Biblio

Fix pattern-based patch generation is a promising direction in Automated Program Repair (APR). Notably, it has been demonstrated to produce more acceptable and correct patches than the patches obtained with mutation operators through genetic programming. The performance of pattern-based APR systems, however, depends on the fix ingredients mined from fix changes in development histories. Unfortunately, collecting a reliable set of bug fixes in repositories can be challenging. In this paper, we propose to investigate the possibility in an APR scenario of leveraging code changes that address violations by static bug detection tools. To that end, we build the AVATAR APR system, which exploits fix patterns of static analysis violations as ingredients for patch generation. Evaluated on the Defects4J benchmark, we show that, assuming a perfect localization of faults, AVATAR can generate correct patches to fix 34/39 bugs. We further find that AVATAR yields performance metrics that are comparable to that of the closely-related approaches in the literature. While AVATAR outperforms many of the state-of-the-art pattern-based APR systems, it is mostly complementary to current approaches. Overall, our study highlights the relevance of static bug finding tools as indirect contributors of fix ingredients for addressing code defects identified with functional test cases.

Due to the large number of terminal nodes and wide deployment of power IOT, it is vulnerable to attacks such as physical hijacking, communication link theft and replay. In order to sense and measure the security risks and threats of massive power IOT terminals in real time, a security threat assessment for power IOT terminals based on knowledge graph was proposed. Firstly, the basic data, operation data and alarm threat data of power IOT terminal equipment are extracted and correlated, and the power IOT terminal based on knowledge graph is constructed. Then, the real-time monitoring data of the power IOT terminal is preprocessed. Based on the knowledge graph of the power IOT terminal, the safety analysis and operation analysis of the terminal are carried out, and the threat index of the power IOT terminal is perceived in real time. Finally, security operation and maintenance personnel make disposal decisions on the terminals according to the threat index of power IOT terminals to ensure the safe and stable operation of power IOT terminal nodes. The experimental results show that compared with the traditional IPS, the method can effectively detect the security threat of the power IOT terminal and reduce the alarm vulnerability rate.

In the big data cloud computing environment, data security issues have become a focus of attention. This paper delivers an overview of conceptions, characteristics and advanced technologies for big data cloud computing. Security issues of data quality and privacy control are elaborated pertaining to data access, data isolation, data integrity, data destruction, data transmission and data sharing. Eventually, a virtualization architecture and related strategies are proposed to against threats and enhance the data security in big data cloud environment.

In human-robot collaboration (HRC), human trust in the robot is the human expectation that a robot executes tasks with desired performance. A higher-level trust increases the willingness of a human operator to assign tasks, share plans, and reduce the interruption during robot executions, thereby facilitating human-robot integration both physically and mentally. However, due to real-world disturbances, robots inevitably make mistakes, decreasing human trust and further influencing collaboration. Trust is fragile and trust loss is triggered easily when robots show incapability of task executions, making the trust maintenance challenging. To maintain human trust, in this research, a trust repair framework is developed based on a human-to-robot attention transfer (H2R-AT) model and a user trust study. The rationale of this framework is that a prompt mistake correction restores human trust. With H2R-AT, a robot localizes human verbal concerns and makes prompt mistake corrections to avoid task failures in an early stage and to finally improve human trust. User trust study measures trust status before and after the behavior corrections to quantify the trust loss. Robot experiments were designed to cover four typical mistakes, wrong action, wrong region, wrong pose, and wrong spatial relation, validated the accuracy of H2R-AT in robot behavior corrections; a user trust study with 252 participants was conducted, and the changes in trust levels before and after corrections were evaluated. The effectiveness of the human trust repairing was evaluated by the mistake correction accuracy and the trust improvement.

Trust in autonomous teammates has been shown to be a key factor in human-autonomy team (HAT) performance, and anthropomorphism is a closely related construct that is underexplored in HAT literature. This study investigates whether perceived anthropomorphism can be measured from team communication behaviors in a simulated remotely piloted aircraft system task environment, in which two humans in unique roles were asked to team with a synthetic (i.e., autonomous) pilot agent. We compared verbal and self-reported measures of anthropomorphism with team error handling performance and trust in the synthetic pilot. Results for this study show that trends in verbal anthropomorphism follow the same patterns expected from self-reported measures of anthropomorphism, with respect to fluctuations in trust resulting from autonomy failures.

