Self-Adaptive Systems for Information Survivability: PMOP and AWDRAT

Information systems form the backbones of the critical infrastructures of modern societies. Unfortunately, these systems are highly vulnerable to attacks that can result in enormous damage. Furthermore, traditional approaches to information security have not provided all the protections necessary to defeat and recover from a concerted attack; in particular, they are largely irrelevant to the problem of defending against attacks launched by insiders.This paper describes two related systems PMOP and AWDRAT that were developed during the DARPA Self Regenerative Systems program. PMOP defends against insider attacks while AWDRAT is intended to detect compromises to software systems. Both rely on self-monitoring, diagnosis and self-adaptation. We describe both systems and show the results of experiments with each

The National Scalable Cluster Project: Three Lessons about High Performance Data Mining and

Today a 10 GB data set can easily be produced with a simple mistake, 100 GB- 1 TB data sets are common, and data sets larger than a Terabyte are becoming common. In this paper, we describe three basic lessons we have learned about data mining and data intensive computing large and massive data sets. First, we give a few definitions. A Terabyte is 1000 Gigabytes and a Petabyte is a 1000 Terabytes

A New Technology for Fast Two-Dimensional Detection of Proton Therapy Beams

The Micromesh Gaseous Structure, or Micromegas, is a technology developed for high count-rate applications in high-energy physics experiments. Tests using a Micromegas chamber and specially designed amplifiers and readout electronics adapted to the requirements of the proton therapy environment and providing both excellent time and high spatial resolution are presented here. The device was irradiated at the Roberts Proton Therapy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The system was operated with ionization gains between 10 and 200 and in low and intermediate dose-rate beams, and the digitized signal is found to be reproducible to 0.8%. Spatial resolution is determined to be 1.1 mm (1σ) with a 1 ms time resolution. We resolve the range modulator wheel rotational frequency and the thicknesses of its segments and show that this information can be quickly measured owing to the high time resolution of the system. Systems of this type will be extremely useful in future treatment methods involving beams that change rapidly in time and spatial position. The Micromegas design resolves the high dose rate within a proton Bragg peak, and measurements agree with Geant4 simulations to within 5%