arXiv subjects

Marco Baldi

Publications and source records attributed to Marco Baldi.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

arXiv2014

Secrecy Transmission on Block Fading Channels: Theoretical Limits and Performance of Practical Codes

We consider a system where an agent (Alice) aims at transmitting a message to a second agent (Bob) over a set of parallel channels, while keeping it secret from a third agent (Eve) by using physical layer security techniques. We assume that Alice perfectly knows the set of channels with respect to Bob, but she has only a statistical knowledge of the channels with respect to Eve. We derive bounds on the achievable outage secrecy rates, by considering coding either within each channel or across all parallel channels. Transmit power is adapted to the channel conditions, with a constraint on the average power over the whole transmission. We also focus on the maximum cumulative outage secrecy rate that can be achieved. Moreover, in order to assess the performance in a real life scenario, we consider the use of practical error correcting codes. We extend the definitions of security gap and equivocation rate, previously applied to the single additive white Gaussian noise channel, to Rayleigh distributed parallel channels, on the basis of the error rate targets and the outage probability. Bounds on these metrics are also derived, taking into account the statistics of the parallel channels. Numerical results are provided, that confirm the feasibility of the considered physical layer security techniques.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2014

Disentangling interacting dark energy cosmologies with the three-point correlation function

We investigate the possibility of constraining coupled dark energy (cDE) cosmologies using the three-point correlation function (3PCF). Making use of the CoDECS N-body simulations, we study the statistical properties of cold dark matter (CDM) haloes for a variety of models, including a fiducial $Λ$CDM scenario and five models in which dark energy (DE) and CDM mutually interact. We measure both the halo 3PCF, $ζ(θ)$, and the reduced 3PCF, $Q(θ)$, at different scales ($2<r\,[$Mpc\h$]<40$) and redshifts ($0\leq z\leq2$). In all cDE models considered in this work, $Q(θ)$ appears flat at small scales (for all redshifts) and at low redshifts (for all scales), while it builds up the characteristic V-shape anisotropy at increasing redshifts and scales. With respect to the $Λ$CDM predictions, cDE models show lower (higher) values of the halo 3PCF for perpendicular (elongated) configurations. The effect is also scale-dependent, with differences between $Λ$CDM and cDE models that increase at large scales. We made use of these measurements to estimate the halo bias, that results in fair agreement with the one computed from the two-point correlation function (2PCF). The main advantage of using both the 2PCF and 3PCF is to break the bias$-σ_{8}$ degeneracy. Moreover, we find that our bias estimates are approximately independent of the assumed strength of DE coupling. This study demonstrates the power of a higher-order clustering analysis in discriminating between alternative cosmological scenarios, for both present and forthcoming galaxy surveys, such as e.g. BOSS and Euclid.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2014

Nonlinear growing neutrino cosmology

The energy scale of Dark Energy, $\sim 2 \times 10^{-3}$ eV, is a long way off compared to all known fundamental scales - except for the neutrino masses. If Dark Energy is dynamical and couples to neutrinos, this is no longer a coincidence. The time at which Dark Energy starts to behave as an effective cosmological constant can be linked to the time at which the cosmic neutrinos become nonrelativistic. This naturally places the onset of the Universe's accelerated expansion in recent cosmic history, addressing the why-now problem of Dark Energy. We show that these mechanisms indeed work in the Growing Neutrino Quintessence model - even if the fully nonlinear structure formation and backreaction are taken into account, which were previously suspected of spoiling the cosmological evolution. The attractive force between neutrinos arising from their coupling to Dark Energy grows as large as $10^6$ times the gravitational strength. This induces very rapid dynamics of neutrino fluctuations which are nonlinear at redshift $z \approx 2$. Nevertheless, a nonlinear stabilization phenomenon ensures only mildly nonlinear oscillating neutrino overdensities with a large-scale gravitational potential substantially smaller than that of cold dark matter perturbations. Depending on model parameters, the signals of large-scale neutrino lumps may render the cosmic neutrino background observable.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2014

Security issues for data sharing and service interoperability in eHealth systems: the Nu.Sa. test bed

The aim of the Nu.Sa. project is the definition of national level data standards to collect data coming from General Practitioners' Electronic Health Records and to allow secure data sharing between them. This paper introduces the Nu.Sa. framework and is mainly focused on security issues. A solution for secure data sharing and service interoperability is presented and implemented in the actual system used around Italy. The solution is strongly focused on privacy and correct data sharing with a complete set of tools devoted to authorization, encryption and decryption in a data sharing environment and a distributed architecture. The implemented system with more than one year of experiences in thousands of test cases shows a good feasibility of the approach and a future scalability in a cloud based architecture.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2014

