Kairos: Practical Intrusion Detection and Investigation using Whole-system Provenance

Provenance graphs are structured audit logs that describe the history of a system's execution. Recent studies have explored a variety of techniques to analyze provenance graphs for automated host intrusion detection, focusing particularly on advanced persistent threats. Sifting through their design documents, we identify four common dimensions that drive the development of provenance-based intrusion detection systems (PIDSes): scope (can PIDSes detect modern attacks that infiltrate across application boundaries?), attack agnosticity (can PIDSes detect novel attacks without a priori knowledge of attack characteristics?), timeliness (can PIDSes efficiently monitor host systems as they run?), and attack reconstruction (can PIDSes distill attack activity from large provenance graphs so that sysadmins can easily understand and quickly respond to system intrusion?). We present KAIROS, the first PIDS that simultaneously satisfies the desiderata in all four dimensions, whereas existing approaches sacrifice at least one and struggle to achieve comparable detection performance. Kairos leverages a novel graph neural network-based encoder-decoder architecture that learns the temporal evolution of a provenance graph's structural changes to quantify the degree of anomalousness for each system event. Then, based on this fine-grained information, Kairos reconstructs attack footprints, generating compact summary graphs that accurately describe malicious activity over a stream of system audit logs. Using state-of-the-art benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that Kairos outperforms previous approaches.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures, to appear in the 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'24

Adiponectin improves coronary no-reflow injury by protecting the endothelium in rats with type 2 diabetes mellitus.

To determine the effect of adiponectin (APN) on the coronary no-reflow (NR) injury in rats with Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), 80 male Sprague-Dawley rats were fed with a high-sugar-high-fat diet to build a T2DM model. Rats received vehicle or APN in the last week and then were subjected to myocardial ischemia reperfusion (MI/R) injury. Endothelium-dependent vasorelaxation of the thoracic aorta was significantly decreased and serum levels of endothelin-1 (ET-1), intercellular cell adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1) and vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 (VCAM-1) were noticably increased in T2DM rats compared with rats without T2DM. Serum APN was positively correlated with the endothelium-dependent vasorelaxation, but negatively correlated with the serum level of ET-1. Treatment with APN improved T2DM-induced endothelium-dependent vasorelaxation, recovered cardiac function, and decreased both NR size and the levels of ET-1, ICAM-1 and VCAM-1. Hypoadiponectinemia was associated with the aggravation of coronary NR in T2DM rats. APN could alleviate coronary NR injury in T2DM rats by protecting the endothelium and improving microcirculation

Molecular identification of Clonorchis sinensis and discrimination with other opisthorchid liver fluke species using multiple Ligation-depended Probe Amplification (MLPA)

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Infections with the opisthorchid liver flukes <it>Clonorchis sinensis</it>, <it>Opisthorchis viverrini</it>, and <it>O. felineus </it>cause severe health problems globally, particularly in Southeast Asia. Early identification of the infection is essential to provide timely and appropriate chemotherapy to patients.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this study we evaluate a PCR-based molecular identification method, Multiplex Ligation-dependent Probe Amplification (MLPA), which allows rapid and specific detection of single nucleotide acid differences between <it>Clonorchis sinensis</it>, <it>Opisthorchis viverrini </it>and <it>O. felineus</it>. Three probe pairs were derived from the Internally Transcribed Spacer 1 (ITS1) of three opisthorchid liver flukes using a systematic phylogenetic analysis. Specific loci were detected in all three species, yielding three amplicons with 198,172 and 152 bp, respectively, while no cross reactions were observed. A panel of 66 <it>C. sinensis </it>isolates was screened using MLPA. All species were positively identified, and no inhibition was observed. The detection limit was 10³copies of the ITS gene for the three liver flukes, or about 60 pg genomic DNA for <it>Clonorchis sinensis</it>. Amplification products can be detected by electrophoresis on agarose gel or in a capillary sequencer. In addition, genomic DNA of <it>Clonorchis sinensis </it>in fecal samples of infected rats was positively amplified by MLPA.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The flexibility and specificity make MLPA a potential tool for specific identification of infections by opisthorchid liver flukes in endemic areas.</p

Semantic-Driven 3D Scene Construction Based on Spatial Relationship and Case-Base

At present, 3D scene construction technology has been widely used in various fields. However, 3D scene construction is increasing on the human and material costs, and the production process is also complicated. First, we use a semantic analysis method to achieve better Chinese automatic word segmentation, which is bidirectional matching Chinese word segmentation based on N-gram model. Next, to solve the problems of low degree of automation and intelligence, we propose a new method of 3D scene construction based on spatial relationship and case-base. The objects and spatial relationships extracted from the scene description texts form a spatial constraint in the form of a triple, which is stored in the spatial relationship template library. Then the 3D model in the case-base is invoked to build the scene. This method takes the spatial constraint as the smallest module of the scene construction, which not only accelerates 3D scene construction, but also improves the rationality of the scene layout. At last, we apply this method to scene generation in a strategy game, in which the effectiveness and efficiency of the new method are proved

Promoted Photocharge Separation in 2D Lateral Epitaxial Heterostructure for Visible‐Light‐Driven CO2 Photoreduction

Photocarrier recombination remains a big barrier for the improvement of solar energy conversion efficiency. For 2D materials, construction of heterostructures represents an efficient strategy to promote photoexcited carrier separation via an internal electric field at the heterointerface. However, due to the difficulty in seeking two components with suitable crystal lattice mismatch, most of the current 2D heterostructures are vertical heterostructures and the exploration of 2D lateral heterostructures is scarce and limited. Here, lateral epitaxial heterostructures of BiOCl @ Bi2O3 at the atomic level are fabricated via sonicating‐assisted etching of Cl in BiOCl. This unique lateral heterostructure expedites photoexcited charge separation and transportation through the internal electric field induced by chemical bonding at the lateral interface. As a result, the lateral BiOCl @ Bi2O3 heterostructure demonstrates superior CO2 photoreduction properties with a CO yield rate of about 30 µmol g−1 h−1 under visible light illumination. The strategy to fabricate lateral epitaxial heterostructures in this work is expected to provide inspiration for preparing other 2D lateral heterostructures used in optoelectronic devices, energy conversion, and storage fields

