Track Data Flow Research Articles

ECONOMIC BENEFITS OF ROUTE MONITORING: GPS TRACKING IN KAZAKHSTAN’S RAILWAYS

In the context of Kazakhstan's railway operations, this study explores the economic advantages derived from the implementation of GPS tracking technology focused on route monitoring. Employing Extreme Programming (XP) principles, a case study within a national railway company details the process, challenges, and outcomes of integrating GPS trackers on mobile phones for workforce location tracking and geo-fencing. Results demonstrate the significant improvement in monitoring workforce activities and precise payroll calculation based on actual working hours. Emphasizing the role of the XP methodology, the study showcases enhanced stakeholder communication, iterative development, and continuous system improvement. Technical aspects of the GPS tracking system, including architecture, data flow, and integration with existing railway management systems, are examined. Moreover, the study delves into encountered challenges such as privacy concerns, data security, and user acceptance during implementation. This case study presents valuable insights for transportation organizations aiming to implement location-tracking and geo-fencing technologies, providing a blueprint for effective project management, iterative development, and stakeholder engagement in pursuit of economic benefits through route monitoring.

SpecBox: A Label-Based Transparent Speculation Scheme Against Transient Execution Attacks

Speculative execution techniques have been a cornerstone of modern processors to improve instruction-level parallelism. However, recent studies showed that this kind of techniques could be exploited by attackers to leak secret data via transient execution attacks, such as Spectre. Many defenses are proposed to address this problem, but they all face various challenges: (1) Tracking data flow in the instruction pipeline could comprehensively address this problem, but it could cause pipeline stalls and incur high performance overhead; (2) Making side effect of speculative execution imperceptible to attackers, but it often needs additional storage components and complicated data movement operations. In this article, we propose a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">label-based transparent speculation</i> scheme called <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">SpecBox</small> . It dynamically partitions the cache system to isolate speculative data and non-speculative data, which can prevent transient execution from being observed by subsequent execution. Moreover, it uses thread ownership semaphores to prevent speculative data from being accessed across cores. In addition, <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">SpecBox</small> also enhances the auxiliary components in the cache system against transient execution attacks, such as hardware prefetcher. Our security analysis shows that <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">SpecBox</small> is secure and the performance evaluation shows that the performance overhead on SPEC CPU 2006 and PARSEC-3.0 benchmarks is small.

TaintMan: An ART-Compatible Dynamic Taint Analysis Framework on Unmodified and Non-Rooted Android Devices

Dynamic taint analysis (DTA), as a mainstream information flow tracking technique, has been widely used in mobile security. On the Android platform, the existing DTA approaches are typically implemented by instrumenting the Dalvik virtual machine (DVM) interpreter or the Android emulator with taint enforcement code. The most prominent problem of the interpreter-based approaches is that they cannot work in the new Android RunTime (ART) environment introduced since the 5.0 release. For the emulator-based approaches, the most prominent problem is that they cannot be deployed on real devices. In addition, almost all the existing Android DTA approaches only concern the explicit information flow caused by data dependence, while completely ignore the impact of implicit information flow caused by control dependence. These problems limit their adoption in the latest Android system and make them ineffective in detecting the state-of-the-art malware whose privacy-breaching behaviors are inactivated in the analyzed environment (e.g., the emulator) or conducted via implicit information flow. In this paper, we present TaintMan, an ART-compatible DTA framework that can be deployed on unmodified and non-rooted Android devices. In TaintMan, the taint enforcement code is statically instrumented into both the target application and the system class libraries to track data flow and common control flow. A specially designed execution environment reconstruction technique, named reference hijacking, is proposed to force the target application to reference the instrumented system class libraries. By enforcing on-demand instrumentation and on-demand tracking, the performance overhead is significantly reduced. We have developed TaintMan and deployed it on two popular stock smartphones (HTC One S equipped with Android-4.0 and Motorola MOTO G equipped with Android-5.0). The evaluation with malware samples and real-world applications shows that TaintMan can effectively detect privacy leakage behaviors with an acceptable performance overhead.

DROIT+: Taint tracking for storage access on android

The leakage of sensitive data has been a major concern in Android ecosystem. Analysts therefore propose dynamical taint tracking to effectively track the data flow of accessed data. However, the off-the-shelf taint tracking systems lack byte-granularity support for storage tracking. In this paper, we propose DROIT+ which uses the fine-grained storage tracking technique to track data flow among Android storages. DROIT+ is able to reveal the composition of data flows. Storage tracking on Android is difficult since data flows of apps may span heterogeneous media including memory, SD cards, NAND Flash, and network adapters. To capture a whole picture of data flows in storage, we formally define data flow and propose our method from both logical and physical perspectives. The method has also been implemented as an extension to the proposed tracking system, DROIT. Two case studies and two benchmark tools are used for the evaluation in terms of storage tracking ability, network tracking ability, and efficiency, respectively. The result shows that DROIT+ provides a better coverage using byte-granularity taint tracking.

