1,720,961 research outputs found
Are All Firewall Systems Equally Powerful?
No full textFirewalls are a fundamental tool for managing and protecting computer networks. They not only permit specifying which packets are allowed to enter a network, but also how these packets are modified by translating IP addresses and performing port redirection (NAT). Many firewalls systems are available which provide different tools and configuration languages. In contrast with the intuition, the most widespread languages cannot express the same configurations, even when simple filtering and NAT transformations are considered. This paper formally investigates the power of firewall languages of the most used tools in Unix and Linux. In particular, we introduce two kinds of expressivity. The first concerns the ways a packet can be transformed by NAT. According to this criterion iptables is strictly more expressive than ipfw and pf that are equivalent. The second kind is more finer-grained and considers the dependencies among the management of all packets. Our results show that some configurations are expressible in a system, but not in another one. Indeed, iptables is incomparable with the others, and ipfw is more expressive than pf
Quantum Bisimilarity via Barbs and Contexts: Curbing the Power of Non-deterministic Observers
Full text linkPast years have seen the development of a few proposals for quantum extensions of process calculi. The rationale is clear: with the development of quantum communication protocols, there is a need to abstract and focus on the basic features of quantum concurrent systems, like CCS and CSP have done for their classical counterparts. So far, though, no accepted standard has emerged, neither for the syntax nor for the behavioural semantics. Indeed, the various proposals do not agree on what should be the observational properties of quantum values, and as a matter of fact, the soundness of such properties has never been validated against the prescriptions of quantum theory. To this aim, we introduce a new calculus, Linear Quantum CCS (lqCCS), and investigate the features of behavioural equivalences based on barbs and contexts. Our calculus can be thought of as an asynchronous, linear version of qCCS, which is in turn based on value-passing CCS. The combination of linearity and asynchronous communication fits well with the properties of quantum systems (e.g. the no-cloning theorem), since it ensures that each qubit is sent exactly once, precisely specifying which qubits of a process interact with the context. We exploit contexts to examine how bisimilarities relate to quantum theory. We show that the observational power of general contexts is incompatible with quantum theory: roughly, they can perform non-deterministic moves depending on quantum values without measuring (hence perturbing) them. Therefore, we refine the operational semantics in order to prevent contexts from performing unfeasible non-deterministic choices. This induces a coarser bisimilarity that better fits the quantum setting: (i) it lifts the indistinguishability of quantum states to the distributions of processes and, despite the additional constraints, (ii) it preserves the expressiveness of non-deterministic choices based on classical information. To the best of our knowledge, our semantics is the first one that satisfies the two properties above
Testing Quantum Processes
No full textThe recent development of quantum communication protocols calls for adequate modelling and verification techniques, which requires abstracting and focusing on the basic features of quantum concurrent systems. Several quantum process calculi and behavioural equivalences have been proposed to address this problem, but they are often incompatible with the prescriptions of quantum theory, as they implicitly define omniscient observers that are capable of exactly discriminating the state of a physical system, therefore contradicting the uncertainty principle. In this paper, we directly model these observational limitations by resorting to testing equivalence for a quantum capable version of CCS, building on the concrete actions and experiments that a real tester can perform. Thus, we obtain an equivalence notion pairing processes that cannot be distinguished by any physically implementable observer
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
MuAC: Access Control Language for Mutual Benefits
Full text linkIn a collaborative distributed environment, users own a set of private
resources that they possibly share with each other to achieve mutual advantages.
The access to resources is regulated by a policy defined by each user in
isolation, and independently of the others.
However, typical access control languages allow defining policies that only
check the roles or the attributes of the requesters and resources.
But they do not impose a fair exchange of access grants by taking into account what
requesters offer to others.
Here, we present MuAC, a logic-based access control language designed
for expressing mutuality. In particular, extit{MuAC} allows specifying conditions on what requesters must offer in exchange for using a particular resource
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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