508 research outputs found

    Partial Evaluation for Java Malware Detection

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    The fact that Java is platform independent gives hackers the opportunity to write exploits that can target users on any platform, which has a JVM implementation. Metasploit is a well-known source of Java exploits and to circumvent detection by Anti Virus (AV) software, obfuscation techniques are routinely applied to make an exploit more difficult to recognise. Popular obfuscation techniques for Java include string obfuscation and applying reflection to hide method calls; two techniques that can either be used together or independently. This paper shows how to apply partial evaluation to remove these obfuscations and thereby improve AV matching. The paper presents a partial evaluator for Jimple, which is a typed three-address code suitable for optimisation and program analysis, and also demonstrates how the residual Jimple code, when transformed back into Java, improves the detection rates of a number of commercial AV products

    Effort estimation of FLOSS projects: A study of the Linux kernel

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    This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 SpringerEmpirical research on Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) has shown that developers tend to cluster around two main roles: “core” contributors differ from “peripheral” developers in terms of a larger number of responsibilities and a higher productivity pattern. A further, cross-cutting characterization of developers could be achieved by associating developers with “time slots”, and different patterns of activity and effort could be associated to such slots. Such analysis, if replicated, could be used not only to compare different FLOSS communities, and to evaluate their stability and maturity, but also to determine within projects, how the effort is distributed in a given period, and to estimate future needs with respect to key points in the software life-cycle (e.g., major releases). This study analyses the activity patterns within the Linux kernel project, at first focusing on the overall distribution of effort and activity within weeks and days; then, dividing each day into three 8-hour time slots, and focusing on effort and activity around major releases. Such analyses have the objective of evaluating effort, productivity and types of activity globally and around major releases. They enable a comparison of these releases and patterns of effort and activities with traditional software products and processes, and in turn, the identification of company-driven projects (i.e., working mainly during office hours) among FLOSS endeavors. The results of this research show that, overall, the effort within the Linux kernel community is constant (albeit at different levels) throughout the week, signalling the need of updated estimation models, different from those used in traditional 9am–5pm, Monday to Friday commercial companies. It also becomes evident that the activity before a release is vastly different from after a release, and that the changes show an increase in code complexity in specific time slots (notably in the late night hours), which will later require additional maintenance efforts

    How Do Developers Refactor Code to Improve Code Reusability?

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    . Refactoring is the de-facto practice to optimize software health. While there has been several studies proposing refactoring strategies to optimize software design through applying design patterns and removing design defects, little is known about how developers actually refactor their code to improve its reuse. Therefore, we extract, from 1,828 open source projects, a set of refactorings which were intended to improve the software reusability. We analyze the impact of reusability refactorings on state-of-the-art reusability metrics, and we compare the distribution of reusability refactoring types, with the distribution of the remaining mainstream refactorings. Overall, we found that the distribution of refactoring types, applied in the context of reusability, is different from the distribution of refactoring types in mainstream development. In the refactorings performed to improve reusability, source files are subject to more design level types of refactorings. Reusability refactorings significantly impact, high-level code elements, such as packages, classes, and methods, while typical refactorings, impact all code elements, including identifiers, and parameter

    Evaluation of Software Product Quality Metrics

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    Computing devices and associated software govern everyday life, and form the backbone of safety critical systems in banking, healthcare, automotive and other fields. Increasing system complexity, quickly evolving technologies and paradigm shifts have kept software quality research at the forefront. Standards such as ISO's 25010 express it in terms of sub-characteristics such as maintainability, reliability and security. A significant body of literature attempts to link these subcharacteristics with software metric values, with the end goal of creating a metric-based model of software product quality. However, research also identifies the most important existing barriers. Among them we mention the diversity of software application types, development platforms and languages. Additionally, unified definitions to make software metrics truly language-agnostic do not exist, and would be difficult to implement given programming language levels of variety. This is compounded by the fact that many existing studies do not detail their methodology and tooling, which precludes researchers from creating surveys to enable data analysis on a larger scale. In our paper, we propose a comprehensive study of metric values in the context of three complex, open-source applications. We align our methodology and tooling with that of existing research, and present it in detail in order to facilitate comparative evaluation. We study metric values during the entire 18-year development history of our target applications, in order to capture the longitudinal view that we found lacking in existing literature. We identify metric dependencies and check their consistency across applications and their versions. At each step, we carry out comparative evaluation with existing research and present our results.Comment: Published in: Molnar AJ., Neam\c{t}u A., Motogna S. (2020) Evaluation of Software Product Quality Metrics. In: Damiani E., Spanoudakis G., Maciaszek L. (eds) Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering. ENASE 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1172. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40223-5_

    Early Onset Hypertension Is Associated With Hypertensive End-Organ Damage Already by MidLife