AONT-LT: a Data Protection Scheme for Cloud and Cooperative Storage Systems

We propose a variant of the well-known AONT-RS scheme for dispersed storage systems. The novelty consists in replacing the Reed-Solomon code with rateless Luby transform codes. The resulting system, named AONT-LT, is able to improve the performance by dispersing the data over an arbitrarily large number of storage nodes while ensuring limited complexity. The proposed solution is particularly suitable in the case of cooperative storage systems. It is shown that while the AONT-RS scheme requires the adoption of fragmentation for achieving widespread distribution, thus penalizing the performance, the new AONT-LT scheme can exploit variable length codes which allow to achieve very good performance and scalability.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2014

Enhanced public key security for the McEliece cryptosystem

This paper studies a variant of the McEliece cryptosystem able to ensure that the code used as the public key is no longer permutation-equivalent to the secret code. This increases the security level of the public key, thus opening the way for reconsidering the adoption of classical families of codes, like Reed-Solomon codes, that have been longly excluded from the McEliece cryptosystem for security reasons. It is well known that codes of these classes are able to yield a reduction in the key size or, equivalently, an increased level of security against information set decoding; so, these are the main advantages of the proposed solution. We also describe possible vulnerabilities and attacks related to the considered system, and show what design choices are best suited to avoid them.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2014

Breaking the Cosmic Degeneracy between Modified Gravity and Massive Neutrinos with the Cosmic Web

In a recent work, Baldi et al. highlighted the issue of cosmic degeneracies, consisting in the fact that the standard statistics of the large-scale structure might not be sufficient to conclusively test cosmological models beyond $Λ$CDM when multiple extensions of the standard scenario coexist in nature. In particular, it was shown that the characteristic features of an $f(R)$ Modified Gravity theory and of massive neutrinos with an appreciable total mass $Σ_{i}m_{ν_{i}}$ are suppressed in most of the basic large-scale structure observables for a specific combination of the main parameters of the two non-standard models. In the present work, we explore the possibility that the mean specific size of the supercluster spines -- which was recently proposed as a non-standard statistics by Shim and Lee to probe gravity at large scales -- can help to break this cosmic degeneracy. By analyzing the halo samples from N-body simulations featuring various combinations of $f(R)$ and $Σ_{i}m_{ν_{i}}$ we find that -- at the present epoch -- the value of $Σ_{i}m_{ν_{i}}$ required to maximally suppress the effects of $f(R)$ gravity on the specific sizes of the superclusters spines is different from that found for the other standard statistics. Furthermore, it is also shown that at higher redshifts ($z\ge 0.3$) the deviations of the mean specific sizes of the supercluster spines for all of the four considered combinations from its value for the standard $Λ$CDM case are statistically significant.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2014

Practical LDPC coded modulation schemes for the fading broadcast channel with confidential messages

The broadcast channel with confidential messages is a well studied scenario from the theoretical standpoint, but there is still lack of practical schemes able to achieve some fixed level of reliability and security over such a channel. In this paper, we consider a quasi-static fading channel in which both public and private messages must be sent from the transmitter to the receivers, and we aim at designing suitable coding and modulation schemes to achieve such a target. For this purpose, we adopt the error rate as a metric, by considering that reliability (security) is achieved when a sufficiently low (high) error rate is experienced at the receiving side. We show that some conditions exist on the system feasibility, and that some outage probability must be tolerated to cope with the fading nature of the channel. The proposed solution exploits low-density parity-check codes with unequal error protection, which are able to guarantee two different levels of protection against noise for the public and the private information, in conjunction with different modulation schemes for the public and the private message bits.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2014

LDPC coded transmissions over the Gaussian broadcast channel with confidential messages

We design and assess some practical low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded transmission schemes for the Gaussian broadcast channel with confidential messages (BCC). This channel model is different from the classical wiretap channel model as the unauthorized receiver (Eve) must be able to decode some part of the information. Hence, the reliability and security targets are different from those of the wiretap channel. In order to design and assess practical coding schemes, we use the error rate as a metric of the performance achieved by the authorized receiver (Bob) and the unauthorized receiver (Eve). We study the system feasibility, and show that two different levels of protection against noise are required on the public and the secret messages. This can be achieved in two ways: i) by using LDPC codes with unequal error protection (UEP) of the transmitted information bits or ii) by using two classical non-UEP LDPC codes with different rates. We compare these two approaches and show that, for the considered examples, the solution exploiting UEP LDPC codes is more efficient than that using non-UEP LDPC codes.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2014

Cold dark matter halos in Multi-coupled Dark Energy cosmologies: structural and statistical properties

