waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
hypervisor support for identifying covertly executing binaries. hypervisors have been proposed as a security tool to defend against malware that subverts the os kernel. however, hypervisors must deal with the semantic gap between the low-level information available to them and the high-level os abstractions they need for analysis. to bridge this gap, systems have proposed making assumptions derived from the kernel source code or symbol information. unfortunately, this information is nonbinding - rootkits are not bound to uphold these assumptions and can escape detection by breaking them. in this paper, we introduce patagonix, a hypervisor-based system that detects and identifies covertly executing binaries without making assumptions about the os kernel. instead, patagonix depends only on the processor hardware to detect code execution and on the binary format specifications of executables to identify code and verify code modifications. with this, patagonix can provide trustworthy information about the binaries running on a system, as well as detect when a rootkit is hiding or tampering with executing code. we have implemented a patagonix prototype on the xen 3.0.3 hypervisor. because patagonix makes no assumptions about the os kernel, it can identify code from application and kernel binaries on both linux and windows xp. patagonix introduces less than 3% overhead on most applications.
autoises: automatically inferring security specification and detecting violations. the importance of software security cannot be overstated. in the past, researchers have applied program analysis techniques to automatically detect security vulnerabilities and verify security properties. however, such techniques have limited success in reality because they require manually provided code-level security specifications. manually writing and generating these code-level security specifications are tedious and error-prone. additionally, they seldom exist in production software. in this paper, we propose a novel method and tool, called autoises, which automatically infers security specifications by statically analyzing source code, and then directly use these specifications to automatically detect security violations. our experiments with the linux kernel and xen demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach - autoises automatically generated 84 security specifications and detected 8 vulnerabilities in the linux kernel and xen, 7 of which have already been confirmed by the corresponding developers.
helios: web-based open-audit voting. voting with cryptographic auditing, sometimes called open-audit voting, has remained, for the most part, a theoretical endeavor. in spite of dozens of fascinating protocols and recent ground-breaking advances in the field, there exist only a handful of specialized implementations that few people have experienced directly. as a result, the benefits of cryptographically audited elections have remained elusive. we present helios, the first web-based, open-audit voting system. helios is publicly accessible today: anyone can create and run an election, and any willing observer can audit the entire process. helios is ideal for on-line software communities, local clubs, student government, and other environments where trustworthy, secret-ballot elections are required but coercion is not a serious concern. with helios, we hope to expose many to the power of open-audit elections.
unidirectional key distribution across time and space with applications to rfid security. we explore the problem of secret-key distribution in unidirectional channels, those in which a sender transmits information blindly to a receiver. we consider two approaches: (1) key sharing across space, i.e., via simultaneously emitted values that may follow different data paths and (2) key sharing across time, i.e., in temporally staggered emissions. our constructions are of general interest, treating, for instance, the basic problem of constructing highly compact secret shares. our main motivating problem, however, is practical key management in rfid (radio-frequency identification) systems. we describe the application of our techniques to rfid-enabled supply chains and a prototype privacy-enhancing system.
all your iframes point to us. as the web continues to play an ever increasing role in information exchange, so too is it becoming the prevailing platform for infecting vulnerable hosts. in this paper, we provide a detailed study of the pervasiveness of so-called drive-by downloads on the internet. drive-by downloads are caused by urls that attempt to exploit their visitors and cause malware to be installed and run automatically. over a period of 10 months we processed billions of urls, and our results shows that a non-trivial amount, of over 3 million malicious urls, initiate drive-by downloads. an even more troubling finding is that approximately 1.3% of the incoming search queries to google's search engine returned at least one url labeled as malicious in the results page. we also explore several aspects of the drive-by downloads problem. specifically, we study the relationship between the user browsing habits and exposure to malware, the techniques used to lure the user into the malware distribution networks, and the different properties of these networks.
