TL;DR: The outbreak of the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has induced a considerable degree of fear, emotional stress and anxiety among individuals around the world.
Abstract: The outbreak of the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has induced a considerable degree of fear, emotional stress and anxiety among individuals around t
TL;DR: The Interactive Web-Based Data Visualization with R, plotly, and shiny as mentioned in this paper focuses on the process of programming interactive web graphics for multidimensional data analysis and best practices for visualizing continuous, discrete, and multivariate data.
Abstract: The richly illustrated Interactive Web-Based Data Visualization with R, plotly, and shiny focuses on the process of programming interactive web graphics for multidimensional data analysis. It is written for the data analyst who wants to leverage the capabilities of interactive web graphics without having to learn web programming. Through many R code examples, you will learn how to tap the extensive functionality of these tools to enhance the presentation and exploration of data. By mastering these concepts and tools, you will impress your colleagues with your ability to quickly generate more informative, engaging, and reproducible interactive graphics using free and open source software that you can share over email, export to pdf, and more.
Key Features:
Convert static ggplot2 graphics to an interactive web-based form
Link, animate, and arrange multiple plots in standalone HTML from R
Embed, modify, and respond to plotly graphics in a shiny app
Learn best practices for visualizing continuous, discrete, and multivariate data
Learn numerous ways to visualize geo-spatial data
This book makes heavy use of plotly for graphical rendering, but you will also learn about other R packages that support different phases of a data science workflow, such as tidyr, dplyr, and tidyverse. Along the way, you will gain insight into best practices for visualization of high-dimensional data, statistical graphics, and graphical perception. The printed book is complemented by an interactive website where readers can view movies demonstrating the examples and interact with graphics.
TL;DR: The miRNet 2.0 as mentioned in this paper is an easy-to-use web-based platform designed to help elucidate microRNA functions by integrating users' data with existing knowledge via network-based visual analytics.
Abstract: miRNet is an easy-to-use, web-based platform designed to help elucidate microRNA (miRNA) functions by integrating users' data with existing knowledge via network-based visual analytics. Since its first release in 2016, miRNet has been accessed by >20 000 researchers worldwide, with ∼100 users on a daily basis. While version 1.0 was focused primarily on miRNA-target gene interactions, it has become clear that in order to obtain a global view of miRNA functions, it is necessary to bring other important players into the context during analysis. Driven by this concept, in miRNet version 2.0, we have (i) added support for transcription factors (TFs) and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that affect miRNAs, miRNA-binding sites or target genes, whilst also greatly increased (>5-fold) the underlying knowledgebases of miRNAs, ncRNAs and disease associations; (ii) implemented new functions to allow creation and visual exploration of multipartite networks, with enhanced support for in situ functional analysis and (iii) revamped the web interface, optimized the workflow, and introduced microservices and web application programming interface (API) to sustain high-performance, real-time data analysis. The underlying R package is also released in tandem with version 2.0 to allow more flexible data analysis for R programmers. The miRNet 2.0 website is freely available at https://www.mirnet.ca.
TL;DR: OPUS-MT is a project that focuses on the development of free resources and tools for machine translation that provides open source implementations of web applications that can run efficiently on average desktop hardware with a straightforward setup and installation.
Abstract: This paper presents OPUS-MT a project that focuses on the development of free resources and tools for machine translation. The current status is a repository of over 1,000 pre-trained neural machine translation models that are ready to be launched in on-line translation services. For this we also provide open source implementations of web applications that can run efficiently on average desktop hardware with a straightforward setup and installation.
TL;DR: This article proposes a web attack detection system that takes advantage of analyzing URLs, designed to detect web attacks and is deployed on edge devices, and is competitive in detecting web attacks.
