Yunghsiang S. Han

Wei Yan, Yunghsiang S. Han

The Universal Coding of Integers~(UCI) is suitable for discrete memoryless sources with unknown probability distributions and infinitely countable alphabet sizes. A UCI is a class of prefix codes for which the ratio of the average codeword length to $\max\{1,H(P)\}$ is within a constant expansion factor \textcolor{red}{$C_{\mathcal{C}}$} for any decreasing probability distribution $P$, where $H(P)$ is the entropy of $P$. For any UCI code $\mathcal{C}$, \emph{the minimum expansion factor} \textcolor{red}{$C_{\mathcal{C}}^{*}$} is defined to represent the infimum of the set of extension factors of $\mathcal{C}$. Each $\mathcal{C}$ has a unique corresponding \textcolor{red}{$C_{\mathcal{C}}^{*}$}, and the smaller \textcolor{red}{$C_{\mathcal{C}}^{*}$} is, the better the compression performance of $\mathcal{C}$ is. The class of UCIs $\mathcal{C}$ (or a family $\{\mathcal{C}_i\}_{i=1}^{\infty}$) that achieves the smallest \textcolor{red}{$C_{\mathcal{C}}^{*}$} is defined as the \emph{optimal UCI}. The best current result is that the range of $C_{\mathcal{C}}^{*}$ for the optimal UCI is $2\leq C_{\mathcal{C}}^{*}\leq 2.5$. In this paper, we prove a tighter probability inequality for decreasing distributions, which serves as a new tool for studying the properties of UCIs. On the basis of this inequality, we prove that there exists a class of near-optimal UCIs, called the $ν$ code, achieving \textcolor{red}{$C_ν=2.0386$}. This narrows the range of the minimum expansion factor for the optimal UCI to $2\leq C_{\mathcal{C}}^{*}\leq 2.0386$. We show that the $ν$ code is currently optimal in terms of the minimum expansion factor. In addition, we propose a new proof showing that the minimum expansion factor of the optimal UCI is lower bounded by $2$.

Leilei Yu, Yunghsiang S. Han, Pingping Li et al.

Solving quadratic equations over finite fields is a fundamental task in algebraic coding theory and serves as a key subroutine for computing the roots of cubic and quartic polynomials. Notably, any quadratic polynomial over binary extension fields can be transformed into the reduced form $x^2+x+c\in \mathbb{F}_{2^m}[x]$, for which existing formula-based methods rely on heavy exponentiation or case distinctions on $m$ (odd/even or powers of two), limiting uniformity and efficiency. This paper presents a unified, formula-based solution for all positive integers $m$ that uses only exclusive-OR operations (XORs). The approach leverages a Reed-Muller matrix characterization of evaluations and transforms the problem into computing a binary matrix-vector multiplication. The total cost is at most $m^2-2m+1$ XORs, and under parallelism, the latency is $\lceil \log_2 m\rceil$ XORs, making the method attractive for low-power, low-latency applications.

Chen Quan, Baocheng Geng, Yunghsiang S. Han et al.

This paper employs an audit bit based mechanism to mitigate the effect of Byzantine attacks. In this framework, the optimal attacking strategy for intelligent attackers is investigated for the traditional audit bit based scheme (TAS) to evaluate the robustness of the system. We show that it is possible for an intelligent attacker to degrade the performance of TAS to the system without audit bits. To enhance the robustness of the system in the presence of intelligent attackers, we propose an enhanced audit bit based scheme (EAS). The optimal fusion rule for the proposed scheme is derived and the detection performance of the system is evaluated via the probability of error for the system. Simulation results show that the proposed EAS improves the robustness and the detection performance of the system. Moreover, based on EAS, another new scheme called the reduced audit bit based scheme (RAS) is proposed which further improves system performance. We derive the new optimal fusion rule and the simulation results show that RAS outperforms EAS and TAS in terms of both robustness and detection performance of the system. Then, we extend the proposed RAS for a wide-area cluster based distributed wireless sensor networks (CWSNs). Simulation results show that the proposed RAS significantly reduces the communication overhead between the sensors and the FC, which prolongs the lifetime of the network.

