Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions are increasingly important for the Brazilian cybersecurity community as education and professional tools. Unfortunately, CTF platforms may suffer from security issues, giving an unfair advantage to competitors. To mitigate this, we propose NIZKCTF, the first open-audit CTF platform based on non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs. Educational technology, Cryptography, Distributed information systemsA critical element of a robust cybersecurity strategy is developing talent in modern technological security issues. Research shows that the United States is the most prepared country against cyber attacks, 1 however, there is also a problem of quantity and quality of professionals, especially when it comes to more sophisticated skills such as security by design, defensive programming, applied cryptography, threat intelligence and forensic analysis after a compromise. 2 This problem is aggravated in developing countries, where access to bleeding-edge resources for professional training based on real-world experience is limited.In order to reduce the shortage of cybersecurity professionals, companies, schools, universities and military institutions have been promoting Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions around the world to foster the engagement of professionals in cybersecurity topics. CTF competitions are usually designed to serve an educational purpose to give participants experience with computer security problems from a wide spectrum of technical areas, as well as conducting and reacting to the sort of attacks found in the real world. CTF competitions can also serve as a convenient recruiting tool to fill specific positions with highly-skilled talent. Reverse-engineering, exploitation, forensics, web programming and cryptanalysis are among the typical required skills in CTF competitions. Because CTF competitions are inexpensive to organize and run, they are strategic to countries such as Brazil, allowing the local community to interact and compete with international players.There are two styles of CTF competitions: attack/defense and jeopardy. In an attack/defense competition, each team is given a machine to defend on an isolated network. Teams are scored based on both their success in defending their assigned machine and on their success in attacking the other teams' machines. Jeopardy competitions are more common and usually involve multiple categories of problems, each of which contains a variety of questions of different values and levels of difficulty. A correct solution to a problem reveals a flag, which is submitted to the scoring platform for points. Teams attempt to earn the most points in the competition's time frame (e.g., 24 hours), but usually do not directly attack each other. Rather than a race, this style of gameplay encourages taking time to approach challenges and prioritizes quantity of correct submissions over the timing.An important concern is to protect the CTF software platform against attacks. The platform is usually responsible for storing the flags and updat...
Pulse-type weakly electric fishes communicate through electrical discharges with a stereotyped waveform, varying solely the interval between pulses according to the information being transmitted. This simple codification mechanism is similar to the one found in various known neuronal circuits, which renders these animals as good models for the study of natural communication systems, allowing experiments involving behavioral and neuroethological aspects. Performing analysis of data collected from more than one freely swimming fish is a challenge since the detected electric organ discharge (EOD) patterns are dependent on each animal's position and orientation relative to the electrodes. However, since each fish emits a characteristic EOD waveform, computational tools can be employed to match each EOD to the respective fish. In this paper we describe a computational method able to recognize fish EODs from dyads using normalized feature vectors obtained by applying Fourier and dual-tree complex wavelet packet transforms. We employ support vector machines as classifiers, and a continuity constraint algorithm allows us to solve issues caused by overlapping EODs and signal saturation. Extensive validation procedures with Gymnotus sp. showed that EODs can be assigned correctly to each fish with only two errors per million discharges.
In today's world of big data, computational analysis has become a key driver of biomedical research. High-performance computational facilities are capable of processing considerable volumes of data, yet often lack an easy-to-use interface to guide the user in supervising and adjusting bioinformatics analysis via a tablet or smartphone. Telescope is a novel tool that interfaces with high-performance computational clusters to deliver an intuitive user interface for controlling and monitoring bioinformatics analyses in real-time. Telescope provides a user-friendly method for integrating computational analyses with experimental biomedical research. Telescope is freely available at https://github.com/Mangul-Lab-USC/telescope . 2
Electric fishes modulate their electric organ discharges with a remarkable variability. Some patterns can be easily identified, such as pulse rate changes, offs and chirps, which are often associated with important behavioral contexts, including aggression, hiding and mating. However, these behaviors are only observed when at least two fish are freely interacting. Although their electrical pulses can be easily recorded by non-invasive techniques, discriminating the emitter of each pulse is challenging when physically similar fish are allowed to freely move and interact. Here we optimized a custom-made software recently designed to identify the emitter of pulses by using automated chirp detection, adaptive threshold for pulse detection and slightly changing how the recorded signals are integrated. With these optimizations, we performed a quantitative analysis of the statistical changes throughout the dominance contest with respect to Inter Pulse Intervals, Chirps and Offs dyads of freely moving Gymnotus carapo. In all dyads, chirps were signatures of subsequent submission, even when they occurred early in the contest. Although offs were observed in both dominant and submissive fish, they were substantially more frequent in submissive individuals, in agreement with the idea from previous studies that offs are electric cues of submission. In general, after the dominance is established the submissive fish significantly changes its average pulse rate, while the pulse rate of the dominant remained unchanged. Additionally, no chirps or offs were observed when two fish were manually kept in direct physical contact, suggesting that these electric behaviors are not automatic responses to physical contact.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.