Trojans in Early Design Steps—An Emerging Threat

Hardware Trojans inserted by malicious foundries during integrated circuit manufacturing have received substantial attention in recent years. In this paper, we focus on a different type of hardware Trojan threats: attacks in the early steps of design process. We show that third-party intellectual property cores and CAD tools constitute realistic attack surfaces and that even system specification can be targeted by adversaries. We discuss the devastating damage potential of such attacks, the applicable countermeasures against them and their deficiencies

Analysis domain model for shared virtual environments

The field of shared virtual environments, which also encompasses online games and social 3D environments, has a system landscape consisting of multiple solutions that share great functional overlap. However, there is little system interoperability between the different solutions. A shared virtual environment has an associated problem domain that is highly complex raising difficult challenges to the development process, starting with the architectural design of the underlying system. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution is a broad domain analysis of shared virtual environments, which enables developers to have a better understanding of the whole rather than the part(s). The second contribution is a reference domain model for discussing and describing solutions - the Analysis Domain Model

Service Enquiry Service in the 21st Century

The workshop set out to acknowledge and explore the potential of youth service as a strategy for social, economic and democratic development, to identify new work that needs to be undertaken, and to increase knowledge about youth

Museums as disseminators of niche knowledge: Universality in accessibility for all

Accessibility has faced several challenges within audiovisual translation Studies and gained great opportunities for its establishment as a methodologically and theoretically well-founded discipline. Initially conceived as a set of services and practices that provides access to audiovisual media content for persons with sensory impairment, today accessibility can be viewed as a concept involving more and more universality thanks to its contribution to the dissemination of audiovisual products on the topic of marginalisation. Against this theoretical backdrop, accessibility is scrutinised from the perspective of aesthetics of migration and minorities within the field of the visual arts in museum settings. These aesthetic narrative forms act as modalities that encourage the diffusion of ‘niche’ knowledge, where processes of translation and interpretation provide access to all knowledge as counter discourse. Within this framework, the ways in which language is used can be considered the beginning of a type of local grammar in English as lingua franca for interlingual translation and subtitling, both of which ensure access to knowledge for all citizens as a human rights principle and regardless of cultural and social differences. Accessibility is thus gaining momentum as an agent for the democratisation and transparency of information against media discourse distortions and oversimplifications

Technical vs Ideological Manipulation of MENA Political Narratives via Subtitling

MENA political conflicts have inculcated controversial narratives, giving rise to deep-seated political tensions and combat, locally and globally. Political media can accentuate or contest such narratives and, sometimes, even create new ones. Narratives dwell in their source text until they are relocated to the target text through the translation process, in which they can often be subject to multi-level manipulation in proportion to the ideological constraints of translators and their institutions. Subtitling, in particular, also has its own technical constraints that can require textual manipulation. This variation of constraints motivated the study to investigate whether manipulation is technically necessitated or ideologically driven. The ultimate purpose is to raise awareness of the commonly unrecognised role of ideology in manipulating the subtitling of political narratives under the pretext of technicality. Focusing on the Arabic–English subtitling of MENA political narratives produced by Monitor Mideast, Palestinian Media Watch, and Middle East Media Research Institute, the investigation starts with the first phase, where a micro-analysis drawing on Gottlieb’s (1992) subtitling strategies differentiates between the subtitlers’ technical and ideological choices. The second phase of the investigation comprises of a macro-analysis (comprehensive framework) drawing on Baker’s (2006a) narrative account, which interprets the subtitlers’ ideological choices for the text in association with broader patterns of manipulation in the paratext and context. The study discussed concrete examples where ideology—rather than a technicality—manifested in textual choices. Coherently woven, furthermore, the narrative distortion shown was not only limited to the text but also included the paratext and context. Besides paratextual verbal manipulation (e.g., using different titles), there were also higher-level patterns of non-verbal manipulation that included reconfiguring the original narrative features. These multi-level manipulation patterns have ultimately led to the source text narratives being reframed in the target text

Ada (trademark) projects at NASA. Runtime environment issues and recommendations

Ada practitioners should use this document to discuss and establish common short term requirements for Ada runtime environments. The major current Ada runtime environment issues are identified through the analysis of some of the Ada efforts at NASA and other research centers. The runtime environment characteristics of major compilers are compared while alternate runtime implementations are reviewed. Modifications and extensions to the Ada Language Reference Manual to address some of these runtime issues are proposed. Three classes of projects focusing on the most critical runtime features of Ada are recommended, including a range of immediately feasible full scale Ada development projects. Also, a list of runtime features and procurement issues is proposed for consideration by the vendors, contractors and the government

Advanced Threat Intelligence: Interpretation of Anomalous Behavior in Ubiquitous Kernel Processes

Targeted attacks on digital infrastructures are a rising threat against the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of both IT systems and sensitive data. With the emergence of advanced persistent threats (APTs), identifying and understanding such attacks has become an increasingly difficult task. Current signature-based systems are heavily reliant on fixed patterns that struggle with unknown or evasive applications, while behavior-based solutions usually leave most of the interpretative work to a human analyst. This thesis presents a multi-stage system able to detect and classify anomalous behavior within a user session by observing and analyzing ubiquitous kernel processes. Application candidates suitable for monitoring are initially selected through an adapted sentiment mining process using a score based on the log likelihood ratio (LLR). For transparent anomaly detection within a corpus of associated events, the author utilizes star structures, a bipartite representation designed to approximate the edit distance between graphs. Templates describing nominal behavior are generated automatically and are used for the computation of both an anomaly score and a report containing all deviating events. The extracted anomalies are classified using the Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms. Ultimately, the newly labeled patterns are mapped to a dedicated APT attacker–defender model that considers objectives, actions, actors, as well as assets, thereby bridging the gap between attack indicators and detailed threat semantics. This enables both risk assessment and decision support for mitigating targeted attacks. Results show that the prototype system is capable of identifying 99.8% of all star structure anomalies as benign or malicious. In multi-class scenarios that seek to associate each anomaly with a distinct attack pattern belonging to a particular APT stage we achieve a solid accuracy of 95.7%. Furthermore, we demonstrate that 88.3% of observed attacks could be identified by analyzing and classifying a single ubiquitous Windows process for a mere 10 seconds, thereby eliminating the necessity to monitor each and every (unknown) application running on a system. With its semantic take on threat detection and classification, the proposed system offers a formal as well as technical solution to an information security challenge of great significance.The financial support by the Christian Doppler Research Association, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs, and the National Foundation for Research, Technology and Development is gratefully acknowledged