ACMiner: Extraction and Analysis of Authorization Checks in Android's Middleware

Billions of users rely on the security of the Android platform to protect phones, tablets, and many different types of consumer electronics. While Android's permission model is well studied, the enforcement of the protection policy has received relatively little attention. Much of this enforcement is spread across system services, taking the form of hard-coded checks within their implementations. In this paper, we propose Authorization Check Miner (ACMiner), a framework for evaluating the correctness of Android's access control enforcement through consistency analysis of authorization checks. ACMiner combines program and text analysis techniques to generate a rich set of authorization checks, mines the corresponding protection policy for each service entry point, and uses association rule mining at a service granularity to identify inconsistencies that may correspond to vulnerabilities. We used ACMiner to study the AOSP version of Android 7.1.1 to identify 28 vulnerabilities relating to missing authorization checks. In doing so, we demonstrate ACMiner's ability to help domain experts process thousands of authorization checks scattered across millions of lines of code

Biology, Ecology, and Management of Nonnative Ambrosia Beetles (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Scolytinae) in Ornamental Plant Nurseries

Xylosandrus germanus (Blandford) and Xylosandrus crassiusculus (Motschulsky) (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Scolytinae) are two of the most damaging nonnative ambrosia beetle pests in ornamental plant nurseries. Adult females tunnel into the stems and branches of host plants to create galleries with brood chambers. Hosts are infected with symbiotic Ambrosiella spp. fungi that serve as food for the larvae and adults. Plants can also become infected with secondary opportunistic pathogens, including Fusarium spp. Both X. germanus and X. crassiusculus have broad host ranges, and infestations can result in “toothpicks” of extruded chewed wood and sap flow associated with gallery entrances, canopy dieback, stem and trunk cankers, and plant death. Beetles efficiently locate and preferentially attack living, weakened plants, especially those physiologically stressed by flooding, inadequate drainage, frost injury, or winter injury and low temperature. Maintaining plant health is the foundation of a management plan. Vulnerable hosts can be partially protected with preventive pyrethroid applications in the spring before peak flight and attack, which are monitored using ethanol-based trapping tactics

The development and validation of a scoring tool to predict the operative duration of elective laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Background: The ability to accurately predict operative duration has the potential to optimise theatre efficiency and utilisation, thus reducing costs and increasing staff and patient satisfaction. With laparoscopic cholecystectomy being one of the most commonly performed procedures worldwide, a tool to predict operative duration could be extremely beneficial to healthcare organisations. Methods: Data collected from the CholeS study on patients undergoing cholecystectomy in UK and Irish hospitals between 04/2014 and 05/2014 were used to study operative duration. A multivariable binary logistic regression model was produced in order to identify significant independent predictors of long (> 90 min) operations. The resulting model was converted to a risk score, which was subsequently validated on second cohort of patients using ROC curves. Results: After exclusions, data were available for 7227 patients in the derivation (CholeS) cohort. The median operative duration was 60 min (interquartile range 45–85), with 17.7% of operations lasting longer than 90 min. Ten factors were found to be significant independent predictors of operative durations > 90 min, including ASA, age, previous surgical admissions, BMI, gallbladder wall thickness and CBD diameter. A risk score was then produced from these factors, and applied to a cohort of 2405 patients from a tertiary centre for external validation. This returned an area under the ROC curve of 0.708 (SE = 0.013, p  90 min increasing more than eightfold from 5.1 to 41.8% in the extremes of the score. Conclusion: The scoring tool produced in this study was found to be significantly predictive of long operative durations on validation in an external cohort. As such, the tool may have the potential to enable organisations to better organise theatre lists and deliver greater efficiencies in care

"Maiden flight" for world's biggest grid Hits transfer speed of 1GB per second...

"UK physicists have taken part in the latest test of an international scientific computing grid under working conditions" (1/2 page

World's biggest grid seeks secrets of the universe: It's in Didcot and it's running on open source

The mysteries of dark matter, multiple dimensions and event the conditions following the Big Bang could be solved with the help of the world's biggest computer grid. And a big chunk of it is being built in sleepy Oxfordshire (1 page