Understanding Concurrency Vulnerabilities in Linux Kernel

While there is a large body of work on analyzing concurrency related software bugs and developing techniques for detecting and patching them, little attention has been given to concurrency related security vulnerabilities. The two are different in that not all bugs are vulnerabilities: for a bug to be exploitable, there needs be a way for attackers to trigger its execution and cause damage, e.g., by revealing sensitive data or running malicious code. To fill the gap, we conduct the first empirical study of concurrency vulnerabilities reported in the Linux operating system in the past ten years. We focus on analyzing the confirmed vulnerabilities archived in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database, which are then categorized into different groups based on bug types, exploit patterns, and patch strategies adopted by developers. We use code snippets to illustrate individual vulnerability types and patch strategies. We also use statistics to illustrate the entire landscape, including the percentage of each vulnerability type. We hope to shed some light on the problem, e.g., concurrency vulnerabilities continue to pose a serious threat to system security, and it is difficult even for kernel developers to analyze and patch them. Therefore, more efforts are needed to develop tools and techniques for analyzing and patching these vulnerabilities.Comment: It was finished in Oct 201

Metric-aligned Sample Selection and Critical Feature Sampling for Oriented Object Detection

Arbitrary-oriented object detection is a relatively emerging but challenging task. Although remarkable progress has been made, there still remain many unsolved issues due to the large diversity of patterns in orientation, scale, aspect ratio, and visual appearance of objects in aerial images. Most of the existing methods adopt a coarse-grained fixed label assignment strategy and suffer from the inconsistency between the classification score and localization accuracy. First, to align the metric inconsistency between sample selection and regression loss calculation caused by fixed IoU strategy, we introduce affine transformation to evaluate the quality of samples and propose a distance-based label assignment strategy. The proposed metric-aligned selection (MAS) strategy can dynamically select samples according to the shape and rotation characteristic of objects. Second, to further address the inconsistency between classification and localization, we propose a critical feature sampling (CFS) module, which performs localization refinement on the sampling location for classification task to extract critical features accurately. Third, we present a scale-controlled smooth $L_1$ loss (SC-Loss) to adaptively select high quality samples by changing the form of regression loss function based on the statistics of proposals during training. Extensive experiments are conducted on four challenging rotated object detection datasets DOTA, FAIR1M-1.0, HRSC2016, and UCAS-AOD. The results show the state-of-the-art accuracy of the proposed detector

Discovery of a novel, liver-targeted thyroid hormone receptor-β agonist, CS271011, in the treatment of lipid metabolism disorders

IntroductionThyroid hormone receptor β (THR-β) plays a critical role in metabolism regulation and has become an attractive target for treating lipid metabolism disorders in recent years. Thus, in this study, we discovered CS271011, a novel THR-β agonist, and assessed the safety and efficiency of CS271011 compared to MGL-3196 in vitro and in vivo. MethodsWe conducted luciferase reporter gene assays to assess the activation of THR-β and α in vitro. C57BL/6J mice were fed a high-fat diet for 12 weeks, CS271011 was administered by gavage at the dose of 1 mg/kg and 3 mg/kg, and MGL-3196 was administered at the dose of 3 mg/kg for 10 weeks. Body weight, food intake, serum and hepatic parameters, histological analysis, pharmacokinetic studies, RNA sequencing of the liver and heart, and expression of hepatic lipid-metabolic genes were determined to evaluate the safety and efficiency of CS271011. ResultsCompared with MGL-3196, CS271011 showed higher THR-β activation in vitro. In the diet-induced obesity mice model, CS271011 demonstrated favourable pharmacokinetic properties in mice and was enriched in the liver. Finally, CS271011 improved dyslipidaemia and reduced liver steatosis in the diet-induced obesity murine model. Mechanistically, CS271011 and MGL-3196 showed potent regulation of lipid metabolism-related genes. ConclusionsCS271011 is a potent and liver-targeted THR-β agonist for treating lipid metabolism disorders

The political geography of religious radicalism. A compendium of selected case studies from around the globe

Religion has neither gone away nor remained irrelevant in our world today. There is no day that we do not hear news about religion in the media. The news we hear about religion and violence, however, appears to dominate the headlines. Although the history of religions and violence is not a new one, since September 11, 2001 there has been a growing concern about religious extremism and terrorism. At the same time, there is a corresponding interest in the subject of religion and violence among many disciplines. In the course GEO-83 “Political Geography of Religious Radicalism”, we offered students an excursion into the ambivalent world of religion and conflict through an exploration of different theoretical perspectives and approaches, case studies, seminal and class discussions and extensive literature review. The unique angle of interrogation that political geography offers in terms of the spatial dimensions and the power relations between different actors as well as the discursive aspects of interreligious conflicts and extremism has proved very valuable in generating insights on this subject matter. This volume is an attempt by students of the M.A. “Human Geography – Global Studies” programme of the University of Tübingen to demonstrate acquaintance with the approach of political geography to the study of religious violence and extremism. The students took on some of the most challenging conflicts and religious insurgencies confronting the world and offered insights using diverse theoretical and analytical frameworks. The analysis contained in each chapter was based on secondary data. Thus, limitations are set based on the availability of and access to data. Given the contested nature of religious conflicts and extremism, the reader is invited to consider all the articles in this volume as primarily an academic exercise with no intention to promote a certain narrative or to take sides. Knowledge is always incremental. Therefore, what is presented here is intended to increase our understanding of the phenomenon and to stimulate further research and efforts at finding solutions to the various conflicts. No doubt, this exercise has exposed the students to the rigour of scientific writing. This experience will remain invaluable to them in their continuing academic pursuit as well as in their future endeavours. The lecturers also found this experience to be highly rewarding. The process was quite daunting, but the commitment and the dedication of the students paid off

Further results on Borel removable sets of entire functions

In this paper, the following result is proved. Let (R(m)) be a sequence of real numbers such that lim(n-->infinity) R(m+1)/R(m) = +infinity and let (phi(m)) be a sequence of real numbers such that 0 less-than-or-equal-to phi(m), less-than-or-equal-to 2pi. Suppose that eta(0 < eta < pi) and S ( > 1 ) are two constants. If E = or(m=1)infinity)D(m), where D(m) = {z = re(itheta), R(m) less-than-or-equal-to r less-than-or-equal-to SR(m)} \ {z = re(itheta), phi(m) - eta < theta < phi(m) + eta} (m = 1, 2,...), then Borel's theorem holds in C \ E for every entire function f (z) of positive order.MathematicsSCI(E)5ARTICLE167-811