Abstract: With the development of Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud technologies, numerous IoT devices and sensors transmit huge amounts of data to cloud data centers for further processing. While providing us considerable convenience, cloud-based computing and storage also bring us many security problems, such as the abuse of information collection and concentrated web servers in the cloud. Traditional intrusion detection systems and web application firewalls are becoming incompatible with the new network environment, and related systems with machine learning or deep learning are emerging. However, cloud-IoT systems increase attacks against web servers, since data centralization carries a more attractive reward. In this article, based on distributed deep learning, we propose a web attack detection system that takes advantage of analyzing URLs. The system is designed to detect web attacks and is deployed on edge devices. The cloud handles the above challenges in the paradigm of the Edge of Things. Multiple concurrent deep models are used to enhance the stability of the system and the convenience in updating. We implemented experiments on the system with two concurrent deep models and compared the system with existing systems by using several datasets. The experimental results with 99.410% in accuracy, 98.91% in true positive rate (TPR), and 99.55% in detection rate of normal requests (DRN) demonstrate the system is competitive in detecting web attacks.
TL;DR: It has been hypothesized that the trend in the proposal of traditional methods to mitigate XSS attacks is greater than the proposals that use some artificial intelligence technique.
TL;DR: WAR (Web APIs Recommendation), the first data-driven approach for web APIs recommendation that integrates web API discovery, verification and selection operations based on keywords search over the web API correlation graph, is proposed.
Abstract: The ever-increasing popularity of web APIs allows app developers to leverage a set of existing APIs to achieve their sophisticated objectives. The heavily fragmented distribution of web APIs makes it challenging for an app developer to find appropriate and compatible web APIs. Currently, app developers usually have to manually discover candidate web APIs, verify their compatibility and select appropriate and compatible ones. This process is cumbersome and requires detailed knowledge of web APIs which is often too demanding. It has become a major obstacle to further and broader applications of web APIs. To address this issue, we first propose a web API correlation graph built on extensive data about the compatibility between web APIs. Then, we propose WAR (Web APIs Recommendation), the first data-driven approach for web APIs recommendation that integrates API discovery, verification and selection operations based on keywords search over the web API correlation graph. WAR assists app developers without detailed knowledge of web APIs in searching for appropriate and compatible APIs by typing a few keywords that represent the tasks required to achieve app developers’ objectives. We conducted large-scale experiments on 18,478 real-world APIs and 6,146 real-world apps to demonstrate the usefulness and efficiency of WAR.
TL;DR: Tracy is an efficient and versatile command-line application that enables basecalling, alignment, assembly and deconvolution of sequencing chromatogram files and its companion web applications make all functionality of Tracy easily accessible using standard web browser technologies and interactive graphical user interfaces.
Abstract: DNA sequencing is at the core of many molecular biology laboratories. Despite its long history, there is a lack of user-friendly Sanger sequencing data analysis tools that can be run interactively as a web application or at large-scale in batch from the command-line. We present Tracy, an efficient and versatile command-line application that enables basecalling, alignment, assembly and deconvolution of sequencing chromatogram files. Its companion web applications make all functionality of Tracy easily accessible using standard web browser technologies and interactive graphical user interfaces. Tracy can be easily integrated in large-scale pipelines and high-throughput settings, and it uses state-of-the-art file formats such as JSON and BCF for reporting chromatogram sequencing results and variant calls. The software is open-source and freely available at https://github.com/gear-genomics/tracy, the companion web applications are hosted at https://www.gear-genomics.com. Tracy can be routinely applied in large-scale validation efforts conducted in clinical genomics studies as well as for high-throughput genome editing techniques that require a fast and rapid method to confirm discovered variants or engineered mutations. Molecular biologists benefit from the companion web applications that enable installation-free Sanger chromatogram analyses using intuitive, graphical user interfaces.
TL;DR: LIONESS Lab provides solutions for the methodological challenges of interactive online experimentation, including ways to reduce waiting time, form groups on the fly, and deal with participant dropout.
Abstract: LIONESS Lab is a free web-based platform for interactive online experiments. An intuitive, user-friendly graphical interface enables researchers to develop, test, and share experiments online, with minimal need for programming experience. LIONESS Lab provides solutions for the methodological challenges of interactive online experimentation, including ways to reduce waiting time, form groups on-the-fly, and deal with participant dropout. We highlight key features of the software, and show how it meets the challenges of conducting interactive experiments online.
TL;DR: Webina is a new version of Vina that runs Vina entirely in a web browser, so users need only visit a Webina-enabled webpage to complete docking calculations.
