9457575
Secure Mobile Code Execution Service
Mobile code refers to programs that come into a host computer over the network and start to execute with or without a user's knowledge or consent. Because these programs run in the execution context of the user that downloads them, they can issue any system calls that the user is allowed to make, and thus pose a serious security threat when they are malicious. Although many solutions have been proposed to solve the malicious mobile code problem, none of them are truly effective at striking a good balance between defeating zero-day attacks and minimizing disruption to the execution of legitimate applications. 
 
This paper describes a commercial system called SEES that secures the execution of mobile code that comes into a host computer as an email attachment or as a web document downloaded through an anchor link by running them on a separate guinea pig machine rather than on the user machine. Effectively, it takes an isolation approach to the secure mobile code execution problem. As a result, SEES guarantees that no malicious email attachments or web documents that act on behalf of the user that downloads them, can damage the resources of the user machine, or can leak any confidential information. In particular, even zero-day virus cannot cause any harms. We present the design, implementation and evaluation of SEES on the Windows platform, and contrast it with other existing approaches to the same problem.
9176644
Automated and safe vulnerability assessment
As the number of system vulnerabilities multiplies in recent years, vulnerability assessment has emerged as a powerful system security administration tool that can identify vulnerabilities in existing systems before they are exploited. Although there are many commercial vulnerability assessment tools in the market, none of them can formally guarantee that the assessment process never compromises the computer systems being tested. This paper proposes a featherweight virtual machine (FVM) technology to address the safety issue associated with vulnerability testing. Compared with other virtual machine technologies, FVM is designed to facilitate sharing between virtual machines but still provides strong protection between them. The FVM technology allows a vulnerability assessment tool to test an exact replica of a production-mode network service, including both hardware and system software components, while guaranteeing that the production-mode network service is fully isolated from the testing process. In addition to safety, the vulnerability assessment support system described in this paper can also automate the entire process of vulnerability testing and thus for the first time makes it feasible to run vulnerability testing autonomously and frequently. Experiments on a Windows-based prototype show that Nessus assessment results against an FVM virtual machine are identical to those against a real machine. Furthermore, modifications to the file system and registry state made by vulnerability assessment runs are completely isolated from the host machine. Finally, the performance impact of vulnerability assessment runs on production network services is as low as 3%
1810758
Display-only file server: a solution against information theft due to insider attack
Insider attack is one of the most serious cybersecurity threats to corporate America. Among all insider threats, information theft is considered the most damaging in terms of potential financial loss. Moreover, it is also especially difficult to detect and prevent, because in many cases the attacker has the proper authority to access the stolen information. According to the 2003 CSI/FBI Computer Crime and Security Survey, theft of proprietary information was the single largest category of losses in the 2003 survey totaling $70.1 million or 35% of the total financial loss reported in that survey. In this paper, we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of an industrial-strength solution called <i>Display-Only File Server</i> (DOFS), which can transparently and effectively stop information theft by insiders in most cases, even if the insiders have proper authorities to read/write the protected information. The DOFS architecture ensures that bits of a protected file never leave a DOFS server after the file is checked in and users can still interact with the protected files in the same way as if it is stored locally. Essentially, DOFS decouples "display access" from other types of accesses to a protected file by providing users only the "display image" rather than the bits of the files, and applies the thin-client computing model on existing client-server applications.
5882124
A feather-weight virtual machine for windows applications
Many fault-tolerant and intrusion-tolerant systems require the ability to execute unsafe programs in a realistic environment without leaving permanent damages. Virtual machine technology meets this requirement perfectly because it provides an execution environment that is both realistic and isolated. In this paper, we introduce an OS level virtual machine architecture for Windows applications called Feather-weight Virtual Machine (FVM), under which virtual machines share as many resources of the host machine as possible while still isolated from one another and from the host machine. The key technique behind FVM is namespace virtualization, which isolates virtual machines by renaming resources at the OS system call interface. Through a copy-on-write scheme, FVM allows multiple virtual machines to physically share resources but logically isolate their resources from each other. A main technical challenge in FVM is how to achieve strong isolation among different virtual machines and the host machine, due to numerous namespaces and interprocess communication mechanisms on Windows. Experimental results demonstrate that FVM is more flexible and scalable, requires less system resource, incurs lower start-up and run-time performance overhead than existing hardware-level virtual machine technologies, and thus makes a compelling building block for security and fault-tolerant applications.
