Publications

Assessing the security of large enterprise networks is complex and labor intensive. Current security analysis tools typically examine only individual firewalls, routers, or hosts separately and do not comprehensively analyze overall network security. We present a new approach that uses configuration information on firewalls and vulnerability information on all network...

Algorithm implementation efficiency is key to delivering high-performance computing capabilities to demanding, high throughput signal and image processing applications and simulations. Significant progress has been made in optimization of serial programs, but many applications require parallel processing, which brings with it the difficult task of determining efficient mappings of algorithms...

Large data sets that cannot fit in memory can be addressed with out-of-core methods, which use memory as a "window" to view a section of the data stored on disk at a time. The Parallel Matlab for eXtreme Virtual Memory (pMatlab XVM) library adds out-of-core extensions to the Parallel Matlab...

The computational demands of software continue to outpace the capacities of processor and memory technologies, especially in scientific and engineering programs. One option to improve performance is parallel processing. However, despite decades of research and development, writing parallel programs continues to be difficult. This is especially the case for scientists...

Parameter sweep applications execute the same piece of code multiple times with unique sets of input parameters. This type of application is extremely amenable to parallelization. This document describes how to parallelize parameter sweep applications with pMATLAB by introducting a simple serial parameter sweep applicaiton written in MATLAB, then parallelizing...

A corpus of 291 small C-program test cases was developed to evaluate static and dynamic analysis tools designed to detect buffer overflows. The corpus was designed and labeled using a new, comprehensive buffer overflow taxonomy. It provides a benchmark to measure detection, false alarm, and confusion rates of tools, and...

We report on results of two experiments designed to compare subjects' ability to extract information from audio recordings of conversational telephone speech (CTS) with their ability to extract information from text transcripts of these conversations, with and without the ability to hear the audio recordings. Although progress in machine processing...

The capabilities of seven dynamic buffer overflow detection tools (Chaperon, Valgrind, CCured, CRED, Insure++, ProPolice and TinyCC) are evaluated in this paper. These tools employ different approaches to runtime buffer overflow detection and range from commercial products to open-source gcc-enhancements. A comprehensive testsuite was developed consisting of specifically-designed test cases...

A recent theoretical result proposed Sigma, a novel GM protocol that forms views using a single-round of message exchange. Prior GM protocols have required more rounds in the worst-case. In this paper, we investigate how well Sigma performs in practice. We simulate Sigma using WAN connectivity traces and compare its...

This document describes a series of kernel benchmarks for the PCA program. Each kernel benchmark is an operation of importance to DoD sensor applications making use of a PCA architecture. Many of these operations are a part of the composite example applications described elsewhere. The kernel-level benchmarks have been chosen...