Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Emerging research directions in computer science : contributions from the young informatics faculty in Karlsruhe

In order to build better human-friendly human-computer interfaces, such interfaces need to be enabled with capabilities to perceive the user, his location, identity, activities and in particular his interaction with others and the machine. Only with these perception capabilities can smart systems ( for example human-friendly robots or smart environments) become posssible. In my research I\u27m thus focusing on the development of novel techniques for the visual perception of humans and their activities, in order to facilitate perceptive multimodal interfaces, humanoid robots and smart environments. My work includes research on person tracking, person identication, recognition of pointing gestures, estimation of head orientation and focus of attention, as well as audio-visual scene and activity analysis. Application areas are humanfriendly humanoid robots, smart environments, content-based image and video analysis, as well as safety- and security-related applications. This article gives a brief overview of my ongoing research activities in these areas

Using Execution Transactions To Recover From Buffer Overflow Attacks

We examine the problem of containing buffer overflow attacks in a safe and efficient manner. Briefly, we automatically augment source code to dynamically catch stack and heap-based buffer overflow and underflow attacks, and recover from them by allowing the program to continue execution. Our hypothesis is that we can treat each code function as a transaction that can be aborted when an attack is detected, without affecting the application's ability to correctly execute. Our approach allows us to selectively enable or disable components of this defensive mechanism in response to external events, allowing for a direct tradeoff between security and performance. We combine our defensive mechanism with a honeypot-like configuration to detect previously unknown attacks and automatically adapt an application's defensive posture at a negligible performance cost, as well as help determine a worm's signature. The main benefits of our scheme are its low impact on application performance, its ability to respond to attacks without human intervention, its capacity to handle previously unknown vulnerabilities, and the preservation of service availability. We implemented a stand-alone tool, DYBOC, which we use to instrument a number of vulnerable applications. Our performance benchmarks indicate a slow-down of 20% for Apache in full-protection mode, and 1.2% with partial protection. We validate our transactional hypothesis via two experiments: first, by applying our scheme to 17 vulnerable applications, successfully fixing 14 of them; second, by examining the behavior of Apache when each of 154 potentially vulnerable routines are made to fail, resulting in correct behavior in 139 of cases

A New View on Classification of Software Vulnerability Mitigation Methods

Software vulnerability mitigation is a well-known research area and many methods have been proposed for it Some papers try to classify these methods from different specific points of views In this paper we aggregate all proposed classifications and present a comprehensive classification of vulnerability mitigation methods We define software vulnerability as a kind of software fault and correspond the classes of software vulnerability mitigation methods accordingly In this paper the software vulnerability mitigation methods are classified into vulnerability prevention vulnerability tolerance vulnerability removal and vulnerability forecasting We define each vulnerability mitigation method in our new point of view and indicate some methods for each class Our general point of view helps to consider all of the proposed methods in this review We also identify the fault mitigation methods that might be effective in mitigating the software vulnerabilities but are not yet applied in this area Based on that new directions are suggested for the future researc