The recently proposed Multi-coupled Dark Energy (McDE) scenario - characterised by two distinct Cold Dark Matter (CDM) particle species with opposite couplings to a Dark Energy scalar field - introduces a number of novel features in the small-scale dynamics of cosmic structures, most noticeably the simultaneous existence of both attractive and repulsive fifth-forces. Such small-scale features are expected to imprint possibly observable footprints on nonlinear cosmic structures, that might provide a direct way to test the scenario. In order to unveil such footprints, we have performed the first suite of high-resolution N-body simulations of McDE cosmologies, covering the coupling range $|β|\leq 1$. We find that for coupling values corresponding to fifth-forces weaker than standard gravity, the impact on structure formation is very mild, thereby showing a new type of screening mechanism for long-range scalar interactions. On the contrary, for fifth-forces comparable to or stronger than standard gravity a number of effects appear in the statistical and structural properties of CDM halos. Collapsed structures start to fragment into pairs of smaller objects that move on different trajectories, providing a direct evidence of the violation of the weak equivalence principle. Consequently, the relative abundance of halos of different masses is significantly modified. For sufficiently large coupling values, the expected number of clusters is strongly suppressed, which might alleviate the present tension between CMB- and cluster-based cosmological constraints. Finally, the internal structure of halos is also modified, with a significant suppression of the inner overdensity, and a progressive segregation of the two CDM species.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2014

Cosmic Degeneracies I: Joint N-body Simulations of Modified Gravity and Massive Neutrinos

We present the first suite of cosmological N-body simulations that simultaneously include the effects of two different and theoretically independent extensions of the standard $Λ$CDM cosmological scenario - namely an $f(R)$ theory of Modified Gravity (MG) and a cosmological background of massive neutrinos - with the aim to investigate their possible observational degeneracies. We focus on three basic statistics of the large-scale matter distribution, more specifically the nonlinear matter power spectrum, the halo mass function, and the halo bias, for which we determine the deviation with respect to the fiducial $Λ$CDM cosmology in the context of both separate and combined simulations of $f(R)$ MG and massive neutrinos scenarios. Our results show that while these two extended models separately determine very prominent and potentially detectable features in all the three statistics, when we allow them to be simultaneously at work these features are strongly suppressed, resulting in much weaker deviations from the standard model's predictions. In particular, when an $f(R)$ gravity model with $f_{R0}=-1\times 10^{-4}$ is combined with a total neutrino mass of $Σ_{i}m_{ν_{i}}=0.4$ eV, the resulting matter power spectrum, halo mass function, and bias at z=0 are found to be consistent with the standard model's predictions at the 10%, 20%, and 5% accuracy levels, respectively. Therefore, our results imply an intrinsic theoretical limit to the effective discriminating power of present and future observational data sets with respect to these widely considered extensions of the standard cosmological scenario in the absence of independent measurements of the neutrino masses from laboratory experiments, even though the high-redshift evolution might still allow to partially break the degeneracy [Abridged].

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2014

Linear Perturbation constraints on Multi-coupled Dark Energy

The Multi-coupled Dark Energy (McDE) scenario has been recently proposed as a specific example of a cosmological model characterized by a non-standard physics of the dark sector of the universe that nevertheless gives an expansion history which does not significantly differ from the one of the standard $Λ$CDM model. In this work, we present the first constraints on the McDE scenario obtained by comparing the predicted evolution of linear density perturbations with a large compilation of recent data sets for the growth rate $fσ_{8}$, including 6dFGS, LRG, BOSS, WiggleZ and VIPERS. Confirming qualitative expectations, growth rate data provide much tighter bounds on the model parameters as compared to the extremely loose bounds that can be obtained when only the background expansion history is considered. In particular, the $95\%$ confidence level on the coupling strength $|β|$ is reduced from $|β|\leq 83$ (background constraints only) to $|β|\leq 0.88$ (background and linear perturbation constraints). We also investigate how these constraints further improve when using data from future wide-field surveys such as supernova data from LSST and growth rate data from Euclid-type missions. In this case the $95\%$ confidence level on the coupling further reduce to $|β|\leq 0.85$. Such constraints are in any case still consistent with a scalar fifth-force of gravitational strength, and we foresee that tighter bounds might be possibly obtained from the investigation of nonlinear structure formation in McDE cosmologies.[Abridged]

