Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Digit Semantics based Optimization for Practical Password Cracking Tools

Users usually create their passwords with meaningful digits, i.e. digit semantics, which can be partially exploited by probabilistic password guessing models with a data-driven methodology for better efficiency. However, these semantics are largely ignored by current practical password cracking tools, like John the Ripper (JtR) and Hashcat. In this paper, we are motivated to study the digit semantics in passwords and exploit them to improve the guessing efficiency of practical password cracking tools. We first design a practical extraction tool of digit semantics in passwords. Then we conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis of the digit semantics in four large-scale password sets leaked from the real world. Based on the analysis results, we further propose two new operations (the basic unit to construct mangling rules), then generate 1,974 digit semantics rules constructed from them. Moreover, in order to enforce semantics rules in JtR and Hashcat, we optimize their rule engines and running logic with the compatibility of the original built-in operations. The evaluation on the real password sets shows the significant advantage of digit semantics rules to extend current typical rule sets when we crack both Chinese and English (two of the largest user groups) passwords with digit strings.
Variability of Personal Exposure to Fine Particulates for Urban Commuters inside Automobiles

Over the past decade, a growing body of evidence has emerged to suggest a causal link between short-duration exposure to elevated levels of fine airborne particulate matter and adverse health consequences. It is believed that much of this peak exposure occurs in transport microenvironments both because of the higher levels of fine particulates associated with road traffic, primarily from diesel exhaust emissions, and because of the significant amount of time people spend traveling (for instance, 80 min/day for residents of Sydney, Australia). Although previous studies have suggested substantial differences in exposure rates because of factors such as choice of mode, route, in-vehicle conditions, and meteorological factors, current measurement techniques have restricted insights to fairly coarse sampling intervals (e.g., every hour and every trip). As a consequence, little tangible evidence is available on how pollution varies over a trip and, most critically, about the location, duration, and magnitude of peak excursions within trips. With these issues in mind, this current paper reports on a study in which capabilities of Global Positioning Systems and real-time particle monitors are combined to address the problem for an urban commute in Sydney. This ability to reference pollution data precisely and spatially, and to identify hot spots in particular, holds considerable promise for both understanding and reporting of such data in the future.
UCI Liquid Film Miniature Combustor

An overview of research over the past decade on liquid-fuel-film combustor research is presented with a discussion of the performance in miniature configurations suitable for portable power. The concept that justifies its use is presented together with a review of early experiments and proof of concept. A simple analysis shows that burning fuel with a film configuration at small volumes provides sufficient liquid surface area to compete with spray combustion. Furthermore, the film protection against severe wall heating and / or flame quenching is discussed as is the challenge of holding the flame and completing the burning in a small volume. It is shown how the use of secondary air injection with swirl helps to obtain complete combustion in a volume of a few cubic centimeters. The stable triple flame structure is described. Alternative configurations for the film combustor are double-wall configurations and fuel supply through porous walls. Some theoretical results from a linear analysis of the film combustion are presented and discussed in relation to the future opportunities for these miniature power devices.
Discrete Roles for Impulsivity and Compulsivity in Gambling Disorder

Background and Objective: Complex associations between gambling disorder (GD) and impulsivity have been identified. However, little is known regarding how compulsivity associates with different impulsivity domains in GD. In this study, we examined associations between self-reported and behavioral measures of impulsivity–assessed through the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS-11) and the Experiential Discounting Task (EDT), respectively- and compulsivity-measured using the Padua Inventory and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), respectively-, in an adult sample with GD (N = 132, 94 men and 38 women, ages ranging from 18 to 69 years). GD severity was assessed using the South Oaks Gambling Screen. Methods: Structural Equation Modeling was used to examine relationships between impulsivity and compulsivity measures, age, and GD severity. Results: BIS-11 non-planning and BIS-11 total scores positively correlated with GD severity. The standardized coefficients for the SEM showed direct positive contributions of BIS-11 non-planning, Padua and EDT scores to GD severity. Only participants' ages directly contributed to WCST perseverative errors, and no direct or indirect effects were found with respect to GD severity. Conclusion: The findings suggest that specific aspects of impulsivity and compulsivity contribute to GD severity. Interventions specifically targeting domains that are most relevant to GD severity may improve treatment outcomes.
Heterosynaptic Plasticity and the Experience-Dependent Refinement of Developing Neuronal Circuits

