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.
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%
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.
6135111
Design of an agent-based middleware for job matchmaking in teleworking community
In this paper, we proposed an agent-based middleware for Job Matchmaking in a teleworking community. We built an agent-based model of organizing distributed teleworkers for big projects and designed a multi-agent system that performs job matchmaking. The matchmaking agent can also carry out negotiation tasks to make a better match. The matchmaking agents use teleworkers' heuristics acquired dynamically through user interface agents to search for suitable working relationships among many participants in a teleworking community, who are also represented by agents.
8755762
FEM Based Numerical Analysis on the Temperature Field in Grind-hardening
The grind-hardening is a new type of surface modification technology, which utilizes the dissipated grinding heat for hardening the surface layer of the workpiece. Currently, most of the researchers studying the grind-hardening have used Design of Experiments approach, by varying grind-hardening processes parameters with a great deal of experiments which has significant degree of uncertainty of the results. In this paper, temporal and spatial temperature distributions of the workpiece are simulated based on the FEM (finite element method). The simulated hardness penetration depth is deduced from the local temperature distribution and the time history of workpiece and its martensitic phase transformation conditions. The numerical simulation results were validated with experimental data. The results of this research indicate that the finite element method can be used in temperature field simulation in the grind-hardening technology. Thus the experiment cost and time in grind-hardening can be reduced by FEM simulation of the grind-hardening temperature field.
6083994
On communication models for algorithm design in networked sensor systems: A case study,
Towards building a systematic methodology of algorithm design for applications of networked sensor systems, we formally define two link-wise communication models, the Collision Free Model (CFM) and the Collision Aware Model (CAM). While CFM provides ease of programming and analysis for high level application functionality, CAM enables more accurate performance analysis and hence more efficient algorithms through cross-layer optimization, at the expense of increased programming and analysis complexity. These communication models are part of an abstract network model, above which algorithm design and performance optimization is performed. We use the example of optimizing a probability based broadcasting scheme under CAM to illustrate algorithm optimization based on the defined models. Specifically, we present an analytical framework that facilitates an accurate modeling and analysis for the probability based broadcasting in CAM (PB_CAM). Our analytical results indicate that (1) the optimal broadcast probability for either maximizing the reachability within a given latency constraint or minimizing the latency for a given reachability constraint decreases rapidly with node density, and (2) the optimal probability for either maximizing the reachability with a given energy constraint or minimizing the energy cost for a given reachability constraint varies slowly between 0 and 0.1 over the entire range of the variations in node density. Our analysis is also confirmed by extensive simulation results.
39238334
Information Processing and Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks
Introduction of Wireless Sensor Networks Background Energy Models Information Processing within a Collocated Cluster Information Transportation over a Tree Substrate Information Routing with Tunable Compression.
15504838
Utilization-based heuristics for statically mapping real-time applications onto the HiPer-D heterogeneous computing system
Real-time applications continue to increase in importance as they are employed in various critical areas, such as command and control systems. These applications have traditionally required custom-made systems to execute them. Recently, with the widespread use of increasingly powerful commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products, some real-time system designers have started a shift from custom development to COTS-based systems to achieve lower costs and more flexible systems. This research investigates the problem of allocating real-time applications to a set of COTS heterogeneous machines connected together by a COTS high-speed network. The heuristics were implemented on the High Performance Distributed Computing Program's (HiPer-D) Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) testbed. At the specification of NSWC, the goal of this study is to design static resource allocation heuristics that balance the utilization of the computation and network resources in the HiPer-D system based on the system information provided. The broader goal is to maximize the time before dynamic reallocation is required for managing an increased workload at runtime.