A Pact with the Devil - Bond and Danezis, June 6th 2006 With thanks to Joshua Corman and David Etue for pointing this paper out to me during discussions at the GOTO London conference. Does that app really need all those permissions? And why can't permissions be finer-grained or temporary? For example - I'm happy … Continue reading A Pact with the Devil
Month: September 2015
Distributed Information Processing in Biological and Computational Systems
Distributed Information Processing in Biological and Computational Systems - Navlakah & Bar-Joseph 2015 With thanks to Mark Allen for pointing me at today's paper choice via twitter. This is the last of the posts in the 'nature-inspired' series for a while, and we're moving on from optimisation problems to look at the way we build … Continue reading Distributed Information Processing in Biological and Computational Systems
Flower Pollination Algorithm for Global Optimization
Flower Pollination Algorithm for Global Optimization - Xin-She Yang 2013 The last of the optimisation algorithms we'll look at for now, today's paper is the most recent (2013) and also by Xin-She Yang. Once more, we only get comparisons to genetic algorithms and PSO, and once more the comparison is favourable. In many design applications … Continue reading Flower Pollination Algorithm for Global Optimization
Cuckoo Search via Lévy Flights
Cuckoo Search via Lévy Flights - Yang et al. 2010 Another nature inspired optimisation algorithm today - and this time it's the turn of the cuckoos coupled with the flight pattern of fruit flies (which follow a Lévy flight) A Lévy flight is a random walk in which the step-lengths follow a heavy-tailed probability distribution. … Continue reading Cuckoo Search via Lévy Flights
A New Metaheuristic Bat-Inspired Algorithm
A New Metaheuristic Bat-Inspired Algorithm - Xin-She Yang, 2010 Today it's the turn of bats! The bat algorithm is an attempt to combine some of the major advantages of previous algorithms such as the firefly algorithm and harmony search (inspired by music composition). It is based on the echo-location behaviour of bats. Bats are fascinating … Continue reading A New Metaheuristic Bat-Inspired Algorithm
Firefly Algorithms for Multimodal Optimization
Firefly Algorithms for Multimodal Optimization - Xin-She Yang, 2010 This is the third post in a mini-series on nature-inspired optimisation algorithms. The flashing light of fireflies is an amazing sight in the summer sky in the tropical and temperate regions. There are about two thousand firefly species, and most fireflies produce short and rhythmic flashes. … Continue reading Firefly Algorithms for Multimodal Optimization
Ant Algorithms for Discrete Optimization
Ant Algorithms for Discrete Optimization - Dorigo et al. 1999 It's the emergent behaviour in nature-inspired algorithms that excites me. Ant colonies provide a great example: although each individual ant is in principle capable of finding a solution, it is only the ensemble of ants - that is, the ant colony - that exhibits optimisation … Continue reading Ant Algorithms for Discrete Optimization
Particle Swarm Optimization
Particle Swarm Optimization - Kennedy & Eberhart 1995 What do flocks of birds, schools of fish, ant colonies, bat echo-location, firefly flashlights, cuckoos, and flower-pollination all have in common? They've all inspired optimisation algorithms! I've been perusing Xin-She Yang's book on Nature-Inspired Optimization Algorithms and thought it might be fun to make a mini-series out … Continue reading Particle Swarm Optimization
Buffer Overflows: Attacks and Defenses for the Vulnerability of the Decade
Buffer Overflows: Attacks and Defenses for the Vulnerabilty of the Decade - Cowan et al. 2000 Some of you may recall reading "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" (hard to believe that was published in 1996!), which helped to raise consciousness of buffer overflow attacks. In this paper from 2000 Cowan et al. provide … Continue reading Buffer Overflows: Attacks and Defenses for the Vulnerability of the Decade
Lessons Learned in Implementing and Deploying Crypto Software
Lessons Learned in Implementing and Deploying Crypto Software - Gutmann 2002 The author of today's paper, Peter Gutmann, is the developer of CryptLib, which gives him a unique perspective both in the development of crypto, and also in how people use it (from supporting the crypolib user base). The paper was written in 2002, so … Continue reading Lessons Learned in Implementing and Deploying Crypto Software
the morning paper 