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2013

Array Convolutional Low-Density Parity-Check Codes

This paper presents a design technique for obtaining regular time-invariant low-density parity-check convolutional (RTI-LDPCC) codes with low complexity and good performance. We start from previous approaches which unwrap a low-density parity-check (LDPC) block code into an RTI-LDPCC code, and we obtain a new method to design RTI-LDPCC codes with better performance and shorter constraint length. Differently from previous techniques, we start the design from an array LDPC block code. We show that, for codes with high rate, a performance gain and a reduction in the constraint length are achieved with respect to previous proposals. Additionally, an increase in the minimum distance is observed.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2013

Advanced coding schemes against jamming in telecommand links

The aim of this paper is to study the performance of some coding schemes recently proposed for updating the TC channel coding standard for space applications, in the presence of jamming. Besides low-density parity-check codes, that appear as the most eligible candidates, we also consider other solutions based on parallel turbo codes and extended BCH codes. We show that all these schemes offer very good performance, which approaches the theoretical limits achievable.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2013

Advanced channel coding for space mission telecommand links

We investigate and compare different options for updating the error correcting code currently used in space mission telecommand links. Taking as a reference the solutions recently emerged as the most promising ones, based on Low-Density Parity-Check codes, we explore the behavior of alternative schemes, based on parallel concatenated turbo codes and soft-decision decoded BCH codes. Our analysis shows that these further options can offer similar or even better performance.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2013

On a Family of Circulant Matrices for Quasi-Cyclic Low-Density Generator Matrix Codes

We present a new class of sparse and easily invertible circulant matrices that can have a sparse inverse though not being permutation matrices. Their study is useful in the design of quasi-cyclic low-density generator matrix codes, that are able to join the inner structure of quasi-cyclic codes with sparse generator matrices, so limiting the number of elementary operations needed for encoding. Circulant matrices of the proposed class permit to hit both targets without resorting to identity or permutation matrices that may penalize the code minimum distance and often cause significant error floors.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2013

Coding with Scrambling, Concatenation, and HARQ for the AWGN Wire-Tap Channel: A Security Gap Analysis

This study examines the use of nonsystematic channel codes to obtain secure transmissions over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) wire-tap channel. Unlike the previous approaches, we propose to implement nonsystematic coded transmission by scrambling the information bits, and characterize the bit error rate of scrambled transmissions through theoretical arguments and numerical simulations. We have focused on some examples of Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes to estimate the security gap, which we have used as a measure of physical layer security, in addition to the bit error rate. Based on a number of numerical examples, we found that such a transmission technique can outperform alternative solutions. In fact, when an eavesdropper (Eve) has a worse channel than the authorized user (Bob), the security gap required to reach a given level of security is very small. The amount of degradation of Eve's channel with respect to Bob's that is needed to achieve sufficient security can be further reduced by implementing scrambling and descrambling operations on blocks of frames, rather than on single frames. While Eve's channel has a quality equal to or better than that of Bob's channel, we have shown that the use of a hybrid automatic repeat-request (HARQ) protocol with authentication still allows achieving a sufficient level of security. Finally, the secrecy performance of some practical schemes has also been measured in terms of the equivocation rate about the message at the eavesdropper and compared with that of ideal codes.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2013

Maps of CMB lensing deflection from N-body simulations in Coupled Dark Energy Cosmologies

We produce lensing potential and deflection-angle maps in order to simulate CMB weak-lensing via ray-tracing through the COupled Dark Energy Cosmological Simulations (CoDECS). The constructed maps reflect the N-body cosmic structures on a range of scales going from the arcminute to the degree scale. We investigate the variation of the lensing pattern due to the DE dynamics, characterised by different background and perturbation behaviours as a consequence of the interaction between the DE field and CDM. We study the results from three models differing in the background and perturbations evolution, with the purpose to isolate their imprints in the lensing observables. The scenarios investigated include a reference LCDM cosmology, a standard coupled DE (cDE) scenario, and a "bouncing" cDE scenario. For the standard cDE scenario, we find that differences in the lensing potential result from two effects: the enhanced growth of linear CDM density fluctuations with respect to the LCDM case, and the modified nonlinear dynamics of collapsed structures induced by the DE-CDM interaction. As a consequence, CMB lensing highlights the DE impact in the cosmological expansion, even in the degenerate case where the amplitude of the linear matter density perturbations, parametrised through sigma_8, is the same in both the standard cDE and LCDM cosmologies. For the bouncing scenario, we find that the two opposite behaviours of the lens density contrast and of the matter abundance lead to a counter-intuitive effect, making the power of the lensing signal lower by 10% than in the LCDM scenario. Moreover, we compare the behaviour of CDM and baryons in CoDECS separately, in order to isolate effects coming from the coupling with the DE component. We find that, in the bouncing scenario, baryons show an opposite trend with respect to CDM, due to the coupling of the latter with the DE component. [abridged]

astro-ph.CO↗