Be selfish and avoid dilemmas: fork-after-withholding attacks on Bitcoin

December 7, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

Be selfish and avoid dilemmas: fork-after-withholding (FAW) attacks on Bitcoin Kwon et al., CCS’17 Bitcoin was designed to have no central authority. But power has an amazing way of concentrating. Mining solo is a bit like buying a lottery ticket - big payoff if you happen to win, but your chances of winning are pretty ... Continue Reading

The dynamics of innocent flesh on the bone: code reuse ten years later

December 6, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

The dynamics of innocent flesh on the bone: code reuse ten years later van der Veen et al., CCS’17 It’s been ten years since the publication of “The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone,” the paper that introduce the notion of Return Oriented Programming and use of gadgets to craft exploits. In the intervening ... Continue Reading

Hindsight: understanding the evolution of UI vulnerabilities in mobile browsers

December 5, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Hindsight: understanding the evolution of UI vulnerabilities in mobile browsers Luo et al., CCS’17 Towards the end of last year, browsing on mobile devices overtook browsing on the desktop. And so when we think about mobile security, in addition to thinking about malicious applications, we also need to start thinking much more seriously about mobile ... Continue Reading

ffwd: delegation is (much) faster than you think

December 4, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 12 Comments

ffwd: delegation is (much) faster than you think Roghanchi et al., SOSP’17 (Note: the paper link above should give you access to this paper in the ACM DL when accessed from The Morning Paper blog. If you’re subscribed via email and don’t otherwise have access, you might need to go via the blog site to ... Continue Reading

Analyzing software requirements errors in safety-critical embedded systems

December 1, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Analyzing software requirements errors in safety-critical embedded systems Lutz, IEEE Requirements Engineering, 1993 With thanks once more to @Di4naO (Thomas Depierre) who first brought this paper to my attention. We’re going even further back in time today to 1993, and a paper analysing safety-critical software errors uncovered during integration and system testing of the Voyager ... Continue Reading

The role of software in spacecraft accidents

November 30, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

The role of software in spacecraft accidents Leveson, AIAA Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, 2004 With thanks to @Di4naO (Thomas Depierre) who first brought this paper to my attention. Following on from yesterday’s look at safety in AI systems, I thought it would make an interesting pairing to follow up with this 2004 paper from ... Continue Reading

Concrete problems in AI safety

November 29, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

Concrete problems in AI safety Amodei, Olah, et al., arXiv 2016 This paper examines the potential for accidents in machine learning based systems, and the possible prevention mechanisms we can put in place to protect against them. We define accidents as unintended and harmful behavior that may emerge from machine learning systems when we specify ... Continue Reading

Popularity predictions of Facebook videos for higher quality streaming

November 28, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Popularity prediction of Facebook videos for higher quality streaming Tang et al., USENIX ATC’17 Suppose I could grant you access to a clairvoyance service, which could make one class of predictions about your business for you with perfect accuracy. What would you want to know, and what difference would knowing that make to your business? ... Continue Reading

SVE: Distributed video processing at Facebook scale

November 27, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

SVE: Distributed video processing at Facebook scale Huang et al., SOSP’17 SVE (Streaming Video Engine) is the video processing pipeline that has been in production at Facebook for the past two years. This paper gives an overview of its design and rationale. And it certainly got me thinking: suppose I needed to build a video ... Continue Reading

On the information bottleneck theory of deep learning

November 24, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments

On the information bottleneck theory of deep learning Anonymous et al., ICLR’18 submission Last week we looked at the Information bottleneck theory of deep learning paper from Schwartz-Viz & Tishby (Part I,Part II). I really enjoyed that paper and the different light it shed on what’s happening inside deep neural networks. Sathiya Keerthi got in ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
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