Transcript Software Technology

Software Technology
 Refers to the emerging software on your computers
as opposed to the hardware development
Hardware Technology
 As opposed to software the hardware that makes our
computers more powerful – like an improved processor
or an accurate camera.
Biomedical Engineering
 Mathematical modeling enables $100
depth sensor to approximate the
measurements of a $100,000 piece of
lab equipment
 Uses a technique called: fluorescence
lifetime imaging
 Applied towards DNA sequencing
and cancer diagnosis
 MIT researcher quote: ”We show you
that you can use something in
consumer imaging like Microsoft
Kinect, to do what bio-imaging does
for thousands of dollars”.
Automated conversion 2-D
to 3-D
 Exploiting video game software yields
broadcast-quality 3-D video in real
time.
 Video games store a detailed 3-D map
of the virtual environment; when the
player moves the map adjusts
accordingly and on the fly generates a
2-D projection of a 3-D scene.
 Researchers used FIFA13 to steal
Microsoft’s video game analysis tool
called PIX to continuously store screen
shots of action.
Game learns from English
• System that learns how to play a text-based computer game with no
prior assumptions on how the language works
• The system can discover meaning of words during its training
• In 2011, professor Regina Barzilay and her students reported a
system that learned how to play the game “Civilization” by reading
the instruction manual.
• The learning system
has no direct access to
the underlying “state of
the game program
Attacking
 Researchers mount successful attacks against popular
anonymity network and show how to prevent them.
 Tor daily users = 2.5 million
 It is possible for an adversary to infer a hidden server
location or the source of the information reaching a given
Tor user
 This is done by analyzing the traffic patterns of encrypted
data passing through a single computer in the all-volunteer
Tor network
Attacking
 Let’s say you want to see the New York Times with
Tor.
 The computer will wrap a Web request in several layers
of encryption and send it to another Tor-enabled
computer (selected at random).
 The selected computer (known as the Guard) will peel
off the first layer of encryption and forward the request
to another randomly selected on the network
Attacking
 The last computer in the chain (known as the Exit)
peels off the final layer of encryption, exposing the
requests true destination: The Times
 The guard knows the internet address of the sender,
and the exit knows the internet address of the
destination site but neither sides know both.
 This is why Tor is known as “The Onion Router”
Attacking
 The attack requires that the adversary’s computer is
The Guard on a Tor circuit.
 Since guards are selected at random – if the adversary
connects to enough computers on the Tor network,
odds are high that one or another will be well
positioned to snoop
Attacking
 The researchers showed that by simply looking for patterns in the
number of packets passing in each direction through a Guard,
machine-learning algorithms could with 99% accuracy determine
whether the circuit was an ordinary Web browsing circuit, an
introduction-point circuit, or a rendezvous-circuit.
 That means that an adversary who lucked into the position of
guard for a computer hosting a hidden service, could, with 88
percent certainty, identify it as the service’s host.
 Similarly, a spy who lucked into the position of guard for a user
could, with 88 percent accuracy, tell which sites the user was
accessing.
Attacking
 To defend against this type of attack, “We recommend that
they mask the sequences so that all the sequences look the
same. You send dummy packets to make all five types of
circuits look similar.”
 “For a while, we’ve been aware that circuit fingerprinting is
a big issue for hidden services,” says David Goulet, a
developer with the Tor project.
 “This paper showed that it’s possible to do it passively —
but it still requires an attacker to have a foot in the network
and to gather data for a certain period of time.”