Abstract: Motivation Molecular docking is a computational technique for predicting how a small molecule might bind a macromolecular target Among docking programs, AutoDock Vina is particularly popular Like many docking programs, Vina requires users to download/install an executable file and to run that file from a command-line interface Choosing proper configuration parameters and analyzing Vina output is also sometimes challenging These issues are particularly problematic for students and novice researchers Results We created Webina, a new version of Vina, to address these challenges Webina runs Vina entirely in a web browser, so users need only visit a Webina-enabled webpage The docking calculations take place on the user's own computer rather than a remote server Availability and implementation A working version of the open-source Webina app can be accessed free of charge from http://durrantlabcom/webina Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online
TL;DR: The proposed stacked ensemble for anomaly-based intrusion detection systems in a Web application significantly surpasses existing Web attack detection techniques concerning the accuracy and false positive rate metrics.
Abstract: A Web attack protection system is extremely essential in today’s information age. Classifier ensembles have been considered for anomaly-based intrusion detection in Web traffic. However, they suffer from an unsatisfactory performance due to a poor ensemble design. This paper proposes a stacked ensemble for anomaly-based intrusion detection systems in a Web application. Unlike a conventional stacking, where some single weak learners are prevalently used, the proposed stacked ensemble is an ensemble architecture, yet its base learners are other ensembles learners, i.e. random forest, gradient boosting machine, and XGBoost. To prove the generalizability of the proposed model, two datasets that are specifically used for attack detection in a Web application, i.e. CSIC-2010v2 and CICIDS-2017 are used in the experiment. Furthermore, the proposed model significantly surpasses existing Web attack detection techniques concerning the accuracy and false positive rate metrics. Validation result on the CICIDS-2017, NSL-KDD, and UNSW-NB15 dataset also ameliorate the ones obtained by some recent techniques. Finally, the performance of all classification algorithms in terms of a two-step statistical significance test is further discussed, providing a value-added contribution to the current literature.
TL;DR: The purpose of this article is to compare the abilities and performance of the two software architectures – Microservice and Monolithic on the example of a web application in Java.
Abstract: In this day and age, people demand fast efficient and reliable applications. If a client has a high speed internet connection and required client’s app, the features such as reliability and efficiency can be provided only by the programmer. It is therefore essential to choose appropriate software architecture, before the implementation of functionalities that have been adopted to the project. Some of the most popular architectures are the Monolithic and Microservice architectures that can achieve the same result, however with different advantages and disadvantages. The purpose of this article is to compare the abilities and performance of the two software architectures – Microservice and Monolithic on the example of a web application in Java.
TL;DR: This study proposes the track of Fuzzy AHP-TOPSIS (Analytic Hierarchy Process-Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) technique and identifies the most prioritized attribute contributing towards building usable-security of web application.
Abstract: Security and usability are often thought of as being contradictive in nature. One affects the other negatively. The relation and trade-offs between usability and security must be detected during developing web application to satisfy the user’s requirements with security perspective. Current approaches of usable-security emphasizes on building systems that are easy to use and secure as well. Hence, this paper is recognizing usability-security as a problem with different attributes contributing towards it. Further, there is a need to assess this problem for the satisfaction of the end user. In this context, this study proposes the track of Fuzzy AHP-TOPSIS (Analytic Hierarchy Process-Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) technique to assess the usable-security of web application and also identifies the most prioritized attribute contributing towards building usable-security of web application. Moreover, to corroborate the efficacy of the proposed technique, the authors have tested the results on the institutional web applications. The results of the assessment undertaken in this study and the findings tabulated thereafter will be a helpful reckoner for the developers while designing web applications that afford optimum usable-security.
TL;DR: A novel framework, Mixture of Sequential Experts (MoSE), which explicitly models sequential user behavior using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) in the state-of-art Multi-gate Mixture- of-Expert multi-task modeling framework and shows the effectiveness and flexibility of the MoSE architecture in a real-world decision making engine in GMail.
