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The mid-life crisis of a forty-something techno tinkerer

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Technical Journals

• An Empirical Study on the Performance and Energy Usage of Compiled Python Code

• _{An Empirical Study on the Performance and Energy Usage of Compiled Python Code Vincenzo Stoico, Andrei Calin Dragomir, Patricia Lago Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands v.stoico@vu.nl, a.dragomir@student.vu.nl, p.lago@vu.nl}

• Data Encryption Battlefield - A Deep Dive Into the Dynamic Confrontations in Ransomware Attacks

• _{In the rapidly evolving domain of cybersecurity threats, ransomware stands out as a formidable challenge. Adversaries are in- creasingly employing advanced encryption techniques, such as entropy reduction using Base64 encoding, along with partial and intermittent encryption, to bypass traditional security measures and maximize their illicit gains. This study delves into the nuanced battleground between these adversaries, who are adept at refining encryption strategies to evade detection, and the defenders, who are constantly developing sophisticated countermeasures to safeguard vulnerable data asset}

• Defending Unmanned Aerial Vehicles From Attacks on Inertial Sensors with Model-based Anomaly Detection and Recovery

• _{Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) rely on measurements from Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) to maintain stable flight. However, IMUs are susceptible to physical attacks, in- cluding acoustic resonant and electromagnetic interference attacks, resulting in immediate UAV crashes. Consequently, we introduce a Model-based Anomaly detection and Recovery System (MARS) that enables UAVs to quickly detect adver- sarial attacks on inertial sensors and achieve dynamic flight recovery.}

• Evaluating Large Language Models for Automated Exploit Generation

• _{Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code-related tasks, raising concerns about their potential for automated exploit generation (AEG). This paper presents the first systematic study on LLMs’ ef- fectiveness in AEG, evaluating both their cooperativeness and technical proficiency}

• Evaluating Organisation Security - User Stories of European Union NIS2 Directive

• _{The NIS2 directive requires EU Member States to ensure a consistently high level of cybersecurity by setting risk-management mea- sures for essential and important entities. Evaluations are necessary to assess whether the required security level is met.}

• From Past to Present - A Survey of Malicious URL Detection Techniques, Datasets and Code Repositories

• _{Malicious URLs persistently threaten the cybersecurity ecosystem, by either deceiving users into divulging private data or distributing harmful payloads to infiltrate host systems. The detection of malicious URLs is a protracted arms race between defenders and attackers.}

• Runtime Anomaly Detection for Drones - An Integrated Rule-Mining and Unsupervised Learning Approach

• _{Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, have witnessed a remarkable surge in popularity due to their versatile applications. These cyber-physical systems depend on multiple sensor inputs, such as cameras, GPS receivers, accelerometers, and gyro- scopes, with faults potentially leading to physical instability and serious safety concerns.}

• The Dark Side of Digital Twins - Adversarial Attacks on AI-Driven Water Forecasting

• _{Digital twins (DTs) are improving water distri- bution systems by using real-time data, analytics, and pre- diction models to optimize operations. This paper presents a DT platform designed for a Spanish water supply network, utilizing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to predict water consumption.}

• Wolves in the Repository - A Software Engineering Analysis of the XZ Utils Supply Chain Attack

• _{The digital economy runs on Open Source Software (OSS), with an estimated 90% of modern applications containing open-source components. While this widespread adoption has revolutionized software development, it has also created critical security vulnerabilities, particularly in essential but under- resourced projects. This paper examines a sophisticated attack on the XZ Utils project (CVE-2024-3094), where attackers exploited not just code, but the entire open-source development process to inject a backdoor into a fundamental Linux compression library.}

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