The association between ATM D1853N polymorphism and breast cancer susceptibility: a meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Emerging evidence suggests that ataxia telangiectasia-mutated (ATM) is involved in numerous damage repair signaling pathways and cell-cycle checkpoints. Heterozygous carriers of ATM-mutations have an increased risk for the development of breast cancer. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the association between ATM exon39 5557G > A (D1853N, rs1801516) polymorphism and breast cancer susceptibility with the use of a meta-analysis. METHODS: By searching PubMed and Embase databases, a total of 9 epidemiological studies with 4,191 cases and 3,780 controls were identified. Crude odds ratios (ORs) and their corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for ATM D1853N polymorphism and breast cancer risk were calculated using fixed- or random-effects model based on the degree of heterogeneity among studies. RESULTS: No significant association between the ATM D1853N polymorphism and breast cancer risk was observed in overall analysis (GA versus GG: OR = 1.18; 95% CI, 0.90-1.53; AA versus GG: OR = 0.77; 95% CI, 0.58-1.03; dominant model: OR = 1.16; 95% CI, 0.89-1.51; and recessive model: OR = 0.78; 95% CI, 0.59-1.04, respectively). CONCLUSION: Our results indicate that ATM D1853N polymorphism is not a risk factor for developing breast cancer

Predictive Value of Plasma MicroRNA-216a/b in the Diagnosis of Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is a common human malignancy with poor survival, which was usually diagnosed at an advanced stage. MicroRNAs (miRNAs), a class of single stranded noncoding RNAs with only 17-25 ribonucleotides, were demonstrated to play an important role in lots of cancers. In the recent years, increasing evidence revealed that circulating miRNAs exhibited great potential in the diagnosis of various types of cancers. The present study was designed to evaluate the diagnostic value of plasma miRNA-216a/b for ESCC. Our results showed that the expression level of plasma miRNA-216a/b was significantly lower in ESCC patients compared with that of healthy controls. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis yielded an area under the ROC curve (AUC) value of 0.877 [95% CI (confidence interval): 0.818-0.922] for miRNA-216a and 0.756 (95% CI: 0.685-0.819) for miRNA-216b. Clinical data indicated that plasma miRNA-216a/b were inversely correlated with lymph node metastasis and TNM stage. Additionally, the plasma miRNA-216b expression level was significantly upregulated in postoperative samples compared to preoperative samples. Our study, for the first time, demonstrated that plasma miRNA-216a/b might serve as potential biomarkers for the diagnosis of ESCC and dysregulation of miRNA-216a/b might be involved in the progression of ESCC

Contourlet textual features: Improving the diagnosis of solitary pulmonary nodules in two dimensional ct images

Materials and Methods: A total of 6,299 CT images were acquired from 336 patients, with 1,454 benign pulmonary nodule images from 84 patients (50 male, 34 female) and 4,845 malignant from 252 patients (150 male, 102 female). Further to this, nineteen patient information categories, which included seven demographic parameters and twelve morphological features, were also collected. A contourlet was used to extract fourteen types of textural features. These were then used to establish three support vector machine models. One comprised a database constructed of nineteen collected patient information categories, another included contourlet textural features and the third one contained both sets of information. Ten-fold cross-validation was used to evaluate the diagnosis results for the three databases, with sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, the area under the curve (AUC), precision, Youden index, and F-measure were used as the assessment criteria. In addition, the synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) was used to preprocess the unbalanced data.Results: Using a database containing textural features and patient information, sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, AUC, precision, Youden index, and F-measure were: 0.95, 0.71, 0.89, 0.89, 0.92, 0.66, and 0.93 respectively. These results were higher than results derived using the database without textural features (0.82, 0.47, 0.74, 0.67, 0.84, 0.29, and 0.83 respectively) as well as the database comprising only textural features (0.81, 0.64, 0.67, 0.72, 0.88, 0.44, and 0.85 respectively). Using the SMOTE as a pre-processing procedure, new balanced database generated, including observations of 5,816 benign ROIs and 5,815 malignant ROIs, and accuracy was 0.93.Objective: To determine the value of contourlet textural features obtained from solitary pulmonary nodules in two dimensional CT images used in diagnoses of lung cancer. Copyright:Conclusion: Our results indicate that the combined contourlet textural features of solitary pulmonary nodules in CT images with patient profile information could potentially improve the diagnosis of lung cancer

Method for Evaluation of Foxtail Millet Cooking and Edible Quality

Foxtail millet, a high-quality coarse cereal, is generally used to cook porridge. Cooked foxtail millet is another food product of this cereal. However, a systematic evaluation method for the eating quality of cooked foxtail millet has not yet been established. In this study, heater type, millet-to-water mass ratio, water type, and soaking time affecting the edible quality of cooked foxtail millet (Variety: Zhangzagu 13) were investigated. The hardness viscometer, colorimeter and sensory evaluation were used to comprehensively evaluate the edible quality of millet. The optimal cooking method was determined as follows: Firstly, put 300 g of millet in an electric cooker and wash twice with deionized water quickly. Secondly, add deionized water in a mass ratio of millet to water 1.0∶2.0 and soak for 30 min. Finally, cook millet for about 45 minutes in the essence rice mode. After cooking, stir well and stew for 20 min. This research provides an important scientific basis for foxtail millet cooking and edible quality evaluation