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, with its highly distributed and interconnected architecture, is gaining ground in Industry 4.0 and in critical infrastructures like the eHealth sector, the Smart Grid, Intelligent Power Plants and Smart Mobility. In these critical sectors, the preservation of metrological characteristics and their traceability is a strong legal requirement, just like cyber-security, since it offers the ground for liability. Any vulnerability in the system in which the metrological network is embedded can endanger human lives, the environment or entire economies. This paper presents a framework comprised of a methodology and some tools for the governance of the metrological chain. The proposed methodology combines the RAMI 4.0 model, which is a Reference Architecture used in the field of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), with the the Reference Model for Information Assurance & Security (RMIAS), a framework employed to guarantee information assurance and security, merging them with the well established paradigms to preserve calibration and referability of metrological instruments. Thus, metrological traceability and cyber-security are taken into account straight from design time, providing a conceptual space to achieve security by design and to support the maintenance of the metrological chain over the entire system lifecycle. The framework lends itself to be completely automatized with Model Checking to support automatic detection of non conformity and anomalies at run time.

The security of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has become a matter of great concern in recent years. The existence of security holes in the executable programs in the IoT devices has resulted in difficult to estimate security risks. For a long time, vulnerability detection is mainly completed by manual debugging and analysis, and the detection efficiency is low and the accuracy is difficult to guarantee. In this paper, the mainstream automated vulnerability analysis methods in recent years are studied, and a vulnerability detection algorithm based on symbol execution is presented. The detection algorithm is suitable for lightweight applications in small and medium-sized IoT devices. It realizes three functions: buffer overflow vulnerability detection, encryption reliability detection and protection state detection. The robustness of the detection algorithm was tested in the experiment, and the detection of overflow vulnerability program was completed within 2.75 seconds, and the detection of encryption reliability was completed within 1.79 seconds. Repeating the test with multiple sets of data showed a small difference of less than 6.4 milliseconds. The results show that the symbol execution detection algorithm presented in this paper has high detection efficiency and more robust accuracy and robustness.

A program is said to be isochronous if its running time does not depend on classified information. The programming languages literature contains much work that transforms programs to ensure isochronicity. The current state-of-the-art approach is a code transformation technique due to Wu et al., published in 2018. That technique has an important virtue: it ensures that the transformed program runs exactly the same set of operations, regardless of inputs. However, in this paper we demonstrate that it has also a shortcoming: it might add out-of-bounds memory accesses into programs that were originally memory sound. From this observation, we show how to deliver the same runtime guarantees that Wu et al. provide, in a memory-safe way. In addition to being safer, our LLVM-based implementation is more efficient than its original inspiration, achieving shorter repairing times, and producing code that is smaller and faster.

Arbitrary style transfer refers to generate a new image based on any set of existing images. Meanwhile, the generated image retains the content structure of one and the style pattern of another. In terms of content retention and style transfer, the recent arbitrary style transfer algorithms normally perform well in one, but it is difficult to find a trade-off between the two. In this paper, we propose the Deep Content Guidance Network (DCGN) which is stacked by content guidance (CG) layers. And each CG layer involves one position self-attention (pSA) module, one channel self-attention (cSA) module and one content guidance attention (cGA) module. Specially, the pSA module extracts more effective content information on the spatial layout of content images and the cSA module makes the style representation of style images in the channel dimension richer. And in the non-local view, the cGA module utilizes content information to guide the distribution of style features, which obtains a more detailed style expression. Moreover, we introduce a new permutation loss to generalize feature expression, so as to obtain abundant feature expressions while maintaining content structure. Qualitative and quantitative experiments verify that our approach can transform into better stylized images than the state-of-the-art methods.

To ensure organization business and resources sustainability, it is required to establish Business Continuity Management System (BCMS). A key component of BCMS is conducting drills, which enables the organization to assess its readiness, sustainability and resiliency with an adequate planning for business continuation of unforeseen circumstances. The testing of the business services and processes is crucial and failing to conduct drills would lead to improper response and recovery strategies which will result in major financial loses. The drills aim to evaluate IT organization response, IT services recovery, identify observations, lessons learned and areas of improvement. As a result, identified observations are shared with service owners and tracked by BCMS to ensure closing all observations. However, tracking observations in a traditional manual approach is always associated with several challenges. This paper presents our experience in planning, executing, and validating the process of drills, by illustrating how an organization could overcome manual approach challenges with an automated observation tracking system. Additionally, we present our solution results in terms of time management and cost saving.

