Shared Library Research Articles

D-Linker: Debloating Shared Libraries by Relinking From Object Files

D-Linker: Debloating Shared Libraries by Relinking From Object Files

EFACT: An External Function Auto-Completion Tool to strengthen static binary lifting

Static binary lifting is essential in binary rewriting frameworks. Existing tools overlook the impact of External Function Completion (EXFC) in static binary lifting. EXFC recovers the declarations of External Functions (EXFs, functions defined in standard shared libraries) using only the function symbols available. Incorrect EXFC can misinterpret the source binary, or cause memory overflows in static binary translation, which eventually results in program crashes. Notably, existing tools struggle to recover the declarations of mangled EXFs originating from binaries compiled from C++. Moreover, they require time-consuming manual processing to support new libraries.This paper presents EFACT, an External Function Auto-Completion Tool for static binary lifting. Our EXF recovery algorithm better recovers the declarations of mangled EXFs, particularly addressing the template specialization mechanism in C++. EFACT is designed as a lightweight plugin to strengthen other static binary rewriting frameworks in EXFC. Our evaluation shows that EFACT outperforms RetDec and McSema in mangled EXF recovery by 96.4% and 97.3% on SPECrate 2017.Furthermore, we delve deeper into static binary translation and address several cross-ISA EXFC problems. When integrated with McSema, EFACT correctly translates 36.7% more benchmarks from x86-64 to x86-64 and 93.6% more from x86-64 to AArch64 than McSema alone on EEMBC.

Facilitating knowledge transfer to policy makers and front-line workers during a pandemic: Implementation, impact and lessons learned.

Stakeholders working on the COVID-19 pandemic response needed access to evidence, requiring a systematic approach to identify and disseminate relevant research. Outlinethe stages of development of a COVID-19 Literature Digest; demonstrate the impact the Digest had on decision-making and knowledge gain; identify the lessons learned. A standardised process was developed to identify and select papers. The main sources for content were PubMed, bioRxiv and medRxiv. A shared EndNote library was used to deduplicate and organise papers. Three user surveys obtained feedback from subscribers to determine if the Digest remained valuable, and explore the benefits to individuals. 40-60 papers were summarised each week. 211 Digests were produced from March 2020 to March 2022, with around 10,000 papers included altogether. Survey results suggest benefits of the Digest were gaining new knowledge, saving time and contributing to evidence-based decision making. Digest procedures constantly evolved and were adapted in response to survey feedback. Lessons identified: learn from failure, communication is key, measure your impact, work collaboratively, reflect and be flexible. The Digest was successfully produced within the limits of available resource. The learning from this Digest will inform evidence monitoring, selection and dissemination for future health crises.

LSVC: A Lifelong Learning Approach for Stream-View Clustering.

Multiview clustering (MVC) can achieve more accurate results by utilizing complementary information from multiple perspectives, compared to traditional single-view methods. However, current multiview techniques require all views to be available upfront, making them inadequate for dealing with prevalent data sources that arrive as streams, such as stem cell analysis and multicamera surveillance. To address this problem, in this article, we propose a method called lifelong stream-view clustering (LSVC), which comprises an embedding anchor knowledge library and three key components, enabling the capability to perform asynchronous clustering on stream views. These three components are specifically: 1) the knowledge extraction module that extracts the abstract knowledge of the newcome view over time and updates the shared knowledge library; 2) the knowledge transfer module that aligns the newcome view with the historical knowledge library, enabling the transfer of structure information to the knowledge library; and 3) the knowledge rule module that constraints the knowledge library to enjoy a fair amount of anchors for each cluster, improving the discrimination of knowledge. The experimental results show that LSVC outperforms traditional single-view clustering (SVC) and MVC methods as it gradually improves with the accumulation of stream views and tends to be stable over time.

DIRECT: Digital Microfluidics for Isolation-Free Shared Library Construction of Single-Cell DNA Methylome and Transcriptome.

Simultaneous profiling of DNA methylation and gene expression within single cells is a powerful technology to dissect complex gene regulatory network of cells. However, existing methods are based on picking a single-cell in a tube and split single-cell lysate into two parts for transcriptome and methylome library construction, respectively, which is costly and cumbersome. Here, DIRECT is proposed, a digital microfluidics-based method for high-efficiency single-cell isolation and simultaneous analysis of the methylome and transcriptome in a single library construction. The accuracy of DIRECT is demonstrated in comparison with bulk and single-omics data, and the high CpG site coverage of DIRECT allows for precise analysis of copy number variation information, enabling expansion of single cell analysis from two- to three-omics. By applying DIRECT to monitor the dynamics of mouse embryonic stem cell differentiation, the relationship between DNA methylation and changes in gene expression during differentiation is revealed. DIRECT enables accurate, robust, and reproducible single-cell DNA methylation and gene expression co-analysis in a more cost-effective, simpler library preparation and automated manner, broadening the application scenarios of single-cell multi-omics analysis and revealing a more comprehensive and fine-grained map of cellular regulatory landscapes.

