Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Seminar Topics - Brain Computer Interface

Brain-Computer interface is a staple of science fiction writing.  Init's earliest  incarnations nomechanism was thought necessary, as the  technology seemed so far fetched that no explanation was likely.   As more became known about the brain however, the possibility has become more real and the science fiction more technically sophisticated.  Recently, the cyberpunk movement has adopted the idea of 'jacking in', sliding 'biosoft' chips into slots implanted in the skull (Gibson, W. 1984).  

                              Although such  biosofts are still science fiction, there have been several recent steps toward interfacing the brain and computers.  Chief among these are techniques for stimulating and recording from areas of the brain with   permanently implanted electrodes and using conscious control of EEG to control computers. 

                                         

                                        Some preliminary work is being done on synapsing neurons on silicon transformers and on growing neurons into neural networks on top of computer chips.The most advanced work in designing a brain-computer interface has stemmed   from the evolution of traditional electrodes.  There are essentially two main problems, stimulating the brain (input) and recording from the brain (output).

                             

                                        Traditionally, both input and output were handled by electrodes pulled from metal wires and glass tubing.Using conventional electrodes, multi-unit recordings can be constructed from mutlibarrelled pipettes.   In addition to being fragile and bulky, the electrodes in these arrays are often too far apart, as most fine neural processes are only .1 to 2 µm apart.

                                   

 

                      Pickard describes a new type   of electrode, which circumvents many of the problems listed above.  These printed circuit micro-electrodes (PCMs) are manufactured in the same manner of computer chips.  A design of a chip is photoreduced to produce an image on a photosensitive glass plate. This is used as a mask, which covers a UV sensitive glass or plastic film.

   A PCM has three essential elements:

                           1) the tissue terminals,

                           2) a circuit board controlling or reading from the terminals      

                           3) a Input/Output controller-interpreter,  such as a computer.                                     

Engineering Seminar Topics

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Saturday, May 26, 2007

AKA

AKA stands for the Authentication and Key Agreement security protocol. It is a mechanism which performs authentication and session key distribution in Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) networks. AKA is a challenge-response based mechanism that uses symmetric cryptography. AKA is typically run in a UMTS IM Services Identity Module (ISIM), which resides on a smart card like device that also provides tamper resistant storage of shared secrets.

Exponential key exchange

The first publicly knownbpublic-key agreement protocol that meets the above criteria was the Diffie-Hellman exponential key exchange, in which two people jointly exponentiate a generator with random numbers, in such a way that an eavesdropper has no way of guessing what the key is.However, exponential key exchange in and of itself does not specify any prior agreement or subsequent authentication between the participants. It has thus been described as an anonymous key agreement protocol.

Authentication

Anonymous key exchange, like Diffie-Hellman, does not provide authentication of the parties, and is thus vulnerable to Man-in-the-middle attacks.A wide variety of cryptographic authentication schemes and protocols have been developed to provide authenticated key agreement to prevent man-in-the-middle and related attacks. These methods generally mathematically bind the agreed key to other agreed-upon data, such as:
Public/private key pairs , Shared secret keys , Passwords