Downloaders are malicious programs with the goal to subversively download and install malware (eggs) on a victim’s machine. In this paper, we analyze and characterize 23 Windows-based malware downloaders. We first show a high diversity in downloaders’ communication architectures (e.g., P2P), carrier protocols and encryption schemes. Using dynamic malware analysis traces from over two years, we ...

Dynamic optimization allows for the determination of the upper bound of achievable performance in the operation of continuous chemical processes in transient operationwhich often results from load or grade changes. Performance assessment can rely on the computation of optimal trajectories for selected scenarios which properly reflect the operational envelope. Realistic industrial problems, howe...

Almost all published work on causal ordering mechanisms assumes theoretically unbounded counters for timestamps, thus ignoring the real-world problem that arises if one is actually interested in an operable implementation, since unbounded counters simply cannot be realized. An argument for its justification often encountered states, that the counter size can be chosen such that counters practic...

An Interval Operability-based approach [1, 2] is applied to calculate operable output constraints for the Sheet Forming Control Problem (SFCP) from DuPont. The SFCP attempts to control the sheet thickness at 15 different points, which represent 15 output variables, using 9 manipulated variables in the presence of 3 disturbances. Thus, this problem represents a computationally complex, high-dime...

The information explosion has led to problems and possibilities in many areas of society, including that of law enforcement. In comparing individual criminal investigations on similarity, we seize one of the opportunities of the information surplus to determine what crimes may or may not have been committed by the same group of individuals. For this purpose we introduce a new distance measure t...

Hazard and Operability (HazOp) and Fault Tree Analyses (FTA) are embedded into UML component models. The latter are constructed by employing UML's extension mechanisms in conjunction with component-based software techniques. Taking an application's safety-related requirements into consideration, the elements of HazOp and FTA are defined as component attributes, and assigned to a UML component m...

In this work we present a new method called compiler wrapping for extracting information from the source code of large software systems written in the C++ language. This new method can be used without having to modify the analyzed source code in any way. With the extracted information we can calculate different object oriented metrics and characterize the analyzed system. For source code analys...

The achievable control quality (“controllability”) is limited by the plant itself, independent of the controller design algorithm. A key issue in the controllability analysis is to decide upfront if there exists a controller that can reduce the effect of disturbances to an acceptable level with the available manipulated variables. When such a controller exists, the process is said to have “oper...

This paper presents an alternative methodological approach to O-D matrix and analyses its validity on the viewpoint of Bonnafous’ operability triangle. The proposed model is able to estimate the impacts of urban goods movements in terms of number of vehicles, total travelled distances and road occupancy rates without generating O-D pairs. The originality of the model arises on two main elements...

The current imaging modalities are not sufficient to identify inoperable tumor factors, including distant metastasis and local invasion. Hence, we conducted this study using urine samples to discover non-invasive biomarkers for the incurability of gastric cancer (GC). Urine samples from 111 GC patients were analyzed in this study. The GC cohort was categorized and analyzed according to disease ...