IEEE Online
PrePrint: Deterring Strategic Cyber Attack
Security & Privacy - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
Protecting critical infrastructure from interstate cyberattack is a matter of considerable concern. Can deterrence play a role in such protection? This article examines the elements of nuclear deterrence—the most elaborated and successful version of deterrence—and looks for lessons that might be adapted to the cyber case. It finds little overlap under current circumstances, though that might change in the aftermath of an extensive, destructive cyberattack. The most effective, but challenging, means of protecting the cyber-dependent infrastructure is comprehensive defense (deterrence by denial), which was impractical in the nuclear regime. Existing legal norms, particularly those related to controlling collateral damage, may have some deterrent effect, and a new international agreement may be an option, but one with several difficult issues.
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: Provable Security in the Real World
Security & Privacy - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
Provable Security is sometimes portrayed as having revolutionised Cryptography, transforming it from an art into a science. Three decades after the inception of Provable Security, is this transition complete? Are cryptanalysts out of business? If so, why do we still hear about attacks against real-world cryptographic systems?
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: A Vision for Scalable Trustworthy Computing
Security & Privacy - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
The cybersecurity landscape consists of an ad hoc patchwork of solutions [1]. Optimal cybersecurity is considered “hard,” for various reasons: complexity, immense data and processing requirements, resource-agnostic cloud computing, practical time-space-energy constraints, inherent flaws in “Maginot Line” defenses as well as the growing number and sophistication of attacks. We begin by defining and abstracting the high priority problems including a crosswalk of the potential and co-opted solution space. Within that space, we claim that achieving scalable trustworthy computing and communications is possible via real-time knowledge-based decisions about cyber trust. Our vision is based on the human-physiology-immunity (HPI) metaphor and the human brain’s ability to extract knowledge from data and information. We outline some future steps toward scalable trustworthy systems requiring a long-term commitment to solve the well-known “hard problems.”
Cloud computing - Computing - Technology - Maginot Line - Data
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: Thresholds for Cyberwarfare
Security & Privacy - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
The use of network technologies and the exploitation of cyberspace for intelligence and attack has become a normal part of military activity. Questions persist as to the appropriate framework for considering this new mode of conflict, but to a degree these questions result from weak data, imprecise terminology and a certain reluctance to abandon the notion that cyber conflict is unique and sui generis, rather than being just another mode of attack. This essay will review the utility and use of cyber attack in armed conflicts, thresholds for considering a cyber exploit as the use of force, the applicability of existing laws of armed conflict to cyber attack, and the political implications of “strategic” versus “tactical” applications of cyber exploits during conflict.
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: Security Modeling and Analysis
Security & Privacy - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
This article describes a uniform approach for evaluating the security of systems and illustrates the approach by summarizing three past case studies. Security modeling centers on identifying the behavior of the system of interest (including any security defenses), the power of the system adversary, and the properties that constitute security of the system. Once a security model is clearly defined, security analysis proceeds by evaluating whether the adversary, interacting with the system, is able to defeat the desired security properties. While we illustrate security analysis using model checking, various forms of analysis methods and tools can be used to evaluate system security, including manual and automated theorem proving tools that provide assurance about absence of attacks within a specified threat model. Security modeling and analysis also provide a basis for comparative evaluation and some forms of security metrics.
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: On Adversary Models and Compositional Security
Security & Privacy - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
We outline a theory of compositional security, addressing a recognized scientific challenge. Contemporary systems are built up from smaller components. However, even if each component is secure in isolation, the composed system may not achieve the desired security property: an adversary may exploit complex interactions between components to compromise security. The goal of a theory of compositional security is to identify relationships among systems, adversaries and properties such that precisely defined composition operations over systems and adversaries preserve security properties. In presenting our theory, we describe our model for general classes of systems, adversaries and security properties. We then present composition results (relationships) in this model. We also discuss how our theory explains a number of specific attacks found in the wild and how it can serve as the basis for predicting whether security properties of systems will be preserved as adversaries come up with new attacks.
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: Secure Software Installation on Smartphones
Security & Privacy - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
We look at the four main smartphone platforms (Symbian, Apple iOS, Android, Blackberry) and how each achieves software installation through their respective app markets (app stores), with focus on the security- related issues. We also provide a generic classification of (3) software installation approaches that they fit into, and a detailed (but still high-level) overview of the steps involved in vetting applications, by those controlling the markets (Apple, Symbian, etc.).
