In security, layout randomization is a popular, effective attack mitigation technique. Recent work has aimed to explain it rigorously, focusing on deterministic systems. In this paper, we study layout randomization in the presence of nondeterministic choice. We develop a semantic approach based on denotational models and simulation relations. This approach abstracts from language details, and h...

Despite decades of research on software diversification, only address space layout randomization has seen widespread adoption. Code randomization, an effective defense against return-oriented programming exploits, has remained an academic exercise mainly due to i) the lack of a transparent and streamlined deployment model that does not disrupt existing software distribution norms, and ii) the i...

Randomization may add beneficial flexibility to the construction of optimal simple decision rules in dynamic environments. A decision maker, restricted to the use of simple rules, may find a stochastic rule that strictly outperforms all deterministic ones. This is true even in highly separable Markovian environments where the set of feasible choices is stationary and the decision maker’s choice...

Systems of polynomial equations arise naturally in applications ranging from the study of chemical reactions to coding theory to geometry and number theory. Furthermore, the complexity of the equations we wish to solve continues to rise: while engineers in ancient Egypt needed to solve quadratic equations in one variable, today we have applications in satellite orbit design and combustive fluid...

FRAMEWORK AND ANALYSIS Most randomized incremental algorithms in the literature follow the framework sketched here for the computation of the trapezoidal map: the structure to be computed is maintained while the objects defining it are inserted in random order. To insert a new object, one first has to find a “conflict” of that object (the location step), then local updates in the structure are ...

In this abstract, we provide an overview of our survey of randomized techniques for exploiting the parallelism in string matching problems. Broadly, the study of string matching falls into two categories: standard stringology and nonstandard stringology. Standard Stringology concerns the study of various exact matching problems. The fundamental problem here is the basic string matching problem ...