ECFGM: enriched control flow graph miner for unknown vicious infected code detection

Vicious codes, especially viruses, as a kind of impressive malware have caused many disasters and continue to exploit more vulnerabilities. These codes are injected inside benign programs in order to abuse their hosts and ease their propagation. The offsets of injected virus codes are unknown and their targets usually are latent until they are executed and activated, what in turn makes viruses very hard to detect. In this paper enriched control flow graph miner, ECFGM in short, is presented to detect infected files corrupted by unknown viruses. ECFGM uses enriched control flow graph model to represent the benign and vicious codes. This model has more information than traditional control flow graph (CFG) by utilizing statistical information of dependent assembly instructions and API calls. To the best of our knowledge, the presented approach in this paper, for the first time, can recognize the offset of infected code of unknown viruses in the victim files. The main contributions of this paper are two folds: first, the presented model is able to detect unknown vicious code using ECFG model with reasonable complexity and desirable accuracy. Second, our approach is resistant against metamorphic viruses which utilize dead code insertion, variable renaming and instruction reordering methods.     

Transient growth of a micro-void in an infinite medium under thermal load with modified Zerilli–Armstrong model

In this paper, the transient growth of a spherical micro-void under remote thermal load in an infinite medium is investigated. After developing the governing equations in the problem domain, the coupled nonlinear set of equations is solved through a numerical scheme. It is shown that a small cavity can grow rapidly as the temperature increases in a remote distance and may damage the material containing preexisting micro-voids. Conducting a transient thermal analysis simultaneously with a structural one reveals that the material may experience a peak in the radial stress distribution, which is five times larger compared to the steady-state one, and shows the importance of employing a time-dependent approach in this problem. Furthermore, utilizing a sensible yield criterion, i.e., the modified Zerilli–Armstrong model, discloses that there is a large discrepancy in the results assuming perfectly plastic constitutive model. It is verified that the obtained results do not violate the proportional loading conditions that is the basis for development of the governing formulation in this work. The monotonic alteration of the plastic strain components versus time proves that we do not encounter any elastic unloading during the void growth, which is a basic assumption in the present work. Some numerical examples are also presented to investigate the features of the presented model.     

ERES: an extended regular expression signature for polymorphic worm detection

Journal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques - The quick spreading of modern sophisticated polymorphic worms poses a serious threat to the internet security. So far, several signature...     

The Bulk Osteosarcoma and Osteosarcoma Stem Cell Activity of a Necroptosis-Inducing Nickel(II)–Phenanthroline Complex

We report the anti-osteosarcoma and anti-osteosarcoma stem cell (OSC) properties of a nickel(II) complex, 1 . Complex 1 displays similar potency towards bulk osteosarcoma cells and OSCs, in the micromolar range. Notably, 1 displays similar or better OSC potency than the clinically approved platinum(II) anticancer drugs cisplatin and carboplatin in two- and three-dimensional osteosarcoma cell cultures. Mechanistic studies revealed that 1 induces osteosarcoma cell death by necroptosis, an ordered form of necrosis. The nickel(II) complex, 1 triggers necrosome-dependent mitrochondrial membrane depolarisation and propidium iodide uptake. Interestingly, 1 does not evoke necroptosis by elevating intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) or hyperactivation of poly ADP ribose polymerase (PARP-1). ROS elevation and PARP-1 activity are traits that have been observed for established necroptosis inducers such as shikonin, TRAIL and glutamate. Thus the necroptosis pathway evoked by 1 is distinct. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report into the anti-osteosarcoma and anti-OSC properties of a nickel complex.     

Effect of different microstructural parameters on hydrogen induced cracking in an API X70 pipeline steel

In this study, the surface and cross section of an as-received API X70 pipeline steel was studied by SEM and EDS techniques in order to categorize the shape and morphology of inclusions. Then, an electrochemical hydrogen charging using a mixed solution of 0.2 M sulfuric acid and 3 g/l ammonium thiocyanate has been utilized to create hydrogen cracks in X70 steel. After hydrogen charging experiments, the cross section of this steel has been accurately checked by SEM in order to find out hydrogen cracks. The region of hydrogen cracks was investigated by SEM and EBSD techniques to predict the role of different microstructural parameters involving hydrogen induced cracking (HIC) phenomenon. The results showed that inclusions were randomly distributed in the cross section of tested specimens. Moreover, different types of inclusions in as-received X70 steel were found. However, only inclusions which were hard, brittle and incoherent with the metal matrix, such as manganese sulfide and carbonitride precipitates, were recognized to be harmful to HIC phenomenon. Moreover, HIC cracks propagate dominantly in transgraular manner through differently oriented grains with no clear preferential trend. Moreover, a different type of HIC crack with about 15-20 degrees of deviation from the rolling direction was found and studied by EBSD technique and role of micro-texture parameters on HIC was discussed.     