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: Building An Active Computer Security Ethics Community
Security & Privacy - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
The profound statements of the Declaration of Helsinki and Belmont Report motivated a rich and active discipline of bioethics growing alongside traditional biomedical research. Unfortunately, no equivalently active ethics discipline has parallelled the growth of computer security research, where serious ethical challenges are regularly raised by studies of increasingly sophisticated security threats (e.g., worms, botnets, phishing). In this absence, program committees and funding agencies are routinely asked to judge the acceptability of our research studies. Such judgments are often difficult due to a lack of community consensus on ethical standards, disagreement about who should enforce standards and how, and limited experience applying ethical decision-making methods. This article motivates the need for such a community, touching on the extensive field of ethical decision making, examining existing ethical guidelines and enforcement mechanisms used by the computer security research community, and calling our community to joint action to address this broad challenge.
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: Comparative Analysis of Intrusion-Tolerant System Architectures
Security & Privacy - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
Today, institutions want to build open systems and provide services to the public via the Internet. Such systems would potentially expose security vulnerabilities, and become susceptible to attacks. Therefore, security is critical in order to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability for system data and services. With increasing sophistication of security attacks the protection of open system is more challenging. Intrusion tolerance should be part of the overall defense in-depth security solution. In this paper, we will study and compare different approaches to intrusion-tolerant system architectures, focusing on three different lines of approach. The case study of an Open Archival Information System will be used to illustrate the security features of those architectures in the face of malicious attacks. We also include a qualitative and comparative analysis with respect to confidentiality, integrity, availability, and data ex-filtration.
Security - Open Archival Information System - Confidentiality - Data - Intrusion Detection Systems
Categories: IEEE Online
IEEE Security and Privacy - March/April 2011 (Vol. 9, No. 2)
Security & Privacy - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: Knowledge Infusion from Open Knowledge Sources: an Artificial Player for a Language Game
Intelligent Systems - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
This paper presents a strategy for enhancing systems which perform tasks requiring human-level intelligence by providing them with the linguistic and cultural knowledge typically prerogative of human beings. The idea is to define a knowledge infusion process which analyzes unstructured information stored in open knowledge sources on the Web to create a memory of linguistic competencies and world facts that can be effectively exploited by the system for a deeper understanding of the information it deals with. We present OTTHO – On the Tip of my THOught – a system which implements that process for solving a challenging language game, called Guillotine, which demands knowledge covering a broad range of topics. Experiments show promising results, and our feeling is that the approach has a great potential for other more practical applications besides language games.
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: Using Social Media to Predict Future Events with Agent-based Markets
Intelligent Systems - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
We propose agent-based prediction markets, i.e. markets that use agents instead of human participants. Agents extract user sentiments and assessments available on social media and use them in order to make informed transactions that enable the prediction of future events. By combining an agent-based approach with information available on social media we were able to match the predictive accuracy of human-based PMs without the need to recruit and incentivize humans.
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: Searching the Long Tail of Social Media Streams on the Web
Intelligent Systems - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
Information is increasingly being distributed in the form of dynamic streams instead of static web pages. It began with news RSS feeds, but with the emergence of social media services such as twitter and facebook, now encompasses instant status updates as well as shared links to various types of web content. While one of the challenging tasks in using such stream based services is to search quality streams of interests, existing work has mainly focused on the retrieval models for individual posts or classification frameworks for blogs, leaving the problems arising in building a dedicated stream search engine in real-world settings largely unexplored. This paper presents a novel stream search engine, named FeedMil, that can satisfy the need for retrieving quality streams of topical relevance for the purpose of subscription. Through addressing the issues unique to the stream search problem, FeedMil is able to give a new search experience that is focused on quality and topic relevance beyond just a sim-ple query matching, enabling users to quickly discover high quality but less popular streams located in the long tail of millions of streams.
Web search engine - Social media - Search - Long Tail - World Wide Web
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: Knowledge Consolidation and Inference in the Integrated Neuro-Cognitive Architecture
Intelligent Systems - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
Current technological progress is rendering our environment ever more incomprehensible. One key role of artificial intelligence is thus to make machines easier to build and to use, by realizing truly natural communication and human-like cognition. Accordingly, cognitive architectures are increasingly investigated as blueprints for building intelligent agents, aiming to achieve human-level, general intelligence. Many cognitive architectures have been proposed over the years, of varying types, abilities and complexity. Yet, there remains a need to further develop salient traits such as self-organization, scalability, and metacognition. Here we present an Integrated Neuro-Cognitive Architecture (INCA) that emulates the putative functional aspects of various major brain systems via a learning memory modeling approach. INCA features scalable structural/parameter self-organizing mechanisms to form high-level symbolic knowledge from low-level data and knowledge exploitation mechanisms based on plausible consolidation and inference cycles, respectively. Some promising results are given as illustration.
