4,386 research outputs found

    SoK:Prudent Evaluation Practices for Fuzzing

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    Fuzzing has proven to be a highly effective approach to uncover software bugs over the past decade. After AFL popularized the groundbreaking concept of lightweight coverage feedback, the field of fuzzing has seen a vast amount of scientific work proposing new techniques, improving methodological aspects of existing strategies, or porting existing methods to new domains. All such work must demonstrate its merit by showing its applicability to a problem, measuring its performance, and often showing its superiority over existing works in a thorough, empirical evaluation. Yet, fuzzing is highly sensitive to its target, environment, and circumstances, e.g., randomness in the testing process. After all, relying on randomness is one of the core principles of fuzzing, governing many aspects of a fuzzer's behavior. Combined with the often highly difficult to control environment, the reproducibility of experiments is a crucial concern and requires a prudent evaluation setup. To address these threats to validity, several works, most notably Evaluating Fuzz Testing by Klees et al., have outlined how a carefully designed evaluation setup should be implemented, but it remains unknown to what extent their recommendations have been adopted in practice. In this work, we systematically analyze the evaluation of 150 fuzzing papers published at the top venues between 2018 and 2023. We study how existing guidelines are implemented and observe potential shortcomings and pitfalls. We find a surprising disregard of the existing guidelines regarding statistical tests and systematic errors in fuzzing evaluations. For example, when investigating reported bugs, we find that the search for vulnerabilities in real-world software leads to authors requesting and receiving CVEs of questionable quality. Extending our literature analysis to the practical domain, we attempt to reproduce claims of eight fuzzing papers. These case studies allow us to assess the practical reproducibility of fuzzing research and identify archetypal pitfalls in the evaluation design. Unfortunately, our reproduced results reveal several deficiencies in the studied papers, and we are unable to fully support and reproduce the respective claims. To help the field of fuzzing move toward a scientifically reproducible evaluation strategy, we propose updated guidelines for conducting a fuzzing evaluation that future work should follow

    Multi-epoch machine learning for galaxy formation

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    In this thesis I utilise a range of machine learning techniques in conjunction with hydrodynamical cosmological simulations. In Chapter 2 I present a novel machine learning method for predicting the baryonic properties of dark matter only subhalos taken from N-body simulations. The model is built using a tree-based algorithm and incorporates subhalo properties over a wide range of redshifts as its input features. I train the model using a hydrodynamical simulation which enables it to predict black hole mass, gas mass, magnitudes, star formation rate, stellar mass, and metallicity. This new model surpasses the performance of previous models. Furthermore, I explore the predictive power of each input property by looking at feature importance scores from the tree-based model. By applying the method to the LEGACY N-body simulation I generate a large volume mock catalog of the quasar population at z=3. By comparing this mock catalog with observations, I demonstrate that the IllustrisTNG subgrid model for black holes is not accurately capturing the growth of the most massive objects. In Chapter 3 I apply my method to investigate the evolution of galaxy properties in different simulations, and in various environments within a single simulation. By comparing the Illustris, EAGLE, and TNG simulations I show that subgrid model physics plays a more significant role than the choice of hydrodynamics method. Using the CAMELS simulation suite I consider the impact of cosmological and astrophysical parameters on the buildup of stellar mass within the TNG and SIMBA models. In the final chapter I apply a combination of neural networks and symbolic regression methods to construct a semi-analytic model which reproduces the galaxy population from a cosmological simulation. The neural network based approach is capable of producing a more accurate population than a previous method of binning based on halo mass. The equations resulting from symbolic regression are found to be a good approximation of the neural network

    Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) Applications in Payment, Clearing, and Settlement Systems:A Study of Blockchain-Based Payment Barriers and Potential Solutions, and DLT Application in Central Bank Payment System Functions