6882751
Applications of a feather-weight virtual machine
A Feather-weight Virtual Machine (FVM) is an OS-level virtualization technology that enables multiple isolated execution environments to exist on a single Windows kernel. The key design goal of FVM is efficient resource sharing among VMs so as to minimize VM startup/shutdown cost and scale to a larger number of concurrent VM instances. As a result, FVM provides an effective platform for fault-tolerant and intrusion-tolerant applications that require frequent invocation and termination of dispensable VMs. This paper presents three complete applications of the FVM technology: scalable web site testing; shared binary service for application deployment and distributed Display-Only File Server (DOFS). To identify malicious web sites that exploit browser vulnerabilities, we use a web crawler to access untrusted sites, render their pages in multiple browsers each running in a separate VM, and monitor their execution behaviors. To allow Windows-based end user machines to share binaries that are stored, managed and patched on a central location, we run shared binaries in a special VM on the end user machine whose runtime environment is imported from the central binary server. To protect confidential files in a file server against information theft by insiders, we ensure that file viewing/editing programs run in a VM, which grants file content display but prevents file content from being saved on the host machine. In this paper, we show how to customize the generic FVM framework to accommodate the needs of the three applications, and present experimental results that demonstrate their performance and effectiveness.
2701730
Data Gathering with Tunable Compression in Sensor Networks
We study the problem of constructing a data gathering tree over a wireless sensor network in order to minimize the total energy for compressing and transporting information from a set of source nodes to the sink. This problem is crucial for advanced computationally intensive applications, where traditional "maximum" in-network compression may result in significant computation energy. We investigate a tunable data compression technique that enables effective trade-offs between the computation and communication costs. We derive the optimal compression strategy for a given data gathering tree and then investigate the performance of different tree structures for networks deployed on a grid topology, as well as general graphs. Our analytical results pertaining to the grid topology and simulation results pertaining to the general graphs indicate that the performance of a simple greedy approximation to the Minimal Steiner Tree (MST) provides a constant-factor approximation for the grid topology and good average performance on the general graphs. Although, theoretically, a more complicated randomized algorithm offers a polylogarithmic performance bound, the simple greedy approximation of MST is attractive for practical implementation.
12506111
A Case Study in Integrating Multiple E-commerce Standards via Semantic Web Technology
Internet business-to-business transactions present great challenges in merging information from different sources. In this paper we describe a project to integrate four representative commercial classification systems with the Federal Cataloging System (FCS). The FCS is used by the US Defense Logistics Agency to name, describe and classify all items under inventory control by the DoD. Our approach uses the ECCMA Open Technical Dictionary (eOTD) as a common vocabulary to accommodate all different classifications. We create a semantic bridging ontology between each classification and the eOTD to describe their logical relationships in OWL DL. The essential idea is that since each classification has formal definitions in a common vocabulary, we can use subsumption to automatically integrate them, thus mitigating the need for pairwise mappings. Furthermore our system provides an interactive interface to let users choose and browse the results and more importantly it can translate catalogs that commit to these classifications using compiled mapping results.
11987571
Predicting Future Customers via Ensembling Gradually Expanded Trees
Our LAMDAer team has won the 10th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) 2006 Data Mining Competition (open category) grand champion. This report presents our solution to the PAKDD 2006 Data Mining Competition. Following a brief description of the task, we discuss the difficulties of the task and explain the motivation of our solution. Then, we propose the Gradually Expanded Tree Ensemble (GetEnsemble) method, which handles the difficulties via ensembling expanded trees. We evaluated the proposed method and several other methods using AUC, and found the proposed method beats others in this task. Besides, we show how to obtain cues on which kind of second generation (2G) customers are likely to become third generation (3G) users with the proposed method.
5420099
A new approach to estimating the expected first hitting time of evolutionary algorithms
The expected first hitting time is an important issue in theoretical analyses of evolutionary algorithms since it implies the average computational time complexity. In this paper, by exploiting the relationship between the convergence rate and the expected first hitting time, a new approach to estimating the expected first hitting time is proposed. This approach is then applied to four evolutionary algorithms which involve operators of mutation, mutation with population, mutation with recombination, and time-variant mutation, respectively. The results show that the proposed approach is helpful for analyzing a broad range of evolutionary algorithms.
1336005
Supporting concurrent applications in wireless sensor networks
It is vital to support concurrent applications sharing a wireless sensor network in order to reduce the deployment and administrative costs, thus increasing the usability and efficiency of the network. We describe Melete 1 , a system that supports concurrent applications with efficiency, reliability, flexibility, programmability, and scalability. Our work is based on the Maté virtual machine [1] with significant modifications and enhancements. Melete enables reliable storage and execution of concurrent applications on a single sensor node. Dynamic grouping is used for flexible, on-the-fly deployment of applications based on contemporary status of the sensor nodes. The grouping procedure itself is programmed with the TinyScript language. A group-keyed code dissemination mechanism is also developed for reliable and efficient code distribution among sensor nodes. Both analytical and simulation results are presented to study the impact of several key parameters and optimization techniques on the code dissemination mechanism. Simulation results indicate satisfactory scalability of our techniques to both application code size and node density. The usefulness and effectiveness of Melete is also validated by empirical study.