The Mediterranean Ocean Colour Observing System – system development and product validation

Abstract. This paper presents the Mediterranean Ocean Colour Observing System in the framework of the growing demand of near real-time data emerging within the operational oceanography international context. The main issues related to the satellite operational oceanography are tied to the following: (1) the near real-time ability to track data flow uncertainty sources; (2) in case of failure, to provide backup solutions to end-users; and (3) to scientifically assess the product quality. We describe the major scientific and technological steps made to develop, maintain and improve the operational system and its products. A method for assessing the near real-time product quality is developed and its limitation discussed. Main results are concerned with the degradation, starting from mid-2010, of the MODIS Aqua channel at 443 nm with its successive recovery thanks to the new calibration scheme implemented in the recently released SeaDAS version 6.4. The product validation analysis highlights that SeaWiFS chlorophyll product over the Mediterranean Sea is the best performing in comparison with those of MODIS and MERIS. Despite their general good agreement with in situ observations, MODIS- and MERIS-derived chlorophyll present a slight and systematic underestimation of the in situ counter part. The most relevant implications induced by these results are discussed from an operational point of view.

Burn Disaster Response Planning in New York City

Since its inception in 2006, the New York City (NYC) Task Force for Patients with Burns has continued to develop a city-wide and regional response plan that addressed the triage, treatment, transportation of 50/million (400) adult and pediatric victims for 3 to 5 days after a large-scale burn disaster within NYC until such time that a burn center bed and transportation could be secured. The following presents updated recommendations on these planning efforts. Previously published literature, project deliverables, and meeting documents for the period of 2009-2010 were reviewed. A numerical simulation was designed to evaluate the triage algorithm developed for this plan. A new, secondary triage scoring algorithm, based on co-morbidities and predicted outcomes, was created to prioritize multiple patients within a given acuity and predicted survivability cohort. Recommendations for a centralized patient and resource tracking database, plan operations, activation thresholds, mass triage, communications, data flow, staffing, resource utilization, provider indemnification, and stakeholder roles and responsibilities were specified. Educational modules for prehospital providers and nonburn center nurses and physicians who would provide interim care to burn injured disaster victims were created and pilot tested. These updated best practice recommendations provide a strong foundation for further planning efforts, and as of February 2011, serve as the frame work for the NYC Burn Surge Response Plan that has been incorporated into the New York State Burn Plan.

Low-Overhead Architecture for Security Tag

A security-tagged architecture is one that applies tags on data to detect attack or information leakage, tracking data flow. The previous studies using security-tagged architecture mostly focused on how to utilize tags, not how the tags are implemented. A naive implementation of tags simply adds a tag field to every byte of the cache and the memory. Such a technique, however, results in a huge hardware overhead. This paper proposes a low-overhead tagged architecture. We achieve our goal by exploiting some properties of tag, the non-uniformity and the locality of reference. Our design includes the use of uniquely designed multi-level table and various cache-like structures, all contributing to exploit these properties. Under simulation, our method was able to limit the memory overhead to 0.685%, where a naive implementation suffered 12.5% overhead.

Kaleidaseq: a Web-based tool to monitor data flow in a high throughput sequencing facility.

Tracking data flow in high throughput sequencing is important in maintaining a consistent number of successfully sequenced samples, making decisions on scheduling the flow of sequencing steps, resolving problems at various steps and tracking the status of different projects. This is especially critical when the laboratory is handling a multitude of projects. We have built a Web-based data flow tracking package, called Kaleidaseq, which allows us to monitor the flow and quality of sequencing samples through the steps of preparation of library plates, plaque-picking, preparation of templates, conducting sequencing reactions, loading of samples on gels, base-calling the traces, and calculating the quality of the sequenced samples. Kaleidaseq's suite of displays allows for outstanding monitoring of the production sequencing process. The online display of current information that Kaleidaseq provides on both project status and process queues sorted by project enables accurate real-time assessment of the necessary samples that must be processed to complete the project. This information allows the process manager to allocate future resources optimally and schedule tasks according to scientific priorities. Quality of the sequenced samples can be tracked on a daily basis, which allows the sequencing laboratory to maintain a steady performance level and quickly resolve dips in quality. Kaleidaseq has a simple easy-to-use interface that allows access to all major functions and process queues from one Web page. This software package is modular and designed to allow additional processing steps and new monitoring variables to be added and tracked with ease. Access to the underlying relational database is through the Perl DBI interface, which allows for the use of different relational databases. Kaleidaseq is available for free use by the academic community from http://www.cshl.org/kaleidaseq.

Interprocedural optimization: Experimental results

AbstractThe problem of tracking data flow across procedure boundaries has a long history of theoretical study by people who believed that such information would be useful for code optimization. Building upon previous work, an algorithm for interprocedural data flow analysis has been implemented. The algorithm produces three flow‐insensitive summary sets: MOD, USE and ALIASES. The utility of the resulting information was investigated using an optimizing Pascal compiler. Over a sampling of 27 bench‐marks, new optimizations performed as a result of interprocedural summary information contributed almost nothing to program execution speed. Finally, related optimization techniques of possibly greater potential are discussed.