Neurons remodel the structure and strength of their synapses during critical periods of development in order to optimize both perception and cognition. Many of these developmental synaptic changes are thought to occur through synapse-specific homosynaptic forms of experience-dependent plasticity. However, homosynaptic plasticity can also induce or contribute to the plasticity of neighboring synapses through heterosynaptic interactions. Decades of research in vitro have uncovered many of the molecular mechanisms of heterosynaptic plasticity that mediate local compensation for homosynaptic plasticity, facilitation of further bouts of plasticity in nearby synapses, and cooperative induction of plasticity by neighboring synapses acting in concert. These discoveries greatly benefited from new tools and technologies that permitted single synapse imaging and manipulation of structure, function, and protein dynamics in living neurons. With the recent advent and application of similar tools for in vivo research, it is now feasible to explore how heterosynaptic plasticity contribute to critical periods and the development of neuronal circuits. In this review, we will first define the forms heterosynaptic plasticity can take and describe our current understanding of their molecular mechanisms. Then, we will outline how heterosynaptic plasticity may lead to meaningful refinement of neuronal responses and observations that suggest such mechanisms are indeed at work in vivo. Finally, we will use a well-studied model of cortical plasticity—ocular dominance plasticity during a critical period of visual cortex development—to highlight the molecular overlap between heterosynaptic and developmental forms of plasticity, and suggest potential avenues of future research.
Analysis of Salivary Microbiome and Its Association With Periodontitis in Patients With Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Objectives This study aimed to analyze the periodontal conditions of patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) in relation to the salivary microbiome. Materials and Methods In total, 54 male adults (27 with OSA, 27 controls) completed this cross-sectional study. All participants were monitored by overnight polysomnography (PSG) and underwent full-mouth periodontal examination. Saliva samples were then collected, and the microbial 16S ribosomal RNA gene was sequenced. The data were analyzed to determine the microbial distribution and the community structure of the two groups. Results Demonstrated by alpha and beta diversity, the OSA group had a lower microbial richness and a lower observed species than the controls. There was no significant difference in the microbial species diversity or evenness between the OSA and the non-OSA groups. The OSA group had fewer operational taxonomic units (OTUs), and the distribution of microbiome showed that several gram-positive bacteria had higher abundance in the OSA group. As for periodontal pathogens, the relative abundance of Prevotella was significantly increased in the OSA group. No significant difference was observed in the relative abundance of other pathogens at either the genus or species level. Conclusions The salivary microbial community structure was altered in patients with OSA in terms of species richness and trans-habitat diversity, along with an increase in Prevotella, a specific periodontal pathogen. These findings might explain the high prevalence of periodontitis in OSA patients.
Gender Differences in the Association Between Cataract and Mental Health in Adults With Diabetes: A Cross-Sectional Analysis From the Spanish National Health Survey 2017

Objective: This study aimed to explore gender differences in the associations between cataracts and self-reported depression and chronic anxiety in Spanish adults with diabetes. Methods: Cross-sectional data from the Spanish Health Survey 2017 were analyzed. Inclusion criterion was a positive response to the question “Have you ever been diagnosed with diabetes? ” Diabetes, cataracts, depression and chronic anxiety were based on self-reported lifetime diagnosis. Multivariable logistic regression was conducted to assess the association between cataracts and depression or anxiety among respondents with diabetes, stratifying by gender. Results: Out of a total 23,089 respondents, 2,266 people self-reported suffering from diabetes (50.2% women; average age 69.7 ± 12.7 years; age range 15-98 years). In people with diabetes, the presence of cataracts was associated with significantly higher odds for depression (OR = 1.655; 95% CI = 1.295-2.115). Gender-stratified analyses showed that only women with cataracts were significantly associated with higher odds for depression (OR = 1.762; 95% CI = 1.307-2.374) and chronic anxiety (OR = 1.519; 95% CI = 1.067-2.163). Conclusion: Cataracts are a significant risk factor for depression and chronic anxiety in Spanish women with diabetes, but not in men. Women with both diabetes and cataracts require assessment for depression and chronic anxiety, and possibly earlier interventions in order to reduce the potential risk of further mental health complications.
Microorganisms in Whole Botanical Fermented Foods Survive Processing and Simulated Digestion to Affect Gut Microbiota Composition