Abstract: It is often desirable to model multiple objectives in real-world web applications, such as user satisfaction and user engagement in recommender systems. Multi-task learning has become the standard approach for such applications recently. While most of the multi-task recommendation model architectures proposed to date are focusing on using non-sequential input features (e.g., query and context), input data is often sequential in real-world web application scenarios. For example, user behavior streams, such as user search logs in search systems, are naturally atemporal sequence. Modeling user sequential behaviors as explicit sequential representations can empower the multi-task model to incorporate temporal dependencies, thus predicting future user behavior more accurately. Furthermore, user activity streams can come from heterogeneous data sources, such as user search logs and user browsing logs. They typically possess very different properties such as data sparsity and thus need careful treatment when being modeled jointly. In this work, we study the challenging problem of how to model sequential user behavior in the neural multi-task learning settings. Our major contribution is a novel framework, Mixture of Sequential Experts (MoSE). It explicitly models sequential user behavior using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) in the state-of-art Multi-gate Mixture-of-Expert multi-task modeling framework. In experiments, we show the effectiveness of the MoSE architecture over seven alternative architectures on both synthetic and noisy real-world user data in G Suite. We also demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the MoSE architecture in a real-world decision making engine in GMail that involves millions of users, balancing between search quality and resource costs.
TL;DR: This study assesses the performance and relationship between different variables of an application that runs in a monolithic structure compared to one of the micro-services, and applies the non-parametric regression mathematical model to explain the dependency relationship between the performance variables.
Abstract: Currently, organizations face the need to create scalable applications in an agile way that impacts new forms of production and business organization. The traditional monolithic architecture no longer meets the needs of scalability and rapid development. The efficiency and optimization of human and technological resources prevail; this is why companies must adopt new technologies and business strategies. However, the implementation of microservices still encounters several challenges, such as the consumption of time and computational resources, scalability, orchestration, organization problems, and several further technical complications. Although there are procedures that facilitate the migration from a monolithic architecture to micro-services, none of them accurately quantifies performance differences. The current study aims primarily to analyze some related work that evaluated both architectures. Furthermore, we assess the performance and relationship between different variables of an application that runs in a monolithic structure compared to one of the micro-services. With this, the state-of-the-art review was initially conducted, which confirms the interest of the industry. Subsequently, two different scenarios were evaluated: the first one comprises a web application based on a monolithic architecture that operates on a virtual server with KVM, and the second one demonstrates the same web application based on a microservice architecture, but it runs in containers. Both situations were exposed to stress tests of similar characteristics and with the same hardware resources. For their validation, we applied the non-parametric regression mathematical model to explain the dependency relationship between the performance variables. The results provided a quantitative technical interpretation with precision and reliability, which can be applied to similar issues.
TL;DR: To increase uptake, it is important to ensure that health professionals receive education, familiarization, and training to support them in incorporating web-based therapies into their practice, and to design systems that support health professionals in this new way of working with patients and addressing their concerns.
Abstract: Background: Web-based therapies hold great promise to increase accessibility and reduce costs of delivering mental health care; however, uptake in routine settings has been low.
Objective: Our objective in this review was to summarize what is known about health care professionals’ perceptions of the barriers to and facilitators of the implementation of web-based psychological treatments in routine care of adults in health care settings.
Methods: We searched 5 major databases (MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, CINAHL, and the Cochrane Library) for qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods studies exploring health professionals’ views on computer- or internet-based psychological treatment programs. We coded included articles for risk of bias and extracted data using a prepiloted extraction sheet.
Results: We identified 29 eligible articles: 14 qualitative, 11 quantitative, and 4 mixed methods. We identified the following themes: patient factors, health professional factors, the therapeutic relationship, therapy factors, organizational and system factors, and models of care. Health professionals supported web-based therapies only for patients with relatively straightforward, low-risk diagnoses, strong motivation and engagement, high computer literacy and access, and low need for tailored content. They perceived flexibility with timing and location as advantages of web-based therapy, but preferred blended therapy to facilitate rapport and allow active monitoring and follow-up of patients. They emphasized the need for targeted training and organizational support to manage changed workflows. Health professionals were concerned about the confidentiality and security of client data for web-based programs, suggesting that clear and transparent protocols need to be in place to reassure health professionals before they will be willing to refer.
Conclusions: Without health professionals’ support, many people will not access web-based therapies. To increase uptake, it is important to ensure that health professionals receive education, familiarization, and training to support them in incorporating web-based therapies into their practice, and to design systems that support health professionals in this new way of working with patients and addressing their concerns.
