An Application of Jeeves for Honeypot Sanitization

Being able to quickly create realistic honeypots is very useful for obtaining accurate information about attacker behavior. However, creating realistic honeypots requires sanitization of the original system from which the honeypot is derived. To achieve this the use of the Jeeves, a language based on faceted values, is extended to rapidly replace secret values with believable and non-interfering sanitized values. By making several changes to the source code of Jelf, a web server implemented in Jeeves, we are able to quickly and easily create sanitized honeypots. Our experiments show that the sanitized and unsanitized versions of Jelf only differ in response times by less than 1%

A Comparison of Transfer Learning Algorithms for Defect and Vulnerability Detection

Machine learning techniques for defect and vulnerability detection have the potential to quickly direct developers' attention to software components with faulty implementations. Effective application of such defect prediction methods in practical software development environments requires transfer learning algorithms so that models built using existing projects can recognize defects as they emerge in a new project. Up until this study, comparing the efficacy of transfer learning algorithms was challenging because previous studies used differing data sets, baselines, and performance metrics. By providing open source implementations and baseline performance metrics for several transfer learning algorithms on two different data sets, our project offers software engineers the tools to objectively compare methods and readily identify top performing transfer learning algorithms in the domain of both vulnerability and defect prediction

Sensitivity and Specificity of Multiple Kato-Katz Thick Smears and a Circulating Cathodic Antigen Test for Schistosoma mansoni Diagnosis Pre- and Post-repeated-Praziquantel Treatment

Two Kato-Katz thick smears (Kato-Katzs) from a single stool are currently recommended for diagnosing Schistosoma mansoni infections to map areas for intervention. This ‘gold standard’ has low sensitivity at low infection intensities. The urine point-of-care circulating cathodic antigen test (POC-CCA) is potentially more sensitive but how accurately they detect S. mansoni after repeated praziquantel treatments, their suitability for measuring drug efficacy and their correlation with egg counts remain to be fully understood. We compared the accuracies of one to six Kato-Katzs and one POC-CCA for the diagnosis of S. mansoni in primary-school children who have received zero to ten praziquantel treatments. We determined the impact each diagnostic approach may have on monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and drug-efficacy findings

Coastline responses to changing storm patterns

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2006. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 33 (2006): L18404, doi:10.1029/2006GL027445.Researchers and coastal managers are pondering how accelerated sea-level rise and possibly intensified storms will affect shorelines. These issues are most often investigated in a cross-shore profile framework, fostering the implicit assumption that coastline responses will be approximately uniform in the alongshore direction. However, experiments with a recently developed numerical model of coastline change on a large spatial domain suggest that the shoreline responses to climate change could be highly variable. As storm and wave climates change, large-scale coastline shapes are likely to shift—causing areas of greatly accelerated coastal erosion to alternate with areas of considerable shoreline accretion. On complex-shaped coastlines, including cuspate-cape and spit coastlines, the alongshore variation in shoreline retreat rates could be an order of magnitude higher than the baseline retreat rate expected from sea-level rise alone.The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation Biocomplexity Program, and the Duke University Center on Global Change supported this work

Fast and Service-preserving Recovery from Malware Infections using CRIU

Once a computer system has been infected with malware, restoring it to an uninfected state often requires costly service-interrupting actions such as rolling back to a stable snapshot or reimaging the system entirely. We present CRIU-MR: a technique for restoring an infected server system running within a Linux container to an uninfected state in a service-preserving manner using Checkpoint/Restore in Userspace (CRIU). We modify the CRIU source code to flexibly integrate with existing malware detection technologies so that it can remove suspected malware processes within a Linux container during a checkpoint/restore event. This allows for infected containers with a potentially damaged filesystem to be checkpointed and subsequently restored on a fresh backup filesystem while both removing malware processes and preserving the state of trusted ones. This method can be quickly performed with minimal impact on service availability, restoring active TCP connections and completely removing several types of malware from infected Linux containers

Degradation of native and exotic riparian plant leaf litter in a floodplain pond

1. A litter-bag experiment was undertaken in a pond on the margins of a large temperate floodplain in south-western France to assess the potential influence of the replacement of native by exotic riparian species on organic matter degradation. We determined initial litter chemical composition, breakdown rates and the invertebrate assemblages associated with the litter for five pairs of native dominant and exotic invasive species co-occurring at different stages along a successional gradient. 2. Litter chemical composition, breakdown rates and abundance and diversity of detritivorous invertebrates were similar for the exotic and native species overall. No overall changes in organic matter degradation can thus be predicted from the replacement of dominant natives by exotic invasives. Breakdown rates were primarily driven by the C⁄N ratio. 3. One invasive species (Buddleja davidii) showed significantly higher breakdown rates than its native counterpart (Populus nigra), resulting in the disappearance of leaf litter 6 months prior to the next litterfall. In some cases, therefore, invasion by exotic species may result in discontinuity of resource supply for decomposers

Effects of antiplatelet therapy on stroke risk by brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases: subgroup analyses of the RESTART randomised, open-label trial

Background Findings from the RESTART trial suggest that starting antiplatelet therapy might reduce the risk of recurrent symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhage compared with avoiding antiplatelet therapy. Brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases (such as cerebral microbleeds) are associated with greater risks of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage. We did subgroup analyses of the RESTART trial to explore whether these brain imaging features modify the effects of antiplatelet therapy

Flexible prey handling, preference and a novel capture technique in invasive, sub-adult Chinese mitten crabs

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The attached file is the published version of the article

Social comparison processes in organizations

We systematically analyze the role of social comparison processes in organizations. Specifically, we describe how social comparison processes have been used to explain six key areas of organizational inquiry: (1) organizational justice, (2) performance appraisal, (3) virtual work environments, (4) affective behavior in the workplace, (5) stress, and (6) leadership. Additionally, we describe how unique contextual factors in organizations offer new insight into two widely studied sub-processes of social comparison, acquiring social information and thinking about that information. Our analyses underscore the merit of integrating organizational phenomena and social comparison processes in future research and theory

Accounting for heterogeneity in θ-σ relationship:application to wheat phenotyping using ΕMI

Geophysical methods, such as electromagnetic induction (EMI), can be effective for monitoring changes in soil moisture at the field scale, particularly in agricultural applications. The electrical conductivity (σ) inferred from EMI needs to be converted to soil moisture content (θ) using an appropriate relationship. Typically, a single global relationship is applied to an entire agricultural field, however, soil heterogeneity at the field scale may limit the effectiveness of such an approach. One application area that may suffer from such an effect is crop phenotyping. Selecting crop varieties based on their root traits is important for crop breeding and maximizing yield. Hence, high throughput tools for phenotyping the root system architecture and activity at the field-scale are needed. Water uptake is a major root activity and, under appropriate conditions, can be approximated by measuring changes in soil moisture from time-lapse geophysical surveys. We examine here the effect of heterogeneity in the θ-σ relationship using a crop phenotyping study for illustration. In this study, the θ-σ relationship was found to vary substantially across a field site. To account for this, we propose a range of local (plot specific) θ-σ models. We show that the large number of parameters required for these models can be estimated from baseline σ and θ measurements. Finally, we compare the use of global (field scale) and local (plot scale) models with respect to ranking varieties based on the estimated soil moisture content change