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Recent research yielded a wide array of drift detectors. However, in order to achieve remarkable performance, the true class labels must be available during the drift detection phase. This paper targets at detecting drift when the ground truth is unknown during the detection phase. To that end, we introduce Gaussian Split Detector (GSD) a novel drift detector that works in batch mode. GSD is designed to work when the data follow a normal distribution and makes use of Gaussian mixture models to monitor changes in the decision boundary. The algorithm is designed to handle multi-dimension data streams and to work without the ground truth labels during the inference phase making it pertinent for real world use. In an extensive experimental study on real and synthetic datasets, we evaluate our detector against the state of the art. We show that our detector outperforms the state of the art in detecting real drift and in ignoring virtual drift which is key to avoid false alarms.

Third-party software components like Log4J accelerate software application development but introduce substantial risk. These components have led to many software supply chain attacks. These attacks succeed because third-party software components are implicitly trusted in an application. Although several security defenses exist to reduce the risks from third-party software components, none of them fulfills the full set of requirements needed to defend against common attacks. No individual solution prevents malicious access to operating system resources, is dependency-aware, and enables the discovery of least privileges, all with low runtime costs. Consequently, they cannot prevent software supply chain attacks. This paper proposes applying the NIST Zero Trust Architecture to software applications. Our Zero Trust Dependencies concept applies the NIST ZTA principles to an application's dependencies. First, we assess the expected effectiveness and feasibility of Zero Trust Dependencies using a study of third-party software components and their vulnerabilities. Then, we present a system design, ZTDSYS, that enables the application of Zero Trust Dependencies to software applications and a prototype, ZTDJAVA, for Java applications. Finally, with evaluations on recreated vulnerabilities and realistic applications, we show that ZTDJAVA can defend against prevalent vulnerability classes, introduces negligible cost, and is easy to configure and use., Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables

Almost regular hexagonal arrays of a few micrometers tall and wide micropyramids consisting of soot nano-particles are formed on the surface of graphitized hollow filaments, which are resistively heated to ~1800$^\circ$C-2400$^\circ$C in an Ar atmosphere containing trace amounts of oxygen (~300 p.p.m.). At the higher temperatures (T>2300$^\circ$C, approximately) the soot particles are represented mainly by multi-shell carbon nano-onions. The height and the width of the pyramids is strongly dependent on the temperature of the resistive heating, diminishing from 5-10mkm at T=1800$^\circ$C to 1mkm at 2300-2400$^\circ$C. Quasi-hexagonal arrays of the micropyramids are organized in the convex ``craters'' on the surface of the microtubes, which grow with the time of the thermal treatment. The pyramids are pointing always normally to the surface of the craters, except at the boundaries between the craters, where the normal direction is not well defined. The pyramids are soft and can be easy destroyed by touching them, but can be hardened by heating them in the oxygen-free atmosphere. The pyramids are observed only on the exterior surface of the microtubes, but not on their inner surface. This suggests that the thermophoretic force generated by a strong temperature gradient near the external surface of the tubes may be the cause of the micropyramids formation. Electrostatic charging of the soot nanoparticles due to thermionic emission may also be relevant to this phenomenon. The micropyramids can function as field emission point sources, as demonstrated with the use of a micro-nanoprobing station, mounted in a scanning electron microscope., Comment: ACS Nano, In press

SAT research has a long history of source code and binary releases, thanks to competitions organized every year. However, since every cycle of competitions has its own set of rules and an adhoc way of publishing source code and binaries, compiling or even running any solver may be harder than what it seems. Moreover, there has been more than a thousand solvers published so far, some of them released in the early 90's. If the SAT community wants to archive and be able to keep track of all the solvers that made its history, it urgently needs to deploy an important effort. We propose to initiate a community-driven effort to archive and to allow easy compilation and running of all SAT solvers that have been released so far. We rely on the best tools for archiving and building binaries (thanks to Docker, GitHub and Zenodo) and provide a consistent and easy way for this. Thanks to our tool, building (or running) a solver from its source (or from its binary) can be done in one line.

