SYNOPSISWhile much is now known about the operation and organisation of the brain at the neuronal and microcircuit level, we are still some way from understanding it as a complete system from the lowest to the highest levels of description. One way to gain such an integrative understanding of neural systems is to construct them. We have built the largest neuromorphic system yet known, an interactive space called 'Ada' that is able to interact with many people simultaneously using a wide variety of sensory and behavioural modalities. 'She' received 553,700 visitors over 5 months during the Swiss Expo.02 in 2002. In this paper we present the broad motivations, design and technologies behind Ada, and discuss the construction and analysis of the system.
Despite immense progress in neuroscience, we remain restricted in our ability to construct autonomous, behaving robots that match the competence of even simple animals. The barriers to the realisation of this goal include lack of knowledge of system integration issues, engineering limitations and the organisational constraints common to many research laboratories. In this paper we describe our approach to addressing these issues by constructing an artificial organism within the framework of the Ada projecta large-scalepublic exhibit for the Swiss Exp0.02 national exhibition.
HTTPS is a cornerstone of privacy in the modern Web. The public key infrastructure underlying HTTPS, however, is a frequent target of attacks. In several cases, forged certificates have been issued by compromised Certificate Authorities (CA) and used to spy on users at large scale. While the concept of Certificate Transparency (CT) provides a means for detecting such forgeries, it builds on a distributed system of CT logs whose correctness is still insufficiently protected. By compromising a certificate authority and the corresponding log, a covert adversary can still issue rogue certificates unnoticed.
We introduce LogPicker, a novel protocol for strengthening the public key infrastructure of HTTPS. LogPicker enables a pool of CT logs to collaborate, where a randomly selected log includes the certificate while the rest witness and testify the certificate issuance process. As a result, CT logs become capable of auditing the log in charge independently without the need for a trusted third party. This auditing forces an attacker to control each participating witness, which significantly raises the bar for issuing rogue certificates. LogPicker is efficient and designed to be deployed incrementally, allowing a smooth transition towards a more secure Web.
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