privacy-preserving location tracking of lost or stolen devices: cryptographic techniques and replacing trusted third parties with dhts. we tackle the problem of building privacy-preserving device-tracking systems--or private methods to assist in the recovery of lost or stolen internet-connected mobile devices. the main goals of such systems are seemingly contradictory: to hide the device's legitimately-visited locations from third-party services and other parties (location privacy) while simultaneously using those same services to help recover the device's location(s) after it goes missing (device-tracking). we propose a system, named adeona, that nevertheless meets both goals. it provides strong guarantees of location privacy while preserving the ability to efficiently track missing devices. we build a version of adeona that uses opendht as the third party service, resulting in an immediately deployable system that does not rely on any single trusted third party. we describe numerous extensions for the basic design that increase adeona's suitability for particular deployment environments.
multi-flow attacks against network flow watermarking schemes. we analyze several recent schemes for watermarking network flows based on splitting the flow into intervals. we show that this approach creates time dependent correlations that enable an attack that combines multiple watermarked flows. such an attack can easily be mounted in nearly all applications of network flow watermarking, both in anonymous communication and stepping stone detection. the attack can be used to detect the presence of a watermark, recover the secret parameters, and remove the watermark from a flow. the attack can be effective even if different the watermarks in different flows carry different messages. we analyze the efficacy of our attack using a probabilistic model and a markov-modulated poisson process (mmpp) model of interactive traffic. we also implement our attack and test it using both synthetic and real-world traces, showing that our attack is effective with as few as 10 watermarked flows. finally, we propose a countermeasure that defeats the attack by using multiple watermark positions.
netauth: supporting user-based network services. in user-based network services (ubns), the process servicing requests from user u runs under u's id. this enables (operating system) access controls to tailor service authorization to u. like privilege separation, ubns partitions applications into processes in such a way that each process' permission is minimized. however, because ubns fundamentally affects the structure of an application, it is best performed early in the design process. ubns depends on other security mechanisms, most notably authentication and cryptographic protections. these seemingly straightforward needs add considerable complexity to application programming. to avoid this complexity, programmers regularly ignore security issues at the start of program construction. however, after the application is constructed, ubns is difficult to apply since it would require significant structural changes to the application code. this paper describes easy-to-use security mechanisms supporting ubns, and thus significantly reducing the complexity of building ubns applications. this simplification enables much earlier (and hence more effective) use of ubns. it focuses the application developer's attention on the key security task in application development, partitioning applications so that least privilege can be effectively applied. it removes vulnerabilities due to poor application implementation or selection of security mechanisms. finally, it enables significant control to be externally exerted on the application, increasing the ability of system administrators to control, understand, and secure such services.
verifying compliance of trusted programs. in this paper, we present an approach for verifying that trusted programs correctly enforce system security goals when deployed. a trusted program is trusted to only perform safe operations despite have the authority to perform unsafe operations; for example, initialization programs, administrative programs, root network daemons, etc. currently, these programs are trusted without concrete justification. the emergence of tools for building programs that guarantee policy enforcement, such as security-typed languages (stls), and mandatory access control systems, such as user-level policy servers, finally offers a basis for justifying trust in such programs: we can determine whether these programs can be deployed in compliance with the reference monitor concept. since program and system policies are defined independently, often using different access control models, compliance for all program deployments may be difficult to achieve in practice, however. we observe that the integrity of trusted programs must dominate the integrity of system data, and use this insight, which we call the pidsi approach, to infer the relationship between program and system policies, enabling automated compliance verification. we find that the pidsi approach is consistent with the selinux reference policy for its trusted programs. as a result, trusted program policies can be designed independently of their target systems, yet still be deployed in a manner that ensures enforcement of system security goals.
multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping using particle filters. this paper describes an on-line algorithm for multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (slam). the starting point is the single-robot rao-blackwellized particle filter described by hähnel et al., and three key generalizations are made. first, the particle filter is extended to handle multi-robot slam problems in which the initial pose of the robots is known (such as occurs when all robots start from the same location). second, an approximation is introduced to solve the more general problem in which the initial pose of robots is not known a priori (such as occurs when the robots start from widely separated locations). in this latter case, it is assumed that pairs of robots will eventually encounter one another, thereby determining their relative pose. this relative attitude is used to initialize the filter, and subsequent observations from both robots are combined into a common map. third and finally, a method is introduced to integrate observations collected prior to the first robot encounter, using the notion of a virtual robot travelling backwards in time. this novel approach allows one to integrate all data from all robots into a single common map.
a filtered retrieval technique for structural information. we present a filtered retrieval technique for structural information on internet-scale knowledge such as large-scale xml data in the web. the technique evaluates xml standard queries on heterogeneous xml documents using information retrieval technique based on the relational tables in relational database management systems. the xml standard queries, xpath queries, in their general form are partial match queries, and these queries are particularly useful for searching documents of heterogeneous schemas. thus, our technique is geared for partial match queries expressed as the queries. this indexes the elements in label paths, which are sequences of node labels, like keywords in texts, and finds the label paths matching a given query.
intelligent embedded real-time software architecture for dynamic skill selection and identification in multi-shaped robots. this paper presents an intelligent embedded, modular software and hardware architecture for multi-shaped robots using real-time dynamic skill identification and selection. it is a layered architecture with reusable and reconfigurable modules, which can embed in an expert system as both hardware and software modules and demonstrated with snake robot and physically reconfigured four-legged robot as examples. the intelligent dynamic selection and synchronization of selected behaviors enable the mobile robot to perform many tasks in complex situations. the architecture proposed is applicable to multi-shaped robots, for dynamic selection of behaviors during reconfiguration, where the hardware and software modules can be reused during reconfiguration. related videos of these robots can be viewed at: http://rtlab.knu.ac.kr/robots.htm
efficient rfid authentication protocol for minimizing rfid tag computation. rfid systems have become vital technology for realizing ubiquitous computing environments. however, features of rfid systems present potential security and privacy problems. in an effort to resolve these problems, many kinds of security and privacy enhancement technologies have been researched. however, solutions produced to date still have flaws and are not sufficiently effective for real rfid systems such as the epcglobal network™. therefore, in this paper, to make rfid systems more secure and efficient, improved technology based on password, is proposed. the proposed technology combines an encryption algorithm with a password-derived key, and can be applied to low-cost rfid systems for enhancing the security and privacy of these systems.
approximate life cycle assessment of product concepts using a hybrid genetic algorithm and neural network approach. environmental impact assessment of products has been a key area of research and development for sustainable product development. many companies copy these trends and they consider environmental criteria into the product design process. life cycle assessment (lca) is used to support the decision-making for product design and the best alternative can be selected by its estimated environmental impacts and benefits. the need for analytical lca has resulted in the development of approximate lca. this paper presents an optimization strategy for approximate lca using a hybrid approach which incorporate genetic algorithms (gas) and neural networks (nns). in this study, gas are employed to select feature subsets to eliminate irrelevant factors and determine the number of hidden nodes and processing elements. in addition, gas will optimize the connection weights between layers of nn simultaneously. experimental results show that a hybrid ga and nn approach outperforms the conventional backpropagation neural network and verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
investigative data mining for counterterrorism. after the tragic events of 9/11, the concern about national security has increased significantly. however, law enforcement agencies, particularly in view of current emphasis on terrorism, increasingly face the challenge of information overload and lack of advanced, automated techniques for the effective analysis of criminal and terrorism activities. data mining applied in the context of law enforcement and intelligence analysis, called investigative data mining (idm), holds the promise of alleviating such problems. an important problem targeted by idm is the identification of terror/crime networks, based on available intelligence and other information. in this paper, we present an understanding to show how idm works and the importance of this approach in the context of terrorist network investigations and give particular emphasis on how to destabilize them by knowing the information about leaders and subgroups through hierarchical structure.
optimally pricing european options with real distributions. most option pricing methods use mathematical distributions to approximate underlying asset behavior. however, it is difficult to approximate the real distribution using pure mathematical distribution approaches. this study first introduces an innovative computational method of pricing european options based on the real distributions of the underlying asset. this computational approach can also be applied to expected value related applications that require real distributions rather than mathematical distributions. the contributions of this study include the following: a) it solves the risk neutral issue related to price options with real distributions, b) it proposes a simple method adjusting the standard deviation according to the practical need to apply short term volatility to real world applications and c) it demonstrates that modern databases are capable of handling large amounts of sample data to provide efficient execution speeds.
