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This article describes the use of a comic book to anchor a cryptology and cybersecurity curriculum for upper elementary students. Perceptions about the comic book from 138 students across 11 afterschool programs were examined using survey, classroom observation, and interviews. Data analysis revealed that the comic book created a “macrocontext” to situate learners in an exciting adventure about cryptology and cybersecurity. Students found the characters relatable, and their perceptions were tightly tied to other components of the curriculum. Reading the word bubbles was chal- lenging at first, but got easier over time. This study illustrates how comic books can anchor unfamiliar STeM content for younger learners. 

Abstract Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles due to benefits in improved fuel economy, lower operating cost, and reduced emission. BEVs use electric motors rather than fossil fuels for propulsion and typically store electric energy in lithium-ion cells. With rising concerns over fossil fuel depletion and the impact of ICE vehicles on the climate, electric mobility is widely considered as the future of sustainable transportation. BEVs promise to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a result of the transportation sector. However, mass adoption of BEVs faces major barriers due to consumer worries over several important battery-related issues, such as limited range, long charging time, lack of charging stations, and high initial cost. Existing solutions to overcome these barriers, such as building more charging stations, increasing battery capacity, and stationary vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) charging, often suffer from prohibitive investment costs, incompatibility to existing BEVs, or long travel delays. In this paper, we propose P eer-to- P eer C ar C harging (P2C2), a scalable approach for charging BEVs that alleviates the need for elaborate charging infrastructure. The central idea is to enable BEVs to share charge among each other while in motion through coordination with a cloud-based control system. To re-vitalize a BEV fleet, which is continuously in motion, we introduce Mobile Charging Stations (MoCS), which are high-battery-capacity vehicles used to replenish the overall charge in a vehicle network. Unlike existing V2V charging solutions, the charge sharing in P2C2 takes place while the BEVs are in-motion, which aims at minimizing travel time loss. To reduce BEV-to-BEV contact time without increasing manufacturing costs, we propose to use multiple batteries of varying sizes and charge transfer rates. The faster but smaller batteries are used for charge transfer between vehicles, while the slower but larger ones are used for prolonged charge storage. We have designed the overall P2C2 framework and formalized the decision-making process of the cloud-based control system. We have evaluated the effectiveness of P2C2 using a well-characterized simulation platform and observed dramatic improvement in BEV mobility. Additionally, through statistical analysis, we show that a significant reduction in carbon emission is also possible if MoCS can be powered by renewable energy sources. 

Abstract Automatic recognition of unique characteristics of an object can provide a powerful solution to verify its authenticity and safety. It can mitigate the growth of one of the largest underground industries—that of counterfeit goods–flowing through the global supply chain. In this article, we propose the novel concept of material biometrics , in which the intrinsic chemical properties of structural materials are used to generate unique identifiers for authenticating individual products. For this purpose, the objects to be protected are modified via programmable additive manufacturing of built-in chemical “tags” that generate signatures depending on their chemical composition, quantity, and location. We report a material biometrics-enabled manufacturing flow in which plastic objects are protected using spatially-distributed tags that are optically invisible and difficult to clone. The resulting multi-bit signatures have high entropy and can be non-invasively detected for product authentication using $$^{35}$$ 35 Cl nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) spectroscopy. 

The development of hardware intellectual properties (IPs) has faced many challenges due to malicious modifications and piracy. One potential solution to protect IPs against these attacks is to perform a key-based logic locking process that disables the functionality and corrupts the output of the IP when the incorrect key value is applied. However, many attacks on logic locking have been introduced to break the locking mechanism and obtain the key. In this paper, we present SWEEP, a constant propagation attack that exploits the change in characteristics of the IP when a single key-bit value is hard-coded. The attack process starts with analyzing design features that are generated from the synthesis tool and establishes a correlation between these features and the correct key values. In order to perform the attack, the logic locking tool needs to be available. The level of accuracy of the extracted key mainly depends on the type of logic locking approach used to obfuscate the IP. Our attack was applied to ISCAS85, and MCNC benchmarks obfuscated using various logic locking techniques and has obtained an average accuracy of 92.09%. 

Various attacks on hardware intellectual properties (IPs) have been successful in obtaining design information that can be used to reverse engineer a system, create counterfeits, or insert hardware Trojans. Key-based hardware obfuscation is an attractive solution that helps prevent such attacks. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a key error tolerant obfuscation approach that achieves graceful degradation in output Quality of Service (QoS) as the bit error rate (BER) in obfuscation key increases. The approach, which we refer to it as, “Quality Obfuscation”, is applicable to a large variety of IPs, including digital signal processing (DSP) and approximating computing IPs, which are resilient to output QoS degradation. We present a complete obfuscation framework that can be adapted to any error tolerance rate. To demonstrate its robustness, we obfuscate several common DSP IP blocks and observe the performance under various percentages of bit-flips in the key. We show that our approach provides controllability of system quality, as well as the strong protection at low overhead, e.g., average 15% area and 5.9% power overhead to tolerate 10% BER.