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    Payment, clearing, and settlement systems are essential components of the financial markets and exert considerable influence on the overall economy. While there have been considerable technological advancements in payment systems, the conventional systems still depend on centralized architecture, with inherent limitations and risks. The emergence of Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is being regarded as a potential solution to transform payment and settlement processes and address certain challenges posed by the centralized architecture of traditional payment systems (Bank for International Settlements, 2017). While proof-of-concept projects have demonstrated the technical feasibility of DLT, significant barriers still hinder its adoption and implementation. The overarching objective of this thesis is to contribute to the developing area of DLT application in payment, clearing and settlement systems, which is still in its initial stages of applications development and lacks a substantial body of scholarly literature and empirical research. This is achieved by identifying the socio-technical barriers to adoption and diffusion of blockchain-based payment systems and the solutions proposed to address them. Furthermore, the thesis examines and classifies various applications of DLT in central bank payment system functions, offering valuable insights into the motivations, DLT platforms used, and consensus algorithms for applicable use cases. To achieve these objectives, the methodology employed involved a systematic literature review (SLR) of academic literature on blockchain-based payment systems. Furthermore, we utilized a thematic analysis approach to examine data collected from various sources regarding the use of DLT applications in central bank payment system functions, such as central bank white papers, industry reports, and policy documents. The study's findings on blockchain-based payment systems barriers and proposed solutions; challenge the prevailing emphasis on technological and regulatory barriers in the literature and industry discourse regarding the adoption and implementation of blockchain-based payment systems. It highlights the importance of considering the broader socio-technical context and identifying barriers across all five dimensions of the social technical framework, including technological, infrastructural, user practices/market, regulatory, and cultural dimensions. Furthermore, the research identified seven DLT applications in central bank payment system functions. These are grouped into three overarching themes: central banks' operational responsibilities in payment and settlement systems, issuance of central bank digital money, and regulatory oversight/supervisory functions, along with other ancillary functions. Each of these applications has unique motivations or value proposition, which is the underlying reason for utilizing in that particular use case

    Determining the ages of sub-fossil cetacean remains, found in the Carse of Stirling, Scotland

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    During the 19th and early 20th centuries, sub-fossil cetacean remains were often discovered in the Firth of Forth, Central Scotland. These bones and skeletons of "Whales" were excavated from a recent, estuarine deposit (named "carse clay") and, within the biological and geological sciences, were not judged to be important. That palaeontological evidence is re-evaluated in this thesis. These cetacean remains have been preserved in an unusual marine environment and form an exceptional fossil assemblage, with almost no geological precedents. Why is it there? Whatever caused exceptional preservation in the Firth of Forth in the early Holocene (c. 9.5 – 2.5ka cal BP) can be best identified with chronological data. The ages of six sets of cetacean remains are determined in this thesis, by radiocarbon dating and stratigraphic inference. To reconstruct where a bone or skeleton had been found in the "carse" and then to identify any surviving elements in modern museum collections, archaic textual sources had to be thoroughly investigated. Radiocarbon dates from marine organisms require correction for "reservoir effects" and those applicable to mysticete cetaceans require careful consideration. The absolute dating evidence shows that no two "Whales" are the same age and that each died, and was then preserved, over the period 9.5 – 7.0ka cal BP. Therefore, a "disaster" (e.g. tsunami) or mass mortality is unlikely to have caused these remains to accumulate. A combination of physical processes and stable environmental conditions are more likely responsible, and might still permit exceptional preservation in the modern Firth of Forth. Actualistic experiment (observing if, and how, a cetacean carcass is preserved or dispersed on a modern tidal foreshore) would allow further insights into this cryptic palaeontological assemblage

    A Critical Review Of Post-Secondary Education Writing During A 21st Century Education Revolution