Trial Registration: PROSPERO CRD42018100869; https://tinyurl.com/y5vaoqsk
TL;DR: ProteinVR displays molecular structures within 3D environments that give useful biological context and allow users to situate themselves in 3D space and is ideal for hypothesis generation and education in research and large-classroom settings.
Abstract: Protein structure determines biological function. Accurately conceptualizing 3D protein/ligand structures is thus vital to scientific research and education. Virtual reality (VR) enables protein visualization in stereoscopic 3D, but many VR molecular-visualization programs are expensive and challenging to use; work only on specific VR headsets; rely on complicated model-preparation software; and/or require the user to install separate programs or plugins. Here we introduce ProteinVR, a web-based application that works on various VR setups and operating systems. ProteinVR displays molecular structures within 3D environments that give useful biological context and allow users to situate themselves in 3D space. Our web-based implementation is ideal for hypothesis generation and education in research and large-classroom settings. We release ProteinVR under the open-source BSD-3-Clause license. A copy of the program is available free of charge from http://durrantlab.com/protein-vr/, and a working version can be accessed at http://durrantlab.com/pvr/.
TL;DR: In the evaluation using 8 real-world traces of 1.4 billion Web requests, ZeroWall successfully detects real zero-day attacks missed by existing WAFs and achieves high F1-scores over 0.98, which significantly outperforms all baseline approaches.
Abstract: Zero-day Web attacks are arguably the most serious threats to Web security, but are very challenging to detect because they are not seen or known previously and thus cannot be detected by widely-deployed signature-based Web Application Firewalls (WAFs). This paper proposes ZeroWall, an unsupervised approach, which works with an existing WAF in pipeline, to effectively detecting zero-day Web attacks. Using historical Web requests allowed by an existing signature-based WAF, a vast majority of which are assumed to be benign, ZeroWall trains a self-translation machine using an encoder-decoder recurrent neural network to capture the syntax and semantic patterns of benign requests. In real-time detection, a zero-day attack request (which the WAF fails to detect), not understood well by self-translation machine, cannot be translated back to its original request by the machine, thus is declared as an attack. In our evaluation using 8 real-world traces of 1.4 billion Web requests, ZeroWall successfully detects real zero-day attacks missed by existing WAFs and achieves high F1-scores over 0.98, which significantly outperforms all baseline approaches.
TL;DR: In this article, a novel Diachronic Graph Embedding Framework (D-GEF) is proposed to generate word embeddings in an unsupervised manner for cyber threat intelligence.
Abstract: Cybersecurity experts have appraised the total global cost of malicious hacking activities to be $450 billion annually. Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) has emerged as a viable approach to combat this societal issue. However, existing processes are criticized as inherently reactive to known threats. To combat these concerns, CTI experts have suggested proactively examining emerging threats in the vast, international online hacker community. In this study, we aim to develop proactive CTI capabilities by exploring online hacker forums to identify emerging threats in terms of popularity and tool functionality. To achieve these goals, we create a novel Diachronic Graph Embedding Framework (D-GEF). D-GEF operates on a Graph-of-Words (GoW) representation of hacker forum text to generate word embeddings in an unsupervised manner. Semantic displacement measures adopted from diachronic linguistics literature identify how terminology evolves. A series of benchmark experiments illustrate D-GEF's ability to generate higher quality than state-of-the-art word embedding models (e.g., word2vec) in tasks pertaining to semantic analogy, clustering, and threat classification. D-GEF's practical utility is illustrated with in-depth case studies on web application and denial of service threats targeting PHP and Windows technologies, respectively. We also discuss the implications of the proposed framework for strategic, operational, and tactical CTI scenarios. All datasets and code are publicly released to facilitate scientific reproducibility and extensions of this work.
TL;DR: There is a need to know for the great and awful effects of the web based life on the authors' instruction sectors as well as on their people to come and make an appropriate arrangement in the two cases if the use of webbased life is positive or negative.
TL;DR: Wang et al. as discussed by the authors propose a self-supervised framework, named TaxoExpan, which automatically generates a set of query concept, anchor concept pairs from the existing taxonomy as training data.
