João Paulo Soares

Abstract
Byzantine Fault tolerant (BFT) protocols are implemented to guarantee the correct system/application behavior even in the presence of arbitrary faults (i.e., Byzantine faults). Byzantine Fault tolerant State Machine Replication (BFT-SMR) is a known software solution for masking arbitrary faults and malicious attacks (Liu et al., 2020). In this survey, we present and discuss relevant BFT-SMR protocols, focusing on deterministic and probabilistic approaches. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss the characteristics of proposed works for each approach, as well as identify the trade-offs for each different approach.& COPY; 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

Abstract
The increasing level of sophistication of cyber attacks which are employing cross-cutting strategies that leverage multi-domain attack surfaces, including but not limited to, software defined networking poisoning, biasing of machine learning models to suppress detection, exploiting software (development), and leveraging system design deficiencies. While current defensive solutions exist, they only partially address multi-domain and multi-stage attacks, thus rendering them ineffective to counter the upcoming generation of attacks. More specifically, we argue that a disruption is needed to approach separated knowledge domains, namely Intrusion Tolerant systems, cybersecurity, and machine learning. We argue that current solutions tend to address different concerns/facets of overlapping issues and they tend to make strong assumptions of supporting infrastructure, e.g., assuming that event probes/metrics are not compromised. To address these issues, we present Skynet, a platform that acts as a secure overseer that merges traditional roles of SIEMs with conventional orchestrators while being rooted on the fundamentals introduced by previous generations of intrusion tolerant systems. Our goal is to provide an open-source intrusion tolerant platform that can dynamically adapt to known and unknown security threats in order to reduce potential vulnerability windows.

Abstract
The European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) was the first animal model used to understand human diseases like rabies and syphilis. Nowadays, the rabbit is still used to study several human infectious diseases like syphilis, HIV and papillomavirus. However, due to several mainly practical reasons, it has been replaced as an animal model by mice (Mus musculus). The rabbit and mouse share a recent common ancestor and are classified in the superorder Glires which arose at approximately 82 million years ago (mya). These species diverged from the Primates' ancestor at around 92 million years ago and, as such, one expects the rabbit-human and mouse-human genetic distances to be very similar. To evaluate this hypothesis, we developed a set of tools for automatic data extraction, sequence alignment and similarity study, and a web application for visualization of the resulting data. We aligned and calculated the genetic distances for 2793 innate immune system genes from human, rabbit and mouse using sequences available in the NCBI database. The obtained results show that the rabbit-human genetic distance is lower than the mouse-human genetic distance for 88% of these genes. Furthermore, when we considered only genes with a difference in genetic distance higher than 0.05, this figure increase to 93%. These results can be explained by the increase of the mutation rates in the mouse lineage suggested by some authors and clearly show that, at least looking to the genetic distance to human genes, the European rabbit is a better model to study innate immune system genes than the mouse.

Abstract
Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) protocols are designed to increase system dependability and security. They guarantee liveness and correctness even in the presence of arbitrary faults. However, testing and validating BFT systems is not an easy task. As is the case for most concurrent and distributed applications, the correctness of these systems is not solely dependant on algorithm and protocol correctness. Ensuring the correct behaviour of BFT systems requires exhaustive testing under real-world scenarios. An approach is to use fault injection tools that deliberate introduce faults into a target system to observe its behaviour. However, existing tools tend to be designed for specific applications and systems, thus cannot be used generically. We argue that more advanced and powerful tools and frameworks are needed for testing the security and safety of distributed applications in general, and BFT systems in particular. Specifically, a fault injection framework that can be integrated into both client and server side applications, for testing them exhaustively. We present ZERMIA, a modular and extensible fault injection framework, designed for testing and validating concurrent and distributed applications. We validate ZERMIA’s principles by conduction a series of experiments on a distributed applications and a state of the art BFT library, to show the benefits of ZERMIA for testing and validating applications. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
Road pavement conditions influence the daily lives of both drivers and passengers. Anomalies in road pavement can cause discomfort, increase stress, cause mechanical failures in vehicles and compromise safety of road users. Detecting and surveying road condition/anomalies requires expensive and specially designed equipment and vehicles, that cost considerable amounts of money, and require specialized workers to operate them. As an alternative, an emergent sensing paradigm is being discussed as a promising mechanism for collecting large-scale real-world data. In this paper we describe our experience on the design, implementation and deployment of a cloud based road anomaly information management service, that combines Collaborative Mobile Sensing and data-mining approaches, to provide a practical solution for detecting, identifying and managing road anomaly information. Additionally, we identify technical challenges and propose guidelines that may help to improve this type of services and applications. © 2018 IEEE.