1,720,952 research outputs found

    Clustering Malware's Network Behavior using Simple Sequential Features

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    Developing malware variants is extremely cheap for attackers because of the availability of various obfuscation tools. These variants can be grouped in malware families, based on information retrieved from their static and dynamic analysis. Dynamic, network-level analysis of malware shows its core behavior since it captures the interaction with its developer. On the other hand, increasingly more emphasis is given to using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) in order to cluster malware’s network behavior. However, DPI has severe privacy implications, as it involves inspecting payloads of the network traffic.This thesis presents an exploratory study, the aim of which is to characterize and cluster malware behavior using high-level, non-privacy-invasive, sequential features extracted from its network activity. The key intuition behind the proposed solution is that if the underlying infrastructure of distinct malware samples is similar, the order in which they perform certain actions should also be similar. The results of this research show that sequence clustering allows flexible and robust clusters, as opposed to using non-sequential features. The clusters themselves reveal interesting attacking capabilities, such as port scans, and the same Command and Control server responding to different malware families. Lastly, a comparison with clusters obtained from static analysis reveals that network-based clustering is far more qualified to determine the many behaviors exhibited by a single malware family, as well as behaviors common across multiple malware families.Computer Science | Cyber Securit

    Behaviour Modelling and Anomaly Detection in Smart-Home IoT Devices

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    The usage of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has been exponentially increasing and their security is often overlooked. Hackers exploit the vulnerabilities present to perform large scale attacks as well as to obtain privacy-sensitive information. Resource constraints combined with a lack of incentives for manufacturers makes it harder to implement security solutions part of these devices. This thesis aims at developing a system that monitors the behaviour of these IoT devices. Network traffic is captured and analysed as part of a network middle-box to model the behaviour of an IoT device. This traffic shows the interactions of the IoT device with other devices and hosts. By modelling the normal behaviour of a device, we can detect anomalies exhibited. Denial of Service attack was performed to evaluate the effectiveness of state machines in detecting anomalies. To verify the validity of state machines built based on network traffic in a laboratory setup, a test environment with a different setting was used. Traffic was captured from a smart home setting and used to validate the state machines. We show that state machines can be effectively used to model the behaviour of IoT devices at the packet level and can also be used to uniquely identify commands issued from smartphone to IoT device. They can also effectively distinguish attack traffic from normal traffic.Computer Science | Cyber Securit

    Investigating Type Declaration Mismatches in Python

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    Past research provided evidence that developers making code changes sometimes omit to update the related documentation, thus creating inconsistencies that may contribute to faults and crashes. In dynamically typed languages, such as Python, an inconsistency in the documentation may lead to a mismatch in type declarations only visible at runtime.With our study, we investigate how often the documentation is inconsistent in a sample of 239 methods from five Python open- source software projects. Our results highlight that more than 20% of the comments are either partially defined or entirely missing and that almost 1% of the methods in the analyzed projects contain type inconsistencies. Based on these results, we create a tool, PyID, to early detect type mismatches in Python documentation and we evaluate its performance with our oracle.Accepted Author ManuscriptSoftware Engineerin

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The 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

    Variations on the Author

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    “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

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    We 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

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    We 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

    Author Index

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    koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist

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    We have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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