Abstract: Taxonomies consist of machine-interpretable semantics and provide valuable knowledge for many web applications. For example, online retailers (e.g., Amazon and eBay) use taxonomies for product recommendation, and web search engines (e.g., Google and Bing) leverage taxonomies to enhance query understanding. Enormous efforts have been made on constructing taxonomies either manually or semi-automatically. However, with the fast-growing volume of web content, existing taxonomies will become outdated and fail to capture emerging knowledge. Therefore, in many applications, dynamic expansions of an existing taxonomy are in great demand. In this paper, we study how to expand an existing taxonomy by adding a set of new concepts. We propose a novel self-supervised framework, named TaxoExpan, which automatically generates a set of ⟨query concept, anchor concept⟩ pairs from the existing taxonomy as training data. Using such self-supervision data, TaxoExpan learns a model to predict whether a query concept is the direct hyponym of an anchor concept. We develop two innovative techniques in TaxoExpan: (1) a position-enhanced graph neural network that encodes the local structure of an anchor concept in the existing taxonomy, and (2) a noise-robust training objective that enables the learned model to be insensitive to the label noise in the self-supervision data. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets from different domains demonstrate both the effectiveness and the efficiency of TaxoExpan for taxonomy expansion.
TL;DR: The online interactive overview of the current spread of CO VID-19 in the Czech Republic was launched on March 11, 2020 and has immediately become the primary communication channel employed by the health care sector to present the current situation regarding the COVID-19 epidemic.
Abstract: Background: The beginning of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) epidemic dates back to December 31, 2019, when the first cases were reported in the People’s Republic of China. In the Czech Republic, the first three cases of infection with the novel coronavirus were confirmed on March 1, 2020. The joint effort of state authorities and researchers gave rise to a unique team, which combines methodical knowledge of real-world processes with the know-how needed for effective processing, analysis, and online visualization of data.
Objective: Due to an urgent need for a tool that presents important reports based on valid data sources, a team of government experts and researchers focused on the design and development of a web app intended to provide a regularly updated overview of COVID-19 epidemiology in the Czech Republic to the general population.
Methods: The cross-industry standard process for data mining model was chosen for the complex solution of analytical processing and visualization of data that provides validated information on the COVID-19 epidemic across the Czech Republic. Great emphasis was put on the understanding and a correct implementation of all six steps (business understanding, data understanding, data preparation, modelling, evaluation, and deployment) needed in the process, including the infrastructure of a nationwide information system; the methodological setting of communication channels between all involved stakeholders; and data collection, processing, analysis, validation, and visualization.
Results: The web-based overview of the current spread of COVID-19 in the Czech Republic has been developed as an online platform providing a set of outputs in the form of tables, graphs, and maps intended for the general public. On March 12, 2020, the first version of the web portal, containing fourteen overviews divided into five topical sections, was released. The web portal’s primary objective is to publish a well-arranged visualization and clear explanation of basic information consisting of the overall numbers of performed tests, confirmed cases of COVID-19, COVID-19-related deaths, the daily and cumulative overviews of people with a positive COVID-19 case, performed tests, location and country of infection of people with a positive COVID-19 case, hospitalizations of patients with COVID-19, and distribution of personal protective equipment.
Conclusions: The online interactive overview of the current spread of COVID-19 in the Czech Republic was launched on March 11, 2020, and has immediately become the primary communication channel employed by the health care sector to present the current situation regarding the COVID-19 epidemic. This complex reporting of the COVID-19 epidemic in the Czech Republic also shows an effective way to interconnect knowledge held by various specialists, such as regional and national methodology experts (who report positive cases of the disease on a daily basis), with knowledge held by developers of central registries, analysts, developers of web apps, and leaders in the health care sector.
TL;DR: The OHIF Viewer provides a flexible framework for building applications to support imaging research and could reduce redundancies in software development for National Cancer Institute–funded projects, including Informatics Technology for Cancer Research and the Quantitative Imaging Network.
Abstract: PURPOSE Zero-footprint Web architecture enables imaging applications to be deployed on premise or in the cloud without requiring installation of custom software on the user’s computer. Benefits inc...
TL;DR: The aim is to design a prototype auto-scaling system for microservice-based Web applications that can learn from the past service experience and evaluate a hybrid sequence and supervised learning model for recommending scaling actions.
