Counterplanning Deceptions to Foil Cyber-Attack Plans

Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE Workshop in Information Assurance, West Point, NY, June 2003Tactics involving deception are important in military strategies. We have been exploring deliberate deception in defensive tactics by information systems under cyber-attack as during information warfare. We have developed a tool to systematically "counterplan" or find ways to foil a particular attack plan. Our approach is to first find all possible atomic "ploys" that can interfere with the plan. Ploys are simple deceits the operating system can do such as lying about the status of a file. We analyze ploys as to the degree of difficulty they cause to the plan wherever they can be applied. We then formulate a "counterplan" by selecting the most cost-effective set of ploys and assign appropriate presentation methods for them, taking into account the likelihood that, if we are not careful, the attacker will realize they are being deceived and will terminate our game with them. The counterplan can be effected by a modified operating system. We have implemented our counterplanner in a tool MECOUNTER that uses multi-agent planning coupled with some novel inference methods to efficiently find a best counterplan. We apply the tool to an example of a rootkit-installation plan and discuss the results.supported by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs and Office for Domestic PreparednessApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

A multi-zone muffle furnace design

A Multi-Zone Muffle-Tube Furnace was designed, built, and tested for the purpose of providing an in-house experience base with tubular furnaces for materials processing in microgravity. As such, it must not only provide the desired temperatures and controlled thermal gradients at several discrete zones along its length but must also be capable of sustaining the rigors of a Space Shuttle launch. The furnace is insulated to minimize radial and axial heat losses. It is contained in a water-cooled enclosure for purposes of dissipating un-wanted residual heat, keeping the outer surfaces of the furnace at a 'touch-safe' temperature, and providing a rugged housing. This report describes the salient features of the furnace, testing procedures and results, and concluding remarks evaluating the overall design

Recommended outline for M.S. theses

Thesis Writing DocumentA summary of the main points of the thesis. You should try to have a sentence corresponding to ach chapter of the thesis except the first and last. Mention your most important accomplishments, and minimize background information.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Inferring depictions in natural-language captions for efficient access to picture data

This paper appeared in: Information Processing and Management, 30, no. 3 (1994), 379-388.Multimedia data can require significant examination time to find desired features ("content analysis"). An alternative is using natural-language captions to describe the data, and matching captions to English queries. But it is hard to include everything in the caption of a complicated datum, so significant content analysis may still seem required. We discuss linguistic clues in captions, both syntactic and semantic, that can simplify or eliminate content analysis. We introduce the notion of concept depiction and rules for depiction inference. Our approach is implemented in an expert system which demonstrated significant increases in recall in experiments.sponsored by the Naval Ocean Systems Center in San Diego, California, the Naval Air Warfare Center, Weapons Division, in China Lake, California, the U. S. Naval Postgraduate Schoolhttp://archive.org/details/inferringdepicti00roweFunds provided by the Chief for Naval Operations, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects AdministrationApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Obtaining Optimal Mobile-Robot Paths with Non-Smooth Anisotropic Cost Functions Using Qualitative-State Reasoning

This paper appeared in the International Journal of Robotics Research, 16, 3 (June 1997), 375-399. The equations were reconstructed in 2007 for better readability.Realistic path-planning problems frequently show anisotropism, dependency of traversal cost or feasibility on the traversal heading. Gravity, friction, visibility, and safety are often anisotropic for mobile robots. Anisotropism often differs qualitatively with heading, as when a vehicle has insufficient power to go uphill or must brake to avoid accelerating downhill. Modeling qualitative distinctions requires discontinuities in either the cost-per-traversal-distance function or its derivatives, preventing direct application of most results of the calculus of variations. We present a new approach to optimal anisotropic path planning that first identifies qualitative states and permissible transitions between them. If the qualitative states are chosen appropriately, our approach replaces an optimization problem with such discontinuities by a set of subproblems without discontinuities, subproblems for which optimization is likely to be faster and less troublesome. Then the state space in the near neighborhood of any particular state can be partitioned into "behavioral regions" representing states optimally reachable by single qualitative "behaviors", sequences of qualitative states in a finite-state diagram. Simplification of inequalities and other methods can find the behavioral regions. Our ideas solve problems not easily solvable any other way, especially those with what we define as "turn-hostile" anisotropism. We illustrate our methods on two examples, navigation on an arbitrarily curved surface with gravity and friction effects (for which we show much better performance than a previously-published program 22 times longer), and flight of a simple missile.This work was supported in part by the U.S. Army Combat Developments Experimentation Center under MIPR ATEC 88-86. This work was also prepared in part in conjunction with research conducted for the Naval Air Systems Commandfunded by the Naval Postgraduate SchoolApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Towards Reversible Cyberattacks

This paper appeared in the Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Information Warfare and Security, July 2010, Thessaloniki, Greece.Warfare without damage has always been a dream of military planners. Traditional warfare usually leaves persistent side effects in the form of dead and injured people and damaged infrastructure. An appealing feature of cyberwarfare is that it could be more ethical than traditional warfare because its damage could be less and more easily repairable. Damage to data and programs (albeit not physical hardware) can be repaired by rewriting over damaged bits with correct data. However, there are practical difficulties in ensuring that cyberattacks minimize unreversible collateral damage while still being easily repairable by the attacker and not by the victim. We discuss four techniques by which cyberattacks can be potentially reversible. One technique is reversible cryptography, where the attacker encrypts data or programs to prevent their use, then decrypts them after hostilities have ceased. A second technique is to obfuscate the victim's computer systems in a reversible way. A third technique to withhold key data from the victim, while caching it to enable quick restoration on cessation of hostilities. A fourth technique is to deceive the victim so that think they mistakenly think they are being hurt, then reveal the deception at the conclusion of hostilities. We also discuss incentives to use reversible attacks such as legality, better proportionality, lower reparations, and easier ability to use third parties. As an example, we discuss aspects of the recent cyberattacks on Georgia.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

An expert system for the diagnosis of vehicle malfunctions.

http://archive.org/details/expertsystemford00seleNAN

Statistical versus symbolic parsing for captioned-information retrieval / Workshop on the Balancing Act, ACL-94, Las Cruces NM, July 1994

Workshop on the Balancing Act, ACL-94, Las Cruces NM, July 1994We discuss implementation issues of MARIE-1, a mostly symbolic parser fully implemented, and MARIE-2, a more statistical parser partially implemented. They address a corpus of 100,000 picture captions. We argue that the mixed approach of MARIE-2 should be better for this corpus because its algorithms (not data) are simpler.This work was sponsored by DARPA as part of the I3 Project under AO 8939. Copyright is held by the ACL.This work was sponsored by DARPA as part of the I3 Project under AO 8939. Copyright is held by the ACL

Wireless Sensor Networks for Detection of IED Emplacement / 14th ICCRTS: C2 and Agility

14th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium (ICCRTS), June 15-17, 2009, Washington DC.This paper appeared in the Proceedings of the 14th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, Washington, DC, June 2009.We are investigating the use of wireless nonimaging-sensor networks for the difficult problem of detection of suspicious behavior related to IED emplacement. Hardware for surveillance by nonimaging-sensor networks can cheaper than that for visual surveillance, can require much less computational effort by virtue of simpler algorithms, and can avoid problems of occlusion of view that occur with imaging sensors. We report on four parts of our investigation. First, we discuss some lessons we have learned from experiments with visual detection of deliberately-staged suspicious behavior, which suggest that the magnitude of the acceleration vector of a tracked person is a key clue. Second, we describe experiments we conducted with tracking of moving objects in a simulated sensor network, showing that tracking is not always possible even with excellent sensor performance due to the illconditioned nature of the mathematical problems involved. Third, we report on experiments we did with tracking from acoustic data of explosions during a NATO test. Fourth, we report on experiments we did with people crossing a live sensor network. We conclude that nonimaging-sensor networks can detect a variety of suspicious behavior, but implementation needs to address a number of tricky problems.supported in part by the National Science Foundation under the EXP Program and in part by the National Research Council under their Research Associateship Program at the Army Research Laborator

The Android Smartphone as an Inexpensive Sentry Ground Sensor

Proc. SPIE Conf. on Unattended Ground, Sea, and Air Sensor Technologies and Applications XIV, Baltimore, MD, April 2012A key challenge of sentry and monitoring duties is detection of approaching people in areas of little human traffic. We are exploring smartphones as easily available, easily portable, and less expensive alternatives to traditional military sensors for this task, where the sensors are already integrated into the package. We developed an application program for the Android smartphone that uses its sensors to detect people passing nearby; it takes their pictures for subsequent transmission to a central monitoring station. We experimented with the microphone, light sensor, vibration sensor, proximity sensor, orientation sensor, and magnetic sensor of the Android. We got best results with the microphone (looking for footsteps) and light sensor (looking for abrupt changes in light), and sometimes good results with the vibration sensor. We ran a variety of tests with subjects walking at various distances from the phone under different environmental conditions to measure limits on acceptable detection. We got best results by combining average loudness over a 200 millisecond period with a brightness threshold adjusted to the background brightness, and we set our phones to trigger pictures no more than twice a second. Subjects needed to be within ten feet of the phone for reliable triggering, and some surfaces gave poorer results. We primarily tested using the Motorola Atrix 4G (Android 2.3.4) and HTC Evo 4G (Android 2.3.3) and found only a few differences in performance running the same program, which we attribute to differences in the hardware. We also tested two older Android phones that had problems with crashing when running our program. Our results provide good guidance for when and where to use this approach to inexpensive sensing