The Shadow Knows: Refinement and security in sequential programs

Stepwise refinement is a crucial conceptual tool for system development, encouraging program construction via a number of separate correctness-preserving stages which ideally can be understood in isolation. A crucial conceptual component of security is an adversary’s ignorance of concealed information. We suggest a novel method of combining these two ideas.Our suggestion is based on a mathematical definition of “ignorance-preserving” refinement that extends classical refinement by limiting an adversary’s access to concealed information: moving from specification to implementation should never increase that access. The novelty is the way we achieve this in the context of sequential programs.Specifically we give an operational model (and detailed justification for it), a basic sequential programming language and its operational semantics in that model, a “logic of ignorance” interpreted over the same model, then a program-logical semantics bringing those together — and finally we use the logic to establish, via refinement, the correctness of a real (though small) protocol: Rivest’s Oblivious Transfer. A previous report^? treated Chaum’s Dining Cryptographers similarly.In passing we solve the Refinement Paradox for sequential programs.     

一种基于复数域网络编码的双层卫星通信系统

针对卫星通信网络吞吐量不足、可靠性不高的问题,提出一种基于复数域网络编码(Complex Field Network Coding,CFNC)的卫星通信方案。该方案在信号发送前对源信息作预编码处理,即在复数域上选取一个大小合适的参数化空时码与源信号相乘,编码后的信号与源信号在复数域上有着一一映射关系。对该方案的吞吐量和成对差错概率(Pairwise Error Probability,PEP)做了详尽的理论分析,结果表明,采用该编码方案的卫星通信系统在终端发射功率不变的情况下,吞吐量比路由模式提高了100%以上,比传统的CFNC方式至少可提高75%。该方案还可以扩展至更多的地面源节点,从而支持多用户网络通信。最后,仿真实验表明,在较高的信噪比下,PEP仿真值逼近于渐近值,验证了理论分析的正确性。     

Variants of fractionation of irradiation in intracavitary gamma-therapy

Under study was the efficacy of three schedules of dose fractionation in intracavitary gamma-therapy in cervical cancer patients treated on the machine "AGAT-B". Single doses were 1000, 700 and 500 rad, while total dosage at point A depending on the stage of the disease was within the range of 4000-5000 rad. The survival during the first, second and third years following termination of the radiotherapy was found to be identical for patients of all the groups under examination. No differences were noted in them also in the character of early radiation reactions on the part of the adjacent organs. The frequency and severity of late radiation injuries of the urinary bladder, rectum and vagina were related to the dose fractionation regimen.     

Dufour Gland Contents of Ants of the Cataglyphis bicolor Group

The species of desert-dwelling ants of the Cataglyphis bicolor (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) group are difficult to distinguish by morphological features. Analysis of the secretion from the Dufour glands of workers of a number of colonies was undertaken to see if it provided a clear test of species. Linked 6c-ms showed in all samples straight and branched-chain alkanes, linear alkenes, ketones, aldehydes, acetates, and a group of C₂₂ to C₂₈ esters not previously identified in this genus. Contents of the Dufour glands of C. savignyi from Tunisia and Egypt were similar, and comprised straight and branched-chain alkanes, alkenes and small amounts of esters. C. bicolor from Tunisia contained compounds similar to C. savignyi but was distinguished from the latter by larger amounts of the esters. The major compound in the glands of C. viaticus was tridecane, in contrast to the pentadecane of other species. It also contained a branched alkane, 3-methyltridecane as a major component. Branched-chain esters and a wide variety of acetates were also found in this species. C. diehlii had a limited range of compounds, with branched alkanes almost completely absent and high proportions of pentadecene and dodecyl acetate. C. bombycinus, a sympatric species, but recognized as not belonging to the bicolor group by its different mandibular gland substances, was notable in having butanoate esters in its Dufour glands. Despite these differences among species, both the great variability of individuals from a single colony and the among between conspecific colonies make species diagnosis from a few individuals difficult, in contrast with postpharyngeal glands, which, as recently reported, give a clearer indication of species.     