Impedance Studies on Stress Corrosion Cracking Behavior of Steel Pipeline in NS4 Solution under SSRT Test Condition

Protection of Metals and Physical Chemistry of Surfaces - Stress corrosion cracking behavior of API 5L X65 steel in a NS4 solution with different pH was investigated by electrochemical impedance...     

Microstructure–mechanical property relationship in an Al–Mg alloy processed by constrained groove pressing-cross route

The constrained groove pressing-cross route process was implemented on a commercially annealed AA5052 alloy at room temperature, with up to two passes (strain of ～4.64) along the rolling direction and transverse direction. The results showed the formation of an ultrafine-grained structure with an average sub-grain/cell size in the 300–500?nm range. The indentation hardness and tensile strength increased significantly, up to ～75 and 105%, respectively, and became more homogenous with a uniform and isotropic trend, as compared to the annealed alloy. According to the Hall–Petch and Taylor models used, grain refinement and increasing dislocation density were proposed as the main strengthening mechanisms. Fractographic studies revealed a ductile-fracture behaviour, with a dimpled structure proportional to the UFG structure.     

An energetically consistent annular crack in a piezoelectric medium

The analytical treatment of an energetically consistent annular crack in a piezoelectric solid subjected to remote opening electromechanical loading is addressed. Potential functions and Hankel transform in combination with a robust technique are employed to reduce the solution of the mixed boundary value problem into a Fredholm integral equation of the second kind. The limiting case of a penny-shaped crack in a piezoelectric medium with energetically consistent boundary conditions over the crack faces is extracted for the first time. The electrical discharge phenomenon within the crack gap is modeled utilizing a non-linear constitutive law and the effects of the breakdown field on the energy release rate are delineated. The energy release rate, the electric displacement inside the crack gap, and the closing traction on crack faces are plotted for all possible geometries of a non-discharging annular crack.     

A graph mining approach for detecting unknown malwares

Nowadays malware is one of the serious problems in the modern societies. Although the signature based malicious code detection is the standard technique in all commercial antivirus softwares, it can only achieve detection once the virus has already caused damage and it is registered. Therefore, it fails to detect new malwares (unknown malwares). Since most of malwares have similar behavior, a behavior based method can detect unknown malwares. The behavior of a program can be represented by a set of called API's (application programming interface). Therefore, a classifier can be employed to construct a learning model with a set of programs' API calls. Finally, an intelligent malware detection system is developed to detect unknown malwares automatically. On the other hand, we have an appealing representation model to visualize the executable files structure which is control flow graph (CFG). This model represents another semantic aspect of programs. This paper presents a robust semantic based method to detect unknown malwares based on combination of a visualize model (CFG) and called API's. The main contribution of this paper is extracting CFG from programs and combining it with extracted API calls to have more information about executable files. This new representation model is called API-CFG. In addition, to have fast learning and classification process, the control flow graphs are converted to a set of feature vectors by a nice trick. Our approach is capable of classifying unseen benign and malicious code with high accuracy. The results show a statistically significant improvement over n-grams based detection method.     

Control of three phase PWM rectifier using virtual flux‐based predictive direct power control and SVM under harmonic conditions

In this paper, a new predictive direct power control algorithm to control the PWM rectifier based on virtual flux (VF) is presented. In this algorithm, supply network and the line inductances are assumed as an induction machine and so virtual flux space vectors are assumed corresponding with the space vector of the network voltages. Instantaneous active and reactive powers and finally convertor average voltage in both stationary and rotating reference frames are calculated by the virtual flux space vector components. The main advantages of the proposed method are low total harmonic distortion of the input current and low ripple in the instantaneous active and reactive powers and direct current‐bus voltage under harmonic distorted condition of the supply voltage in comparison with voltage‐based predictive direct power control (V‐PDPC) method. Proposed VF‐PDPC method with space vector modulation switching strategy was tested in simulations and compared with the V‐PDPC method. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.