Repeatable Reverse Engineering for the Greater Good with PANDA

We present PANDA, an open-source tool that has been purpose-built to support whole system reverse engineering. It is built upon the QEMU whole system emulator, and so analyses have access to all code executing in the guest and all data. PANDA adds the ability to record and replay executions, enabling iterative, deep, whole system analyses. Further, the replay log files are compact and shareable, allowing for repeatable experiments. A nine billion instruction boot of FreeBSD, e.g., is represented by only a few hundred MB. Further, PANDA leverages QEMU's support of thirteen different CPU architectures to make analyses of those diverse instruction sets possible within the LLVM IR. In this way, PANDA can have a single dynamic taint analysis, for example, that precisely supports many CPUs. PANDA analyses are written in a simple plugin architecture which includes a mechanism to share functionality between plugins, increasing analysis code re-use and simplifying complex analysis development. We demonstrate PANDA's effectiveness via a number of use cases, including enabling an old but legitimate version of Starcraft to run despite a lost CD key, in-depth diagnosis of an Internet Explorer crash, and uncovering the censorship activities and mechanisms of a Chinese IM client

BMJ Open

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effect of air pollution, from oocyte retrieval to embryo transfer, on the results of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) in terms of clinical pregnancy rates, at two fertility centres, from 2013 to 2019. DESIGN: Exploratory retrospective cohort study. SETTING: This retrospective cohort study was performed in the Reproductive Biology Department of Bordeaux University Hospital localised in Bordeaux, France and the Jean Villar Fertility Center localised in Bruges, France. PARTICIPANTS: This study included 10 763 IVF attempts occurring between January 2013 and December 2019, 2194 of which resulted in a clinical pregnancy. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: The outcome of the IVF attempt was recorded as the presence or absence of a clinical pregnancy; exposure to air pollution was assessed by calculating the cumulative exposure of suspended particulate matter, fine particulate matter, black carbon, nitrogen dioxide and ozone (O(3)), over the period from oocyte retrieval to embryo transfer, together with secondary exposure due to the presence of the biomass boiler room, which was installed in 2016, close to the Bordeaux University Hospital laboratory. The association between air pollution and IVF outcome was evaluated by a random-effects logistic regression analysis. RESULTS: We found negative associations between cumulative O(3) exposure and clinical pregnancy rate (OR=0.92, 95% CI = (0.86 to 0.98)), and between biomass boiler room exposure and clinical pregnancy rate (OR=0.75, 95% CI = (0.61 to 0.91)), after adjustment for potential confounders. CONCLUSION: Air pollution could have a negative effect on assisted reproductive technology results and therefore precautions should be taken to minimise the impact of outdoor air on embryo culture

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements