Virus wars: fewer attacks, new threats

Security professionals have fought an ongoing battle with malicious-code writers since the development of the first major Internet worm in 1988. However, the battle recently took an interesting turn: The number of reported attacks, as well as the losses they caused, dropped for the first time. The bad news is that malware writers have developed some new, significant, and hard-to-defeat techniques this year, forcing antivirus-software vendors to look for new ways to combat these threats.     

Format wars all over again

Sometime soon Sony intends to embed Blu-Ray, a new optical disc format, in the PlayStation 3 and Sony’s VCRs. Sony has gone to great lengths to generate a coalition of firms to support Blu-Ray. Opposing it is the high-definition DVD, sponsored and supported by many firms, including Toshiba, NEC, Sanyo, Microsoft, and Intel.     

The computer graphics wars heat up

The author describes the present status of computer graphics hardware. While console games flourished, PC game sales have plummeted. The plans of Nvidia and ATI, the 3D graphics world's two dominant players are described.     

Multiplexed buses: the endian wars continue

The issue of data exchange between type-1 and type-2 buses, which multiplex the first data byte (which has the lowest address) with the least and most significant portions of the address, respectively, is considered. In an analogy based on Gulliver's Travels, the associated architectures have been dubbed little-endian and big-endian processors, respectively. It is pointed out that the byte order within integers and the byte order during transmission can differ. Therefore, the big and little adjectives are used to describe the order of bytes within integers, and the acronyms Mad and Sad to describe the order of bytes (most versus least important first) during transmission on a multiplexed address-data bus. After a review of the endian ordering issues, it is concluded that big- and little-endians can use the same bus standard. For high-performance serialized buses, the mad-endian order seems superior to a sad-endian order. For consistency between serialized and multiplexed parallel buses of various widths, the mad-endian order is proposed for future multiplexed standards. To minimize the interface costs to mad-endian buses, a big-endian order is proposed for shared data also     

Clone wars: Distributed detection of clone attacks in mobile WSNs

Among security challenges raised by mobile Wireless Sensor Networks, clone attack is particularly dreadful since it makes an adversary able to subvert the behavior of a network just leveraging a few replicas of some previously compromised sensors. In this work, we provide several contributions: first, we introduce two novel realistic adversary models, the vanishing and the persistent adversary, characterized by different compromising capability. We then propose two distributed, efficient, and cooperative protocols to detect replicas: History Information-exchange Protocol (HIP) and its optimized version (HOP). Both HIP and HOP leverage just local (one-hop) communications and node mobility, and differ for the amount of computation required. We study their behavior against the introduced types of attacker, considering two different mobility models and comparing our solutions against the state of the art. Both analysis and simulation results show that our solutions are effective and efficient, providing high detection rate, while incurring limited overhead.     

Winning strategies for robotic wars: defense applications of linguistic geometry

This paper reports new results of research, which started in 1972 in Moscow, USSR. For 16 years Boris Stilman was involved in the advanced research project PIONEER led by a formed World Chess champion, Professor Mikhail Botvinnik. The goal of the project was, at first, to discover and mathematically formalize methodologies utilized by the most advanced chess experts (including Botvinnik himself) in solving chess problems almost without search. The next step was to apply this new theory to complex search problems from various problem domains. In the 1980s, in Moscow, Stilman developed the foundations of the new approach. In 1991, while at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, Stilman coined the term “Linguistic Geometry” (LG) as a name for the new theory for solving Abstract Board Games. After 1991, this research continued at the University of Colorado at Denver, USA. In 1995, V. Yakhnis joined the LG effort. In the 1990s, it was shown that LG is applicable to a wide class of higher-dimensional, multi-agent games with concurrently moving agents, which are ideally suited for combat planning and control. Also, it was proved that for several classes of games LG generates optimal strategies in polynomial time. This groundbreaking results also suggests that for much wider classes of games LG strategies are also optimal or close to optimal. Over a hundred papers on LG have been published. Stilman wrote the first scholarly book on LG,Linguistic Geometry: From Search to Construction, published in February 2000. Over the last two years, defense applications of LG have attracted so much attention at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Rockwell, and Boeing that the number of LG-based projects has skyrocketed. In 1999, recognizing the maturity and power of this technology, a group of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs founded a company, STILMAN Advanced Strategies, to facilitate development of government and commercial applications of LG. This work was presented, in part at the Fourth International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 19–22, 1999     

以“毒”攻毒不是异想天开

随着因特网技术的广泛应用和发展,计算机病毒的传播形式发生了根本的变化,用户机器感染计算机病毒的几率大大增加。而计算机病毒与黑客技术的融合,使其具有了前所未有的破坏性。该文根据计算机病毒传播的特点,描述了以“毒”攻毒的工作和传播方式,从技术和实际需求讨论了以“毒”攻毒的可行性和必要性。同时对它可能产生的问题进行分析,并且提出了疫苗共享的思想。     

着眼未来战争需要 把握坦克射击训练特点

坦克射击专业的训练要紧密结合本专业的特点,要突出重点内容的学习和研究,突出训练方法、训练思路的规范和创新,突出训练保障、训练管理的质量和效益等环节等有关规定,坚持从实战、实际、实效出发,抓好落实,提高射击训练的质量。提高装甲机械化部队专业技术训练水平,是当前全军深化军事训练内容改革、推动军事训练转型的重点和切入点。     

计算机病毒的预防与最新病毒

当系统可能或者已经染有病毒时,需要检测病毒。系统和文件染毒以后,需要消毒。但是,破坏性病毒一旦沾染了没有副本的程序,便无法医治,隐蔽性病毒和多态性病毒使人难以检测,在与病毒的对抗中,如果能采取有效的预防措施,就能使系统不染毒,或者染毒后能减少损失,是上策。像对待生物病毒一样,应以预防为主,防患于未然,避免染毒以后被动地打针吃药。     

美艳病毒

一个冬天，几乎所有的媒体都在谈论H1N1，它有多么顽强、多么普遍、多么难以抵挡。     

计算机病毒防范浅探

随着互联网的迅猛发展,计算机病毒的发生频率更高、潜伏性更强、影响面更广,破坏性更大。本文从计算机病毒的定义入手,谈了计算机病毒发作征兆、注意事项及防治方法。