Presented by: Ismail Afia

Date: Wednesday, April 2, 2025
Time: 3:00 pm - 3:45 pm
Place: Zoom - see below.

Abstract:

In CT-RSA 2020, P3S was proposed as the first policy-based sanitizable signature scheme, allowing the signer to designate future message sanitizers by defining an access policy relative to their attributes rather than their keys. However, since P3S utilizes a policy-based chameleon hash (PCH), it does not achieve unlinkability, a required notion in privacy-preserving applications. Moreover, P3S requires running a procedure to share the secret trapdoor information for PCH with each new sanitizer before sanitizing a new message. We further observe that to maintain transparency in P3S’s multiple sanitizers setting, the signature size should grow linearly with the number of sanitizers. In this work, we propose an unlinkable policy-based sanitizable signature scheme (UP3S) where we employ a rerandomizable digital signature scheme and a traceable attribute-based signature scheme as its building blocks. Compared to P3S, UP3S achieves unlinkability, does not require new secrets to be shared with future sanitizers prior to sanitizing each message, and has a fixed signature size for a given sanitization policy. We define and formally prove the security notions of the generic scheme, propose an instantiation of UP3S utilizing the Pointcheval-Sanders rerandomizable signature scheme and DTABS traceable attribute-based signature scheme, and analyze its efficiency. Finally, we compare UP3S with P3S in terms of the features of the procedures, scalability, and security models.

Location: Remote via Zoom

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Presented by: Vladislav Govor

Date: Wednesday, April 9, 2025
Time: 12:15 pm - 1:00 pm
Place: Zoom - see below.

Abstract: Ultrasound imaging is a widely used technique in non-destructive testing for detecting and sizing defects in industrial pipelines. Accurate defect localization and sizing are critical for diagnosing the structural integrity of pipelines and preventing failures that pose significant environmental, economic, and safety risks. Motivated by the need to mitigate such risks, this thesis presents an effective technique for localization and sizing of surface-breaking cracks on the outer walls of liquid-filled pipes.

The proposed approach combines traditional and novel data processing techniques applied to a sequence of multi-view ultrasound image frames of inspected pipe sections. Tri-sectional sliding windows are utilized for frame-by-frame view specific defect localization, followed by establishing correspondence among potentially differing crack location estimates across all considered views and frames, as well as for defect sizing. Additionally, a similarity-based sizing method is developed to increase the accuracy by comparing synthetic images to the original ones. Our evaluation results using real-world experimental data demonstrate that the sliding window method is computationally inexpensive and yields accurate localization and sizing results in most cases, while the similarity-based method provides superior sizing accuracy in more complex scenarios.

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Presented by: See list below.

Date: Thursday, April 10, 2025
Time: 9:30 am - 12:00 pm
Place: ECS 660

The Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering invites you to the ECE Research Day Workshop, an exciting event highlighting groundbreaking research from our postdoctoral fellows and graduate students.

With 29 posters and 5 live demos, this event highlights innovations in renewable energy, AI/ML, robotics, cybersecurity, wireless networks, IoT, advanced sensing, and more.

📅 Date/Time: Thursday, April 10, 2025, 9:30am – 12:00pm
📍 Location: ECS 660, University of Victoria

Session 1 (9:30am – 10:30am)

 Renewable Energy & Sustainable Technologies; Advanced Sensing & THz Technologies; Others

1. Muhammad Awais: Fabrication of Efficient and Stable Perovskite Solar Cells in Ambient Air (Demo)
2. Victor Marrugat Arnal: Indoor Photovoltaics: Towards 50% Efficiency in Recycling Indoor Light (Demo)
3. Afraz Ahmad: Optimized Design of a Triple Active Bridge Converter for Multiport Electric Vehicle Charging
4. Ghazal Mansoori: greenhouse gas modelling and quantification
5. Fatemeh Ghalavand: Comparative Analysis of novel Spoke-Type Motor and Chevy Bolt in Electric Vehicle Applications: Performance, Cost, and Sustainability
6. Akanksha: Wireless Power Transfer for Light Electric Vehicles
7. Parinaz Moazzezi: Discovery of Perovskite Cosolvency and Undoped FAPbI3 Single-Crystal Solar Cells Fabricated in Ambient Air
8. Yameen Ahmed: All‐Scalable CH3NH3PbI3 Perovskite Solar Cells Fabricated in Ambient Air
9. Mohsen Haghighat Boroujeni: On chip glucose sensing using guided waves at terahertz frequencies
10. Ali Dehghanian: Machine Learning-Driven Inverse Design of Filters for Terahertz System-on-Chip
11. Marlene Otto: Reflection-mode nanoaperture optical trapping using off-center illumination for enhanced polarization separation
12. Haoyun Chen: Guided Filtering of ARFI Displacement Data for Shear Wave Speed Estimation 
13. Muhammad Kazim: Macroscopic modeling of traffic flow dynamics
14. Mehrab Najafian: Sudoku games and construction of Sudoku tables