Heat denaturation of hemocytocardiotoxin from the venom of the Central Asian cobra

It has been stated that boiled for three hours haemocytocardiotoxin (HT) from cobra poison loses "direct" hemolytic activity and is unable to potentiate a haemolytic effect of phospholipase A. Surface activity of HT does not change. It is shown that in the course of heat denaturation the aggregation of toxin molecules to dimers and trimers takes place and electrophoretic mobility is decreased. The fluorescence of HT tyroxin residues supported the fact of its irreversible heat denaturation.     

Compositional noninterference from first principles

The recently formulated Shadow Semantics for noninterference-style security of sequential programs avoids the Refinement Paradox by preserving demonic nondeterminism in those cases where reducing it would compromise security. The construction (originally) of the semantic domain for The Shadow, and the interpretation of programs in it, relied heavily on intuition, guesswork and the advice of others. That being so, it is natural after the fact to try to reconstruct an idealised “inevitable” path from first principles to where we actually ended up: not only does one learn (more) about semantic principles by doing so, but the “rational reconstruction” helps to expose the choices made, along the way, and to legitimise the decisions that resolved them. Unlike our other papers on noninterference, this one does not contain a significant case study: instead its aim is to provide the most accessible account we can of the methods we use and why our model, in its details, has turned out the way it has. In passing, it might give some insight into the general role and significance of compositionality and testing-with-context for program semantics. Finally, a technical contribution here is a new “Transfer Principle” that captures uniformly a large class of classical refinements that remain valid when noninterference is taken into account in our style.     

Pain and dissociation in the cold pressor test: A study of hypnotic analgesia with "hidden reports" through automatic key pressing and automatic talking.

To test whether pain blocked by hypnotic analgesia may still be perceived at some level, 20 highly hypnotizable undergraduates participated in an experiment involving cold pressor pain in the normal condition and in hypnotically suggested analgesia. 3 reports were obtained reflecting felt pain within the hypnotic analgesia condition: the usual verbal report on a numerical scale, a manual report by "automatic key pressing," and a retrospective verbal report through "automatic talking." 9 Ss who were amnesic for both keypressing and automatic talking reported more pain in the automatic (hidden) reports than in their usual verbal reports. 8 of these 9, following release of amnesia, had a clear perception of 2 levels of awareness of the pain: the usual hypnotic experience of pain attenuated by analgesia suggestions, and a knowledge at another level of a more severe pain. In no case, however, did an S give a retrospective report of normal suffering at this "hidden" level. The hypnotically analgesic S may have reported no pain verbally because he was amnesic for it; when amnesia was removed he recalled the sensory pain, but without a suffering component, because suffering apparently did not occur. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Efficient surface reconstruction from contours based on two‐dimensional Delaunay triangulation

This paper introduces an efficient method for surface reconstruction from sectional contours. The surface between neighbouring sections is reconstructed based on the consistent utilization of the two‐dimensional constrained Delaunay triangulation. The triangulation is used to extract the parametric domain and to solve the problems associated with correspondence, tiling and branching in a general framework. Natural distance interpolations are performed in order to complete the mapping of the added intermediate points. Surface smoothing and remeshing are conducted to optimize the initial surface triangulations. Several examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Remotely sensed indicators of habitat heterogeneity: Use of synthetic aperture radar in mapping vegetation structure and bird habitat

An integrated remote sensing/field ecology project linked the use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and aerial photography to studies of landscape spatial heterogeneity and bird community ecology. P-, L-, and C-band SAR data, collected over a section of Kakadu National Park in Australia's Northern Territory during the Joint NASA/Australia DC-8 data acquisition campaign, were analyzed in light of field data integrating vegetation structure and floristics with bird abundances across a heterogeneous study site. Results indicate that SAR data are able to discern structural differences relevant to bird habitat quality within floristically homogeneous stands, while multispectral sensors successfully identified floristic differences among habitat types. Simplifying indices of bird diversity showed ambiguous changes across the site; however, the abundances of individual species were observed to change significantly across both floristic and structural gradients. These results suggest that efforts to map bird diversity should focus on species-specific habitat relationships and that some measure of vegetation structure is needed to understand bird habitat. The approach employed here advances the use of SAR data in the three-dimensional mapping of animal habitats from remotely sensed data, and extends current capabilities for mapping and modeling large-scale patterns in the distribution of biological diversity.