We present the first acoustic side-channel attack that recovers what users type on the virtual keyboard of their touch-screen smartphone or tablet. When a user taps the screen with a finger, the tap generates a sound wave that propagates on the screen surface and in the air. We found the device's microphone(s) can recover this wave and "hear" the finger's touch, and the wave's distortions are characteristic of the tap's location on the screen. Hence, by recording audio through the built-in microphone(s), a malicious app can infer text as the user enters it on their device. We evaluate the effectiveness of the attack with 45 participants in a real-world environment on an Android tablet and an Android smartphone. For the tablet, we recover 61% of 200 4-digit PIN-codes within 20 attempts, even if the model is not trained with the victim's data. For the smartphone, we recover 9 words of size 7--13 letters with 50 attempts in a common side-channel attack benchmark. Our results suggest that it not always sufficient to rely on isolation mechanisms such as TrustZone to protect user input. We propose and discuss hardware, operating-system and application-level mechanisms to block this attack more effectively. Mobile devices may need a richer capability model, a more user-friendly notification system for sensor usage and a more thorough evaluation of the information leaked by the underlying hardware., Comment: Paper built on the MPhil thesis of Ilia Shumailov. 2017

Modern SAT solvers have experienced a remarkable progress on solving industrial instances. Most of the techniques have been developed after an intensive experimental process. It is believed that these techniques exploit the underlying structure of industrial instances. However, there are few works trying to exactly characterize the main features of this structure. The research community on complex networks has developed techniques of analysis and algorithms to study real-world graphs that can be used by the SAT community. Recently, there have been some attempts to analyze the structure of industrial SAT instances in terms of complex networks, with the aim of explaining the success of SAT solving techniques, and possibly improving them. In this paper, inspired by the results on complex networks, we study the community structure, or modularity, of industrial SAT instances. In a graph with clear community structure, or high modularity, we can find a partition of its nodes into communities such that most edges connect variables of the same community. In our analysis, we represent SAT instances as graphs, and we show that most application benchmarks are characterized by a high modularity. On the contrary, random SAT instances are closer to the classical Erd\"os-R\'enyi random graph model, where no structure can be observed. We also analyze how this structure evolves by the effects of the execution of a CDCL SAT solver. In particular, we use the community structure to detect that new clauses learned by the solver during the search contribute to destroy the original structure of the formula. This is, learned clauses tend to contain variables of distinct communities.

An increasing number of countries implement Internet censorship at different scales and for a variety of reasons. In particular, the link between the censored client and entry point to the uncensored network is a frequent target of censorship due to the ease with which a nation-state censor can control it. A number of censorship resistance systems have been developed thus far to help circumvent blocking on this link, which we refer to as link circumvention systems (LCs). The variety and profusion of attack vectors available to a censor has led to an arms race, leading to a dramatic speed of evolution of LCs. Despite their inherent complexity and the breadth of work in this area, there is no systematic way to evaluate link circumvention systems and compare them against each other. In this paper, we (i) sketch an attack model to comprehensively explore a censor's capabilities, (ii) present an abstract model of a LC, a system that helps a censored client communicate with a server over the Internet while resisting censorship, (iii) describe an evaluation stack that underscores a layered approach to evaluate LCs, and (iv) systemize and evaluate existing censorship resistance systems that provide link circumvention. We highlight open challenges in the evaluation and development of LCs and discuss possible mitigations., Comment: Content from this paper was published in Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETS), Volume 2016, Issue 4 (July 2016) as "SoK: Making Sense of Censorship Resistance Systems" by Sheharbano Khattak, Tariq Elahi, Laurent Simon, Colleen M. Swanson, Steven J. Murdoch and Ian Goldberg (DOI 10.1515/popets-2016-0028)

This paper presents an immersive application where users receive sound and visual feedbacks on their interactions with a virtual environment. In this application, the users play the part of conductors of an orchestra of factory machines since each of their actions on interaction devices triggers a pair of visual and audio responses. Audio stimuli were spatialized around the listener. The application was exhibited during the 2013 Science and Music day and designed to be used in a large immersive system with head tracking, shutter glasses and a 10.2 loudspeaker configuration., Comment: Sonic Interaction for Virtual Environments, Minneapolis : United States (2014)