Strategies for protecting intellectual property when using CUDA applications on graphics processing units

Recent advances in the massively parallel computational abilities of graphical processing units (GPUs) have increased their use for general purpose computation, as companies look to take advantage of big data processing techniques. This has given rise to the potential for malicious software targeting GPUs, which is of interest to forensic investigators examining the operation of software. The ability to carry out reverse-engineering of software is of great importance within the security and forensics elds, particularly when investigating malicious software or carrying out forensic analysis following a successful security breach. Due to the complexity of the Nvidia CUDA (Compute Uni ed Device Architecture) framework, it is not clear how best to approach the reverse engineering of a piece of CUDA software. We carry out a review of the di erent binary output formats which may be encountered from the CUDA compiler, and their implications on reverse engineering. We then demonstrate the process of carrying out disassembly of an example CUDA application, to establish the various techniques available to forensic investigators carrying out black-box disassembly and reverse engineering of CUDA binaries. We show that the Nvidia compiler, using default settings, leaks useful information. Finally, we demonstrate techniques to better protect intellectual property in CUDA algorithm implementations from reverse engineering.

Anke Bahl / Philipp Grollmann (Hrsg.: Professionalisierung des Berufsbildungspersonals in Europa – Was kann Deutschland lernen? Bericht zur beruflichen Bildung. Bielefeld: W. Bertelsmann Verlag 2011 [Rezension]

Rezension von: Anke Bahl / Philipp Grollmann (Hrsg.): Professionalisierung des Berufsbildungspersonals in Europa – Was kann Deutschland lernen? Bericht zur beruflichen Bildung, Bielefeld: W. Bertelsmann Verlag 2011 (181 S.; ISBN 978-3-7639-1145-5)

El sector aeronáutico peruano se comporta como un mercado oligopólico

La evolución del transporte aéreo en el Perú ha pasado por varias fases, estando hasta unos pocos años concentrado en pocos operadores y sin lograr la masificación entre los usuarios. En la década de los 70"s y 80"s la mayor parte de las aerolíneas eran estatales, pero por el impulso que se dio sobre todo a AeroPerú está línea dejo de ser local para convertirse en internacional. En los 90's el proceso de apertura comercial y desregulación de la actividad comercial llevado a cabo, trajo consigo un mejoramiento del marco legal orientado a captar mayores flujos de inversión. Actualmente, el mercado aerocomercial domestico está conformado principalmente por cinco empresas: LAN Perú, Star Perú, Taca Perú, Peruvian Airlines y LC Busre; las mismas que cubren el territorio nacional y, entre ellas, presentan diferentes niveles de calidad e infraestructura. Sin embargo, a raíz de la crisis del 2008 originada por la volatilidad del precio del petróleo, que alcanzó los US$145 (en julio 2008) y la crisis financiera mundial, que generó una caída brusca en el turismo, en el mercado aerocomercial se experimentó un cambio significativo con la salida del segundo operador de transporte de pasajeros, la empresa Aerocóndor quien movilizaba el 18% del tráfico aéreo; y la entrada de un nuevo operador en el 2009, Peruvian Airlines. En el 2011, el mercado presenta un comportamiento más dinámico que muestra a empresas compitiendo en la participación de la industria aerocomercial. Ya se registra que, en el 2010, las principales líneas aéreas tenían el 98.04% del tráfico mensual de pasajeros carga/correo y aterrizajes por compañías a nivel nacional En este contexto, el presente estudio evalúa las condiciones de competencia en el sector aerocomercial y plantea que, bajo las condiciones actuales, el mercado peruano se convertiría en un oligopolio donde operarían tres líneas aéreas.

A touchless passive Infrared gesture sensor.

A sensing device for a touchless, hand gesture, user interface based on an inexpensive passive infrared pyroelectric detector array is presented. The 2 x 2 element sensor responds to changing infrared radiation generated by hand movement over the array. The sensing range is from a few millimetres to tens of centimetres. The low power consumption (< 50 μW) enables the sensor’s use in mobile devices and in low energy applications. Detection rates of 77% have been demonstrated using a prototype system that differentiates the four main hand motion trajectories – up, down, left and right. This device allows greater non-contact control capability without an increase in size, cost or power consumption over existing on/off devices.

InfoScout: An interactive, entity centric, person search tool.

Individuals living in highly networked societies publish a large amount of personal, and potentially sensitive, information online. Web investigators can exploit such information for a variety of purposes, such as in background vetting and fraud detection. However, such investigations require a large number of expensive man hours and human effort. This paper describes InfoScout, a search tool which is intended to reduce the time it takes to identify and gather subject centric information on the Web. InfoScout collects relevance feedback information from the investigator in order to rerank search results, allowing the intended information to be discovered more quickly. Users may still direct their search as they see fit, issuing ad-hoc queries and filtering existing results by keywords. Design choices are informed by prior work and industry collaboration.

