IoTSan: Fortifying the Safety of IoT Systems

Today's IoT systems include event-driven smart applications (apps) that interact with sensors and actuators. A problem specific to IoT systems is that buggy apps, unforeseen bad app interactions, or device/communication failures, can cause unsafe and dangerous physical states. Detecting flaws that lead to such states, requires a holistic view of installed apps, component devices, their configurations, and more importantly, how they interact. In this paper, we design IoTSan, a novel practical system that uses model checking as a building block to reveal "interaction-level" flaws by identifying events that can lead the system to unsafe states. In building IoTSan, we design novel techniques tailored to IoT systems, to alleviate the state explosion associated with model checking. IoTSan also automatically translates IoT apps into a format amenable to model checking. Finally, to understand the root cause of a detected vulnerability, we design an attribution mechanism to identify problematic and potentially malicious apps. We evaluate IoTSan on the Samsung SmartThings platform. From 76 manually configured systems, IoTSan detects 147 vulnerabilities. We also evaluate IoTSan with malicious SmartThings apps from a previous effort. IoTSan detects the potential safety violations and also effectively attributes these apps as malicious.Comment: Proc. of the 14th ACM CoNEXT, 201

Cohomological BRST aspects of the massless tensor field with the mixed symmetry (k,k)

The main BRST cohomological properties of a free, massless tensor field that transforms in an irreducible representation of GL(D,R), corresponding to a rectangular, two-column Young diagram with k>2 rows are studied in detail. In particular, it is shown that any non-trivial co-cycle from the local BRST cohomology group H(s|d) can be taken to stop either at antighost number (k+1) or k, its last component belonging to the cohomology of the exterior longitudinal derivative H(gamma) and containing non-trivial elements from the (invariant) characteristic cohomology H^{inv}(delta|d).Comment: Latex, 50 pages, uses amssym

Finite N Fluctuation Formulas for Random Matrices

For the Gaussian and Laguerre random matrix ensembles, the probability density function (p.d.f.) for the linear statistic $\sum_{j=1}^N (x_j - )$ is computed exactly and shown to satisfy a central limit theorem as $N \to \infty$. For the circular random matrix ensemble the p.d.f.'s for the linear statistics ${1 \over 2} \sum_{j=1}^N (\theta_j - \pi)$ and $- \sum_{j=1}^N \log 2|\sin \theta_j/2|$ are calculated exactly by using a constant term identity from the theory of the Selberg integral, and are also shown to satisfy a central limit theorem as $N \to \infty$.Comment: LaTeX 2.09, 11 pages + 3 eps figs (needs epsf.sty

Gaussian Fluctuation in Random Matrices

Let $N(L)$ be the number of eigenvalues, in an interval of length $L$, of a matrix chosen at random from the Gaussian Orthogonal, Unitary or Symplectic ensembles of ${\cal N}$ by ${\cal N}$ matrices, in the limit ${\cal N}\rightarrow\infty$. We prove that $[N(L) - \langle N(L)\rangle]/\sqrt{\log L}$ has a Gaussian distribution when $L\rightarrow\infty$. This theorem, which requires control of all the higher moments of the distribution, elucidates numerical and exact results on chaotic quantum systems and on the statistics of zeros of the Riemann zeta function. \noindent PACS nos. 05.45.+b, 03.65.-wComment: 13 page

Outer membrane vesicles from Neisseria gonorrhoeae target PorB to mitochondria and induce apoptosis.

Neisseria gonorrhoeae causes the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhoea by evading innate immunity. Colonizing the mucosa of the reproductive tract depends on the bacterial outer membrane porin, PorB, which is essential for ion and nutrient uptake. PorB is also targeted to host mitochondria and regulates apoptosis pathways to promote infections. How PorB traffics from the outer membrane of N. gonorrhoeae to mitochondria and whether it modulates innate immune cells, such as macrophages, remains unclear. Here, we show that N. gonorrhoeae secretes PorB via outer membrane vesicles (OMVs). Purified OMVs contained primarily outer membrane proteins including oligomeric PorB. The porin was targeted to mitochondria of macrophages after exposure to purified OMVs and wild type N. gonorrhoeae. This was associated with loss of mitochondrial membrane potential, release of cytochrome c, activation of apoptotic caspases and cell death in a time-dependent manner. Consistent with this, OMV-induced macrophage death was prevented with the pan-caspase inhibitor, Q-VD-PH. This shows that N. gonorrhoeae utilizes OMVs to target PorB to mitochondria and to induce apoptosis in macrophages, thus affecting innate immunity

