On packet marking and Markov modeling for IP Traceback: A deep probabilistic and stochastic analysis

From many years, the methods to defend against Denial of Service attacks have been very attractive from different point of views, although network security is a large and very complex topic. Different techniques have been proposed and so-called packet marking and IP tracing procedures have especially demonstrated a good capacity to face different malicious attacks. While host-based DoS attacks are more easily traced and managed, network-based DoS attacks are a more challenging threat. In this paper, we discuss a powerful aspect of the IP traceback method, which allows a router to mark and add information to attack packets on the basis of a fixed probability value. We propose a potential method for modeling the classic probabilistic packet marking algorithm as Markov chains, allowing a closed form to be obtained for evaluating the correct number of received marked packets in order to build a meaningful attack graph and analyze how marking routers must behave to minimize the overall overhead

A Recipe for Watermarking Diffusion Models

Diffusion models (DMs) have demonstrated advantageous potential on generative tasks. Widespread interest exists in incorporating DMs into downstream applications, such as producing or editing photorealistic images. However, practical deployment and unprecedented power of DMs raise legal issues, including copyright protection and monitoring of generated content. In this regard, watermarking has been a proven solution for copyright protection and content monitoring, but it is underexplored in the DMs literature. Specifically, DMs generate samples from longer tracks and may have newly designed multimodal structures, necessitating the modification of conventional watermarking pipelines. To this end, we conduct comprehensive analyses and derive a recipe for efficiently watermarking state-of-the-art DMs (e.g., Stable Diffusion), via training from scratch or finetuning. Our recipe is straightforward but involves empirically ablated implementation details, providing a foundation for future research on watermarking DMs. The code is available at https://github.com/yunqing-me/WatermarkDM

Decision-making and problem-solving methods in automation technology

The state of the art in the automation of decision making and problem solving is reviewed. The information upon which the report is based was derived from literature searches, visits to university and government laboratories performing basic research in the area, and a 1980 Langley Research Center sponsored conferences on the subject. It is the contention of the authors that the technology in this area is being generated by research primarily in the three disciplines of Artificial Intelligence, Control Theory, and Operations Research. Under the assumption that the state of the art in decision making and problem solving is reflected in the problems being solved, specific problems and methods of their solution are often discussed to elucidate particular aspects of the subject. Synopses of the following major topic areas comprise most of the report: (1) detection and recognition; (2) planning; and scheduling; (3) learning; (4) theorem proving; (5) distributed systems; (6) knowledge bases; (7) search; (8) heuristics; and (9) evolutionary programming

Code deobfuscation by program synthesis-aided simplification of mixed boolean-arithmetic expressions

Treballs Finals de Grau de Matemàtiques, Facultat de Matemàtiques, Universitat de Barcelona, Any: 2020, Director: Raúl Roca Cánovas, Antoni Benseny i Mario Reyes de los Mozos[en] This project studies the theoretical background of Mixed Boolean-Arithmetic (MBA) expressions as well as its practical applicability within the field of code obfuscation, which is a technique used both by malware threats and software protection in order to complicate the process of reverse engineering (parts of) a program. An MBA expression is composed of integer arithmetic operators, e.g. $(+,-, *)$ and bitwise operators, e.g. $(\wedge, \vee, \oplus, \neg).$ MBA expressions can be leveraged to obfuscate the data-flow of code by iteratively applying rewrite rules and function identities that complicate (obfuscate) the initial expression while preserving its semantic behavior. This possibility is motivated by the fact that the combination of operators from these different fields do not interact well together: we have no rules (distributivity, factorization...) or general theory to deal with this mixing of operators. Current deobfuscation techniques to address simplification of this type of data-flow obfuscation are limited by being strongly tied to syntactic complexity. We explore novel program synthesis approaches for addressing simplification of MBA expressions by reasoning on the semantics of the obfuscated expressions instead of syntax, discussing their applicability as well as their limits. We present our own tool $r$ 2syntia that integrates Syntia, an open source program synthesis tool, into the reverse engineering framework radare 2 in order to retrieve the semantics of obfuscated code from its Input/Output behavior. Finally, we provide some improvement ideas and potential areas for future work to be done

Quantum-classical generative models for machine learning

The combination of quantum and classical computational resources towards more effective algorithms is one of the most promising research directions in computer science. In such a hybrid framework, existing quantum computers can be used to their fullest extent and for practical applications. Generative modeling is one of the applications that could benefit the most, either by speeding up the underlying sampling methods or by unlocking more general models. In this work, we design a number of hybrid generative models and validate them on real hardware and datasets. The quantum-assisted Boltzmann machine is trained to generate realistic artificial images on quantum annealers. Several challenges in state-of-the-art annealers shall be overcome before one can assess their actual performance. We attack some of the most pressing challenges such as the sparse qubit-to-qubit connectivity, the unknown effective-temperature, and the noise on the control parameters. In order to handle datasets of realistic size and complexity, we include latent variables and obtain a more general model called the quantum-assisted Helmholtz machine. In the context of gate-based computers, the quantum circuit Born machine is trained to encode a target probability distribution in the wavefunction of a set of qubits. We implement this model on a trapped ion computer using low-depth circuits and native gates. We use the generative modeling performance on the canonical Bars-and-Stripes dataset to design a benchmark for hybrid systems. It is reasonable to expect that quantum data, i.e., datasets of wavefunctions, will become available in the future. We derive a quantum generative adversarial network that works with quantum data. Here, two circuits are optimized in tandem: one tries to generate suitable quantum states, the other tries to distinguish between target and generated states