RadArnomaly: Protecting Radar Systems from Data Manipulation Attacks

Radar systems are mainly used for tracking aircraft, missiles, satellites, and watercraft. In many cases, information regarding the objects detected by the radar system is sent to, and used by, a peripheral consuming system, such as a missile system or a graphical user interface used by an operator. Those systems process the data stream and make real-time, operational decisions based on the data received. Given this, the reliability and availability of information provided by radar systems has grown in importance. Although the field of cyber security has been continuously evolving, no prior research has focused on anomaly detection in radar systems. In this paper, we present a deep learning-based method for detecting anomalies in radar system data streams. We propose a novel technique which learns the correlation between numerical features and an embedding representation of categorical features in an unsupervised manner. The proposed technique, which allows the detection of malicious manipulation of critical fields in the data stream, is complemented by a timing-interval anomaly detection mechanism proposed for the detection of message dropping attempts. Real radar system data is used to evaluate the proposed method. Our experiments demonstrate the method's high detection accuracy on a variety of data stream manipulation attacks (average detection rate of 88% with 1.59% false alarms) and message dropping attacks (average detection rate of 92% with 2.2% false alarms)

Winter Strawberries Production in Greenhouse Soilless Culture under an Arid Climate—Cultivars, Phenology, Physiology, and Consequent Practices

Fifteen years of research and development aimed at the production of high-quality early-winter strawberries in the Negev desert, are concluded. This goal required synchronization of seasonal yields with the peaks of the markets\u27 demand, November−February. For this purpose, selected infra short-day (ISD) cultivars were used. Rooted plug plants with enhanced capacity of simultaneous fast vegetative growth and fruiting were produced. Production was carried out in greenhouses and various protocols aimed at yield enhancement were tested. Currently, drip-fertigated, eye-level hanging soilless system, with plant density at about 200,000 plants ha−1, combined with biological pest management program, are employed. This system brought about a two-fold increase in yield compared to soil culture (80–100 t ha−1), significantly reduced risks of soil- and air-borne diseases, reduced the use of fungicides, and eased extensive labor demands. However, beyond substantial refinements of practices, a significant proportion, 15–25% of the seasonal high-quality yield, was harvested during the earlier two months with no reduction in the total yield or fruit quality. In this chapter, the state of art in early-winter strawberry production is portrayed, including principles, approaches, and methods that have been used and improved during the project. Additionally, ideas for further possible enhancement are discussed

Quantifying the uncertainties of transpiration calculations with the Penman-Monteith equation under different climate and optimum water supply conditions

The uncertainties of transpiration calculations with the Penman-Monteith equation were quantified under different climate conditions of Brazil, Germany and Israel using maize as a common crop type. All experiments were carried out under non-limiting growing conditions. Canopy resistance was determined by scaling to canopy level specific relations between in situ measurements of incident radiation and stomatal conductance using a light penetration model. The model was tested against heat-pulse measured sap flow in plant stems. The root mean square error (RMSE) of daily calculated transpiration minus measured sap flow was 0.4 mm/day. It was dominated by its variance component (variance = 0.2 {min/day}(2); bias = 0.0 mm/day). Calculated transpiration closely matched the measured trends at the three locations. No significant differences were found between seasons and locations. Uncertainties of canopy conductance parameterizations led to errors of up to 2.1 mm/day. The model responded most sensitively to a 30% change of net radiation (absolute bias error = 1.6 mm/day), followed by corresponding alterations of canopy resistances (0.8 mm/day), vapour pressure deficits (0.5 mm/clay) and aerodynamic resistances (0.34 mm/day). Measured and calculated 30-min or hourly averaged transpiration rates are highly correlated (r(2) = 0.95; n = 10634), and the slope of the regression line is close to unity. The overall RMSE of calculated transpiration minus measured sap flow was 0.08 mm/h and was dominated by its variance component (0.005 {mm/h}(2)). Measured sap flow consistently lagged behind calculated transpiration, because plant hydraulic capacitance delays the change of leaf water potential that drives water uptake. Calculated transpiration significantly overestimated sap flow during morning hours (mean = 0.068 mm/h, n = 321) and underestimated it during afternoon hours (mean = -0.065 mm/h; n = 316). The Penman-Monteith approach as implemented in the present study is sufficiently sensitive to detect small differences between transpiration and water uptake and provides a robust tool to manage plant water supply under unstressed conditions. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

AndroDialysis: Analysis of Android Intent Effectiveness in Malware Detection

© 2016 Elsevier Ltd The wide popularity of Android systems has been accompanied by increase in the number of malware targeting these systems. This is largely due to the open nature of the Android framework that facilitates the incorporation of third-party applications running on top of any Android device. Inter-process communication is one of the most notable features of the Android framework as it allows the reuse of components across process boundaries. This mechanism is used as gateway to access different sensitive services in the Android framework. In the Android platform, this communication system is usually driven by a late runtime binding messaging object known as Intent. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of Android Intents (explicit and implicit) as a distinguishing feature for identifying malicious applications. We show that Intents are semantically rich features that are able to encode the intentions of malware when compared to other well-studied features such as permissions. We also argue that this type of feature is not the ultimate solution. It should be used in conjunction with other known features. We conducted experiments using a dataset containing 7406 applications that comprise 1846 clean and 5560 infected applications. The results show detection rate of 91% using Android Intent against 83% using Android permission. Additionally, experiment on combination of both features results in detection rate of 95.5%

A comprehensive overview of radioguided surgery using gamma detection probe technology

The concept of radioguided surgery, which was first developed some 60 years ago, involves the use of a radiation detection probe system for the intraoperative detection of radionuclides. The use of gamma detection probe technology in radioguided surgery has tremendously expanded and has evolved into what is now considered an established discipline within the practice of surgery, revolutionizing the surgical management of many malignancies, including breast cancer, melanoma, and colorectal cancer, as well as the surgical management of parathyroid disease. The impact of radioguided surgery on the surgical management of cancer patients includes providing vital and real-time information to the surgeon regarding the location and extent of disease, as well as regarding the assessment of surgical resection margins. Additionally, it has allowed the surgeon to minimize the surgical invasiveness of many diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, while still maintaining maximum benefit to the cancer patient. In the current review, we have attempted to comprehensively evaluate the history, technical aspects, and clinical applications of radioguided surgery using gamma detection probe technology