41,706 research outputs found
Spatiotemporal patterns and predictability of cyberattacks
A relatively unexplored issue in cybersecurity science and engineering is
whether there exist intrinsic patterns of cyberattacks. Conventional wisdom
favors absence of such patterns due to the overwhelming complexity of the
modern cyberspace. Surprisingly, through a detailed analysis of an extensive
data set that records the time-dependent frequencies of attacks over a
relatively wide range of consecutive IP addresses, we successfully uncover
intrinsic spatiotemporal patterns underlying cyberattacks, where the term
"spatio" refers to the IP address space. In particular, we focus on analyzing
{\em macroscopic} properties of the attack traffic flows and identify two main
patterns with distinct spatiotemporal characteristics: deterministic and
stochastic. Strikingly, there are very few sets of major attackers committing
almost all the attacks, since their attack "fingerprints" and target selection
scheme can be unequivocally identified according to the very limited number of
unique spatiotemporal characteristics, each of which only exists on a
consecutive IP region and differs significantly from the others. We utilize a
number of quantitative measures, including the flux-fluctuation law, the Markov
state transition probability matrix, and predictability measures, to
characterize the attack patterns in a comprehensive manner. A general finding
is that the attack patterns possess high degrees of predictability, potentially
paving the way to anticipating and, consequently, mitigating or even preventing
large-scale cyberattacks using macroscopic approaches
Utilizing scale-free networks to support the search for scientific publications
When searching for scientiļ¬c publications, users today often rely on search engines such as Yahoo.com. Whereas
searching for publications whose titles are known is considered to be an easy task, users who are looking for important publications in research ļ¬elds they are unfamiliar with face greater diffiulties since few or no indications of a publicationās importance to the respective fields are given. In this paper we investigate the application of the theory of scale-free networks to derive importance indicators for a collection of publications. A tool was developed to support the user in his publication search by visualizing the publicationsā importance indicators derived from the number of citations received and the publicationās age as well as visualizing part of the citation network structure. A preliminary user study indicates the utility of our approach and warrants further research in that direction
End-to-End QoS Support for a Medical Grid Service Infrastructure
Quality of Service support is an important prerequisite for the adoption of Grid technologies for medical applications. The GEMSS Grid infrastructure addressed this issue by offering end-to-end QoS in the form of explicit timeliness guarantees for compute-intensive medical simulation services. Within GEMSS, parallel applications installed on clusters or other HPC hardware may be exposed as QoS-aware Grid services for which clients may dynamically negotiate QoS constraints with respect to response time and price using Service Level Agreements. The GEMSS infrastructure and middleware is based on standard Web services technology and relies on a reservation based approach to QoS coupled with application specific performance models. In this paper we present an overview of the GEMSS infrastructure, describe the available QoS and security mechanisms, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods with a Grid-enabled medical imaging service
Wikipedias: Collaborative web-based encyclopedias as complex networks
Wikipedia is a popular web-based encyclopedia edited freely and
collaboratively by its users. In this paper we present an analysis of
Wikipedias in several languages as complex networks. The hyperlinks pointing
from one Wikipedia article to another are treated as directed links while the
articles represent the nodes of the network. We show that many network
characteristics are common to different language versions of Wikipedia, such as
their degree distributions, growth, topology, reciprocity, clustering,
assortativity, path lengths and triad significance profiles. These
regularities, found in the ensemble of Wikipedias in different languages and of
different sizes, point to the existence of a unique growth process. We also
compare Wikipedias to other previously studied networks.Comment: v3: 9 pages, 12 figures, Change of title, few paragraphs and two
figures. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.
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