Peng: A program for transport properties of low-density binary gas mixtures

The fundamental properties of molecules bridge experiment and theory. Transport properties (diffusion, thermal diffusion, thermal conductivity and viscosity) of binary mixtures are measurable in experiments, and well-defined in theory, but difficult to compute with high accuracy. In addition to high-accuracy inter-molecular potential energy curves (PECs), a reliable and high-order solution program that compute the properties based on the PECs is required. In this work, we present a computer program called Peng that performs the collision integration numerically, and solves the Boltzmann equation in Chapman–Enskog fashion. The program has been devised to perform both parts of the solution procedure to arbitrary order, so that no hard-coded limitation will prevent a user from computing at higher precision, except the amount of RAM and the required computational time. Peng is well-designed in an Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) fashion, which make the program clear and easy to modify. In addition to the end-user oriented program, Peng is also compiled as a dynamic shared library that may readily be extended and embedded in users' programs. Program summaryProgram Title:PengCPC Library link to program files:https://doi.org/10.17632/n5tm9426jx.1Developer's repository link:https://github.com/zhaiyusci/pengCode Ocean capsule:https://codeocean.com/capsule/9951686Licensing provisions: LGPLProgramming language: C++Nature of problem: Nowadays, quantum chemistry provides high-accuracy intermolecular interactions potential energy curves (PECs), and more and more accurate thermophysical properties of dilute gases can be measured experimentally. It is meaningful to build a bridge between thermophysical properties and PECs, so that people can refine the PECs and learn more about the nature of dynamics of gases. For a dilute binary gas mixture, the theory, the Boltzmann equation, and its solution has been available for a long time, but fewer numerical solution packages are available for the public. An easy-to-use and easy-to-extend software package is required.Solution method: To complete the work, we have created a program that computes the collision integrals (Ω(ℓ,s)) for a set of temperatures, following which the thermophysical properties are computed using the Chapman–Enskog solutions of the Boltzmann equation. Both parts of the program are written in C++. The program is easy to use, and a well-designed framework is provided thanks to the Object-oriented design. Users with programming experience can readily extend the present work.Additional comments including restrictions and unusual features: In this version, the program is limited to the computation of the properties of mixtures of structureless atoms. For polyatomic molecules, additional work need to be done.

Deep Learning-Enabled Semantic Communication Systems With Task-Unaware Transmitter and Dynamic Data

Existing deep learning-enabled semantic communication systems often rely on shared background knowledge between the transmitter and receiver that includes empirical data and their associated semantic information. In practice, the semantic information is defined by the pragmatic task of the receiver and cannot be known to the transmitter. The actual observable data at the transmitter can also have non-identical distribution with the empirical data in the shared background knowledge library. To address these practical issues, this paper proposes a new neural network-based semantic communication system for image transmission, where the task is unaware at the transmitter and the data environment is dynamic. The system consists of two main parts, namely the semantic coding (SC) network and the data adaptation (DA) network. The SC network learns how to extract and transmit the semantic information using a receiver-leading training process. By using the domain adaptation technique from transfer learning, the DA network learns how to convert the data observed into a similar form of the empirical data that the SC network can process without re-training. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method can be adaptive to observable datasets while keeping high performance in terms of both data recovery and task execution.

Innovative Methodology for Teaching European Studies Using a Corpus Approach

Тhe most popular methodology for teaching European Studies is the methodology is corpus-oriented. The teacher is demonstrating the data and the translation finding information online (Sketch Engine) and in an offline mode (AntConc). It is possible to use many online resources available online avoiding the prepaid data libraries. In addition, we use the Open Library, which contains digitized works of European authors in audio format, access to which is provided by personal free access. In addition, students can provide their digital resources to the shared library. Thus, students may add their digital resources to the shared library. The purpose of this work is to create the shared data resources to learn the European Studies. The open access is viewed as the basic, other data flow is possible and welcomed.

Making Clinical Data Acquisition Standards Harmonization (CDASH) Electronic Case Report Forms Available on the REDCap Shared Data Instrument Library.

