69 research outputs found
Order vs. Chaos: A Language Model Approach for Side-channel Attacks
We introduce the Order vs. Chaos (OvC) classifier, a novel language-model approach for side-channel attacks combining the strengths of multitask learning (via the use of a language model), multimodal learning, and deep metric learning. Our methodology offers a viable substitute for the multitask classifiers used for learning multiple targets, as put forward by Masure et al. We highlight some well-known issues with multitask classifiers, like scalability, balancing multiple tasks, slow learning, large model sizes, and the need for complex hyperparameter tuning. Thus, we advocate language models in side-channel attacks.
We demonstrate improvements in results on different variants of ASCAD-V1 and ASCAD-V2 datasets compared to the existing state-of-the-art results. Additionally, we delve deeper with experiments on protected simulated datasets, allowing us to control noise levels and simulate specific leakage models. This exploration facilitates an understanding of the ramifications when the protective scheme\u27s masks do not leak and allows us to further compare our approach with other approaches. Furthermore, with the help of unprotected simulated datasets, we demonstrate that the OvC classifier, uninformed of the leakage model, can parallelize the proficiency of a conventional multi-class classifier that is leakage model-aware. This finding implies that our methodology sidesteps the need for predetermined a leakage model in side-channel attacks
Outwitting Enlightenment with Words: Philosophical Style, Critique, and History in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment
To many of its most authoritative commentators, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment cannot but entail a reductively negative, pessimistic philosophy of history that ties the historical progress of enlightenment rationality with regression and domination so tightly as to undermine its own critical intentions. My thesis contends that a text as self-reflective of its own form of presentation as the Dialectic obviously is could not be read so literally. To remedy this, I offer an interpretive reappraisal of the Dialectic of Enlightenment , which places a methodological appreciation of the latter’s distinct style and form of presentation at the centre of understanding its philosophical status and more specifically, its philosophical viability as a form of social critique. I argue that the Dialectic pursues, in the first place, the negative, critical aim of undermining the unreflective perceptions of history and progress through which present society constructs its own self-understanding, and does so not only on the level of philosophical content, but also on the level of linguistic form. The text performatively repeats the conventional tropes, narratives and genres in which the historical self-understanding of enlightenment is embodied, and enacts, on the level of linguistic expression itself, the failure of this self-understanding to deliver on its own promise. I argue that this form of critical textual composition simultaneously implicates its own audience and is aimed at their experience of the text. As such, it is concerned not simply with challenging their rational beliefs, but also and especially at undermining their affective investments to socially prevalent notions of history
My Theatrical Sensibility: Theatricality as Metaphor and Tool for Composition
This thesis and accompanying portfolio of compositions are the work of one who identifies as a composer with a theatrical sensibility, whether I am writing for the dramatic or the concert stage. Theatricality as a process in musical creation has been little examined; through parsing theatricality as a discourse in Chapter Two I assemble a number of manifestations relevant to me. I analyse how these tropes occur within my work as outlets for my sense of theatricality, and, in particular, how they impact upon the key triadic relationship between composer, performer, and audience. In Chapters Three and Four, I study these tools and this relationship in two instrumental works: A Painting by Magritte and Five Scenes. In Chapter Five, my analysis moves from a metaphorical consideration of theatricality to theatricality as constitutive feature as I examine a dramatic work, my chamber opera David Davis@. I argue that although this shift is important, the underlying traits and concepts within my process remain the same as they were in the concert works. This study closes with a post-compositional and post-analytical reconsideration and reframing of my relationship with theatricality, and how this relationship has matured within, and traces a future path for, my ongoing artistic practice
A layered approach to improving Blockchain systems security
During the past several years, blockchain systems have gained a lot of traction and adoption, with during peak periods, the total capitalisation of these systems exceeding 2 trillion.
Given the permissionless nature of blockchain systems and their large scope in terms of software - e.g. distributed consensus, untrusted program execution - numerous attack vectors need to be studied, understood and protected against for blockchain systems to be able to deliver their promises of a safer financial system.
In this thesis, we study and contribute to improving the security of various parts of the blockchain stack, from the execution to the application layer.
We start with one of the lowest layers of the Ethereum blockchain stack, the EVM, and study the resource metering mechanism that is used to limit the total amount of resources that can be consumed by a smart contract.
We discover inconsistencies in the metering mechanism and show and responsibly disclose that it would have been possible to execute transactions that would result in a denial of service attack on the Ethereum blockchain.
Our findings were part of the motivation of Ethereum for changing some of its gas metering mechanisms.
We then broaden our analysis to other blockchain systems and study how different fee mechanisms affect the transactional throughput as well as the usage of the blockchain.
We discover that low fees, which are in theory attractive to users, can lead to a lot of spam.
We find that for two of the blockchain we analyse, EOS and Ripple, this type of spam leads to system outages where the blockchain is unable to process transactions.
Finally, we find that a common motivation for spam transactions is to artificially inflate the activity of the application layer, through wash-trading for example.
In the last main chapter of this thesis, we move to the application layer and turn our focus on decentralised finance (DeFi) ecosystem, which is one of the most prevalent types of application implemented on top of blockchain systems.
We start by giving formal definitions of the different types of security, namely technical and economic security.
With that definition in mind, in the first part of this chapter, we study technical security exploits and develop an automated tool to detect on-chain exploits.
We find that the majority of the exploits found through techniques such as program analysis are not exploited in practice, either because of the lack of feasibility of the exploit or because of the lack of economic incentive to do so.