Botanical fermented foods have been shown to improve human health, based on the activity of potentially beneficial lactic acid bacteria (LAB) and yeasts and their metabolic outputs. However, few studies have explored the effects of prolonged storage and functional spices on microbial viability of whole fermented foods from fermentation to digestion. Even fewer have assessed their impact on the gut microbiota. Our study investigated the effects of production processes on LAB and yeast microbial viability and gut microbiota composition. We achieved this by using physicochemical assessments and an in vitro gastrointestinal and a porcine gut microbiota model. In low-salt sauerkraut, we assessed the effects of salt concentration, starter cultures, and prolonged storage, and in tibicos, prolonged storage and the addition of spices cayenne, ginger, and turmeric. In both food matrices, LAB counts significantly increased (p<0.05), reaching a peak of 7–8 log cfu/g, declining to 1–1.5 log cfu/g by day 96. Yeast viability remained at 5–6 log cfu/g in tibicos. Ginger tibicos had significantly increased LAB and yeast viability during fermentation and storage (p<0.05). For maximum microbial consumption, tibicos should be consumed within 28days, and sauerkraut, 7weeks. Simulated upper GI digestion of both products resulted in high microbial survival rates of 70–80%. The 82% microbial survival rate of cayenne tibicos was significantly higher than other treatments (p<0.05). 16S rRNA sequencing of simulated porcine colonic microbiota showed that both spontaneously fermented sauerkraut and tibicos increase the relative abundance of Megasphaera 85-fold. These findings will inform researchers, producers, and consumers about the factors that affect the microbial content of fermented foods, and their potential effects on the gut.
Cost-Related Medication Nonadherence (CRN) on Healthcare Utilization and Patient-Reported Outcomes: Considerations in Managing Medicare Beneficiaries on Antidepressants

Background: Many patients face a financial burden due to their medications, which may lead to poor health outcomes. The behaviors of non-adherence due to financial difficulties, known as cost-related medication non-adherence (CRN), include taking smaller doses of drugs, skipping doses to make prescriptions last longer, or delaying prescriptions. To date, the prevalence of CRN remains unknown, and there are few studies about the association of CRN on self-reported healthcare utilization (Emergency room (ER) visits and outpatient visits) and self-reported health outcomes (health status and disability status) among older adults taking antidepressants. Objectives: The objectives were to 1) examine the CRN prevalence, and 2) determine the association of CRN on self-reported healthcare utilization and self-reported health outcomes. Methods: This study was a cross-sectional study of a sample of older adults from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) who reported having used antidepressants in 2017. Four logistic regressions were implemented to evaluate the association of CRN, and self-reported healthcare utilization and self-reported health outcomes. Results: The study identified 602 participants who were Medicare beneficiaries on antidepressants. The prevalence of CRN among antidepressant users was (16.61%). After controlling for covariates, CRN was associated with poorer self-reported outcomes but not statistically significant: general health status [odds ratio (OR): 0.67; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.39–1.16] and disability status (OR: 1.34; 95% CI: 0.83–2.14). In addition, CRN was associated with increased outpatient visits (OR: 1.89; 95% CI: 1.19–3.02), but not associated with ER visits (OR: 1.10; 95% CI: 0.69–1.76). Conclusion: For Medicare beneficiaries on antidepressants, CRN prevalence was high and contributed to more outpatient visits. The healthcare provider needs to define the reasoning for CRN and provide solutions to reduce the financial burden on the affected patient. Also, health care providers need to consider the factors that may enhance patient health status and healthcare efficiency.
Obfuscation Revealed: Leveraging Electromagnetic Signals for Obfuscated Malware Classification

The Internet of Things (IoT) is constituted of devices that are exponentially growing in number and in complexity. They use numerous customized firmware and hardware, without taking into consideration security issues, which make them a target for cybercriminals, especially malware authors. We will present a novel approach of using side channel information to identify the kinds of threats that are targeting the device. Using our approach, a malware analyst is able to obtain precise knowledge about malware type and identity, even in the presence of obfuscation techniques which may prevent static or symbolic binary analysis. We recorded 100,000 measurement traces from an IoT device infected by various in-the-wild malware samples and realistic benign activity. Our method does not require any modification on the target device. Thus, it can be deployed independently from the resources available without any overhead. Moreover, our approach has the advantage that it can hardly be detected and evaded by the malware authors. In our experiments, we were able to predict three generic malware types (and one benign class) with an accuracy of 99.82%. Even more, our results show that we are able to classify altered malware samples with unseen obfuscation techniques during the training phase, and to determine what kind of obfuscations were applied to the binary, which makes our approach particularly useful for malware analysts.
Heterogeneous-PAKE: Bridging the Gap between PAKE Protocols and Their Real-World Deployment

