Mobile malware is rapidly becoming a serious threat. In this paper, we survey the current state of mobile malware in the wild. We analyze the incentives behind 46 pieces of iOS, Android, and Symbian malware that spread in the wild from 2009 to 2011. We also use this data set to evaluate the effectiveness of techniques for preventing and identifying mobile malware. After observing that 4 pieces of malware use root exploits to mount sophisticated attacks on Android phones, we also examine the incentives that cause non-malicious smartphone tinkerers to publish root exploits and survey the availability of root exploits.

/pdf/a-survey-of-mobile-malware-in-the-wild-18gj2rthl8.pdf

A survey of mobile malware in the wild

A translation apparatus is provided which comprises: an inputting section for inputting a source document in a natural language; a layout analyzing section for analyzing layout information including cascade information, itemization information, numbered itemization information, labeled itemization information and separator line information in the source document inputted by the inputting section and specifying a translation range on the basis of the layout information; a translation processing section for translating a source document text in the specified translation range into a second language; and an outputting section for outputting a translated text provided by the translation processing section.

Automated Planning: Theory and Practice.

The growing maturity of integrated photonic technology makes it possible to build increasingly large and complex photonic circuits on the surface of a chip. Today, most of these circuits are designed for a specific application, but the increase in complexity has introduced a generation of photonic circuits that can be programmed using software for a wide variety of functions through a mesh of on-chip waveguides, tunable beam couplers and optical phase shifters. Here we discuss the state of this emerging technology, including recent developments in photonic building blocks and circuit architectures, as well as electronic control and programming strategies. We cover possible applications in linear matrix operations, quantum information processing and microwave photonics, and examine how these generic chips can accelerate the development of future photonic circuits by providing a higher-level platform for prototyping novel optical functionalities without the need for custom chip fabrication. The current state of programmable photonic integrated circuits is discussed, including recent developments in their building blocks, circuit architectures, electronic control and programming strategies, as well as different application spaces.

https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8677857/file/8677861.pdf

Programmable photonic circuits.

https://pureadmin.qub.ac.uk/ws/files/134629726/paper_v2.pdf

Next generation cloud computing

The bus arrival time is primary information to most city transport travelers. Excessively long waiting time at bus stops often discourages the travelers and makes them reluctant to take buses. In this paper, we present a bus arrival time prediction system based on bus passengers' participatory sensing. With commodity mobile phones, the bus passengers' surrounding environmental context is effectively collected and utilized to estimate the bus traveling routes and predict bus arrival time at various bus stops. The proposed system solely relies on the collaborative effort of the participating users and is independent from the bus operating companies, so it can be easily adopted to support universal bus service systems without requesting support from particular bus operating companies. Instead of referring to GPS enabled location information, we resolve to more generally available and energy efficient sensing resources, including cell tower signals, movement statuses, audio recordings, etc., which bring less burden to the participatory party and encourage their participation. We develop a prototype system with different types of Android based mobile phones and comprehensively experiment over a 7 week period. The evaluation results suggest that the proposed system achieves outstanding prediction accuracy compared with those bus company initiated and GPS supported solutions. At the same time, the proposed solution is more generally available and energy friendly.

/pdf/demo-how-long-to-wait-predicting-bus-arrival-time-with-cml9hw1w3l.pdf

Demo: how long to wait?: predicting bus arrival time with mobile phone based participatory sensing

A cloud infrastructure that communicates with computing devices is provided. The computing devices install filters on other computing devices that they wish to receive items from including pictures, messages, and documents. The filters include criteria that are evaluated on the computing devices, rather than at a server, to determine if an item may be sent to another computing device. The computing devices may then send items that match the criteria to the cloud infrastructure, and the items may be stored and queued for delivery to other computing devices. The items may be encrypted before being provided to the cloud infrastructure, and decrypted when received by the computing devices.

Communicating using a cloud infrastructure

Micro services architecture has started a new trend for application development for a number of reasons: (1) to reduce complexity by using tiny services, (2) to scale, remove and deploy parts of the system easily, (3) to improve flexibility to use different frameworks and tools, (4) to increase the overall scalability, and (5) to improve the resilience of the system. Containers have empowered the usage of micro services architectures by being lightweight, providing fast start-up times, and having a low overhead. Containers can be used to develop applications based on monolithic architectures where the whole system runs inside a single container or inside a micro services architecture where one or few processes run inside the containers. Two models can be used to implement a micro services architecture using containers: master-slave, or nested-container. The goal of this work is to compare the performance of CPU and network running benchmarks in the two aforementioned models of micro services architecture hence provide a benchmark analysis guidance for system designers.

Performance Evaluation of Microservices Architectures Using Containers

Microservices architecture has started a new trend for application development for a number of reasons: (1) to reduce complexity by using tiny services; (2) to scale, remove and deploy parts of the system easily; (3) to improve flexibility to use different frameworks and tools; (4) to increase the overall scalability; and (5) to improve the resilience of the system. Containers have empowered the usage of microservices architectures by being lightweight, providing fast start-up times, and having a low overhead. Containers can be used to develop applications based on monolithic architectures where the whole system runs inside a single container or inside a microservices architecture where one or few processes run inside the containers. Two models can be used to implement a microservices architecture using containers: master-slave, or nested-container. The goal of this work is to compare the performance of CPU and network running benchmarks in the two aforementioned models of microservices architecture hence provide a benchmark analysis guidance for system designers.

Performance Evaluation of Microservices Architectures using Containers

Cell phones connected to high-speed 3G networks constitute an increasingly important class of clients on the Internet. From the viewpoint of the servers they connect to, such devices are virtually indistinguishable from conventional end-hosts. In this study, we examine the IP addresses seen by Internet servers for cell phone clients and make two observations. First, individual cell phones can expose different IP addresses to servers within time spans of a few minutes, rendering IP-based user identification and blocking inadequate. Second, cell phone IP addresses do not embed geographical information at reasonable fidelity, reducing the effectiveness of commercial geolocation tools used by websites for fraud detection, server selection and content customization. In addition to these two observations, we show that application-level latencies between cell phones and Internet servers can differ greatly depending on the location of the cell phone, but do not vary much at a given location over short time spans; as a result, they provide fine-grained location information that IPs do not.

https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/mahesh/papers/ephemera-imc09.pdf

Where's that phone?: geolocating IP addresses on 3G networks

In recent years, two major trends have changed the way mobile phones are used: smartphones have become a platform for applications, and 3G connectivity has turned them into ubiquitous Internet clients. Increasingly, applications on smartphones (such as document sharing, media players and map browsers) interact with the cloud as a backend for data storage and computation. We observe that, for many mobile applications, the specific data that is accessed depends on the current location of the user. For example, a restaurant recommendation application is often used to get information about nearby restaurants. In this paper, we present WhereStore, a location-based data store for smart-phones interacting with the cloud. It uses filtered replication along with each device's location history to distribute items between smartphones and the cloud. We discuss the challenges of designing such a system, relevant applications, and a specific design and prototype implementation.

/pdf/wherestore-location-based-data-storage-for-mobile-devices-1z4rrkljaj.pdf

Iqbal Mohomed

Papers

Communicating using a cloud infrastructure

Performance Evaluation of Microservices Architectures Using Containers

Performance Evaluation of Microservices Architectures using Containers

Where's that phone?: geolocating IP addresses on 3G networks

WhereStore: location-based data storage for mobile devices interacting with the cloud