Action Amplification: A New Approach To Scalable Administration

We present a systems-management approach that enables administrators to effectively handle the challenge of increasing numbers of hosts, routers, users, and services in the networks to manage. Our approach is to map the actions of an administrator on a single host (such as creating a new user account) to the network at large, while maintaining the exact same interface. Our system amplifies the administrator's actions appropriately throughout the network, and confirms the correct propagation of all configuration changes throughout the distributed system. We argue that this approach allows administrators to easily manage several aspects of a large domain, because it provides a familiar and intuitive interface. Such a system can be used as a front-end to any other automation system used to manage large domains. To determine the feasibility of our approach, we implemented it on the OpenBSD system. We discuss the prototype implementation, along with the limitations to our approach that it exposes

The counterterrorism agreements of Europol with third countries:data protection and power asymmetry

Peer reviewedPostprin

Σχεδιασμός και κατασκευή δομής πρωτότυπου τρισδιάστατου εκτυπωτή.

Εθνικό Μετσόβιο Πολυτεχνείο--Μεταπτυχιακή Εργασία. Διεπιστημονικό-Διατμηματικό Πρόγραμμα Μεταπτυχιακών Σπουδών (Δ.Π.Μ.Σ.) “Συστήματα Αυτοματισμού

Significance of autoclaving-induced toxicity from and hydrolysis of carbohydrates in in vitro studies of pollen germination and tube growth

Autoclaving of various carbohydrates resulted in decreased in vitro pollen germination and/or pollen tube growth in species belonging to different families. This toxicity was eliminated by treatment of autoclaved sucrose and glucose solutions with activated charcoal. Autoclaving-induced hydrolysis of sucrose at pH6 resulted in stimulated Agapanthus praecox pollen growth (in detoxified media) probably due to the formation of glucose which was found to be a superior carbohydrate source for in vitro pollen growth in this species. Considering these results as well as previous reports on anther culture studies, autoclaving-induced toxicity from and hydrolysis of carbohydrates should be taken into account in all pollen and anther culture studies as well as in vitro pollination of ovules

Network design: Taxi Planning

The effect of managing aircraft movements on the airport’s ground is an important tool that can alleviate the delays of flights, specially in peak hours or congested situations. Although some strategic design decisions regarding aeronautical and safety aspects have a main impact on the airport’s topology, there exists a number of other additional factors that must be evaluated according to the on ground operations, i.e. previous to the taking-off or after landing. Among these factors one can consider capacities at waiting points and directions of some corridors. These factors are related to the demand situation of a given period and influence the aircraft’s routing on the ground or short term Taxi Planning problem (or TP-S). While the TP-S problem studies the aircraft routing and scheduling on the airport’s ground under a dynamic point of view, this paper presents a Taxi Planning network design model (or TPND), attending to these additional factors of the airport’s topology and the conflicting movements of the aircraft on them with the same modelling approach used in the TP-S problem. The TPND model is formulated as a binary multicommodity network flow problem with additional side constraints under a multiobjective approach. The side constraints included are the classical limitations due to capacity and also as a distinctive approach, constraints that restrict the interference of aircraft in order to decrease the intervention of human controllers during the operations or increase their safety margins. The multiobjective approach adopted for the TPND model balances conflicting objectives: airport’s throughput, travel times, safety of operations and costs. In the paper computational results are included on two test airports solving the TPND model by “Branch and Bound” showing the effect of the conflicting objectives in the design decisions

Shadow Honeypots

We present Shadow Honeypots, a novel hybrid architecture that combines the best features of honeypots and anomaly detection. At a high level, we use a variety of anomaly detectors to monitor all traffic to a protected network or service. Traffic that is considered anomalous is processed by a "shadow honeypot" to determine the accuracy of the anomaly prediction. The shadow is an instance of the protected software that shares all internal state with a regular ("production") instance of the application, and is instrumented to detect potential attacks. Attacks against the shadow are caught, and any incurred state changes are discarded. Legitimate traffic that was misclassified will be validated by the shadow and will be handled correctly by the system transparently to the end user. The outcome of processing a request by the shadow is used to filter future attack instances and could be used to update the anomaly detector. Our architecture allows system designers to fine-tune systems for performance, since false positives will be filtered by the shadow. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach in a proof-of-concept implementation of the Shadow Honeypot architecture for the Apache web server and the Mozilla Firefox browser. We show that despite a considerable overhead in the instrumentation of the shadow honeypot (up to 20% for Apache), the overall impact on the system is diminished by the ability to minimize the rate of false-positives