Nutrition break (10:30am – 11:00am)

Session 2 (11:00am – 12:00pm)

AI/ML & Distributed Computing; Robotics & Autonomous Systems; Wireless Networks & IoT Systems; Cybersecurity & Privacy

1. Ray Zhu: Autonomous Driving with the F1Tenth Racing Car (Demo)
2. Xiang Tianao: FLAD: Federated Learning for LLM-based Autonomous Driving in Vehicle-Edge-Cloud Networks (Demo)
3. Cao Wenqiang: Bearing Rigidity-Based Flocking Control of AUVs via Semi-Supervised Incremental Broad Learning
4. Min Kim: Cybersecurity of IoUT (BlueROV) (Demo)
5. Gagan Gaganjot Kaur: Enhancing Maritime Cyber Security with AIS data
6. Feng Ye: False Noise Attack Detection for Differentially Private Distributed Control of Microgrids
7. Latifa Yusuf: Detection And Severity Estimation of Eccentricity Faults in Synchronous Machines Using Machine Learning Algorithm
8. Long Changqing: Distributed Resource Allocation and Coordinated Scheduling for End-Edge-Cloud Collaborative Computing
9. Lei Zhao: Advancing Ubiquitous Intelligence Through Collaborative Learning and Intelligent Data Trading
10. Wenjun Yang: Networked System for Accelerating Distributed AI Training
11. Pratik Sinha: Transformer-Based Representation Learning for Structured Metadata with Synthetic Benchmarking
12. Jia Yixiang: Crack Defect Characterization Using Raw Channel Data and DNN-Based Classifier
13. Shuang Li: Joint Transmission Mode Selection and Scheduling for AoI Minimization in NOMA-Capable WP-IoT Networks: A Deep Transfer Learning Solution
14. Hyemin Yu: Max-Min Fairness-Oriented Navigation and Scheduling for UAV-Enabled Wireless Networks via Deep Reinforcement Learning
15. Jingyi Tian: Attention-Based Spatiotemporal Model for RTT Prediction in LEO Satellite Networks

Don’t miss this opportunity to connect, learn, and explore the future of electrical, computer and software engineering!

Thanks to the IEEE Victoria Section for their sponsorship.

Contact Lin Cai (cai@uvic.ca) if you need any further information.

Presented by: Ismail Afia

Date: Tuesday, April 22, 2025
Time: 10:00 am - 10:45 am
Place: Zoom - see below.

Abstract:

This research presents advancements in privacy-preserving protocols, focusing on two research areas: policy-based sanitizable signature schemes and fair exchange mechanisms. Sanitizable signature schemes allow designated parties to modify or sanitize signed messages while preserving the message’s authenticity. We present the Unlinkable Policy-Based Sanitizable Signature (UP3S) scheme, which addresses a significant deficiency in existing policy-based sanitizable signature schemes, the lack of unlinkability. A crucial security property, particularly in privacy-sensitive applications, unlinkability guarantees that distinct sanitized versions of a given message cannot be linked to the original message or to each other, even across multiple sanitization operations. Building upon UP3S, we investigate extending its capabilities to support fine-grained control over message modifications. This involves enabling multiple modification policies for a single message and facilitating the delegation of sanitization rights. To this end, we propose the Traceable Policy-Based Signature (TPBS) scheme, which forms the basis for the Extended Policy-Based Sanitizable Signature (EP3S). EP3S offers a flexible and secure framework for policy-based sanitizable signatures, incorporating enhanced control over message modifications and sanitization-rights delegation. In the area of fair exchange mechanisms, our contributions focus on privacy-preserving exchanges of both digital and physical assets. We introduce V2VFx, a privacy-preserving framework for the fair exchange of physical assets, specifically in vehicle-to-vehicle energy trading. Together, these contributions advance the state of privacy-preserving protocols by addressing key limitations in existing schemes and extending their applicability.

Location: Remote via Zoom

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