Hardware-Assisted Dependable Systems

Unpredictable hardware faults and software bugs lead to application crashes, incorrect computations, unavailability of internet services, data losses, malfunctioning components, and consequently financial losses or even death of people. In particular, faults in microprocessors (CPUs) and memory corruption bugs are among the major unresolved issues of today. CPU faults may result in benign crashes and, more problematically, in silent data corruptions that can lead to catastrophic consequences, silently propagating from component to component and finally shutting down the whole system. Similarly, memory corruption bugs (memory-safety vulnerabilities) may result in a benign application crash but may also be exploited by a malicious hacker to gain control over the system or leak confidential data. Both these classes of errors are notoriously hard to detect and tolerate. Usual mitigation strategy is to apply ad-hoc local patches: checksums to protect specific computations against hardware faults and bug fixes to protect programs against known vulnerabilities. This strategy is unsatisfactory since it is prone to errors, requires significant manual effort, and protects only against anticipated faults. On the other extreme, Byzantine Fault Tolerance solutions defend against all kinds of hardware and software errors, but are inadequately expensive in terms of resources and performance overhead. In this thesis, we examine and propose five techniques to protect against hardware CPU faults and software memory-corruption bugs. All these techniques are hardware-assisted: they use recent advancements in CPU designs and modern CPU extensions. Three of these techniques target hardware CPU faults and rely on specific CPU features: ∆-encoding efficiently utilizes instruction-level parallelism of modern CPUs, Elzar re-purposes Intel AVX extensions, and HAFT builds on Intel TSX instructions. The rest two target software bugs: SGXBounds detects vulnerabilities inside Intel SGX enclaves, and “MPX Explained” analyzes the recent Intel MPX extension to protect against buffer overflow bugs. Our techniques achieve three goals: transparency, practicality, and efficiency. All our systems are implemented as compiler passes which transparently harden unmodified applications against hardware faults and software bugs. They are practical since they rely on commodity CPUs and require no specialized hardware or operating system support. Finally, they are efficient because they use hardware assistance in the form of CPU extensions to lower performance overhead

CANADA’S GRAIN HANDLING AND TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM: A GIS-BASED EVALUATION OF POLICY CHANGES

Western Canada is in a post Canadian Wheat Board single-desk market, in which grain handlers face policy, allocation, and logistical changes to the transportation of grains. This research looks at the rails transportation problem for allocating wheat from Prairie to port position, offering a new allocation system that fits the evolving environment of Western Canada’s grain market. Optimization and analysis of the transport of wheat by railroads is performed using geographic information system software as well as spatial and historical data. The studied transportation problem searches to minimize the costs of time rather than look purely at locational costs or closest proximity to port. Through optimization three major bottlenecks are found to constrain the transportation problem; 1) an allocation preference towards Thunder Bay and Vancouver ports, 2) small capacity train inefficiency, and 3) a mismatched distribution of supply and demand between the Class 1 railway firms. Through analysis of counterfactual policies and a scaled sensitivity analysis of the transportation problem, the grains transport system of railroads is found to be dynamic and time efficient; specifically when utilizing larger train capacities, offering open access to rail, and under times of increased availability of supplies. Even under the current circumstances of reduced grain movement and inefficiencies, there are policies and logistics that can be implemented to offer grain handlers in Western Canada with the transportation needed to fulfill their export demands

End-to-end security in embedded system for modern mobile communication technologies

Modern mobile electronic devices such as smartphones or cell phones can now be used for distant devices such as technical systems to monitor and control. While surveillance systems do not require high standards navigating about the time of transfer of the displayed data. More real-time data are needed for a remote mobile robot transfer. Therefore, it has investigated and measured not only the possibilities of employing mobile devices. But also, the supported data transmission channels, such as UMTS, GSM, Wireless LAN, and Bluetooth. The remotecontrol system is used in many applications such as smart homes, cities, smart hospitals, etc., but it must be today updated to ensure fast-changing technology. Extensive coverage, remote control, and reliable operation in realtime in the deployment of wireless security knowledge. The home automation control system delivers significant features together with a user-friendly interface. A secure remote-based end-to-end security system NTMobile, a technique that enables NAT to provide transverse and encrypted communication from end to end. This confirmed that evaluating the performance of the system in the ECHONET lite compatible smartphone ecosystem. This gives flexibility in configuring time-sensitive industrial networks and enables them to be secured. A safe and reliable remote-control system is also conceivable under the privacy of the user

An inclusive taxonomy of behavioral biases

This paper overviews the theoretical and empirical research on behavioral biases and their influence in the literature. To provide a systematic exposition, we present a unified framework that takes the reader through an original taxonomy, based on the reviews of relevant authors in the field. In particular, we establish three broad categories that may be distinguished: heuristics and biases; choices, values and frames; and social factors. We then describe the main biases within each category, and revise the main theoretical and empirical developments, linking each bias with other biases and anomalies that are related to them, according to the literature

Cleveland Mayor Ralph J. Perk: Strong Leadership During Troubled Times

This book is a tribute to one of Cleveland’s greatest leaders. Ralph J. Perk embodied the quintessential 20th century politician. A dedicated administrator with both insight and foresight, he dedicated nearly fifty years to public service. During his six-year tenure as mayor, Cleveland went through extraordinary economic, political and social changes. The citizenry demanded strong leadership and Ralph Perk provided it. An optimistic leader with strong moral and religious convictions, he never walked away from a challenge.https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/clevmembks/1017/thumbnail.jp