Binary rewriting and call interception for efficient runtime protection against buffer overflows

Buffer overflow vulnerabilities are one of the most commonly and widely exploited security vulnerabilities in programs. Most existing solutions for avoiding buffer overflows are either inadequate, inefficient or incompatible with existing code. In this paper, we present a novel approach for transparent and efficient runtime protection against buffer overflows. The approach is implemented by two tools: Type Information Extractor and Depositor (TIED) and LibsafePlus. TIED is first used on a binary executable or shared library file to extract type information from the debugging information inserted in the file by the compiler and reinsert it in the file as a data structure available at runtime. LibsafePlus is a shared library that is preloaded when the program is run. LibsafePlus intercepts unsafe C library calls such as strcpy and uses the type information made available by TIED at runtime to determine whether it would be ‘safe’ to carry out the operation. With our simple design we are able to protect most applications with a performance overhead of less than 10%. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Thrombospondin-1 CD47 Signalling: From Mechanisms to Medicine

Recent advances provide evidence that the cellular signalling pathway comprising the ligand-receptor duo of thrombospondin-1 (TSP1) and CD47 is involved in mediating a range of diseases affecting renal, vascular, and metabolic function, as well as cancer. In several instances, research has barely progressed past pre-clinical animal models of disease and early phase 1 clinical trials, while for cancers, anti-CD47 therapy has emerged from phase 2 clinical trials in humans as a crucial adjuvant therapeutic agent. This has important implications for interventions that seek to capitalize on targeting this pathway in diseases where TSP1 and/or CD47 play a role. Despite substantial progress made in our understanding of this pathway in malignant and cardiovascular disease, knowledge and translational gaps remain regarding the role of this pathway in kidney and metabolic diseases, limiting identification of putative drug targets and development of effective treatments. This review considers recent advances reported in the field of TSP1-CD47 signalling, focusing on several aspects including enzymatic production, receptor function, interacting partners, localization of signalling, matrix-cellular and cell-to-cell cross talk. The potential impact that these newly described mechanisms have on health, with a particular focus on renal and metabolic disease, is also discussed.     

The role of pressure on thin amorphous carbon films deposited using microwave surface wave plasma CVD

We report the effects of gas composition pressure (GCP) on the optical, structural and electrical properties of thin amorphous carbon (a-C) films grown on p-type silicon and quartz substrates by microwave surface wave plasma chemical vapor deposition (MW SWP CVD). The films, deposited at various GCPs ranging from 50 to 110 Pa, were studied by UV/VIS/NIR spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and current–voltage characteristics. The optical band gap of the a-C film was tailored to a relatively high range, 2.3–2.6 eV by manipulating GCPs from 50 to 110 Pa. Also, spin density strongly depended on the band gap of the a-C films. Raman spectra showed qualitative structured changes due to sp³/sp² carbon bonding network. The surfaces of the films are found to be very smooth and uniform (RMS roughness < 0.5 nm). The photovoltaic measurements under light illumination (AM 1.5, 100 mW/cm²) show that short-circuit current density, open-circuit voltage, fill factor and photo-conversion efficiency of the film deposited at 50 Pa were 6.4 μA/cm², 126 mV, 0.164 and 1.4 × 10^− 4% respectively.     

Automated bank cheque verification using image processing and deep learning methods

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Automated bank cheque verification using image processing is an attempt to complement the present cheque truncation system, as well as to provide an alternate...     

Generalized Post Embedding Problems

The Regular Post Embedding Problem extended with partial (co)directness is shown decidable. This extends to universal and/or counting versions. It is also shown that combining directness and codirectness in Post Embedding problems leads to undecidability.     

Recognition of facial expressions based on salient geometric features and support vector machines

Facial expressions convey nonverbal cues which play an important role in interpersonal relations, and are widely used in behavior interpretation of emotions, cognitive science, and social interactions. In this paper we analyze different ways of representing geometric feature and present a fully automatic facial expression recognition (FER) system using salient geometric features. In geometric feature-based FER approach, the first important step is to initialize and track dense set of facial points as the expression evolves over time in consecutive frames. In the proposed system, facial points are initialized using elastic bunch graph matching (EBGM) algorithm and tracking is performed using Kanade-Lucas-Tomaci (KLT) tracker. We extract geometric features from point, line and triangle composed of tracking results of facial points. The most discriminative line and triangle features are extracted using feature selective multi-class AdaBoost with the help of extreme learning machine (ELM) classification. Finally the geometric features for FER are extracted from the boosted line, and triangles composed of facial points. The recognition accuracy using features from point, line and triangle are analyzed independently. The performance of the proposed FER system is evaluated on three different data sets: namely CK+, MMI and MUG facial expression data sets.     

Novel Approach for Mobile Based App Development Incorporating MAAF

Wireless Personal Communications - Increased dominance of mobile applications (henceforth, app) over conventional software applications is quite apparent; however, there is a lack of structured...     

Seasonal trend analysis of image time series

A procedure is introduced for the analysis of seasonal trends in time series of Earth observation imagery. Called Seasonal Trend Analysis (STA), the procedure is based on an initial stage of harmonic analysis of each year in the series to extract the annual and semi‐annual harmonics. Trends in the parameters of these harmonics over years are then analysed using a robust median‐slope procedure. Finally, images of these trends are used to create colour composites highlighting the amplitudes and phases of seasonality trends. The technique specifically rejects high‐frequency sub‐annual noise and is robust to short‐term interannual variability up to a period of 29% of the length of the series. It is, thus, a very effective procedure for focusing on the general nature of longer‐term trends in seasonality.