Practical assessment of Biba integrity for TCG-enabled platforms

Checking the integrity of an application is necessary to determine if the latter will behave as expected. The method defined by the Trusted Computing Group consists in evaluating the fingerprints of the platform hardware and software components required for the proper functioning of the application to be assessed. However, this only ensures that a process was working correctly at load-time but not for its whole life-cycle. Policy-Reduced Integrity Measurement Architecture (PRIMA) addresses this problem by enforcing a security policy that denies information flows from potentially malicious processes to an application target of the evaluation and its dependencies (requirement introduced by CW-Lite, an evolution of the Biba integrity model). Given the difficulty of deploying PRIMA (as platform administrators have to tune their security policies to satisfy the CW-Lite requirements) we propose in this paper Enhanced IMA, an extended version of the Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) that, unlike PRIMA, works almost out of the box and just reports information flows instead of enforcing them. In addition, we introduce a model to evaluate the information reported by Enhanced IMA with existing technique

Exploiting the network for securing personal devices

Personal devices (such as smartphones and laptops) often experience incoherent levels of security due to the different protection applications available on the various devices. This paper presents a novel approach that consists in offloading security applications from personal devices and relocating them inside the network; this will be achieved by enriching network devices with the appropriate computational capabilities to execute generic security applications. This approach is fostered by the Secured project, which will define the architecture, data and protocols needed to turn this vision into reality

Offloading security applications into the network

Users currently experience different levels of protection when accessing the Internet via their various personal devices and network connections, due to variable network security conditions and security applications available at each device. The SECURED project addresses these issues by designing an architecture to offload security applications from the end-user devices to a suitable trusted node in the network: the Network Edge Device (NED). Users populate a repository with their security applications and policy, which will then be fetched by the closest NED to protect the user’s traffic when he connects to a network. This setting provides uniform protection, independent of the actual user device and network location (e.g. public WiFi hotspot or 3G mobile connection). In other words, a user-centric approach is fostered by this architecture, opposed to the current device- or network-based security schema, with cost and protection benefits and simultaneously enabling new business models for service and network providers

Impact of alien insect pests on Sardinian landscape and culture

Geologically Sardinia is a raft which, for just under thirty million years, has been crossing the western Mediterranean, swaying like a pendulum from the Iberian to the Italian Peninsula. An island so large and distant from the other lands, except for its "sister" Corsica, has inevitably developed an autochthonous flora and fauna over such a long period of time. Organisms from other Mediterranean regions have added to this original contingent. These new arrivals were not randomly distributed over time but grouped into at least three great waves. The oldest two correspond with the Messinian salinity crisis about 7 million years ago and with the ice age, when, in both periods, Sardinia was linked to or near other lands due to a fall in sea level. The third, still in progress, is linked to human activity. Man has travelled since ancient times and for many centuries introduced allochthonous species to Sardinia which radically modified the native flora and fauna, but always at a very slow and almost unnoticeable rate. The use of sailing or rowing boats, with their low speeds, hindered the transport of living organisms from one place to another. The use of the steam boat, introduced around 1840 but widely diffuse around 1870-1880, opened the doors to more frequent arrivals and also to organisms from the American Continent. This technical innovation had an influence over the whole world economy, with its well-known grain crisis, and coincided in Sardinia with the arrival of Roman dairymen, producers of pecorino cheese and the beginning of the expansion of sheep farming which would continue uninterrupted until the present day. In this period of sudden social and environmental change, an insect was introduced which would turn out to be probably the most economically devastating agricultural pest in Europe: the Grape Phylloxera. The vineyard and wine business collapsed first in France then in Italy. The Phylloxera arrived in Sardinia in 1883 and wine production crashed a very short time later and only resumed after the distribution of American vine rootstock at the beginning of the 20th Century. From then, vine cultivation in Europe was modified with the essential use of this rootstock. Since then methods of transport have increased enormously in number and speed. The number of allochthonous and invasive species has increased proportionally: some of them along with exotic plants which are cultivated on the island, others following man in his activities. Often these new pests attack and destroy ornamental plants which have become part of the Sardinian landscape, causing it to change; just as often their presence requires methods of pest management which are different from the traditional methods on specific crops; finally in at least one case (the Asian tiger mosquito) they pose a threat to our health

An Individual Marking Technique for Green Lacewings (Neuroptera: Chrysopidae)

We present a new technique developed to uniquely mark individual adult green lacewings (Neuroptera Chrysopidae) with a durable, quickdrying ink applied by a very fine tipped pen. This marking method is particularly suitable for use in laboratory experiments. It is reliable, cheap, and easy to apply and to decode

Supervised Distance Preserving Projections: Applications in the quantitative analysis of diesel fuels and light cycle oils from NIR spectra

In this work, we discuss a recently proposed approach for supervised dimensionality reduction, the Supervised Distance Preserving Projection (SDPP) and, we investigate its applicability to monitoring material’s properties from spectroscopic observations. Motivated by continuity preservation, the SDPP is a linear projection method where the proximity relations between points in the low-dimensional subspace mimic the proximity relations between points in the response space. Such a projection facilitates the design of efficient regression models and it may also uncover useful information for visualisation. An experimental evaluation is conducted to show the performance of the SDPP and compare it with a number of state-of-the-art approaches for unsupervised and supervised dimensionality reduction. The regression step after projection is performed using computationally light models with low maintenance cost like Multiple Linear Regression and Locally Linear Regression with k-NN neighbourhoods. For the evaluation, a benchmark and a full-scale calibration problem are discussed. The case studies pertain the estimation of a number of chemico-physical properties in diesel fuels and in light cycle oils, starting from near-infrared spectra. Based on the experimental results, we found that the SDPP leads to parsimonious projections that can be used to design light and yet accurate estimation models

Fertility-sparing surgery for women with stage I cervical cancer of 4 cm or larger. A systematic review

To investigate current evidence on oncological, fertility and obstetric outcomes of patients with stage I cervical cancer of 4 cm or larger undergoing fertility-sparing surgery (FSS).Objective: To investigate current evidence on oncological, fertility and obstetric outcomes of patients with stage I cervical cancer of 4 cm or larger undergoing fertility-sparing surgery (FSS). Methods: Systematic review of studies including women affected by stage I cervical cancer ≥4 cm who underwent FSS. Main outcome measures: disease-free survival (DFS), overall survival (OS), pregnancy rate, live birth rate, premature delivery rate. Results: Fifteen studies met all eligibility criteria for this systematic review, involving 48 patients affected by cervical cancer ≥4 cm who completed FSS. Three patients (6.3%) experienced a recurrence and one of them (2.1%) died of disease. The 5-year DFS rate was 92.4%. The 5-year OS rate was 97.6%. A significantly shorter 5-year DFS was reported for high-risk patients (G3, non-squamous histotype, diameter ≥5 cm) compared with low-risk (74.7% vs. 100%; log-rank test, p=0.024). Data about fertility outcomes were available for 12 patients. Five patients out of 12 (41.7%) attempted to conceive with an estimated pregnancy rate of 80%, a live birth rate of 83.3% and a premature delivery rate of 20%. Conclusion: Women with high tumor grade, aggressive histology and tumor size ≥5 cm have a higher risk of recurrence. Oncologic outcomes are encouraging among low-risk patients; however, the lack of high-quality studies makes it difficult to draw any firm conclusions. Prospective multicentric clinical trials with a proper selection of inclusion/exclusion criteria should be conducted in women with low-risk factors, strong desire to preserve their fertility and high likelihood to conceive