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    Early onset hypertension confers increased risk for cardiovascular mortality in the community. Whether early onset hypertension also promotes the development of target end-organ damage (TOD), even by midlife, has remained unknown. We studied 2680 middle-aged CARDIA (coronary artery risk development in young adults) Study participants (mean age 50±4 years, 57% women) who underwent up to 8 serial blood pressure measurements between 1985 and 2011 (age range at baseline 18-30 years) in addition to assessments of echocardiographic left ventricular hypertrophy, coronary calcification, albuminuria, and diastolic dysfunction in 2010 to 2011. Age of hypertension onset was defined as the age at first of 2 consecutively attended examinations with blood pressure ≥140/90 mm Hg or use of antihypertensive medication. Participants were divided in groups by hypertension onset age (<35 years, 35-44 years, ≥45 years, or no hypertension). While adjusting for TOD risk factors, including systolic blood pressure, we used logistic regression to calculate odds ratios for cases (participants with TOD) versus controls (participants without TOD) to examine the relation of hypertension onset age and hypertensive TOD. Compared with normotensive individuals, hypertension onset at age <35 years was related to odds ratios of 2.29 (95% CI, 1.36-3.86), 2.94 (95% CI, 1.57-5.49), 1.12 (95% CI, 0.55-2.29), and 2.06 (95% CI, 1.04-4.05) for left ventricular hypertrophy, coronary calcification, albuminuria, and diastolic dysfunction, respectively. In contrast, hypertension onset at age ≥45 years was not related to increased odds of TOD. Our findings emphasize the importance of assessing age of hypertension onset in hypertensive patients to identify high-risk individuals for preventing hypertensive complications

    Do internal software quality tools measure validated metrics?

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    Internal software quality determines the maintainability of the software product and influences the quality in use. There is a plethora of metrics which purport to measure the internal quality of software, and these metrics are offered by static software analysis tools. To date, a number of reports have assessed the validity of these metrics. No data are available, however, on whether metrics offered by the tools are somehow validated in scientific studies. The current study covers this gap by providing data on which tools and how many validated metrics are provided. The results show that a range of metrics that the tools provided do not seem to be validated in the literature and that only a small percentage of metrics are validated in the provided tools

    ‘Do i care?’ young adults' recalled experiences of early adolescent overweight and obesity: a qualitative study

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    &lt;p&gt;Objective: Individual behaviour change to reduce obesity requires awareness of, and concern about, weight. This paper therefore describes how young adults, known to have been overweight or obese during early adolescence, recalled early adolescent weight-related awareness and concerns. Associations between recalled concerns and weight-, health- and peer-related survey responses collected during adolescence are also examined.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Design: Qualitative semi-structured interviews with young adults; data compared with responses to self-report questionnaires obtained in adolescence.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Participants: A total of 35 participants, purposively sub-sampled at age 24 from a longitudinal study of a school year cohort, previously surveyed at ages 11, 13 and 15. Physical measures during previous surveys allowed identification of participants with a body mass index (BMI) indicative of overweight or obesity (based on British 1990 growth reference) during early adolescence. Overall, 26 had been obese, of whom 11 had BMI99.6th centile, whereas 9 had been overweight (BMI=95th–97.9th centile).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Measures: Qualitative interview responses describing teenage life, with prompts for school-, social- and health-related concerns. Early adolescent self-report questionnaire data on weight-worries, self-esteem, friends and victimisation (closed questions).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Results: Most, but not all recalled having been aware of their overweight. None referred to themselves as having been obese. None recalled weight-related health worries. Recollection of early adolescent obesity varied from major concerns impacting on much of an individual's life to almost no concern, with little relation to actual severity of overweight. Recalled concerns were not clearly patterned by gender, but young adult males recalling concerns had previously reported more worries about weight, lower self-esteem, fewer friends and more victimisation in early adolescence; no such pattern was seen among females. Conclusion: The popular image of the unhappy overweight teenager was not borne out. Many obese adolescents, although well aware of their overweight recalled neither major dissatisfaction nor concern. Weight-reduction behaviours are unlikely in such circumstances.&lt;/p&gt

    Body image, body dissatisfaction and weight status in south asian children: a cross-sectional study

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    Background Childhood obesity is a continuing problem in the UK and South Asian children represent a group that are particularly vulnerable to its health consequences. The relationship between body dissatisfaction and obesity is well documented in older children and adults, but is less clear in young children, particularly South Asians. A better understanding of this relationship in young South Asian children will inform the design and delivery of obesity intervention programmes. The aim of this study is to describe body image size perception and dissatisfaction, and their relationship to weight status in primary school aged UK South Asian children. Methods Objective measures of height and weight were undertaken on 574 predominantly South Asian children aged 5-7 (296 boys and 278 girls). BMI z-scores, and weight status (underweight, healthy weight, overweight or obese) were calculated based on the UK 1990 BMI reference charts. Figure rating scales were used to assess perceived body image size (asking children to identify their perceived body size) and dissatisfaction (difference between perceived current and ideal body size). The relationship between these and weight status were examined using multivariate analyses. Results Perceived body image size was positively associated with weight status (partial regression coefficient for overweight/obese vs. non-overweight/obese was 0.63 (95% CI 0.26-0.99) and for BMI z-score was 0.21 (95% CI 0.10-0.31), adjusted for sex, age and ethnicity). Body dissatisfaction was also associated with weight status, with overweight and obese children more likely to select thinner ideal body size than healthy weight children (adjusted partial regression coefficient for overweight/obese vs. non-overweight/obese was 1.47 (95% CI 0.99-1.96) and for BMI z-score was 0.54 (95% CI 0.40-0.67)). Conclusions Awareness of body image size and increasing body dissatisfaction with higher weight status is established at a young age in this population. This needs to be considered when designing interventions to reduce obesity in young children, in terms of both benefits and harms
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