32,924 research outputs found
Software Engineering Challenges for Investigating Cyber-Physical Incidents
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are characterized by the interplay between digital and physical spaces. This characteristic has extended the attack surface that could be exploited by an offender to cause harm. An increasing number of cyber-physical incidents may occur depending on the configuration of the physical and digital spaces and their interplay. Traditional investigation processes are not adequate to investigate these incidents, as they may overlook the extended attack surface resulting from such interplay, leading to relevant evidence being missed and testing flawed hypotheses explaining the incidents. The software engineering research community can contribute to addressing this problem, by deploying existing formalisms to model digital and physical spaces, and using analysis techniques to reason about their interplay and evolution. In this paper, supported by a motivating example, we describe some emerging software engineering challenges to support investigations of cyber-physical incidents. We review and critique existing research proposed to address these challenges, and sketch an initial solution based on a meta-model to represent cyber-physical incidents and a representation of the topology of digital and physical spaces that supports reasoning about their interplay
Reasoning About a Simulated Printer Case Investigation with Forensic Lucid
In this work we model the ACME (a fictitious company name) "printer case
incident" and make its specification in Forensic Lucid, a Lucid- and
intensional-logic-based programming language for cyberforensic analysis and
event reconstruction specification. The printer case involves a dispute between
two parties that was previously solved using the finite-state automata (FSA)
approach, and is now re-done in a more usable way in Forensic Lucid. Our
simulation is based on the said case modeling by encoding concepts like
evidence and the related witness accounts as an evidential statement context in
a Forensic Lucid program, which is an input to the transition function that
models the possible deductions in the case. We then invoke the transition
function (actually its reverse) with the evidential statement context to see if
the evidence we encoded agrees with one's claims and then attempt to
reconstruct the sequence of events that may explain the claim or disprove it.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, 7 listings, TOC, index; this article closely
relates to arXiv:0906.0049 and arXiv:0904.3789 but to remain stand-alone
repeats some of the background and introductory content; abstract presented
at HSC'09 and the full updated paper at ICDF2C'11. This is an updated/edited
version after ICDF2C proceedings with more references and correction
The Need to Support of Data Flow Graph Visualization of Forensic Lucid Programs, Forensic Evidence, and their Evaluation by GIPSY
Lucid programs are data-flow programs and can be visually represented as data
flow graphs (DFGs) and composed visually. Forensic Lucid, a Lucid dialect, is a
language to specify and reason about cyberforensic cases. It includes the
encoding of the evidence (representing the context of evaluation) and the crime
scene modeling in order to validate claims against the model and perform event
reconstruction, potentially within large swaths of digital evidence. To aid
investigators to model the scene and evaluate it, instead of typing a Forensic
Lucid program, we propose to expand the design and implementation of the Lucid
DFG programming onto Forensic Lucid case modeling and specification to enhance
the usability of the language and the system and its behavior. We briefly
discuss the related work on visual programming an DFG modeling in an attempt to
define and select one approach or a composition of approaches for Forensic
Lucid based on various criteria such as previous implementation, wide use,
formal backing in terms of semantics and translation. In the end, we solicit
the readers' constructive, opinions, feedback, comments, and recommendations
within the context of this short discussion.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, index; extended abstract presented at VizSec'10
at http://www.vizsec2010.org/posters ; short paper accepted at PST'1
Information and the reconstruction of quantum physics
The reconstruction of quantum physics has been connected with the interpretation of the quantum formalism, and has continued to be so with the recent deeper consideration of the relation of information to quantum states and processes. This recent form of reconstruction has mainly involved conceiving quantum theory on the basis of informational principles, providing new perspectives on physical correlations and entanglement that can be used to encode information. By contrast to the traditional, interpretational approach to the foundations of quantum mechanics, which attempts directly to establish the meaning of the elements of the theory and often touches on metaphysical issues, the newer, more purely reconstructive approach sometimes defers this task, focusing instead on the mathematical derivation of the theoretical apparatus from simple principles or axioms. In its most pure form, this sort of theory reconstruction is fundamentally the mathematical derivation of the elements of theory from explicitly presented, often operational principles involving a minimum of extraâmathematical content. Here, a representative series of specifically informationâbased treatmentsâfrom partial reconstructions that make connections with information to rigorous axiomatizations, including those involving the theories of generalized probability and abstract systemsâis reviewed.Accepted manuscrip
Event-Driven Contrastive Divergence for Spiking Neuromorphic Systems
Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) and Deep Belief Networks have been
demonstrated to perform efficiently in a variety of applications, such as
dimensionality reduction, feature learning, and classification. Their
implementation on neuromorphic hardware platforms emulating large-scale
networks of spiking neurons can have significant advantages from the
perspectives of scalability, power dissipation and real-time interfacing with
the environment. However the traditional RBM architecture and the commonly used
training algorithm known as Contrastive Divergence (CD) are based on discrete
updates and exact arithmetics which do not directly map onto a dynamical neural
substrate. Here, we present an event-driven variation of CD to train a RBM
constructed with Integrate & Fire (I&F) neurons, that is constrained by the
limitations of existing and near future neuromorphic hardware platforms. Our
strategy is based on neural sampling, which allows us to synthesize a spiking
neural network that samples from a target Boltzmann distribution. The recurrent
activity of the network replaces the discrete steps of the CD algorithm, while
Spike Time Dependent Plasticity (STDP) carries out the weight updates in an
online, asynchronous fashion. We demonstrate our approach by training an RBM
composed of leaky I&F neurons with STDP synapses to learn a generative model of
the MNIST hand-written digit dataset, and by testing it in recognition,
generation and cue integration tasks. Our results contribute to a machine
learning-driven approach for synthesizing networks of spiking neurons capable
of carrying out practical, high-level functionality.Comment: (Under review
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