Mitochondrial DNA Regionalism and Historical Demography in the Extant Populations of Chirocephalus kerkyrensis (Branchiopoda: Anostraca)

Background: Mediterranean temporary water bodies are important reservoirs of biodiversity and host a unique assemblage of diapausing aquatic invertebrates. These environments are currently vanishing because of increasing human pressure. Chirocephalus kerkyrensis is a fairy shrimp typical of temporary water bodies in Mediterranean plain forests and has undergone a substantial decline in number of populations in recent years due to habitat loss. We assessed patterns of genetic connectivity and phylogeographic history in the seven extant populations of the species from Albania, Corfu Is. (Greece), Southern and Central Italy. Methodology/Principal Findings: We analyzed sequence variation at two mitochondrial DNA genes (Cytochrome Oxidase I and 16s rRNA) in all the known populations of C. kerkyrensis. We used multiple phylogenetic, phylogeographic and coalescence-based approaches to assess connectivity and historical demography across the whole distribution range of the species. C. kerkyrensis is genetically subdivided into three main mitochondrial lineages; two of them are geographically localized (Corfu Is. and Central Italy) and one encompasses a wide geographic area (Albania and Southern Italy). Most of the detected genetic variation (<81%) is apportioned among the aforementioned lineages. Conclusions/Significance: Multiple analyses of mismatch distributions consistently supported both past demographic and spatial expansions with the former predating the latter; demographic expansions were consistently placed during interglacial warm phases of the Pleistocene while spatial expansions were restricted to cold periods. Coalescence methods revealed a scenario of past isolation with low levels of gene flow in line with what is already known for other co-distributed fairy shrimps and suggest drift as the prevailing force in promoting local divergence. We recommend that these evolutionary trajectories should be taken in proper consideration in any effort aimed at protecting Mediterranean temporary water bodies

Quantitative Evaluation of Systems with Security Patterns Using a Fuzzy Approach

Abstract. The importance of Software Security has been evident, since it has been shown that most attacks to software systems are based on vulnerabilities caused by software poorly designed and developed. Furthermore, it has been discovered that it is desirable to embed security already at design phase. Therefore, patterns aiming at enhancing the security of a software system, called security patterns, have been suggested. The main target of this paper is to propose a mathematical model, based on fuzzy set theory, in order to quantify the security characteristics of systems using security patterns. In order to achieve this we first determine experimentally to what extent specific security patterns enhance several security aspects of systems. To determine this, we have developed two systems, one without security patterns and one containing them and have experimentally determined the level of the higher robustness to attacks of the latter. The proposed mathematical model follows

Design Pattern Detection Using Similarity Scoring

The identification of design patterns as part of the reengineering process can convey important information to the designer. However, existing pattern detection methodologies generally have problems in dealing with one or more of the following issues: Identification of modified pattern versions, search space explosion for large systems and extensibility to novel patterns. In this paper, a design pattern detection methodology is proposed that is based on similarity scoring between graph vertices. Due to the nature of the underlying graph algorithm, this approach has the ability to also recognize patterns that are modified from their standard representation. Moreover, the approach exploits the fact that patterns reside in one or more inheritance hierarchies, reducing the size of the graphs to which the algorithm is applied. Finally, the algorithm does not rely on any pattern-specific heuristic, facilitating the extension to novel design structures. Evaluation on three open-source projects demonstrated the accuracy and the efficiency of the proposed method

A Novel Approach to Automated Design Pattern Detection

The importance of the use of Design Patterns in order to build reusable and wellstructured software has been eminent since these patterns have been formalized. Thus, it became desirable to be able to detect which design patterns are present in a software system. Knowing this information it is possible to make an evaluation on different aspects of the system. Though, it is a very difficult task for a software engineer to pinpoint all the Design Patterns present in a system, without any assistance. Addressing this need, techniques for automated design pattern detection have appeared in the literature. Some are based on reverseengineering of already existing code while others can work already at design level by analyzing UML diagrams. Though, complexity is one of the characteristics of all the methods proposed until now. Furthermore, all of these techniques work only for a limited number of the GoF patterns. Our aim in this paper is to elaborate on a simple approach for automatic detection of design patterns that works by analyzing UML class diagrams. Our method can achieve the automated detection of all GoF patterns that do not require any code specific information to recognize them

ATTACKS ON THE AKACP PROTOCOL

We discuss a recently proposed one-pass authenticated key agreement protocol, by Mohammad, Chen, Hsu and Lo, which was “derived” from their correponding two-pass version and claimed to be secure. We show that this is not the case by demonstrating a number of vulnerabilities