Bhavya Kailkhura, Yunghsiang S. Han, Swastik Brahma et al.

In this letter, we consider the problem of distributed Bayesian detection in the presence of data falsifying Byzantines in the network. The problem of distributed detection is formulated as a binary hypothesis test at the fusion center (FC) based on 1-bit data sent by the sensors. Adopting Chernoff information as our performance metric, we study the detection performance of the system under Byzantine attack in the asymptotic regime. The expression for minimum attacking power required by the Byzantines to blind the FC is obtained. More specifically, we show that above a certain fraction of Byzantine attackers in the network, the detection scheme becomes completely incapable of utilizing the sensor data for detection. When the fraction of Byzantines is not sufficient to blind the FC, we also provide closed form expressions for the optimal attacking strategies for the Byzantines that most degrade the detection performance.

Bhavya Kailkhura, Swastik Brahma, Yunghsiang S. Han et al.

In this paper, we consider the problem of distributed detection in tree topologies in the presence of Byzantines. The expression for minimum attacking power required by the Byzantines to blind the fusion center (FC) is obtained. More specifically, we show that when more than a certain fraction of individual node decisions are falsified, the decision fusion scheme becomes completely incapable. We obtain closed form expressions for the optimal attacking strategies that minimize the detection error exponent at the FC. We also look at the possible counter-measures from the FC's perspective to protect the network from these Byzantines. We formulate the robust topology design problem as a bi-level program and provide an efficient algorithm to solve it. We also provide some numerical results to gain insights into the solution.

Bhavya Kailkhura, Yunghsiang S. Han, Swastik Brahma et al.

In this paper, we consider the problem of distributed Bayesian detection in the presence of Byzantines in the network. It is assumed that a fraction of the nodes in the network are compromised and reprogrammed by an adversary to transmit false information to the fusion center (FC) to degrade detection performance. The problem of distributed detection is formulated as a binary hypothesis test at the FC based on 1-bit data sent by the sensors. The expression for minimum attacking power required by the Byzantines to blind the FC is obtained. More specifically, we show that above a certain fraction of Byzantine attackers in the network, the detection scheme becomes completely incapable of utilizing the sensor data for detection. We analyze the problem under different attacking scenarios and derive results for different non-asymptotic cases. It is found that existing asymptotics-based results do not hold under several non-asymptotic scenarios. When the fraction of Byzantines is not sufficient to blind the FC, we also provide closed form expressions for the optimal attacking strategies for the Byzantines that most degrade the detection performance.

V. Sriram Siddhardh, Nadendla, Yunghsiang S. Han et al.

The problem of distributed inference with M-ary quantized data at the sensors is investigated in the presence of Byzantine attacks. We assume that the attacker does not have knowledge about either the true state of the phenomenon of interest, or the quantization thresholds used at the sensors. Therefore, the Byzantine nodes attack the inference network by modifying modifying the symbol corresponding to the quantized data to one of the other M symbols in the quantization alphabet-set and transmitting the false symbol to the fusion center (FC). In this paper, we find the optimal Byzantine attack that blinds any distributed inference network. As the quantization alphabet size increases, a tremendous improvement in the security performance of the distributed inference network is observed. We also investigate the problem of distributed inference in the presence of resource-constrained Byzantine attacks. In particular, we focus our attention on two problems: distributed detection and distributed estimation, when the Byzantine attacker employs a highly-symmetric attack. For both the problems, we find the optimal attack strategies employed by the attacker to maximally degrade the performance of the inference network. A reputation-based scheme for identifying malicious nodes is also presented as the network's strategy to mitigate the impact of Byzantine threats on the inference performance of the distributed sensor network.