Trust is vital to promoting human and robot collaboration, but like human teammates, robots make mistakes that undermine trust. As a result, a human’s perception of his or her robot teammate’s trustworthiness can dramatically decrease [1], [2], [3], [4]. Trustworthiness consists of three distinct dimensions: ability (i.e. competency), benevolence (i.e. concern for the trustor) and integrity (i.e. honesty) [5], [6]. Taken together, decreases in trustworthiness decreases trust in the robot [7]. To address this, we conducted a 2 (high vs. low anthropomorphism) x 4 (trust repair strategies) between-subjects experiment. Preliminary results of the first 164 participants (between 19 and 24 per cell) highlight which repair strategies are effective relative to ability, integrity and benevolence and the robot’s anthropomorphism. Overall, this paper contributes to the HRI trust repair literature.

The popularity of P2P (Peer-To-Peer) systems is increased tremendously due to massive increase in the Internet based applications. Initially, P2P systems were mainly designed for wired networks but today people are using more wireless networks and therefore these systems are gaining popularity. There are many wireless networks available today and WMNs (Wireless Mess Networks) are gaining popularity due to hybrid structure. People are using structured P2P systems-based applications within perimeter of a WMN. Structured P2P WMNs will assist the community to fetch the relevant information to accomplish their activities. There are inherent challenges in the structured P2P network and increased in wireless environment like WMNs. Structured P2P systems suffer from many challenges like lack of content availability, malicious content distribution, poor search scalability, free riding behaviour, white washing, lack of a robust trust model etc. Whereas, WMNs have limitations like mobility management, bandwidth constraint, limited battery power of user's devices, security, maintenance etc. in remote/ forward areas. We exploit the better possibility of content availability and search scalability in this paper. We propose replication schemes based on the popularity of content for structured P2P system applications in community based WMNs. The analysis of the performance shows that proposed scheme performs better than the existing replication scheme in different conditions.

Containers technology radically changed the ways for packaging applications and deploying them as services in cloud environments. According to the recent report on security predictions of 2020 by Trend Micro, the vulnerabilities in container components deployed with cloud architecture have been one of the top security concerns for development and operations teams in enterprises. Docker is one of the leading container technologies that automate the deployment of applications into containers. Docker Hub is a public repository by Docker for storing and sharing the Docker images. These Docker images are pulled from the Docker Hub repository and the security of images being used from the repositories in any cloud environment could be at risk. Vulnerabilities in Docker images could have a detrimental effect on enterprise applications. In this paper, the focus is on securing the Docker images using vulnerability centric approach (VCA) to detect the vulnerabilities. A set of use cases compliant with the NIST SP 800-190 Application Container Security Guide is developed for audit compliance of Docker container images with the OWASP Container Security Verification Standards (CSVS). In this paper, firs vulnerabilities of Docker container images are identified and assessed using the VCA. Then, a set of use cases to identify presence of the vulnerabilities is developed to facilitate the security audit of the container images. Finally, it is illustrated how the proposed use cases can be mapped with the requirements of the OWASP Container Security Verification Standards. The use cases can serve as a security auditing tool during the development, deployment, and maintenance of cloud microservices applications.

In this paper, we present FireBugs for Finding and Repairing Bugs based on security patterns. For the common misuse patterns of cryptography APIs (crypto APIs), we encode common cryptography rules into the pattern representations for bug detection and program repair regarding cryptography rule violations. In the evaluation, we conducted a case study to assess the bug detection capability by applying FireBugs to datasets mined from both open source and commercial projects. Also, we conducted a user study with professional software engineers at Mutual of Omaha Insurance Company to estimate the program repair capability. This evaluation showed that FireBugs can help professional engineers develop various cryptographic requirements in a resilient application.

