Reducing the window of opportunity for Android malware Gotta catch ’em all

Spotting malicious samples in the wild has always been difficult, and Android malware is no exception. Actually, the fact Android applications are (usually) not directly accessible from market places hardens the task even more. For instance, Google enforces its own communication protocol to browse and download applications from its market. Thus, an efficient market crawler must reverse and implement this protocol, issue appropriate search requests and take necessary steps so as not to be banned. From end-users?? side, having difficulties spotting malicious mobile applications results in most Android malware remaining unnoticed up to 3?months before a security researcher finally stumbles on it. To reduce this window of opportunity, this paper presents a heuristics engine that statically pre-processes and prioritizes samples. The engine uses 39 different flags of different nature such as Java API calls, presence of embedded executables, code size, URLs?? Each flag is assigned a different weight, based on statistics we computed from the techniques mobile malware authors most commonly use in their code. The engine outputs a risk score which highlights samples which are the most likely to be malicious. The engine has been tested over a set of clean applications and malicious ones. The results show a strong difference in the average risk score for both sets and in its distribution, proving its use to spot malware.     

Handling causality and schedulability when designing and prototyping cyber-physical systems

Software and Systems Modeling - Cyber physical systems are built upon digital and analog circuits, making it necessary to handle different models of computation during their design and verification...     

Secure Software Development by Example

When trying to incorporate security into a program, software developers face either too much theoretical information that they can't apply or exhaustive and discouraging recommendation lists. This article gives an overview of security concerns at each step of a project's life cycle.     

Un environnement de conception de systèmes distribués basé sur UML

This paper introduces a new environment for developing distributed systems. It is based on theTurtle uml profile. Analysis and design phases, described in previous papers, have been extended with an additional deployment phase. In this new step,Turtle components are deployed over hardware execution nodes, and nodes are connected together throughout links,Turtle deployment diagrams are given a formal semantics inRt-lotos, therefore following the approach used forTurtle analysis and design diagrams. Moreover, the paper presents a Java code generator which outputs appropriate Java code forTurtle deployment diagrams. This code is automatically deployable on networks because it implements node communication using network protocols such asUdp orRmi. ttool, the turtle toolkit has been extended to support these new diagrams and code generators. The attack of protected data exchanged throughout securedHttp sessions serves as example.     

The effects of blackcurrant and strawberry powder on the physicochemical and in vitro glycaemic response of starches derived from sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) and potato (Solanum tuberosum)

Phenolic compounds have been shown to deliver numerous health benefits. Research has also shown that starch and phenolic compounds interact. This study aimed to investigate the effects of blackcurrant and strawberry powder on the physicochemical and in vitro predicted glycaemic response of sweet potato and potato starches. Sweet potato, or potato, starches were mixed with 0%, 5%, 10% and 15% (w/w) of blackcurrant, or strawberry, powder, to form blackcurrant and strawberry-enriched starch pastes. The results showed that enrichment with 5%, 10% and 15% blackcurrant or strawberry powder for sweet potato and potato starch significantly altered the pasting viscosity and colour profiles (P < 0.05), increased the phenolic content and antioxidant activities of starch pastes (P < 0.05). Blackcurrant or strawberry powders mixed with sweet potato or potato starches reduced amount of reducing sugar released during in vitro digestion. Addition of 15% blackcurrant powder for the starch exerted stronger in vitro antioxidant and hypoglycaemic properties than that of 15% strawberry powder. Collectively, these findings suggested that addition of blackcurrant or strawberry powder into sweet potato and potato starches manipulated the hypoglycaemic property of pastes.     

The effective velocity model: An improved approach to velocity sampling in actuator line models

Actuator line modeling of wind turbines requires the definition of a free-stream velocity in a computational mesh and a regularization kernel to project the computed body forces onto the domain. Both choices strongly influence the results. In this work, a novel velocity sampling method—the so-called effective velocity model (EVM)—is implemented in the CFD software SOWFA, validated, and compared to pre-existing approaches. Results show superior method robustness with respect to the regularization kernel width ( $ϵ$) choice while preserving acceptable accuracy. In particular, the power predicted by the EVM is nearly independent of the $ϵ$ value.     

Use of a continuous leaching method to assess the oral bioaccessibility of trace elements in seafood

A continuous leaching method, coupled online with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) was used on seafood samples to assess the maximum bioaccessibility of several trace elements. The method indeed involves continuous leaching of the food sample by artificial saliva and gastric juice, successively, where this exposition of the food to fresh reagent drives the dissolution equilibrium to the right. Leaching with intestinal juice had to be omitted because it resulted in clogging problems. The experimental apparatus includes a mini-column of powdered sample, which is directly connected to the nebulizer of an ICP-MS instrument. The on-line approach allows a quick assessment of the maximum bioaccessibility of elements of interest by monitoring the real-time release of elements by a given reagent. The method was applied to determine the bioaccessibility of four toxic elements (Al, Cd, Hg, and Pb) and of four essential elements (V, Mn, Cu, and Zn) in certified reference materials and in actual seafood samples. In all cases, mass balance was verified by carrying out the total digestion of the remaining residue from the mini-column and the relationship between total concentration and bioaccessibility was examined.