Abstract: Today, Internet users expect Web applications to be fast, performant, and always available. With the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT), data collection and the analysis of streams have become more and more challenging. Behind the scenes, application owners and cloud service providers work to meet these expectations, yet, the problem of how to most effectively and efficiently auto-scale a Web application to optimize for performance while reducing costs and energy usage is still a challenge. In particular, this problem has new relevance due to the continued rise of IoT and microservice-based architectures. A key concern, that is often not addressed by current auto-scaling systems, is the decision on which microservice to scale in order to increase performance. Our aim is to design a prototype auto-scaling system for microservice-based Web applications that can learn from the past service experience. The contributions of the work can be divided into two parts: 1) developing a pipeline for microservice auto-scaling and 2) evaluating a hybrid sequence and supervised learning model for recommending scaling actions. The pipeline has proven to be an effective platform for exploring auto-scaling solutions, as we will demonstrate through the evaluation of our proposed hybrid model. The results of the hybrid model show the merit of using a supervised model to identify which microservices should be scaled up more.
TL;DR: For the first time, to the author's knowledge, the industry-standard OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities and CWE/SANS top 25 most dangerous software errors are synced up in a matrix with Checkmarx vulnerability queries, producing an application security framework that helps development teams review and address code vulnerabilities.
Abstract: The delivery of a framework in place for secure application development is of real value for application development teams to integrate security into their development life cycle, especially when a mobile or web application moves past the scanning stage and focuses increasingly on the remediation or mitigation phase based on static application security testing (SAST). For the first time, to the author's knowledge, the industry-standard Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) top 10 vulnerabilities and CWE/SANS top 25 most dangerous software errors are synced up in a matrix with Checkmarx vulnerability queries, producing an application security framework that helps development teams review and address code vulnerabilities, minimise false positives discovered in static scans and penetration tests, targeting an increased accuracy of the findings. A case study is conducted for vulnerabilities scanning of a proof-of-concept mobile malware detection app. Mapping the OWASP/SANS with Checkmarx vulnerabilities queries, flaws and vulnerabilities are demonstrated to be mitigated with improved efficiency.
TL;DR: A Kubernetes scaling engine that makes the auto-scaling decisions apt for handling the actual variability of incoming requests, and introduces a compact management parameter for the cloud-tenant application provider in order to easily set their sweet spot in the resource over-provisioning vs. SLA violation trade-off.
Abstract: Kubernetes, the prevalent container orchestrator for cloud-deployed web applications, offers an automatic scaling feature for the application provider in order to meet the ever-changing amount of demand from its clients. This auto-scaling service, however, requires a seemingly difficult parameter set to be customized by the application provider, and those management parameters are static while incoming web request dynamics often change, not to mention the fact that scaling decisions are inherently reactive, instead of being proactive. Therefore we set the ultimate goal of making cloud-based web applications’ management easier and more effective.We propose a Kubernetes scaling engine that makes the auto-scaling decisions apt for handling the actual variability of incoming requests. In this engine various AI-based forecast methods compete with each other via a short-term evaluation loop in order to always give the lead to the method that suits best the actual request dynamics, as soon as possible. We also introduce a compact management parameter for the cloud-tenant application provider in order to easily set their sweet spot in the resource over-provisioning vs. SLA violation trade-off.The multi-forecast scaling engine and the proposed management parameter are evaluated both in simulations and with measurements on our collected web traces to show the improved quality of fitting provisioned resources to service demand. We find that with just a few competing forecast methods, our auto-scaling engine, implemented in Kubernetes, results in significantly less lost requests with slightly more provisioned resources compared to the default baseline.
TL;DR: It is argued based on a couple of initial case studies that Digital Shadows are not just valuable carriers of deep engineering knowledge but due to their small size also help in reducing network congestion and enabling edge computing, which could make Digital Shadows an interesting solution to address resilience in other information-intensive dynamic systems.
Abstract: The production sector has faced many difficulties in taking full advantage of opportunities found in other web application domains. Production research has focused on sophisticated mathematical models ranging from molecular materials modeling to efficient production control to inter-company supply network logistics. Often, these models have no closed-form solutions; this led to intense simulation research for individual modeling viewpoints, often labeled “Digital Twins”.
