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Publications

Publications by CSE

2020

Integrating Multi-Source Data into HandSpy (Short Paper)

Authors
Valkanov, H; Leal, JP;

Publication
9th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies, SLATE 2020, July 13-14, 2020, School of Technology, Polytechnic Institute of Cávado and Ave, Portugal (Virtual Conference).

Abstract
To study how emotions affect people in expressive writing, scientists require tools to aid them in their research. The researchers at M-BW use an Experiment Management System, called HandSpy to store and analyze the hand-written productions of participants. The input is stored as digital ink and then displayed on a web-based interface. To assist the project, HandSpy integrates with new sources of information to help researchers visualize the link between psychophysiological data and written input. The newly acquired data is synchronized with the existing burst-pause interval model and represented on the user interface of the platform together with the already existing information.

2020

Skeptic: Automatic, Justified and Privacy-Preserving Password Composition Policy Selection

Authors
Johnson, SA; Ferreira, JF; Mendes, A; Cordry, J;

Publication
ASIA CCS '20: The 15th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Taipei, Taiwan, October 5-9, 2020

Abstract
The choice of password composition policy to enforce on a password-protected system represents a critical security decision, and has been shown to significantly affect the vulnerability of user-chosen passwords to guessing attacks. In practice, however, this choice is not usually rigorous or justifiable, with a tendency for system administrators to choose password composition policies based on intuition alone. In this work, we propose a novel methodology that draws on password probability distributions constructed from large sets of real-world password data which have been filtered according to various password composition policies. Password probabilities are then redistributed to simulate different user password reselection behaviours in order to automatically determine the password composition policy that will induce the distribution of user-chosen passwords with the greatest uniformity, a metric which we show to be a useful proxy to measure overall resistance to password guessing attacks. Further, we show that by fitting power-law equations to the password probability distributions we generate, we can justify our choice of password composition policy without any direct access to user password data. Finally, we present Skeptic - -a software toolkit that implements this methodology, including a DSL to enable system administrators with no background in password security to compare and rank password composition policies without resorting to expensive and time-consuming user studies. Drawing on 205,176,321 passwords across 3 datasets, we lend validity to our approach by demonstrating that the results we obtain align closely with findings from a previous empirical study into password composition policy effectiveness. © 2020 ACM.

2020

Container Hardening Through Automated Seccomp Profiling

Authors
Lopes, N; Martins, R; Correia, ME; Serrano, S; Nunes, F;

Publication
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2020 6TH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON CONTAINER TECHNOLOGIES AND CONTAINER CLOUDS (WOC '20)

Abstract
Nowadays the use of container technologies is ubiquitous and thus the need to make them secure arises. Container technologies such as Docker provide several options to better improve container security, one of those is the use of a Seccomp profile. A major problem with these profiles is that they are hard to maintain because of two different factors: they need to be updated quite often and present a complex and time consuming task to determine exactly what to update, therefore not many people use them. The research goal of this paper is to make Seccomp profiles a viable technique in a production environment by proposing a reliable method to generate custom Seccomp profiles for arbitrary containerized application. This research focused on developing a solution with few requirements allowing for an easy integration with any environment with no human intervention. Results show that using a custom Seccomp profile can mitigate several attacks and even some zero day vulnerabilities on containerized applications. This represents a big step forward on using Seccomp in a production environment, which would benefit users worldwide.

2020

Motivating Students to Learn Computer Programming in Higher Education: The SimProgramming Approach

Authors
Nunes, RR; Cruz, G; Pedrosa, D; Maia, AM; Morgado, L; Paredes, H; Cravino, J; Martins, P;

Publication
Technology and Innovation in Learning, Teaching and Education - Second International Conference, TECH-EDU 2020, Vila Real, Portugal, December 2-4, 2020, Proceedings, 3

Abstract
This paper presents an action research study aiming to motivate undergraduate students to develop their computer programming learning skills, particularly within the transition from beginner to proficient level. The SimProgramming motivational approach is presented as a didactic proposal for this context. From the results of this iterative research process, we concluded that SimProgramming is a promising tool for teaching computer programming skills in intermediate classes, with potential to be used and/or applied in other educational contexts. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

2020

A Proposal of a Classification Scheme to a Survey of Augmented Reality for Education and Training

Authors
Cruz, A; Paredes, H; Martins, P;

Publication
Technology and Innovation in Learning, Teaching and Education - Second International Conference, TECH-EDU 2020, Vila Real, Portugal, December 2-4, 2020, Proceedings, 3

Abstract
Augmented Reality (AR) is a field of knowledge that emerged in the middle of the last century, and its use has been spreading because of its usefulness, but also because of mobile platforms, accessible to most users. AR characteristics are valued in several fields of human activity, and also in the field of Education and Training, being AR pointed out as useful to the learning process. In this paper we search and analyse surveys and reviews of AR. We present a AR’s definition, and we create a classification scheme of two dimensions for AR: the dimension of the fields of application of AR, and the dimension of the technologies of AR. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

2020

Source-to-source compilation targeting OpenMP-based automatic parallelization of C applications

Authors
Arabnejad, H; Bispo, J; Cardoso, JMP; Barbosa, JG;

Publication
JOURNAL OF SUPERCOMPUTING

Abstract
Directive-driven programming models, such as OpenMP, are one solution for exploring the potential parallelism when targeting multicore architectures. Although these approaches significantly help developers, code parallelization is still a non-trivial and time-consuming process, requiring parallel programming skills. Thus, many efforts have been made toward automatic parallelization of the existing sequential code. This article presents AutoPar-Clava, an OpenMP-based automatic parallelization compiler which: (1) statically detects parallelizable loops in C applications; (2) classifies variables used inside the target loop based on their access pattern; (3) supportsreductionclauses on scalar and array variables whenever it is applicable; and (4) generates a C OpenMP parallel code from the input sequential version. The effectiveness of AutoPar-Clava is evaluated by using the NAS and Polyhedral Benchmark suites and targeting a x86-based computing platform. The achieved results are very promising and compare favorably with closely related auto-parallelization compilers, such as Intel C/C++ Compiler (icc), ROSE, TRACO and CETUS.

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