Taxi Planner Optimization: A Management Tool

This work introduces taxi planning optimization (TPO) as a methodology to guide airport surface management operations. The optimization model represents competing aircraft using limited ground resources. TPO improves aircraft taxiing routes and their schedule in situations of congestion, minimizing overall taxiing time (TT), and helping taxi planners to meet prespecified goals such as compliance with take-off windows, TT limits, and trajectory conflicts. By considering all simultaneous trajectories during a given planning horizon, TPO's estimation of TT from the stand to the runways improves over current planning methods. The operational optimization model is a large-scale space-time multi-commodity network with capacity constraints. In addition to its natural use as a real-time taxi planning tool, a number of TPO variants can be used for design purposes, such as expansion of new infrastructure. TPO is demonstrated using Madrid-Barajas as test airport

Virtual Private Services: Coordinated Policy Enforcement for Distributed Applications

Large scale distributed applications combine network access with multiple storage and computational elements. The distributed responsibility for resource control creates new security issues, caused by the complexity of the operating environment. In particular, policies at multiple layers and locations force conventional mechanisms such as firewalls and compartmented file storage into roles where they are clumsy and failure-prone. Our approach relies on two functional divisions. First, we split policy specification and policy enforcement, providing local autonomy within the constraints of the global security policy. Second, we create virtual security domains each with its own security policy. Every domain has an associated set of privileges and permissions restricting it to the resources it needs to use and the services it must perform. Virtual private services ensure security and privacy policies are adhered to through coordinated policy enforcement points

The European Union-United States Cybersecurity Relationship : A Transatlantic Functional Cooperation

open access via T&F agreement Acknowledgements The author is grateful to the interviewees for sharing their thoughts and insights. The author would also like to thank the anonymous referees for their comments and feedback and the editorial team for their assistance throughout the publication process.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Upper Cretaceous coprolites from the Münster Basin (northwestern Germany) : a glimpse into the diet of extinct animals

En omfattande samling koproliter från tre lokaler med sediment från sen kritatid i Münsterbassängen (nordvästra Tyskland) har studerats med en mängd olika analytiska tekniker med avsikten att belysa urtida trofiska nivåer och relationen mellan rovdjur och bytesdjur. Den fosfatiska sammansättningen, inneslutningar av benmaterial, storlek och form tyder på att de flesta eller samtliga koproliter producerades av rovlevande vertebrater. Framför allt exemplaren av sen santonsk ålder (som mäter upp till 90 mm) tyder på värddjur av påtaglig storlek. Beninnneslutningarnas karaktäristik tyder på att rovdjuren framför allt jagade fisk men att de även kunde inkludera sköldpaddor i sin diet. Baserat på koproliternas yttre karaktäristik delades exemplaren upp i åtta olika morfotyper. Tänkbara koprolitproducenter innefattar mosasaurier, benfiskar och hajar, vilka samtliga har rapporterats från Münsterbassängen. En fiskätande haj tros ha producerat de heteropolära koproliterna medan benfiskar bedöms ha producerat de amfipolära koproliterna. Förekomsten av märken och skåror på utsidan av flertalet koproliter tyder på hantering av koprofaga vertebrater och/eller evertebrater. Epibionter är också ett vanligt förekommande inslag och de flesta har identifierats som brachiopoden Isocrania. Den här studien visar att kombinationen av ett flertal analystekniker är det mest framgångsrika sättet att avslöja ursprung, sammansättning och betydelsen hos koproliter i analyser av dåtida ekosystem.A large number of coprolites from three localities with Upper Cretaceous strata from the Münster Basin (northwestern Germany) have been subjected to a wide array of analytical techniques with the aim of shedding some light on ancient trophic structures and predator–prey interactions. The phosphatic composition, bone inclusions, size and morphology suggest that most or all coprolites were produced by carnivorous vertebrates, especially the late Santonian specimens (up to 90 mm) imply host animals of significant size. Based on the nature of the bone inclusions, the animals preyed principally upon fish, but may also have included turtles in their diet. Based on their gross morphology, the coprolite specimens are subdivided into eight different morphotypes. Possible coprolite producers include mosasaurs, bony fish and sharks, all of which have been recorded from the Münster Basin. A piscivorous shark producer is inferred for heteropolar coprolites and a bony fish producer for amphipolar ones. The presence of tracks and traces on several of the coprolites suggest handling by coprophagous vertebrates and/or invertebrates. Remains of epibionts are also common and have primarily been identified as brachiopods (Isocrania). The findings of this study highlight that a combination of multiple analytical techniques is the most comprehensive approach for unraveling the origin, composition and importance of coprolites in palaeoecosystem analyses