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    Educational materials are effective instruments which provide information and report new discoveries uncovered by researchers in specific areas of academia. Higher education, like other education institutions, rely on instructional materials to inform its practice of educating adult learners. In post-secondary education, developmental English programs are tasked with meeting the needs of dynamic populations, thus there is a continuous need for research in this area to support its changing landscape. However, the majority of scholarly thought in this area centers on K-12 reading and writing. This paucity presents a phenomenon to the post-secondary community. This research study uses a qualitative content analysis to examine peer-reviewed journals from 2003-2017, developmental online websites, and a government issued document directed toward reforming post-secondary developmental education programs. These highly relevant sources aid educators in discovering informational support to apply best practices for student success. Developmental education serves the purpose of addressing literacy gaps for students transitioning to college-level work. The findings here illuminate the dearth of material offered to developmental educators. This study suggests the field of literacy research is fragmented and highlights an apparent blind spot in scholarly literature with regard to English writing instruction. This poses a quandary for post-secondary literacy researchers in the 21st century and establishes the necessity for the literacy research community to commit future scholarship toward equipping college educators teaching writing instruction to underprepared adult learners

    Software Design Change Artifacts Generation through Software Architectural Change Detection and Categorisation

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    Software is solely designed, implemented, tested, and inspected by expert people, unlike other engineering projects where they are mostly implemented by workers (non-experts) after designing by engineers. Researchers and practitioners have linked software bugs, security holes, problematic integration of changes, complex-to-understand codebase, unwarranted mental pressure, and so on in software development and maintenance to inconsistent and complex design and a lack of ways to easily understand what is going on and what to plan in a software system. The unavailability of proper information and insights needed by the development teams to make good decisions makes these challenges worse. Therefore, software design documents and other insightful information extraction are essential to reduce the above mentioned anomalies. Moreover, architectural design artifacts extraction is required to create the developer’s profile to be available to the market for many crucial scenarios. To that end, architectural change detection, categorization, and change description generation are crucial because they are the primary artifacts to trace other software artifacts. However, it is not feasible for humans to analyze all the changes for a single release for detecting change and impact because it is time-consuming, laborious, costly, and inconsistent. In this thesis, we conduct six studies considering the mentioned challenges to automate the architectural change information extraction and document generation that could potentially assist the development and maintenance teams. In particular, (1) we detect architectural changes using lightweight techniques leveraging textual and codebase properties, (2) categorize them considering intelligent perspectives, and (3) generate design change documents by exploiting precise contexts of components’ relations and change purposes which were previously unexplored. Our experiment using 4000+ architectural change samples and 200+ design change documents suggests that our proposed approaches are promising in accuracy and scalability to deploy frequently. Our proposed change detection approach can detect up to 100% of the architectural change instances (and is very scalable). On the other hand, our proposed change classifier’s F1 score is 70%, which is promising given the challenges. Finally, our proposed system can produce descriptive design change artifacts with 75% significance. Since most of our studies are foundational, our approaches and prepared datasets can be used as baselines for advancing research in design change information extraction and documentation

    Fictocritical Cyberfeminism: A Paralogical Model for Post-Internet Communication

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    This dissertation positions the understudied and experimental writing practice of fictocriticism as an analog for the convergent and indeterminate nature of “post-Internet” communication as well a cyberfeminist technology for interfering and in-tervening in metanarratives of technoscience and technocapitalism that structure contemporary media. Significant theoretical valences are established between twen-tieth century literary works of fictocriticism and the hybrid and ephemeral modes of writing endemic to emergent, twenty-first century forms of networked communica-tion such as social media. Through a critical theoretical understanding of paralogy, or that countercultural logic of deploying language outside legitimate discourses, in-volving various tactics of multivocity, mimesis and metagraphy, fictocriticism is ex-plored as a self-referencing linguistic machine which exists intentionally to occupy those liminal territories “somewhere in among/between criticism, autobiography and fiction” (Hunter qtd. in Kerr 1996). Additionally, as a writing practice that orig-inated in Canada and yet remains marginal to national and international literary scholarship, this dissertation elevates the origins and ongoing relevance of fictocriti-cism by mapping its shared aims and concerns onto proximal discourses of post-structuralism, cyberfeminism, network ecology, media art, the avant-garde, glitch feminism, and radical self-authorship in online environments. Theorized in such a matrix, I argue that fictocriticism represents a capacious framework for writing and reading media that embodies the self-reflexive politics of second-order cybernetic theory while disrupting the rhetoric of technoscientific and neoliberal economic forc-es with speech acts of calculated incoherence. Additionally, through the inclusion of my own fictocritical writing as works of research-creation that interpolate the more traditional chapters and subchapters, I theorize and demonstrate praxis of this dis-tinctively indeterminate form of criticism to empirically and meaningfully juxtapose different modes of knowing and speaking about entangled matters of language, bod-ies, and technologies. In its conclusion, this dissertation contends that the “creative paranoia” engendered by fictocritical cyberfeminism in both print and digital media environments offers a pathway towards a more paralogical media literacy that can transform the terms and expectations of our future media ecology