With the continuous development of Internet technology, people pay more and more attention to private security. In particular, third-party tracking is a major factor affecting privacy security. So far, the most effective way to prevent third-party tracking is to create a blacklist. However, blacklist generation and maintenance need to be carried out manually which is inefficient and difficult to maintain. In order to generate blacklists more quickly and accurately in this era of big data, this paper proposes a machine learning system MFTrackerDetector against third-party tracking. The system is based on the theory of structural hole and only detects third-party trackers. The system consists of two subsystems, DMTrackerDetector and DFTrackerDetector. DMTrackerDetector is a JavaScript-based subsystem and DFTrackerDetector is a Flash-based subsystem. Because tracking code and non-tracking code often call different APIs, DMTrackerDetector builds a classifier using all the APIs in JavaScript as features and extracts the API features in JavaScript through dynamic analysis. Unlike static analysis method, the dynamic analysis method can effectively avoid code obfuscation. DMTrackerDetector eventually generates a JavaScript-based third-party tracker list named Jlist. DFTrackerDetector constructs a classifier using all the APIs in ActionScript as features and extracts the API features in the flash script through static analysis. DFTrackerDetector finally generates a Flash-based third-party tracker list named Flist. DFTrackerDetector achieved 92.98% accuracy in the Flash test set and DMTrackerDetector achieved 90.79% accuracy in the JavaScript test set. MFTrackerDetector eventually generates a list of third-party trackers, which is a combination of Jlist and Flist.

It is important to be able to establish formal performance bounds for autonomous systems. However, formal verification techniques require a model of the environment in which the system operates; a challenge for autonomous systems, especially those expected to operate over longer timescales. This paper describes work in progress to automate the monitor and repair of ROS-based autonomous robot software written for an apriori partially known and possibly incorrect environment model. A taint analysis method is used to automatically extract the dataflow sequence from input topic to publish topic, and instrument that code. A unique reinforcement learning approximation of MDP utility is calculated, an empirical and non-invasive characterization of the inherent objectives of the software designers. By comparing design (a-priori) utility with deploy (deployed system) utility, we show, using a small but real ROS example, that it's possible to monitor a performance criterion and relate violations of the criterion to parts of the software. The software is then patched using automated software repair techniques and evaluated against the original off-line utility.

Artificial intelligence has been widely used in industries such as smart manufacturing, medical care and home furnishings. Among them, the value of the application in communication security is very important. This paper makes a further exploration of the artificial intelligence technology and its application, and gives a detailed analysis of its development, standardization and the application.

To enable virtual machines (VMs) with a large amount of memory to be flexibly migrated, split migration has been proposed. It divides a large-memory VM into small pieces and transfers them to multiple hosts. After the migration, the VM runs across those hosts and exchanges memory data between hosts using remote paging. For such a split-memory VM, however, it becomes difficult to securely run intrusion detection systems (IDS) outside the VM using a technique called IDS offloading. This paper proposes VMemTrans to support transparent IDS offloading for split-memory VMs. In VMemTrans, offloaded IDS can monitor a split-memory VM as if that memory were not distributed. To achieve this, VMemTrans enables IDS running in one host to transparently access VM's remote memory. To consider a trade-off, it provides two methods for obtaining memory data from remote hosts: self paging and proxy paging. We have implemented VMemTrans in KVM and compared the execution performance between the two methods.

To reduce cost and ease maintenance, industrial control systems (ICS) have adopted Ethernetbased interconnections that integrate operational technology (OT) systems with information technology (IT) networks. This integration has made these critical systems vulnerable to attack. Security solutions tailored to ICS environments are an active area of research. Anomalybased network intrusion detection systems are well-suited for these environments. Often these systems must be optimized for their specific environment. In prior work, we introduced a method for assessing the impact of various anomaly-based network IDS settings on security. This paper reviews the experimental outcomes when we applied our method to a full-scale ICS test bed using actual attacks. Our method provides new and valuable data to operators enabling more informed decisions about IDS configurations.

Multiple techniques for modeling cybersecurity attacks and defense have been developed. The use of tree- structures as well as techniques proposed by several firms (such as Lockheed Martin's Cyber Kill Chain, Microsoft's STRIDE and the MITRE ATT&CK frameworks) have all been demonstrated. These approaches model actions that can be taken to attack or stopped to secure infrastructure and other resources, at different levels of detail.This paper builds on prior work on using the Blackboard Architecture for cyberwarfare and proposes a generalized solution for modeling framework/paradigm-based attacks that go beyond the deployment of a single exploit against a single identified target. The Blackboard Architecture Cyber Command Entity attack Route (BACCER) identification system combines rules and facts that implement attack type determination and attack decision making logic with actions that implement reconnaissance techniques and attack and defense actions. BACCER's efficacy to model examples of tree-structures and other models is demonstrated herein.

