Password Cracking and Countermeasures in Computer Security: A Survey

With the rapid development of internet technologies, social networks, and other related areas, user authentication becomes more and more important to protect the data of the users. Password authentication is one of the widely used methods to achieve authentication for legal users and defense against intruders. There have been many password cracking methods developed during the past years, and people have been designing the countermeasures against password cracking all the time. However, we find that the survey work on the password cracking research has not been done very much. This paper is mainly to give a brief review of the password cracking methods, import technologies of password cracking, and the countermeasures against password cracking that are usually designed at two stages including the password design stage (e.g. user education, dynamic password, use of tokens, computer generations) and after the design (e.g. reactive password checking, proactive password checking, password encryption, access control). The main objective of this work is offering the abecedarian IT security professionals and the common audiences with some knowledge about the computer security and password cracking, and promoting the development of this area.Comment: add copyright to the tables to the original authors, add acknowledgement to helpe

Commodities as an Asset Class Throughout the Financial Crisis

This project investigates the performance of commodities as an asset class from September 24, 2003 to June 30, 2011, in the context of its inclusion within a broader portfolio of equities and bonds. Specifically, we examined whether the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI), a fully-collateralized index of commodity futures, performed better or worse than the equity and bond marketplaces leading up to, during, and following the financial crisis of the late-2000s, and whether or not it provided any diversification benefits to a traditional portfolio. Our findings were that the GSCI outperformed U.S. bonds but generally not U.S. stocks during the study period, that it was more volatile than both traditional asset classes, offered modest diversification benefits, especially after the crisis began, and that it fared worse than equities in a review of higher moments. Canadian equity investors would have found the GSCI more appealing in a portfolio context than U.S. equity investors would have during the study period, due to a more favourable return weak performance of the U.S. Dollar. These results are in marked contrast to studies of commodity futures prior to the financial crisis, and provide a cautionary note for investors with respect to incorporating a basket of commodities that is heavily weighted in a particular commodity type, such as the GSCI, into their traditional portfolios. Nevertheless commodities clearly have maintained certain diversification benefits, especially during the worst of crisis where they have tended to outperform equities. On the other hand, an extension of the study period to include the Dotcom crisis revealed that commodities offered substantial diversification benefits to a traditional portfolio during that time. In addition, adding commodity futures to a portfolio of stocks and bonds significantly reduces downside risk, as measured by Value-at-Risk (VaR). On balance, we recommend that a basket of commodity futures be considered for inclusion into a traditional portfolio with a long-term investment horizon

PERCEPTIONS OF STUDENTS ON ONLINE ENGLISH LANGUAGE READING ASSESSMENTS – A PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION

Past paper drilling has been a core component in the English Language subject of the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE), the university entrance examination in Hong Kong, China. Such drilling is normally done with pen and paper as this resembles the actual examination scenario. Nonetheless, this poses huge administrative costs when it comes to analysis of student work and performance. With such, various online platforms have been developed to allow students to complete past papers online. To investigate students’ perceptions towards using online platforms to complete examination papers, 25 Secondary 6 (Grade 12) students in a Hong Kong secondary school participated in a pilot programme in which they completed a HKDSE reading comprehension paper through an online platform accessed using school-provided Chromebooks in-class. Apart from using an online platform as the means of assessment, all other variables were kept controlled when compared to an actual in-school assessment. After the test, students were given tentative scores and immediate feedback generated through the platform’s auto-marking feature. They were also engaged in a short feedback session explaining their scores, strengths and weaknesses, before further follow-up sessions over the next few days centralizing on extra materials developed based on their weaknesses as identified in through their work. When comparing results from their pre-programme and post-programme surveys and when drawing on the teacher-researcher’s observation notes, findings showed that while initial perceptions of making use of an online platform to complete past papers saw an overall change from negative to positive, feedback was generally mixed in terms of technological requirements, efficiency, educational outcomes and physical demands.  Given the increasing importance of digital devices in the modern-day classroom, this paper sheds light on students’ perceptions towards using e-assessment tools and applications in language learning, and holds particular importance in the future development of such platforms

Towards Bidirectional Hierarchical Representations for Attention-Based Neural Machine Translation

This paper proposes a hierarchical attentional neural translation model which focuses on enhancing source-side hierarchical representations by covering both local and global semantic information using a bidirectional tree-based encoder. To maximize the predictive likelihood of target words, a weighted variant of an attention mechanism is used to balance the attentive information between lexical and phrase vectors. Using a tree-based rare word encoding, the proposed model is extended to sub-word level to alleviate the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problem. Empirical results reveal that the proposed model significantly outperforms sequence-to-sequence attention-based and tree-based neural translation models in English-Chinese translation tasks.Comment: Accepted for publication at EMNLP 201

