimed at optimizing the rice husk ash (RHA) content and bacterial concentration in self-compacting concrete (SCC). For this purpose, cement was partially replaced with RHA at 0%, 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, and 30% by weight of cement. In addition, micro-silica (MS) was added to all mixes at a dosage of 10% by weight of cementitious materials. The mix with the optimum RHA content was supplied with bacterial cells with concentrations of 103, 105, and 107 cells/ml to reduce the formation of micro-cracks. The RHA concretes showed reduced workability with increasing RHA content. Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analyses were performed on... 

The authors regret that there is an error with the caption of Figure 10 in the article. The magnification of the SEM image shown in Figure 10(b) is 100×. Furthermore, Ameri et al. [1] is the original source of the image. The correct caption is as follows: Fig. 10. Morphology of pumice aggregate: (a) 30× magnification, (b) 100× magnification [1]. The authors would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused. [1] F. Ameri, P. Shoaei, S.A. Zareei, B. Behforouz, Geopolymers vs. alkali-activated materials (AAMs): A comparative study on durability, microstructure, and resistance to elevated temperatures of lightweight mortars, Constr. Build. Mater. 222 (2019) 49–63.... 

Purpose: The aim of this study was to compare diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) isotropic map (p-map) with current radiographically (T 2/T 2 -FLAIR) methods based on abnormal hyper-signal size and location of glioblastoma tumor using a semi-automatic approach. Materials and methods: Twenty-five patients with biopsy-proved diagnosis of glioblastoma participated in this study. T 2, T 2 -FLAIR images and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) were acquired 1 week before radiotherapy. Hyper-signal regions on T 2, T 2 -FLAIR and DTI p-map were segmented by means of semi-automated segmentation. Manual segmentation was used as ground truth. Dice Scores (DS) were calculated for validation of semiautomatic... 

The authors regret that there were minor errors in the labels of the XRD patterns of cement and micro-silica presented in Figs. 1 and 2, which have been corrected in the figures included here. In addition, due to concerns over the reliability of the XRD pattern of pumice shown in Fig. 9, as caused by a low signal count, the authors have re-analyzed the pumice and the updated XRD pattern has been included here. It is worth noting that these changes do not affect any of the conclusions. The authors would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused. © 2021  

Copper slag (CS) is an industrial by-product, which is commonly disposed in engineered landfills. Prior studies have successfully incorporated CS as an aggregate phase in cementitious materials. However, the alkali-activated material (AAM) incorporating CS has been scarcely studied. Specifically, the elevated temperature behavior of AAM with CS has not been investigated previously. The present paper aims to study the effects of elevated temperature treatment on the mass loss and residual strength of alkali-activated slag mortars incorporating 0–100% (by volume) of CS with an incremental step of 20% instead of natural sand. The mass loss, compressive and flexural strengths, and microstructure...