We present ClearTrack, a system that tracks meta-data for each primitive value in Java programs to detect and nullify a range of vulnerabilities such as integer overflow/underflow and SQL/command injection vulnerabilities. Contributions include new techniques for eliminating false positives associated with benign integer overflows and underflows, new metadata-aware techniques for detecting and nullifying SQL/command command injection attacks, and results from an independent evaluation team. These results show that 1) ClearTrack operates successfully on Java programs comprising hundreds of thousands of lines of code (including instrumented jar files and Java system libraries, the majority of the applications comprise over 3 million lines of code), 2) because of computations such as cryptography and hash table calculations, these applications perform millions of benign integer overflows and underflows, and 3) ClearTrack successfully detects and nullifies all tested integer overflow and underflow and SQL/command injection vulnerabilities in the benchmark applications.

The current study explored the influence of trust and distrust behaviors on performance, process, and purpose (trustworthiness) perceptions over time when participants were paired with a robot partner. We examined the changes in trustworthiness perceptions after trust violations and trust repair after those violations. Results indicated performance, process, and purpose perceptions were all affected by trust violations, but perceptions of process and purpose decreased more than performance following a distrust behavior. Similarly, trust repair was achieved in performance perceptions, but trust repair in perceived process and purpose was absent. When a trust violation occurred, process and purpose perceptions deteriorated and failed to recover from the violation. In addition, the trust violation resulted in untrustworthy perceptions of the robot. In contrast, trust violations decreased partner performance perceptions, and subsequent trust behaviors resulted in a trust repair. These findings suggest that people are more sensitive to distrust behaviors in their perceptions of process and purpose than they are in performance perceptions.

We present a fast dynamic graph data structure for the GPU. Our dynamic graph structure uses one hash table per vertex to store adjacency lists and achieves 3.4-14.8x faster insertion rates over the state of the art across a diverse set of large datasets, as well as deletion speedups up to 7.8x. The data structure supports queries and dynamic updates through both edge and vertex insertion and deletion. In addition, we define a comprehensive evaluation strategy based on operations, workloads, and applications that we believe better characterize and evaluate dynamic graph data structures.

This paper proposes a mathematical model for assessing the trustworthiness of the system condition prognosis. The set of mutually exclusive events at the time of predictive checking are analyzed. Correct and incorrect decisions correspond to events such as true-positive, false-positive, true-negative, and false-negative. General expressions for computing the probabilities of possible decisions when predicting the system condition at discrete times are proposed. The paper introduces the effectiveness indicators of predictive maintenance in the form of average operating costs, total error probability, and a posteriori probability of failure-free operation in the upcoming interval. We illustrate the developed approach by calculating the probabilities of correct and incorrect decisions for a specific stochastic deterioration process.

Existing systems allow manufacturers to acquire factory floor data and perform analysis with cloud applications for machine health monitoring, product quality prediction, fault diagnosis and prognosis etc. However, they do not provide capabilities to perform testing of machine tools and associated components remotely, which is often crucial to identify causes of failure. This paper presents a fault diagnosis system in a cyber-physical manufacturing cloud (CPMC) that allows manufacturers to perform diagnosis and maintenance of manufacturing machine tools through remote monitoring and online testing using Machine Tool Communication (MTComm). MTComm is an Internet scale communication method that enables both monitoring and operation of heterogeneous machine tools through RESTful web services over the Internet. It allows manufacturers to perform testing operations from cloud applications at both machine and component level for regular maintenance and fault diagnosis. This paper describes different components of the system and their functionalities in CPMC and techniques used for anomaly detection and remote online testing using MTComm. It also presents the development of a prototype of the proposed system in a CPMC testbed. Experiments were conducted to evaluate its performance to diagnose faults and test machine tools remotely during various manufacturing scenarios. The results demonstrated excellent feasibility to detect anomaly during manufacturing operations and perform testing operations remotely from cloud applications using MTComm.