Two entities, who only share a password and communicate over an insecure channel, authenticate each other and agree on a large session key for protecting their subsequent communication. This is called the password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) protocol. PAKE protocol has been considered a suitable substitute for the prevailing hash-based authentication which is vulnerable to various attacks. However, vendors are discouraged by both its prohibitively computational overheads as well as integrating costs, leading to its limited use since being proposed. After carefully analyzing the general workflow of PAKE protocols, we present Heterogeneous-PAKE, an entire PAKE stack with high-performance and compatibility for both client-side and server-side for Web systems. Using SRP and SPAKE2+ as case studies, we conduct a series of comprehensive experiments, especially comparing with the conventional hash-based solutions to evaluate the Heterogeneous-PAKE. The implementation harvests high throughput on the server-side with over 240k, 70k, 30k, and 1,650k operations per second for SRP-1024, SRP-1536, SRP-2048, and SPAKE2+ respectively. Meanwhile, on most testing platforms, the latency is well controlled within user-acceptable bounds, especially the SPAKE2+ whose delay is less than 3x that of a traditional authentication approach based on Bcrypt. The empirical results demonstrate that the Heterogeneous-PAKE is a very economical (with only a GPU-ready server) and convenient (with an easy-to-integrate software stack without user participation or database rebuilding) solution for upgrading existing systems with high-performance PAKE services.
Efficient, Private and Robust Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) has demonstrated tremendous success in various mission-critical large-scale scenarios. However, such promising distributed learning paradigm is still vulnerable to privacy inference and byzantine attacks. The former aims to infer the privacy of target participants involved in training, while the latter focuses on destroying the integrity of the constructed model. To mitigate the above two issues, a few works recently explored unified solutions by utilizing generic secure computation techniques and common byzantine-robust aggregation rules, but there are two major limitations: 1) they suffer from impracticality due to efficiency bottlenecks, and 2) they are still vulnerable to various types of attacks because of model incomprehensiveness. To approach the above problems, in this paper, we present SecureFL, an efficient, private and byzantine-robust FL framework. SecureFL follows the state-of-the-art byzantine-robust FL method (FLTrust NDSS’21), which performs comprehensive byzantine defense by normalizing the updates’ magnitude and measuring directional similarity, adapting it to the privacy-preserving context. More importantly, we carefully customize a series of cryptographic components. First, we design a crypto-friendly validity checking protocol that functionally replaces the normalization operation in FLTrust, and further devise tailored cryptographic protocols on top of it. Benefiting from the above optimizations, the communication and computation costs are reduced by half without sacrificing the robustness and privacy protection. Second, we develop a novel preprocessing technique for costly matrix multiplication. With this technique, the directional similarity measurement can be evaluated securely with negligible computation overhead and zero communication cost. Extensive evaluations conducted on three real-world datasets and various neural network architectures demonstrate that SecureFL outperforms prior art up to two orders of magnitude in efficiency with state-of-the-art byzantine robustness.
On Key Reinstallation Attacks over 4G LTE Control-Plane: Feasibility and Negative Impact

This paper studies the feasibility of key reinstallation attacks in the 4G LTE network. It is well known that LTE uses session keys for confidentiality and integrity protection of its control-plane signaling packets. However, if the keys are not updated and counters are reset, key reinstallation attacks may arise. In this paper, we show that several design choices in the current LTE security setup are vulnerable to key reinstallation attacks. Specifically, on the control plane, the LTE security association setup procedures, which establish security between the device and the network, are disconnected. The keys are installed through one procedure, whereas their associated parameters (such as uplink and downlink counters) are reset through another different procedure. The adversary can thus exploit the disjoint security setup procedures, and launch the key stream reuse attacks. He consequently breaks message encryption, when he tricks the victim to use the same pair of keys and counter value to encrypt multiple messages. This control-plane attack hi-jacks the location update procedure, thus rendering the device to be unreachable from the Internet. Moreover, it may also deregister the victim from the LTE network. We have confirmed our findings with two major US operators, and found that such attacks can be launched with software-defined radio devices that cost about $299. We further propose remedies to defend against such threats.
Keeping Safe Rust Safe with Galeed

Rust is a programming language that simultaneously offers high performance and strong security guarantees. Safe Rust (i.e., Rust code that does not use the unsafe keyword) is memory and type safe. However, these guarantees are violated when safe Rust interacts with unsafe code, most notably code written in other programming languages, including in legacy C/C++ applications that are incrementally deploying Rust. This is a significant problem as major applications such as Firefox, Chrome, AWS, Windows, and Linux have either deployed Rust or are exploring doing so. It is important to emphasize that unsafe code is not only unsafe itself, but also it breaks the safety guarantees of ‘safe’ Rust; e.g., a dangling pointer in a linked C/C++ library can access and overwrite memory allocated to Rust even when the Rust code is fully safe. This paper presents Galeed, a technique to keep safe Rust safe from interference from unsafe code. Galeed has two components: a runtime defense to prevent unintended interactions between safe Rust and unsafe code and a sanitizer to secure intended interactions. The runtime component works by isolating Rust’s heap from any external access and is enforced using Intel Memory Protection Key (MPK) technology. The sanitizer uses a smart data structure that we call pseudo-pointer along with automated code transformation to avoid passing raw pointers across safe/unsafe boundaries during intended interactions (e.g., when Rust and C++ code exchange data). We implement and evaluate the effectiveness and performance of Galeed via micro- and macro-benchmarking, and use it to secure a widely used component of Firefox.