arXiv subjects

Jianwei Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Jianwei Liu.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Building Blocks of Sharding Blockchain Systems: Concepts, Approaches, and Open Problems

Sharding is the prevalent approach to breaking the trilemma of simultaneously achieving decentralization, security, and scalability in traditional blockchain systems, which are implemented as replicated state machines relying on atomic broadcast for consensus on an immutable chain of valid transactions. Sharding is to be understood broadly as techniques for dynamically partitioning nodes in a blockchain system into subsets (shards) that perform storage, communication, and computation tasks without fine-grained synchronization with each other. Despite much recent research on sharding blockchains, much remains to be explored in the design space of these systems. Towards that aim, we conduct a systematic analysis of existing sharding blockchain systems and derive a conceptual decomposition of their architecture into functional components and the underlying assumptions about system models and attackers they are built on. The functional components identified are node selection, epoch randomness, node assignment, intra-shard consensus, cross-shard transaction processing, shard reconfiguration, and motivation mechanism. We describe interfaces, functionality, and properties of each component and show how they compose into a sharding blockchain system. For each component, we systematically review existing approaches, identify potential and open problems, and propose future research directions. We focus on potential security attacks and performance problems, including system throughput and latency concerns such as confirmation delays. We believe our modular architectural decomposition and in-depth analysis of each component, based on a comprehensive literature study, provides a systematic basis for conceptualizing state-of-the-art sharding blockchain systems, proving or improving security and performance properties of components, and developing new sharding blockchain system designs.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

A comprehensive survey on smart contract construction and execution: paradigms, tools, and systems

Smart contracts are regarded as one of the most promising and appealing notions in blockchain technology. Their self-enforcing and event-driven features make some online activities possible without a trusted third party. Nevertheless, problems such as miscellaneous attacks, privacy leakage, and low processing rates pre-vent them from being widely applied. Various schemes and tools have been proposed to facilitate the construction and execution of secure smart contracts. However, a comprehensive survey for these proposals is absent, hindering new researchers and developers from a quick start. This paper surveys the literature and online resources on smart contract construction and execution over the period 2008-2020. We divide the studies into three categories: (1) design paradigms that give examples and patterns on contract construction, (2) design tools that facilitate the development of secure smart contracts, and (3) extensions and alternatives that improve the privacy or efficiency of the system. We start by grouping the relevant construction schemes into the first two categories. We then review the execution mechanisms in the last category and further divide the state-of-the-art solutions into three classes: private contracts with extra tools, off-chain channels, and extensions on core functionalities. Finally, we summarize several challenges and identify future research directions toward developing secure, privacy-preserving, and efficient smart contracts.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

A Framework for Behavior Privacy Preserving in Radio Frequency Signal

Recent years have witnessed the bloom development of the human-centered wireless sensing applications, in which some human information, such as the user's identity and motions, can be retrieved through analyzing the signal distortion caused by the target person. However, the openness of wireless transmission raises increasing concerns on user privacy, since either the human identity or human motion is sensitive in certain scenarios, including personal residence, laboratory, and office. Researchers have reported that commodity WiFi signals can be abused to identify users. To dispel this threat, in this paper we propose a privacy-preserving framework to effectively hide the information of user behaviors in wireless signals while retaining the ability of user authentication. The core of our framework is a novel Siamese network-based deep model, namely RFBP-Net. In this way, wireless sensing reveals user information moderately. We conduct extensive experiments on both the real WiFi and RFID system and open datasets. The experiment results show that RFBP-Net is able to significantly reduce the activity recognition accuracy, i.e., 70% reduction in the RFID system and 80% reduction in the WiFi system, with a slight penalty in the user authentication accuracy, i.e., only 5% and 1% decrease in the RFID and WiFi system, respectively.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Adversary Helps: Gradient-based Device-Free Domain-Independent Gesture Recognition

Wireless signal-based gesture recognition has promoted the developments of VR game, smart home, etc. However, traditional approaches suffer from the influence of the domain gap. Low recognition accuracy occurs when the recognition model is trained in one domain but is used in another domain. Though some solutions, such as adversarial learning, transfer learning and body-coordinate velocity profile, have been proposed to achieve cross-domain recognition, these solutions more or less have flaws. In this paper, we define the concept of domain gap and then propose a more promising solution, namely DI, to eliminate domain gap and further achieve domain-independent gesture recognition. DI leverages the sign map of the gradient map as the domain gap eliminator to improve the recognition accuracy. We conduct experiments with ten domains and ten gestures. The experiment results show that DI can achieve the recognition accuracies of 87.13%, 90.12% and 94.45% on KNN, SVM and CNN, which outperforms existing solutions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Synergistic Effects of Nanoparticle Heating and Amoxicillin on H. Pylori Inhibition

We report the design and development of a dual-functional magnetic nanoparticle platform for potential treatment of H. pylori infection. We show that an ultralow concentration of Mn0.3Fe2.7O4@SiO2 nanoparticles subjected to a moderate AC magnetic field, without bulk heating effect, can deposit heat locally and effectively inhibit H. pylori growth and virulence in vitro. When coupled with antibiotic amoxicillin, the dual-functional amoxicillin loaded Mn0.3Fe2.7O4@SiO2 further decreases the bacteria survival rate by a factor of 7 and 5, respectively, compared to amoxicillin treatment and nanoparticle heating alone. The synergistic effect can be partially attributed to the heating induced damage to the cell membrane and protective biofilm, which may increase the permeability of antibiotics to bacteria. Our method provides a viable approach to treat H. pylori infection, with the potential of reducing side effects and enhancing the efficacy for combating drug resistant strains.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2012

Spatially resolved pump-probe study of single-layer graphene produced by chemical vapor deposition

Carrier dynamics in single-layer graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is studied using spatially and temporally resolved pump-probe spectroscopy by measuring both differential transmission and differential reflection. By studying the expansion of a Gaussian spatial profile of carriers excited by a 1500-nm pump pulse with a 1761-nm probe pulse, we observe a diffusion of hot carriers of 5500 square centimeter per second. We also observe that the expansion of the carrier density profile decreases to a slow rate within 1 ps, which is unexpected. Furthermore, by using an 810-nm probe pulse we observe that both the differential transmission and reflection change signs, but also that this sign change can be permanently removed by exposure of the graphene to femtosecond laser pulses of relatively high fluence. This indicates that the differential transmission and reflection at later times may not be directly caused by carriers, but may be from some residue material from the sample fabrication or transfer process.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