In the second part of this chapter, we focus on economic security and study the liquidation mechanism that is used to protect the users of DeFi lending protocols.
We highlight how the efficiency of the liquidations has increased over time, and how depegging events of stablecoin have caused very large amounts of liquidations because of the over-confidence in their stability.Open Acces
Reading Contemporary French Literature
This book focuses upon a dozen French writers who have helped to set the terms for contemporary French literature and its horizon of possibility. Though they have pursued significantly different paths, each one of them is committed to the principle of literary innovation, to making French literature new. They work in full cognizance of literary history and of the tradition that they inherit, even as they reshape that tradition in each of their books. They invite their readers to take a critical stance with regard to those books, and to participate actively in the construction of literary meaning. Both bold and mobile in their own practice, they encourage us to be just as agile in our own readerly practice, offering us a rare degree of franchise in a literary dynamic founded on the notion of articulation.
Writers discussed include Raymond Queneau, Edmond Jabès, Georges Perec, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques Jouet, Marie NDiaye, Marie Cosnay, Bernard Noël, Jean Rolin, Jacques Serena, Julia Deck, and Christine Montalbetti.
Warren Motte is Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado Boulder. He specializes in contemporary French literature, with particular emphasis on experimentalist works that put accepted ideas of literary form into question. In 2015, the French Republic named him a Knight in the Order of Academic Palms for career service to French culture. His most recent books include Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990 (2003), Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century (2008), Mirror Gazing (2014), French Fiction Today (2017), and Pour une littérature critique (2021).https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/1126/thumbnail.jp
Pesher and Hypomnema: A Comparison of Two Commentary Traditions from the Hellenistic-Roman Period
In Pesher and Hypomnema Pieter B. Hartog compares ancient Jewish commentaries on the Hebrew Bible with papyrus commentaries on the Iliad. Hartog shows that members of the Qumran movement adopted classical commentary writing and adapted it to their own needs.; Readership: All interested in the position of ancient Judaism within the Graeco-Roman world, ancient textual scholarship, the Dead Sea Scrolls, papyrology, and the reception of the Hebrew Bible and the Iliad
On the Study of Fitness Landscapes and the Max-Cut Problem
The goal of this thesis is to study the complexity of NP-Hard problems, using the Max-Cut and the Max-k-Cut problems, and the study of fitness landscapes. The Max-Cut and Max-k-Cut problems are well studied NP-hard problems specially since the approximation algorithm of Goemans and Williamson (1995) which introduced the use of SDP to solve relaxed problems. In order to prove the existence of a performance guarantee, the rounding step from the SDP solution to a Max-Cut solution is simple and randomized. For the Max-k-Cut problem, there exist several approximation algorithms but many of them have been proved to be equivalent. Similarly as in Max-Cut, these approximation algorithms use a simple randomized rounding to be able to get a performance guarantee.
Ignoring for now the performance guarantee, one could ask if there is a rounding process that takes into account the structure of the relaxed solution since it is the result of an optimization problem. In this thesis we answered this question positively by using clustering as a rounding method.
In order to compare the performance of both algorithms, a series of experiments were performed using the so-called G-set benchmark for the Max-Cut problem and using the Random Graph Benchmark of Goemans1995 for the Max-k-Cut problem.
With this new rounding, larger cut values are found both for the Max-Cut and the Max-k-Cut problems, and always above the value of the performance guarantee of the approximation algorithm. This suggests that taking into account the structure of the problem to design algorithms can lead to better results, possibly at the cost of a worse performance guarantee. An example for the vertex k-center problem can be seen in Garcia-Diaz et al. (2017), where a 3-approximation algorithm performs better than a 2-approximation algorithm despite having a worse performance guarantee.
Landscapes over discrete configurations spaces are an important model in evolutionary and structural biology, as well as many other areas of science, from the physics of disordered systems to operations research. A landscape is a function defined on a very large discrete set V that carries an additional metric or at least topological structure into the real numbers R. We will consider landscapes defined on the vertex set of undirected graphs. Thus let G=G(V,E) be an undirected graph and f an arbitrary real-valued function taking values from V . We will refer to the triple (V,E,f) as a landscape over G.
We say two configurations x,y in V are neutral if f(x)=f(y). We colloquially refer to a landscape as 'neutral'' if a substantial fraction of adjacent pairs of configurations are neutral. A flat landscape is one where f is constant. The opposite of flatness is ruggedness and it is defined as the number of local optima or by means of pair correlation functions.
These two key features of a landscape, ruggedness and neutrality, appear to be two sides of the same coin. Ruggedness can be measured either by correlation properties, which are sensitive to monotonic transformation of the landscape, and by combinatorial properties such as the lengths of downhill paths and the number of local optima, which are invariant under monotonic transformations. The connection between the two views has remained largely unexplored and poorly understood. For this thesis, a survey on fitness landscapes is presented, together with the first steps in the direction to find this connection together with a relation between the covariance matrix of a random landscape model and its ruggedness
Translating Early Modern Science (Volume 51)
Translating Early Modern Science explores the roles of translation and the practices of translators in early modern Europe. In a period when multiple European vernaculars challenged the hegemony long held by Latin as the language of learning, translation assumed a heightened significance. This volume illustrates how the act of translating texts and images was an essential component in the circulation and exchange of scientific knowledge. It also makes apparent that translation was hardly ever an end in itself; rather it was also a livelihood, a way of promoting the translator’s own ideas, and a means of establishing the connections that in turn constituted far-reaching scientific networks
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