A guiding principle behind the development and deployment of the REDCap data management platform has always included attention to workflow design that allows easy implementation of best practices for clinical and translational researchers. CDISC standards such as CDASH have helped the clinical research community improve the efficiency, actionability, and quality of their clinical trials data, but have had limited uptake among the academic institutions. To create a scalable methodology to convert CDISC CDASH eCRF instrument metadata into REDCap data dictionaries for the purpose of simplifying adoption and use of CDASH instruments by research teams across the REDCap Consortium. We have used our replicable methods to translate metadata from 34 CDASH Foundational eCRFs and 20 CDASH Crohn's Disease eCRFs into REDCap eCRF metadata and have made these instruments available in the REDCap Shared Data Instrument Library for widespread sharing and uptake across the REDCap Consortium. Users can import the standardized eCRFs directly into their REDCap projects for immediate use in clinical trial data collection. Disseminating CDISC standards through the REDCap community will increase the accessibility of these standards for academic medical centers. Having academic clinical researchers using CDISC standards may lead to more research datasets that interoperate with pharmaceutical sponsored trials, and more discoveries from secondary use of clinical research data.

Study on Energy Efficiency Using Building Information Modelling (BIM) at Shared Library Pagoh Higher Education Hub

Structures in Malaysia, particularly commercial buildings, have been exceeding the benchmark of building energy usage over the past few years. By maintaining thermal comfort of building under hot climate in Malaysia, air-conditioning system became a basic demand which incessantly operating to fulfil comfort requirement for the occupants in the library. Regards to this, research on energy efficiency using Building Information Modelling (BIM) software by simulating energy analysis was carried out in order to increase energy efficiency of the library. Mineral wool and Polyurethane Foam (P.U.F.) are the materials which proposed to apply in existing wall of building as the thermal insulation layer to increase thermal resistance when external heat transfer through the walls. The Objective of the study is to determine the existing building energy consumption and compare with energy analysis of mineral wool and polyurethane foam. The findings of the building energy analysis simulated by Green Building Studio (GBS) are then compared to discover the most appropriate walls for reducing the building’s energy consumption. P.U.F with its characteristics of high R-value and low U-value, obtain the most effective energy analysis which provide benefits of lowering total annual energy consumption of 294,651 , total annual energy cost of RM 107,645, and energy use intensity (EUI) of 121.7.

Data Management and Service Mode of Library Based on Data Mining Algorithm

Data management for large-scale data library services with mining procedures improves the availability and readiness of heterogeneous sources. The heterogeneous data sources are assimilated as a single entity through mining procedures to meet the data demands. This article introduces connectivity-persistent data mining method (CDMM) to improve the data handling precision with boosting availability. The proposed method relies on federated learning for identifying the service demands, thereby providing data mining. The learning paradigm accumulates information on shared data library existence over various services. Based on the availability, further mining demands are forwarded to the data management system. If the existence verified by the federated learning is adaptable, then sharing-enabled mining is endorsed for the connected users. The data management then augments several heterogeneous shared libraries to meet the mining requirements. This process is reversible based on the service mode and existence. Therefore, the proposed method improves data availability with less mining and access time and fewer failures.

Improving Reading Comprehension Ability with the Think Pair Share Cooperative Learning Model and Library Utilization of Writing Skills Courses in the Department of Indonesian Language and Literature Semester II at FKIP UMSU Academic Year 2021-2022

Writing skills courses in higher education are learning that requires students to be able to understand reading both in text and context. Students need to be given the opportunity to understand the reading so that they can pour what is on their mind into written form. Ability to read comprehension with the implementation of the Think Pair Share (TPS) Cooperative Learning Model and Library Utilization. Reading Comprehension Ability in Basic Competence of Writing Skills from the results of observations. Cycle I showed the average percentage score of Reading Comprehension in Basic Competence of Writing Skills of 76.19%, the score then increased in cycle II to 84.57% in cycle II. There was an increase in the average percentage score of Reading Comprehension in Basic Competence of Writing Skills from cycle I to cycle II of 8.38%. The results of the average percentage of Reading Comprehension Ability in the Basic Competence of Writing Skills also shows that more than 75% of the indicators of success in Reading Comprehension Basic Competence in Writing Skills have been achieved.