Aircraft Fault Detection and Classification Using Multi-Level Immune Learning Detection

This work is an extension of a recently developed software tool called MILD (Multi-level Immune Learning Detection), which implements a negative selection algorithm for anomaly and fault detection that is inspired by the human immune system. The immunity-based approach can detect a broad spectrum of known and unforeseen faults. We extend MILD by applying a neural network classifier to identify the pattern of fault detectors that are activated during fault detection. Consequently, MILD now performs fault detection and identification of the system under investigation. This paper describes the application of MILD to detect and classify faults of a generic transport aircraft augmented with an intelligent flight controller. The intelligent control architecture is designed to accommodate faults without the need to explicitly identify them. Adding knowledge about the existence and type of a fault will improve the handling qualities of a degraded aircraft and impact tactical and strategic maneuvering decisions. In addition, providing fault information to the pilot is important for maintaining situational awareness so that he can avoid performing an action that might lead to unexpected behavior - e.g., an action that exceeds the remaining control authority of the damaged aircraft. We discuss the detection and classification results of simulated failures of the aircraft's control system and show that MILD is effective at determining the problem with low false alarm and misclassification rates

Advance care planning documentation strategies; goals-of-care as an alternative to not-for-resuscitation in medical and oncology patients. A pre-post controlled study on quantifiable outcomes

Background: Health services in Tasmania, Victoria and now Western Australia are changing to goals-of-care (GOC) advance care planning (ACP) documentation strategies. Aim: To compare the clinical impact of two different health department-sanctioned ACP documentation strategies. Methods: A non-blinded, pre–post, controlled study over two corresponding 6-month periods in 2016 and 2017 comparing the current discretional not-for-resuscitation (NFR) with a new, inclusive GOC strategy in two medical/oncology wards at a large private hospital. Main outcomes were the uptake of ACP forms per hospitalisation and the timing between hospital admission, ACP form completion and in-patient death. Secondary outcomes included utilisation of the rapid response team (RRT), palliative and critical care services. Results: In total, 650 NFR and 653 GOC patients underwent 1885 admissions (mean Charlson Comorbidity Index = 3.7). GOC patients had a higher uptake of ACP documentation (346 vs 150 ACP forms per 1000 admissions, P \u3c 0.0001) and a higher proportion of ACP forms completed within the first 48 h of admission (58 vs 39%, P = 0.0002) but a higher incidence of altering the initial ACP level of care (P = 0.003). All other measures, including ACP documentation within 48 h of death (P = 0.50), activation of RRT (P = 0.73) and admission to critical (P = 0.62) or palliative (P = 0.81) care services, remained similar. GOC documentation was often incomplete, with most sub-sections left blank between 74 and 87% of occasions. Conclusion: Despite an increased uptake of the GOC form, overall use remained low, written completion was poor, and most quantitative outcomes remained statistically unchanged. Further research is required before a wider GOC implementation can be supported in Australia’s healthcare systems

Cerebrospinal fluid levels of extracellular heat shock protein 72: A potential biomarker for bacterial meningitis in children

Extracellular heat shock protein 72 (Hsp72) is an endogenous danger signal and potential biomarker for critical illness in children. We hypothesized that elevated levels of extracellular Hsp72 in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of children with suspected meningitis could predict bacterial meningitis. We measured extracellular Hsp72 levels in the CSF of 31 critically ill children with suspected meningitis via a commercially available enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Fourteen had bacterial meningitis based on CSF pleocytosis and bacterial growth in either blood or CSF culture. Seventeen children with negative cultures comprised the control group. CSF Hsp72 was significantly elevated in children with bacterial meningitis compared to controls. Importantly, CSF Hsp72 levels did not correlate with the CSF white blood cell count. On receiver operator characteristic analysis, using a cut-off of 8.1 ng/mL, CSF Hsp72 has a sensitivity of 79% and a specificity of 94% for predicting bacterial meningitis. We therefore conclude that CSF extracellular Hsp72 levels are elevated in critically ill children with bacterial meningitis versus controls. Hsp72 potentially offers clinicians improved diagnostic information in distinguishing bacterial meningitis from other processes

Unsupervised Chunking Based on Graph Propagation from Bilingual Corpus

This paper presents a novel approach for unsupervised shallow parsing model trained on the unannotated Chinese text of parallel Chinese-English corpus. In this approach, no information of the Chinese side is applied. The exploitation of graph-based label propagation for bilingual knowledge transfer, along with an application of using the projected labels as features in unsupervised model, contributes to a better performance. The experimental comparisons with the state-of-the-art algorithms show that the proposed approach is able to achieve impressive higher accuracy in terms of F-score