R-Locker: Thwarting Ransomware Action through a Honey le-based Approach

Ransomware has become a pandemic nowadays. Although some proposals exist to fight against this increasing type of extorsion, most of them are prevention like and rely on the assumption that early detection is not so effective once the victim is infected. This paper presents a novel approach intended not just to early detect ransomware but to completly thwart its action. For that, a set of honeyfiles are deployed around the target environment in order to catch the ransomware. Instead of being normal archives, honeyfiles are FIFO like, so that the ransomware is blocked once it starts reading the file. In addition to frustrate its action, our honeyfile solution is able to automatically launch countermeasures to solve the infection. Moreover, as it does not require previous training or knowledge, the approach allows fighting against unknown, zero-day ransomware related attacks. As a proof of concept, we have developed the approach for Unix platforms. The tool, named R-Locker, shows excellent performance both from the perspective of its accuracy as well as in terms of complexity and resource consumption. In addition, it has no special needs or privileges and does not affect the normal operation of the overall environment

Development Cost for Embedded Real-time Computer Systems

Schematic overview of the proposed budgeting tool

Tunne rajasi : opas seksuaalisen häirinnän ennaltaehkäisemiseen maahanmuuttajanuorille

Tämän opinnäytetyön tarkoituksena oli luoda opas seksuaalisen häirinnän ennaltaehkäisystä, maahanmuuttajanuorille suunnattuna. Toimeksiantajana toimi Papyrus-hanke. Tarve työhön tuli Papyrus-hankkeelta, jonka tarkoituksena on kehittää maahanmuuttajanuorten kanssa työtä tekevien osaamista. Tämä opinnäytetyö on yksi osa kuudesta työpaketista. Oppimis- ja valmennuspaketit muodostavat yhdessä yhden osan työpakettia, ja seksuaalisen häirinnän opas on yksi näistä oppimis-/valmennuspaketeista. Maahanmuuttajien määrä Suomessa on kasvanut viime vuosien aikana. Aikaisempaa opasta seksuaalisesta häirinnästä, juuri maahanmuuttajille suunnattuna, ei ole olemassa, joten siksi tarve tähän oli todellinen. Tässä opinnäytetyössä kerromme nuorille, sekä seksuaalisuudesta, seksuaalisesta häirinnästä, sekä yleisesti seksuaalikulttuurista Suomessa. Opas on kirjoitettu ennaltaehkäisemään hyväksikäyttöä. Se on kirjoitettu selventämään suomalaista seksuaalikulttuuria ja sitä, mitä pidetään Suomessa seksuaalisena häirintänä. Kehittämistyö on tehty parityönä kahden opiskelijan kesken. Opasta tehdessä olemme käyttäneet molempien opiskelijoiden työ- ja harjoittelupaikkaa hyväksi, jotta olemme päässeet lähemmäksi kohderyhmää, ja sitä kautta saaneet suoraa tietoa ja mielipiteitä heiltä. Kyseisissä paikoissa olemme havainnoinnin avulla saaneet uusia ideoita, joiden avulla olemme saaneet opinnäytetyön, sekä itse oppaan lopulliseen muotoon. Lisäksi parityössä olemme käyttäneet menetelmiä, kuten dialogista keskustelua, jotta olemme saaneet toisistamme kaiken mahdollisen hyödyn irti, ja päästy siten haluttuun yhteiseen päämäärään. Opinnäytteen tuloksena on siis laadittu kokonainen opas, jota tarjotaan sähköiseen muotoon Papyrus-hankkeen internetsivuille. Opas löytyy liitteenä tämän opinnäytetyön viimeisiltä sivuilta.The purpose of this work is to provide a guide about prevention of sexual harassment aimed for migrant youths. This guide has been created under the mandate of Papyrus-project. The need for this type of guide was brought up by the Papyrus-project, the aim of which is to develop the skills of those, who work with migrant youths. The number of immigrants has remarkably increased during recent times. Until now there has not been any guide concerning sexual harassment that was aimed specifically for migrant youths, so the need for it was real. In this work we tell and present information to young people about sexuality, sexual harassment and generally about Finnish culture concerning sexuality. The guide is made to prevent situations with sexual harassment. It is written to clarify what Finnish sexual culture means, and what is seen as sexual harassment in Finland. This guide has been written jointly by two students. Both have experience in such projects and workplaces where they have come to contact with migrant youths. This has enabled us to obtain information and gain understanding about them and about their opinions. This understanding has helped us in writing our guide and provided us ideas about how to write it. An important part of this project has been our conversations in which we have got to share our experiences and insights. The guide will be posted to the website of the Papyrus-project. It is added as an appendix to this work