Transition probabilities in the X(5) candidate 122^{122}Ba

To investigate the possible X(5) character of 122Ba, suggested by the ground state band energy pattern, the lifetimes of the lowest yrast states of 122Ba have been measured, via the Recoil Distance Doppler-Shift method. The relevant levels have been populated by using the 108Cd(16O,2n)122Ba and the 112Sn(13C,3n)122Ba reactions. The B(E2) values deduced in the present work are compared to the predictions of the X(5) model and to calculations performed in the framework of the IBA-1 and IBA-2 models

The semi-classical expansion and resurgence in gauge theories: new perturbative, instanton, bion, and renormalon effects

We study the dynamics of four dimensional gauge theories with adjoint fermions for all gauge groups, both in perturbation theory and non-perturbatively, by using circle compactification with periodic boundary conditions for the fermions. There are new gauge phenomena. We show that, to all orders in perturbation theory, many gauge groups are Higgsed by the gauge holonomy around the circle to a product of both abelian and nonabelian gauge group factors. Non-perturbatively there are monopole-instantons with fermion zero modes and two types of monopole-anti-monopole molecules, called bions. One type are "magnetic bions" which carry net magnetic charge and induce a mass gap for gauge fluctuations. Another type are "neutral bions" which are magnetically neutral, and their understanding requires a generalization of multi-instanton techniques in quantum mechanics - which we refer to as the Bogomolny-Zinn-Justin (BZJ) prescription - to compactified field theory. The BZJ prescription applied to bion-anti-bion topological molecules predicts a singularity on the positive real axis of the Borel plane (i.e., a divergence from summing large orders in peturbation theory) which is of order N times closer to the origin than the leading 4-d BPST instanton-anti-instanton singularity, where N is the rank of the gauge group. The position of the bion--anti-bion singularity is thus qualitatively similar to that of the 4-d IR renormalon singularity, and we conjecture that they are continuously related as the compactification radius is changed. By making use of transseries and Ecalle's resurgence theory we argue that a non-perturbative continuum definition of a class of field theories which admit semi-classical expansions may be possible.Comment: 112 pages, 7 figures; v2: typos corrected, discussion of supersymmetric models added at the end of section 8.1, reference adde

Functional limit theorems for random regular graphs

Consider d uniformly random permutation matrices on n labels. Consider the sum of these matrices along with their transposes. The total can be interpreted as the adjacency matrix of a random regular graph of degree 2d on n vertices. We consider limit theorems for various combinatorial and analytical properties of this graph (or the matrix) as n grows to infinity, either when d is kept fixed or grows slowly with n. In a suitable weak convergence framework, we prove that the (finite but growing in length) sequences of the number of short cycles and of cyclically non-backtracking walks converge to distributional limits. We estimate the total variation distance from the limit using Stein's method. As an application of these results we derive limits of linear functionals of the eigenvalues of the adjacency matrix. A key step in this latter derivation is an extension of the Kahn-Szemer\'edi argument for estimating the second largest eigenvalue for all values of d and n.Comment: Added Remark 27. 39 pages. To appear in Probability Theory and Related Field

Quasi-linear Stokes phenomenon for the second Painlev\'e transcendent

Using the Riemann-Hilbert approach, we study the quasi-linear Stokes phenomenon for the second Painlev\'e equation $y_{xx}=2y^3+xy-\alpha$. The precise description of the exponentially small jump in the dominant solution approaching $\alpha/x$ as $|x|\to\infty$ is given. For the asymptotic power expansion of the dominant solution, the coefficient asymptotics is found.Comment: 19 pages, LaTe