Mitre Corporation

About: Mitre Corporation is a company organization based out in Bedford, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Air traffic control & National Airspace System. The organization has 4884 authors who have published 6053 publications receiving 124808 citations. The organization is also known as: Mitre & MITRE.

Cognitive biases and time stress in team decision making

Abstract: This experiment investigates the impart of time stress on the decision making performance of command and control teams. Two person teams were trained to execute a set of simple decision procedures. Some of these procedures required subjects to make judgments that were inconsistent with normal heuristic decision processing. The principal hypothesis was that these decision procedures would be vulnerable-to-bias, and would therefore be more vulnerable to the effects of time stress than other decision procedures. The results support this hypothesis. In addition, the results suggest that the subjects adapted inappropriately to time stress. As time stress increased, they began to use a decision processing strategy that was less effective than the strategy they were trained to use.

A design methodology for reliable software systems

Abstract: Any user of a computer system is aware that current systems are unreliable because of errors in their software components. While system designers and implementers recognize the need for reliable software, they have been unable to produce it. For example, operating systems such as OS/360 are released to the public with hundreds of errors still in them.

A Sparsity Regularization Approach to the Electromagnetic Inverse Scattering Problem

Abstract: We investigate solving the electromagnetic inverse scattering problem using the distorted Born iterative method (DBIM) in conjunction with a variable-selection approach known as the elastic net. The elastic net applies both l 1 and l 2 penalties to regularize the system of linear equations that result at each iteration of the DBIM. The elastic net thus incorporates both the stabilizing effect of the l 2 penalty with the sparsity encouraging effect of the l 1 penalty. The DBIM with the elastic net outperforms the commonly used l 2 regularizer when the unknown distribution of dielectric properties is sparse in a known set of basis functions. We consider two very different 3-D examples to demonstrate the efficacy and applicability of our approach. For both examples, we use a scalar approximation in the inverse solution. In the first example the actual distribution of dielectric properties is exactly sparse in a set of 3-D wavelets. The performances of the elastic net and l 2 approaches are compared to the ideal case where it is known a priori which wavelets are involved in the true solution. The second example comes from the area of microwave imaging for breast cancer detection. For a given set of 3-D Gaussian basis functions, we show that the elastic net approach can produce a more accurate estimate of the distribution of dielectric properties (in particular, the effective conductivity) within an anatomically realistic 3-D numerical breast phantom. In contrast, the DBIM with an l 2 penalty produces an estimate which suffers from multiple artifacts.

A Study of MAC Address Randomization in Mobile Devices and When it Fails

Abstract: MAC address randomization is a privacy technique whereby mobile devices rotate through random hardware addresses in order to prevent observers from singling out their traffic or physical location from other nearby devices. Adoption of this technology, however, has been sporadic and varied across device manufacturers. In this paper, we present the first wide-scale study of MAC address randomization in the wild, including a detailed breakdown of different randomization techniques by operating system, manufacturer, and model of device. We then identify multiple flaws in these implementations which can be exploited to defeat randomization as performed by existing devices. First, we show that devices commonly make improper use of randomization by sending wireless frames with the true, global address when they should be using a randomized address. We move on to extend the passive identification techniques of Vanhoef et al. to effectively defeat randomization in ~96% of Android phones. Finally, we show a method that can be used to track 100% of devices using randomization, regardless of manufacturer, by exploiting a previously unknown flaw in the way existing wireless chipsets handle low-level control frames.

ELICIT: a system for detecting insiders who violate need-to-know

Abstract: Malicious insiders do great harm and avoid detection by using their legitimate privileges to steal information that is often outside the scope of their duties. Based on information from public cases, consultation with domain experts, and analysis of a massive collection of information-use events and contextual information, we developed an approach for detecting insiders who operate outside the scope of their duties and thus violate need-to-know. Based on the approach, we built and evaluated elicit, a system designed to help analysts investigate insider threats. Empirical results suggest that, for a specified decision threshold of .5, elicit achieves a detection rate of .84 and a false-positive rate of .015, flagging per day only 23 users of 1, 548 for further scrutiny. It achieved an area under an roc curve of .92.