ubiquitous healthcare system using context information based on the dogf. this paper proposed the ubiquitous healthcare system using context information for the personalized healthcare services in a home network environment. the context information is generated by location, health, and home environment information collected from sensors/devices equipped in home. this system is designed on the distributed object group framework (dogf) supporting the functions which manage context information, applications and devices as one or more logical units in healthcare home environment. especially, the system provides the continuous healthcare multimedia service by generating the context information based on resident's location through the mobile proxy and the context provider as components of the dogf. for verifying the execution of our system, we implemented the seamless multimedia service, the prescription/advice service and the schedule notification/alarm service according to a healthcare scenario in home. finally, we showed the execution results of healthcare home services by using service devices existed in the residential space.
moving cast shadow elimination algorithm using principal component analysis in vehicle surveillance video. moving cast shadows on object distort figures which causes serious detection deficiency and analysis problems in its related applications. thus, shadow removal plays an important role for robust object extraction from surveillance videos. in this paper, we propose an algorithm to eliminate moving cast shadow that uses features of color information about foreground and background figures. the significant information among the features of shadow, background and object is extracted by pca transformation and tilting coordinates system. by appropriate analyses of the information, we found distributive characteristics of colors from the tilted pca space. with this new color space, we can detect moving cast shadow and remove them effectively.
real-time travel time estimation using automatic vehicle identification data in hong kong. this paper proposes a real-time traveler information system (rtis) for estimating current travel times using automatic vehicle identification (avi) data in hong kong. the current travel times, in rtis, are estimated by real-time avi data, the off-line travel time estimates and the related variance-covariance relationships between road links. the real-time avi data adopted for rtis are autotoll tag data in hong kong; whereas the off-line link travel time estimates and their variance-covariance matrices are obtained from a traffic flow simulator. on the basis of integration of these real-time and off-line traffic data, the current traffic conditions on hong kong major roads can be estimated at five-minute intervals. a case study is carried out in kowloon central urban area to collect observed data for validation of the results of the proposed rtis.
a frequency adaptive packet wavelet coder for still images using cnn. we present the packet wavelet coder implemented with cellular neural network architecture as an example of the applications of cellular neural networks. this paper also demonstrates how the cellular neural universal machine (cnnum) architecture can be extended to image compression. the packet wavelet coder performs the operation of image compression, aided by cnn architecture. it uses the highly parallel nature of the cnn structure and its speed outperforms traditional digital computers. in packet wavelet coder, an image signal can be analyzed by passing it through an analysis filter banks followed by a decimation process, according to the rules of packet wavelets. the simulation results indicate that the quality of the reconstructed image is improvised by using packet wavelet coding scheme.
design and implementation of a performance analysis and visualization toolkit for cluster environments. the low cost and wide availability of pc-based clusters have made them excellent alternatives to supercomputing. however, while network of workstations are readily available, there is an increasing need for performance tools that support these computing platforms in order to achieve even higher performance. strategies that may be considered toward such performance achievement we may list are: performance data analysis, algorithm design, parallel program restructuring, among others. introduced in this paper is a toolkit that generates performance data and graphical charts of pure mpi, pure openmp, as well as hybrid mpi/openmp parallel applications, reflecting to its sequence of execution over time and cache behavior, with the use of dp*graph representation, a parallel version of timing graph. that is, parallel applications have their execution sequence in a cluster system platform shown through graphical charts composed by sequential codes, parallel threads, dependencies and communication structures, symbols defined in dp*graph. it is discussed the implementation of this toolkit, as also some of its features, together with experimental use of the toolkit on parallel applications such as matrix multiplication (parallel implementation using mpi) and spice3 (parallel implementation using openmp).
load balancing using dynamic replication scheme for the distributed object group. corba is the most widely used middleware for implementing distributed application. currently, object implementations facilitate object group model to organize the object services. in addition to the complexity of designing the object groups, researchers also seek to improve the quality of service (qos) by various means such as implementing load balancing to the system. this paper deals with the proposed load balancing service of distributed object groups. the proposed load balancing service uses the dynamic replication scheme which is mechanized by flow balance assumption (fba) that derives from the arrival and service rate to execute request forwarding to new objects. the proposed on-demand replication scheme adjusts the number of replicated objects based on the arrival rate to minimize the waiting time of clients. it consists of procedures such as intercepting the request and executing on-demand activation of objects. the result of the simulation shows the improvement of the total mean client request completion time of the system as compared to other load balancing schemes.