InstructExcel: A Benchmark for Natural Language Instruction in Excel

With the evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) we can solve increasingly more complex NLP tasks across various domains, including spreadsheets. This work investigates whether LLMs can generate code (Excel OfficeScripts, a TypeScript API for executing many tasks in Excel) that solves Excel specific tasks provided via natural language user instructions. To do so we introduce a new large-scale benchmark, InstructExcel, created by leveraging the 'Automate' feature in Excel to automatically generate OfficeScripts from users' actions. Our benchmark includes over 10k samples covering 170+ Excel operations across 2,000 publicly available Excel spreadsheets. Experiments across various zero-shot and few-shot settings show that InstructExcel is a hard benchmark for state of the art models like GPT-4. We observe that (1) using GPT-4 over GPT-3.5, (2) providing more in-context examples, and (3) dynamic prompting can help improve performance on this benchmark.Comment: Findings of EMNLP 2023, 18 page

Long-lived authentication protocols for critical infrastructure process control systems

Process Control Systems monitor and control processes that manage critical infrastructure systems. To enable these systems to continue working uninterrupted, situational awareness is imperative. Communication systems that provide situational awareness pose challenges such as low latency, high availability and security. Being a modern life supporting system, critical infrastructures such as electric power grids have very high risk and may potentially result in enormous economic and social impact if attacked. Authentication is the fundamental step towards security. The goals of other security services can be attained only if they are based on successful authentication. This thesis presents an authentication framework that authenticates nodes to ensure that they are genuine. A set of authentication protocols that employ authentication modules that can be changed at runtime to support long-lived systems such as Process Control Systems are introduced in this work. The protocols use a pre-loaded key set as identification material. The pre-loaded key set is used minimally and only for authentication purposes. Keys for encryption are generated and exchanged between authenticated nodes thus enabling the security architecture to function longer. GridStat, a publish/subscribe middleware system offers mechanisms that enable low latency and high availability for operational data delivery. GridStat has been designed specifically to improve situational awareness in the electric power grid. GridStat Security Management System protects the data exchanged using GridStat with confidentiality, integrity and availability. These capabilities would be able to serve their purpose only if authentic GridStat entities are exchanging the information being protected. This thesis presents the authentication framework and protocols in the context of GridStat