    Mapping the Focal Points of WordPress: A Software and Critical Code Analysis

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    Programming languages or code can be examined through numerous analytical lenses. This project is a critical analysis of WordPress, a prevalent web content management system, applying four modes of inquiry. The project draws on theoretical perspectives and areas of study in media, software, platforms, code, language, and power structures. The applied research is based on Critical Code Studies, an interdisciplinary field of study that holds the potential as a theoretical lens and methodological toolkit to understand computational code beyond its function. The project begins with a critical code analysis of WordPress, examining its origins and source code and mapping selected vulnerabilities. An examination of the influence of digital and computational thinking follows this. The work also explores the intersection of code patching and vulnerability management and how code shapes our sense of control, trust, and empathy, ultimately arguing that a rhetorical-cultural lens can be used to better understand code\u27s controlling influence. Recurring themes throughout these analyses and observations are the connections to power and vulnerability in WordPress\u27 code and how cultural, processual, rhetorical, and ethical implications can be expressed through its code, creating a particular worldview. Code\u27s emergent properties help illustrate how human values and practices (e.g., empathy, aesthetics, language, and trust) become encoded in software design and how people perceive the software through its worldview. These connected analyses reveal cultural, processual, and vulnerability focal points and the influence these entanglements have concerning WordPress as code, software, and platform. WordPress is a complex sociotechnical platform worthy of further study, as is the interdisciplinary merging of theoretical perspectives and disciplines to critically examine code. Ultimately, this project helps further enrich the field by introducing focal points in code, examining sociocultural phenomena within the code, and offering techniques to apply critical code methods

    La traduzione specializzata all’opera per una piccola impresa in espansione: la mia esperienza di internazionalizzazione in cinese di Bioretics© S.r.l.

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    Global markets are currently immersed in two all-encompassing and unstoppable processes: internationalization and globalization. While the former pushes companies to look beyond the borders of their country of origin to forge relationships with foreign trading partners, the latter fosters the standardization in all countries, by reducing spatiotemporal distances and breaking down geographical, political, economic and socio-cultural barriers. In recent decades, another domain has appeared to propel these unifying drives: Artificial Intelligence, together with its high technologies aiming to implement human cognitive abilities in machinery. The “Language Toolkit – Le lingue straniere al servizio dell’internazionalizzazione dell’impresa” project, promoted by the Department of Interpreting and Translation (ForlĂŹ Campus) in collaboration with the Romagna Chamber of Commerce (ForlĂŹ-Cesena and Rimini), seeks to help Italian SMEs make their way into the global market. It is precisely within this project that this dissertation has been conceived. Indeed, its purpose is to present the translation and localization project from English into Chinese of a series of texts produced by Bioretics© S.r.l.: an investor deck, the company website and part of the installation and use manual of the Aliquis© framework software, its flagship product. This dissertation is structured as follows: Chapter 1 presents the project and the company in detail; Chapter 2 outlines the internationalization and globalization processes and the Artificial Intelligence market both in Italy and in China; Chapter 3 provides the theoretical foundations for every aspect related to Specialized Translation, including website localization; Chapter 4 describes the resources and tools used to perform the translations; Chapter 5 proposes an analysis of the source texts; Chapter 6 is a commentary on translation strategies and choices
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