2505382
Catalytic inference analysis: detecting inference threats due to knowledge discovery
Knowledge discovery in databases can be enhanced by introducing "catalytic relations" conveying external knowledge. The new information catalyzes database inference, manifesting latent channels. Catalytic inference is imprecise in nature, but the granularity of inference may be fine enough to create security compromises. Catalytic inference is computationally intensive. However, it can be automated by advanced search engines that gather and assemble knowledge from information repositories. The relentless information gathering potential of such search engines makes them formidable security threats. This paper presents a formalism for modeling and analyzing catalytic inference in "mixed" databases containing various precise, imprecise and fuzzy relations. The inference formalism is flexible and robust, and well-suited to implementation.
9161104
A Framework for High Assurance Security of Distributed Objects
High assurance security is difficult to achieve in distributed computer systems and databases because of their complexity, non-determinism and inherent heterogeneity. The practical application of formal methods is the key to high assurance security in open, distributed environments. This paper proposes the use of formal methods and a special layered architecture to achieve secure interoperation of heterogeneous distributed objects. The foundation is provided by ROC, a process calculus tailored for concurrent objects. Lying above ROC in the layered architecture is a meta-object model for creating object models with various programming constructs, mega-programming facilities and security mechanisms. Successive layers of the architecture represent more sophisticated toolkits for modeling distributed objects. Since each layer inherits ROC’s formal foundation, it automatically has an unambiguous semantics and supports verification.
15030633
Strata-Gem: risk assessment through mission modeling
Strata-Gem utilizes mission trees to perform risk assessments by linking an organization's objectives to the IT assets that implement them. Critical states are identified which indicate goals that a potential attacker can achieve to prevent each asset from completing its objectives. Those goals are then used as states to drive attack and fault tree analysis to determine the likelihood of an attack. This provides a quantitative risk measurement to be calculated for each asset, objective, and the overall organization.
43143623
Language Extensions for Programmable Security
Software developers rely on sophisticated programming language protection models and APIs to manifest security policies for Internet applications. These tools do not provide suitable expressiveness for finegrained, configurable policies. Nor do they ensure the consistency of a given policy implementation. Programmable security provides syntactic and semantic constructs in programming languages for systematically embedding security functionality within applications. Furthermore, it facilitates compile-time and run-time security-checking (analogous to type-checking). This paper introduces a methodology for programmable security by language extension, as well as a prototype model and implementation of JPAC, a programmable access control extension to Java.
16766690
Security policy coordination for heterogeneous information systems
Coordinating security policies in information enclaves is challenging due to their heterogeneity and autonomy. Administrators must reconcile the semantic diversity of data and security models before negotiating secure interoperation. This paper proposes an architecture that uses mediators and a primitive ticket-based authorization model to manage disparate policies in information enclaves. The formal foundation of the architecture facilitates static and dynamic analysis of global consistency and policy enforcement.
14508115
Redacting Digital Information from Electronic Devices
Redaction is the process of removing privileged information from a document before it is presented to other parties. This paper discusses the major issues associated with the redaction of digital information from electronic devices. A novel technique involving a tokenized representation is presented as a solution to digital redaction in legal proceedings.
7472011
PCFGs with Syntactic and Prosodic Indicators of Speech Repairs
A grammatical method of combining two kinds of speech repair cues is presented. One cue, prosodic disjuncture, is detected by a decision tree-based ensemble classifier that uses acoustic cues to identify where normal prosody seems to be interrupted (Lickley, 1996). The other cue, syntactic parallelism, codifies the expectation that repairs continue a syntactic category that was left unfinished in the reparandum (Levelt, 1983). The two cues are combined in a Treebank PCFG whose states are split using a few simple tree transformations. Parsing performance on the Switchboard and Fisher corpora suggests that these two cues help to locate speech repairs in a synergistic way.
5567072
Surprising Parser Actions and Reading Difficulty
An incremental dependency parser's probability model is entered as a predictor in a linear mixed-effects model of German readers' eye-fixation durations. This dependency-based predictor improves a baseline that takes into account word length, n-gram probability, and Cloze predictability that are typically applied in models of human reading. This improvement obtains even when the dependency parser explores a tiny fraction of its search space, as suggested by narrow-beam accounts of human sentence processing such as Garden Path theory.
59657780
Getting Useful Gender Statistics from English Text
Gender, understood as a lexical feature, is important for anaphora because it narrows down the number of possible referents involved in a typical pronoun resolution situation. This work describes an automatic method for obtaining reliable guesses about the gender of entities in a corpus using free text. By using a simple but unreliable anaphora algorithm repeatedly over a large corpus, the probable genders of referenced entities can be compiled and given a salience ranking. These statistics are an inexpensive way to add on gender-feature information to a statistical anaphora resolution algorithm.