Dynamically balanced and plausible trajectory planning for human-like characters

International audience

Analysis and Visualisation of Crowd-sourced Tourism Data

C3S2E '16 Proceedings of the Ninth International C* Conference on Computer Science & Software Engineering

Speculative document evaluation

Optimisation of real world Variable Data printing (VDP) documents is a dicult problem because the interdependencies between layout functions may drastically reduce the number of invariant blocks that can be factored out for pre-rasterisation. This paper examines how speculative evaluation at an early stage in a document-preparation pipeline, provides a generic and effective method of optimising VDP documents that contain such interdependencies. Speculative evaluation will be at its most effective in speeding up print runs if sets of layout invariances can either be discovered automatically, or designed into the document at an early stage. In either case the expertise of the layout designer needs to be supplemented by expertise in exploiting potential invariances and also in predicting the effects of speculative evaluation on the caches used at various stages in the print production pipeline.

Extracting reusable document components for variable data printing

Variable Data Printing (VDP) has brought new flexibility and dynamism to the printed page. Each printed instance of a specific class of document can now have different degrees of customized content within the document template. This flexibility comes at a cost. If every printed page is potentially different from all others it must be rasterized separately, which is a time-consuming process. Technologies such as PPML (Personalized Print Markup Language) attempt to address this problem by dividing the bitmapped page into components that can be cached at the raster level, thereby speeding up the generation of page instances. A large number of documents are stored in Page Description Languages at a higher level of abstraction than the bitmapped page. Much of this content could be reused within a VDP environment provided that separable document components can be identified and extracted. These components then need to be individually rasterisable so that each high-level component can be related to its low-level (bitmap) equivalent. Unfortunately, the unstructured nature of most Page Description Languages makes it difficult to extract content easily. This paper outlines the problems encountered in extracting component-based content from existing page description formats, such as PostScript, PDF and SVG, and how the differences between the formats affects the ease with which content can be extracted. The techniques are illustrated with reference to a tool called COG Extractor, which extracts content from PDF and SVG and prepares it for reuse.

A comparative study of navigation meshes

International audience

A Mapping-Scheduling Algorithm for Hardware Acceleration on Reconfigurable Platforms

Reconfigurable platforms are a promising technology that offers an interesting trade-off between flexibility and performance, which many recent embedded system applications demand, especially in fields such as multimedia processing. These applications typically involve multiple ad-hoc tasks for hardware acceleration, which are usually represented using formalisms such as Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs), Data Flow Graphs (DFGs), Control and Data Flow Graphs (CDFGs) or Petri Nets. However, none of these models is able to capture at the same time the pipeline behavior between tasks (that therefore can coexist in order to minimize the application execution time), their communication patterns, and their data dependencies. This paper proves that the knowledge of all this information can be effectively exploited to reduce the resource requirements and the timing performance of modern reconfigurable systems, where a set of hardware accelerators is used to support the computation. For this purpose, this paper proposes a novel task representation model, named Temporal Constrained Data Flow Diagram (TCDFD), which includes all this information. This paper also presents a mapping-scheduling algorithm that is able to take advantage of the new TCDFD model. It aims at minimizing the dynamic reconfiguration overhead while meeting the communication requirements among the tasks. Experimental results show that the presented approach achieves up to 75% of resources saving and up to 89% of reconfiguration overhead reduction with respect to other state-of-the-art techniques for reconfigurable platforms.

An Approach to Manage Reconfigurations and Reduce Area Cost in Hard Real-Time Reconfigurable Systems

This article presents a methodology to build real-time reconfigurable systems that ensure that all the temporal constraints of a set of applications are met, while optimizing the utilization of the available reconfigurable resources. Starting from a static platform that meets all the real-time deadlines, our approach takes advantage of run-time reconfiguration in order to reduce the area needed while guaranteeing that all the deadlines are still met. This goal is achieved by identifying which tasks must be always ready for execution in order to meet the deadlines, and by means of a methodology that also allows reducing the area requirements.

Spotter: towards a unified search interface in IDEs

Program comprehension requires developers to reason about many kinds of highly interconnected software entities. Dealing with this reality prompts developers to continuously intertwine searching and navigation. Nevertheless, most integrated development environments (IDEs) address searching by means of many disconnected search tools, making it difficult for developers to reuse search results produced by one search tool as input for another search tool. This forces developers to spend considerable time manually linking disconnected search results. To address this issue we propose Spotter, a model for expressing and combining search tools in a unified way. The current implementation shows that Spotter can unify a wide range of search tools. More information about Spotter can be found at scg.unibe.ch/research/moldablespotter

The Amplifier - v. 11, no. 5

In this issue...Mary McGrath, Geophysics Club, Marcus Daly, Intramurals, Constitution, Circle K Club, Homecoming, Kiwanis Club, Rose Parade