Martin Reed

Chenhao Xue, Weitao Hu, Joyraj Chakraborty et al.

Combining multiple audio features can improve the performance of music tagging, but common deep learning-based feature fusion methods often lack interpretability. To address this problem, we propose a Genetic Programming (GP) pipeline that automatically evolves composite features by mathematically combining base music features, thereby capturing synergistic interactions while preserving interpretability. This approach provides representational benefits similar to deep feature fusion without sacrificing interpretability. Experiments on the MTG-Jamendo and GTZAN datasets demonstrate consistent improvements compared to state-of-the-art systems across base feature sets at different abstraction levels. It should be noted that most of the performance gains are noticed within the first few hundred GP evaluations, indicating that effective feature combinations can be identified under modest search budgets. The top evolved expressions include linear, nonlinear, and conditional forms, with various low-complexity solutions at top performance aligned with parsimony pressure to prefer simpler expressions. Analyzing these composite features further reveals which interactions and transformations tend to be beneficial for tagging, offering insights that remain opaque in black-box deep models.

Miroslav Mitev, Mahdi Shekiba-Herfeh, Arsenia Chorti et al.

Lightweight and low latency security schemes at the physical layer that have recently attracted a lot of attention include: (i) physical unclonable functions (PUFs), (ii) localization based authentication, and, (iii) secret key generation (SKG) from wireless fading coefficients. In this paper, we focus on short blocklengths and propose a fast, privacy preserving, multi-factor authentication protocol that uniquely combines PUFs, proximity estimation and SKG. We focus on delay constrained applications and demonstrate the performance of the SKG scheme in the short blocklength by providing a numerical comparison of three families of channel codes, including half rate low density parity check codes (LDPC), Bose Chaudhuri Hocquenghem (BCH), and, Polar Slepian Wolf codes for n=512, 1024. The SKG keys are incorporated in a zero-round-trip-time resumption protocol for fast re-authentication. All schemes of the proposed mutual authentication protocol are shown to be secure through formal proofs using Burrows, Abadi and Needham (BAN) and Mao and Boyd (MB) logic as well as the Tamarin-prover.

Miroslav Mitev, Arsenia Chorti, E. Veronica Belmega et al.

Wireless secret key generation (W-SKG) from shared randomness (e.g., from the wireless channel fading realizations), is a well established scheme that can be used for session key agreement. W-SKG approaches can be of particular interest in delay constrained wireless networks and notably in the context of ultra reliable low latency communications (URLLC) in beyond fifth generation (B5G) systems. However, W-SKG schemes are known to be malleable over the so called "advantage distillation" phase, during which observations of the shared randomness are obtained at the legitimate parties. As an example, an active attacker can act as a man-in-the-middle (MiM) by injecting pilot signals and/or can mount denial of service attacks (DoS) in the form of jamming. This paper investigates the impact of injection and reactive jamming attacks in W-SKG. First, it is demonstrated that injection attacks can be reduced to - potentially less harmful - jamming attacks by pilot randomization; a novel system design with randomized QPSK pilots is presented. Subsequently, the optimal jamming strategy is identified in a block fading additive white Gaussian noise (BF-AWGN) channel in the presence of a reactive jammer, using a game theoretic formulation. It is shown that the impact of a reactive jammer is far more severe than that of a simple proactive jammer

Miroslav Mitev, Arsenia Chorti, Martin Reed et al.

With the emergence of 5G low latency applications, such as haptics and V2X, low complexity and low latency security mechanisms are sought. Promising lightweight mechanisms include physical unclonable functions (PUF) and secret key generation (SKG) at the physical layer, as considered in this paper. In this framework we propose i) a novel authenticated encryption using SKG; ii) a combined PUF / SKG authentication to reduce computational overhead; iii) a 0-RTT resumption authentication protocol; iv) pipelining of the SKG and the encrypted data transfer. With respect to the latter, we investigate a parallel SKG approach for multi-carrier systems, where a subset of the subcarriers are used for SKG and the rest for data transmission. The optimal resource allocation is identified under security, power and delay constraints, by formulating the subcarrier allocation as a subset-sum $0-1$ knapsack optimization problem. A heuristic approach of linear complexity is proposed and shown to incur negligible loss with respect to the optimal dynamic programming solution. All of the proposed mechanisms, have the potential to pave the way for a new breed of latency aware security protocols.