Predicting Fluid Properties in the MUFITS Reservoir Simulator with User-Supplied Modules

We present a recent development of the MUFITS reservoir simulator aiming at modelling the transport of fluids whose properties and phase equilibria are calculated in a user-supplied external shared library. Both the explicit correlations and tabulated data for the fluid parameters can be implemented in the library that we name the EoS-module (Equation of State-module). An iterative approach—which, for example, is based on the phase equilibria calculation through the Gibbs energy minimisation (GEM) method, can also be used in the EoS-module. A considerable effort has been undertaken to minimise the number of program procedures exported by the shared library. This should facilitate and ease the usage of the developed software extension by the scientific community. Furthermore, we supplement the article with the source code of two simple EoS-modules that can serve as templates in other modelling and software development efforts. The EoS-modules are also useful for coupling MUFITS with other elaborate software for fluid property prediction. To demonstrate such a possibility, we supplement the article with the source code of a more complicated EoS-module that couples MUFITS with the geochemical code GEMS3K. This module is used in a simple 1-D benchmark study showing the capabilities of MUFITS for modelling reactive transport in porous media.

Migrating to a shared Library Management System: evaluation from the perspective of librarians and lessons learned

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to investigate certain aspects, problems and benefits from the migration to a shared Library Management System (LMS).Design/methodology/approachA review of the literature and a quantitative survey was conducted, based on a structured questionnaire, with a response rate of 44.7%.FindingsAmong the crucial issues that should be taken seriously into consideration when transiting into a new and shared LMS, are the audit of the data quality before migration, the employees' training design and the composition of the LMS central support team. The benefits of a shared LMS are mainly effectiveness in terms of libraries' budgets and time for the employees' day-to-day work.Originality/valueThe survey presented in this article evaluates the merits of a shared LMS and contributes innovative aspects to the existing bibliography by investigating issues and problems that arose during the transition. This way, the professionals involved in similar initiatives will benefit by avoiding possible mistakes and drawbacks when implementing such a project.

Transparent Control Flow Transfer between CPU and Accelerators for HPC

Heterogeneous platforms with FPGAs have started to be employed in the High-Performance Computing (HPC) field to improve performance and overall efficiency. These platforms allow the use of specialized hardware to accelerate software applications, but require the software to be adapted in what can be a prolonged and complex process. The main goal of this work is to describe and evaluate mechanisms that can transparently transfer the control flow between CPU and FPGA within the scope of HPC. Combining such a mechanism with transparent software profiling and accelerator configuration could lead to an automatic way of accelerating regular applications. In this work, a mechanism based on the ptrace system call is proposed, and its performance on the Intel Xeon+FPGA platform is evaluated. The feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated by a working prototype that performs the transparent control flow transfer of any function call to a matching hardware accelerator. This approach is more general than shared library interposition at the cost of a small time overhead in each accelerator use (about 1.3 ms in the prototype implementation).

Surveillance Video Coding for Traffic Scene based on Vehicle Knowledge and Shared Library by Cloud-Edge Computing in Cyber-Physical-Social Systems

With rapid development of intelligent video surveillance systems based on cloud computing devices and edge computing devices in Cyber-Physical-Social Systems, massive surveillance video data has brings enormous challenge for video storage and transmission. However, existing surveillance video coding approaches hardly utilize intelligent video analysis results for improving video coding. This paper proposed a surveillance video coding scheme for traffic scene based on vehicle knowledge and shared library by cloud-edge computing in Cyber-Physical-Social Systems. Firstly, in order to provide the object library for synchronous application at the encode and decode side offline, a generation method of shared long-term foreground reference object library is proposed by using the existing large-scale monitoring vehicle object datasets. Then, to meet the requirement of low complexity and high-performance coding, a virtual foreground reference picture generation method with coding-oriented object retrieval is proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can obtain the satisfactory effect of the virtual foreground reference picture. Also, it can yield remarkable bit rate reductions, compared to HEVC.

Large-scale Debloating of Binary Shared Libraries

Developers nowadays have access to an arsenal of toolkits and libraries for rapid application prototyping. However, when an application loads a library, the entirety of that library’s code is mapped into the process address space, even if only a single function is actually needed. The unused portion is bloat that can negatively impact software defenses by unnecessarily inflating their overhead or increasing the attack surface. In this article, we investigate whether debloating is possible and practical at the binary level. To this end, we present Nibbler : a system that identifies and erases unused functions within dynamic shared libraries. Nibbler works in tandem with defenses such as continuous code re-randomization and control-flow integrity, enhancing them without incurring additional run-time overhead. We developed and tested a prototype of Nibbler on x86-64 Linux; Nibbler reduces the size of shared libraries and the number of available functions, for real-world binaries and the SPEC CINT2006 suite, by up to 56% and 82%, respectively. We also demonstrate that Nibbler benefits defenses by showing that: (i) it improves the deployability of a continuous re-randomization system for binaries, namely, Shuffler, by increasing its efficiency by 20%, and (ii) it improves certain fast but coarse and context-insensitive control-flow integrity schemes by reducing the number of gadgets reachable through indirect branch instructions by 75% and 49%, on average. Last, we apply Nibbler on ≈30K C/C++ binaries and ≈5K unique dynamic shared libraries (i.e., almost the complete set of the Debian sid distribution), as well as on nine official Docker images (with millions of downloads in Docker Hub), reporting entrancing findings regarding code bloat at large.