Artificial intelligence - Cognition - Brain - Social Sciences - Philosophy
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: Product Feature Grouping for Opinion Mining Using Soft-Constraints and EM
Intelligent Systems - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
In opinion mining of product reviews, one often wants to produce a summary of opinions based on product features/attributes. However, for the same feature, people can express it with different words and phrases. To produce a meaningful summary, these words and phrases, which are domain synonyms, need to be grouped under the same feature group. This paper proposes a constrained semi-supervised learning method to solve the problem. Experimental results using reviews from five different domains show promising results. It outperforms the state-of-the-art existing methods by a large margin.
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: Assembling Learning Objects for Personalized Learning. An AI Planning Perspective
Intelligent Systems - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
The aim of educational systems is to assemble learning objects on a set of topics tailored to the goals and individual students' styles. Given the amount of available learning objects, the challenge of e-learning is to select the proper objects, define their relationships, and adapt their sequencing (i.e. course composition) to the specific needs, objectives and background of the student. This paper describes the general requirements for this course adaptation, the full potential of applying planning techniques on the construction of personalized e-learning routes, and how to accommodate the temporal and resource constraints to make the course applicable in a real scenario.
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: Demand Response Management in Power Systems Using a Particle Swarm Optimization Approach
Intelligent Systems - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
Demand response (DR) is not a new concept but it is gaining a growing focus of attention in nowadays electric power systems operation and planning, with several advantages for the reliable power system functioning and for electricity prices. In this paper, price-based DR is applied to electricity consumers through the management of electricity prices. This management is based on demand elasticity and consumers are expected to react enabling to accomplish the required load reduction. The methodology is implemented in a developed DR simulator – DemSi - that uses PSCAD® for technical validation of solutions and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for solution optimization. The performance of PSO is evaluated in terms of running time and obtained solutions in comparison with the Non-Linear Programming (NLP) solutions obtained in GAMS™. Case studies involving 32 and 320 consumers are used to illustrate the proposed methodology and to discuss its performance.
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: Adaptive System for Collaborative Online Laboratories.
Intelligent Systems - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
In the last decade, researchers in the Online Engineering field have attempted to provide hands-on, web-based approaches for Distance Learning. The primary goal of this research is to produce Online Laboratories that serve as the eduational substitute for in situ Laboratories for Distance Learning. A limitation of existing Online Laboratories, however, is that they generally only allow a single user to be connected at a time. Since group learning activities, such as peer assistance, peer emulation, and collaborative experimental setup, are core dimensions of the traditional laboratory experience, this shortcoming is a significant pedagogical bottleneck. Recent research has focused on creating Collaborative Online Laboratories (COL) which attempt to address this shortcoming by focusing on the group awareness aspect of the laboratory learning experience. This paper discusses how group awareness can serve as a key component in replicating the collaborative aspect of learning in local laboratories. We discuss strategies for describing group awareness and how these strategies are associated both with a tutor's pedagogical objectives and in the management of the group of collaborating students. We describe an experimental system that we have developed that uses Semantic Web technologies to define a knowledge-driven system that allows researchers to describe and execute a variety of collaborative strategies for online laboratories.
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: Mining Inhibition Pathways for Protein Kinases on Skeletal Muscle
Intelligent Systems - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
Protein kinases have played a central role in regulating many cellular pathways. A deep study into the degree of activation and inhibition of catalytic and regulatory subunits of protein kinases assists in understanding their profound effect on a cell. The inhibitors of kinase activity are a frequent cause of diseases, where kinases participate in many aspects that control cell growth, movement and death. Thus, it is critical to discover the inhibition pathways for protein kinases as well as positive patterns. This article develops an innovative methodology for negative rule association, X →¬Y for investigating the potential inhibitive regulatory correlation between the subunit isoforms of AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), and the stimulus factors. The rules present the pathways that have biological meaning and some were previously unknown. This not only prompts a comprehensive understanding of signalling pathways of protein kinase but also provides an attractive pharmacological target for disease treatment.
Categories: IEEE Online
PrePrint: Word Sense Disambiguation with Automatically Acquired Knowledge
Intelligent Systems - Sat, 04/16/2011 - 02:58
Word sense disambiguation is the process of determining which sense of a word is used in a given context. Due to its importance in understanding semantics and many real-world applications, word sense disambiguation has been extensively studied in Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics. However, existing methods either narrowly focus on a few specific words due to their reliance on expensive manually annotated training text, or give only mediocre performance in real-world settings. Broad coverage and disambiguation quality are critical for real-world natural language processing applications. In this paper we present a fully automatic disambiguation method that utilizes two readily available knowledge sources: a dictionary and knowledge extracted from unannotated text. Such an automatic approach overcomes the knowledge acquisition bottleneck suffered and makes broad-coverage word sense disambiguation feasible in practice. Evaluated with two large scale WSD evaluation corpora, our system significantly outperforms the best unsupervised system and achieves the similar performance as the top-performing supervised systems.
Categories: IEEE Online