Velody 2—Resilient High-Capacity MIDI Steganography for Organ and Harpsichord Music

A new method for musical steganography for the MIDI format is presented. The MIDI standard is a user-friendly music technology protocol that is frequently deployed by composers of different levels of ambition. There is to the author’s knowledge no fully implemented and rigorously specified, publicly available method for MIDI steganography. The goal of this study, however, is to investigate how a novel MIDI steganography algorithm can be implemented by manipulation of the velocity attribute subject to restrictions of capacity and security. Many of today’s MIDI steganography methods—less rigorously described in the literature—fail to be resilient to steganalysis. Traces (such as artefacts in the MIDI code which would not occur by the mere generation of MIDI music: MIDI file size inflation, radical changes in mean absolute error or peak signal-to-noise ratio of certain kinds of MIDI events or even audible effects in the stego MIDI file) that could catch the eye of a scrutinizing steganalyst are side-effects of many current methods described in the literature. This steganalysis resilience is an imperative property of the steganography method. However, by restricting the carrier MIDI files to classical organ and harpsichord pieces, the problem of velocities following the mood of the music can be avoided. The proposed method, called Velody 2, is found to be on par with or better than the cutting edge alternative methods regarding capacity and inflation while still possessing a better resilience against steganalysis. An audibility test was conducted to check that there are no signs of audible traces in the stego MIDI files

Less Pessimistic Worst-Case Delay Analysis for Packet-Switched Networks

The rapid growth of distributed real-time systems creates a need for cheap and available network solutions while still fulfilling the real-time requirements. In this paper we propose a method for less pessimistic delay analysis for packet switched first come first serve network, when knowing the intervals of possible message generation. Experiments show that the proposed method generates the expected results according to theoretical limitations of the experiment cases. The experiments also show that the proposed method could be practically used for non-trivial systems. Suggestions are given for future work on how to relax traffic requirements and how to cope with circular dependencies. 1

A tool for derivation of implementation constraints : – evaluation using implementation simulation

The industrial use of ad hoc implementation methods for non-functional constrained tasks has sometimes resulted in unnecessary expensive projects. In some cases, ad hoc methods result in overly many iterations to be made and in some severe cases, total project breakdown. To be able to solve these problems a new method has been developed to derive end-to-end non-functional constraints, such as performance or resource utilization requirements, to task-level constraints and to promote this information to the implementation phase of the project. For a tool to be really useful it is important to be able to show the usability and potential cost reduction. To be able to show that a certain implementation method costs less in work hours than to use an ad hoc implementation method, a model for implementation simulation has been developed. As far as we know, no similar experiments has been done to compare implementation methods

Derivation of implementation constraints - implementation simulation and treatment of multiple design choices

The industrial use of ad hoc implementation methods for non-functional constrained tasks has resulted in unnecessary expensive projects. In some cases, ad hoc methods result in overly many iterations to be made and in some severe cases, total project breakdown. To be able to solve these problems a method has been developed to derive end-to-end non-functional constraints, such as timing requirements, to task-level constraints and to promote this information to the implementation phase of the project. For a tool, as the one described above, to be really useful it is important to be able to show that there is a potential cost reduction to be made. To be able to show that a certain implementation method costs less in work hours than to use an ad hoc implementation method, a model for implementation simulation with support for multiple implementation alternatives has been developed. The experiments show that using the budget based implementation method leads to a significant cost reduction in most cases, compared to the ad hoc method. As far as we know, no similar experiments have been done to compare implementation methods.©2005 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.</p

A program for comparing proteins using a graph representation of atom triplet surfaces

This report details the development of software with the capability to find similarities on the surfaces of large biological molecules and display the result graphically in three dimensions. In the field of bioinformatics an approach to represent proteins as triangle surfaces has emerged and it is therefore interesting to have software tools available to examine this structure representation. The software has the ability to identify the largest common surface patch on two proteins as well as letting the user choose a patch to be matched for in the supplementary protein. This is done using an algorithm based on McGregor (1982) with some modi cations. The result of the protein comparison is rendered in 3D with the option of rotating the proteins as well as changing several graphical options such as color and the visibility of wireframe and atoms. The resulting program works well for most inputs, but when comparing large, similar proteins the program can fail to terminate within an hour according to performance testing