Hardware Root-of-Trust-based integrity for shared library function pointers in embedded systems

Many security measures designed for large-scale compute hardware (e.g., workstations and servers) are not optimized for embedded systems. One such measure, Relocation Read-Only (RelRO), protects binary relocation sections from tampering after dynamic linking; however, RelRO depends on the presence of memory management hardware that not all embedded systems include. More generally, the latest hardware modifications to processor architectures may not always be available to provide security in small-scale embedded systems. In this paper, we propose another solution for relocation protection for use in embedded systems that have a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) on chip. Our solution prevents relocation section overwrites from diverting control flow as they would in an unprotected binary by implementing a hardware Root of Trust into which to store and out of which to retrieve shared library function pointers. We offer two system variations which provide designers with flexibility to choose a lighter or a more robust protection. We also demonstrate a proof of concept implemented on a popular FPGA development board and provide comparison with RelRO. Our work provides embedded system developers with a security measure like RelRO without requiring a customized memory management unit. Our work is useful on computer systems that include embedded reconfigurable logic on chip. The authors believe this is the first paper in which reconfigurable logic is used to provide security functionality previously implemented in a custom instruction set or other computer architecture modifications. Our work points toward a future where FPGA logic embedded on chip can be adapted to improve the security of software.

Cyberinsights: Talking about the Software Supply Chain.

Cyberinsights: Talking about the Software Supply Chain.

CPL library — A minimal framework for coupled particle and continuum simulation

We present an open-source library for coupling particle codes, such as molecular dynamics (MD) or the discrete element method (DEM), and grid based computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The application is focused on domain decomposition coupling, where a particle and continuum software model different parts of a single simulation domain with information exchange. This focus allows a simple library to be developed, with core mapping and communication handled by just four functions. Emphasis is on scaling on supercomputers, a tested cross-language library, deployment with containers and well-documented simple examples. Building on this core, a template is provided to facilitate the user development of common features for coupling, such as averaging routines and functions to apply constraint forces. The interface code for LAMMPS and OpenFOAM is provided to both include molecular detail in a continuum solver and model fluids flowing through a granular system. Two novel development features are highlighted which will be useful in the development of the next generation of multi-scale software: (i) The division of coupled code into a smaller blocks with testing over a range of processor topologies. (ii) The use of coupled mocking to facilitate coverage of various parts of the code and allow rapid prototyping. These two features aim to help users develop coupled models in a test-driven manner and focus on the physics of the problem instead of just software development. All presented code is open-source with detailed documentation on the dedicated website (cpl-library.org) permitting useful aspects to be evaluated and adopted in other projects. Program summaryProgram Title:CPLLIBRARYProgram Files doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/9dh8w97d2x.1Licensing provisions: GPLv3Programming languages: Fortran/C/C++/PythonExternal routines/libraries: Message Passing Interface (MPI)Nature of problem: Coupling of particle and continuum software to enable simulations not possible with either code alone. In particular, handling communication and interaction of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software with either molecular dynamics (MD) or discrete element method (DEM) solvers on high performance computing (HPC) platforms.Solution method: A shared library with a minimal set of functions to enable coupling, together with an entire infrastructure to facilitate development of validated coupled software. This includes a minimal Python interface to encourage mock testing, libraries to help develop coupled tools along with pre-coupled examples including OpenFOAM, LAMMPS, Flowmol (Smith, 2014) and interactive plotting using wxPython and matplotlib.Unusual features: Minimal interface with simple setup. A CPL_Mocks framework to facilitate debugging and test driven development. Communication established between independent executables using MPI_Open_Port, reducing required changes to core source code. Coupled codes track the git repository with validation through continuous integration testing and deployment on DockerHub. All communication based on MPI_Cart and MPI_Graph so optimisation is possible through MPI implementation on supercomputers.