TL;DR: This work implemented the technique for the ECMAScript 5 language in a tool called Ichnaea, and evaluated it on 22 NPM modules containing several types of injection vulnerabilities, including 4 modules containing vulnerabilities that were not previously discovered and reported.
Abstract: Previous approaches to dynamic taint analysis for JavaScript are implemented directly in a browser or JavaScript engine, limiting their applicability to a single platform and requiring ongoing maintenance as platforms evolve, or they require nontrivial program transformations. We present an approach that relies on instrumentation to encode taint propagation as instructions for an abstract machine. Our approach has two key advantages: it is platform-independent and can be used with any existing JavaScript engine, and it can track taint on primitive values without requiring the introduction of wrapper objects. Furthermore, our technique enables multiple deployment scenarios by varying when and where the generated instructions are executed and it supports indirect taint sources , i.e., situations where taint enters an application via arguments passed to dynamically registered event-listener functions. We implemented the technique for the ECMAScript 5 language in a tool called Ichnaea , and evaluated it on 22 NPM modules containing several types of injection vulnerabilities, including 4 modules containing vulnerabilities that were not previously discovered and reported. On these modules, run-time overheads range from 3.17x to 38.42x, which is significantly better than a previous transformation-based technique. We also report on a case study that shows how Ichnaea can be used to detect privacy leaks in a Tizen web application for the Samsung Gear S2 smart watch.
TL;DR: A novel fully automated black-box auditing framework that analyzes web apps by exploring their susceptibility to various cookie-hijacking attacks while also assessing their deployment of pertinent security mechanisms (e.g., HSTS).
Abstract: In this paper, we focus on authentication and authorization flaws in web apps that enable partial or full access to user accounts. Specifically, we develop a novel fully automated black-box auditing framework that analyzes web apps by exploring their susceptibility to various cookie-hijacking attacks while also assessing their deployment of pertinent security mechanisms (e.g., HSTS). Our modular framework is driven by a custom browser automation tool developed to transparently offer fault-tolerance during extended interactions with web apps. We use our framework to conduct the first automated large-scale study of cookie-based account hijacking in the wild. As our framework handles every step of the auditing process in a completely automated manner, including the challenging process of account creation, we are able to fully audit 25K domains. Our framework detects more than 10K domains that expose authentication cookies over unencrypted connections, and over 5K domains that do not protect authentication cookies from JavaScript access while also embedding third party scripts that execute in the first party's origin. Our system also automatically identifies the privacy loss caused by exposed cookies and detects 9,324 domains where sensitive user data can be accessed by attackers (e.g., address, phone number, password). Overall, our study demonstrates that cookie-hijacking is a severe and prevalent threat, as deployment of even basic countermeasures (e.g., cookie security flags) is absent or incomplete, while developers struggle to correctly deploy more demanding mechanisms.
TL;DR: NASQAR (Nucleic acid SeQuence Analysis Resource) as discussed by the authors is a collection of custom and publicly available open-source web applications that make extensive use of a variety of R packages to provide interactive data analysis and visualization.
Abstract: As high-throughput sequencing applications continue to evolve, the rapid growth in quantity and variety of sequence-based data calls for the development of new software libraries and tools for data analysis and visualization Often, effective use of these tools requires computational skills beyond those of many researchers To ease this computational barrier, we have created a dynamic web-based platform, NASQAR (Nucleic Acid SeQuence Analysis Resource) NASQAR offers a collection of custom and publicly available open-source web applications that make extensive use of a variety of R packages to provide interactive data analysis and visualization The platform is publicly accessible at http://nasqarabudhabinyuedu/
Open-source code is on GitHub at https://githubcom/nasqar/NASQAR
, and the system is also available as a Docker image at https://hubdockercom/r/aymanm/nasqarall
NASQAR is a collaboration between the core bioinformatics teams of the NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU New York Centers for Genomics and Systems Biology NASQAR empowers non-programming experts with a versatile and intuitive toolbox to easily and efficiently explore, analyze, and visualize their Transcriptomics data interactively Popular tools for a variety of applications are currently available, including Transcriptome Data Preprocessing, RNA-seq Analysis (including Single-cell RNA-seq), Metagenomics, and Gene Enrichment