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Experiences in cyber security education: the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Capture-the-Flag exercise

Published in:
Proc. 4th Cyber Security Experimentation Test, 8 August 2011.

Summary

Many popular and well-established cyber security Capture the Flag (CTF) exercises are held each year in a variety of settings, including universities and semi-professional security conferences. CTF formats also vary greatly, ranging from linear puzzle-like challenges to team-based offensive and defensive free-for-all hacking competitions. While these events are exciting and important as contests of skill, they offer limited educational opportunities. In particular, since participation requires considerable a priori domain knowledge and practical computer security expertise, the majority of typical computer science students are excluded from taking part in these events. Our goal in designing and running the MIT/LL CTF was to make the experience accessible to a wider community by providing an environment that would not only test and challenge the computer security skills of the participants, but also educate and prepare those without an extensive prior expertise. This paper describes our experience in designing, organizing, and running an education-focused CTF, and discusses our teaching methods, game design, scoring measures, logged data, and lessons learned.
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Summary

Many popular and well-established cyber security Capture the Flag (CTF) exercises are held each year in a variety of settings, including universities and semi-professional security conferences. CTF formats also vary greatly, ranging from linear puzzle-like challenges to team-based offensive and defensive free-for-all hacking competitions. While these events are exciting and...

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Hazard alerting based on probabilistic models

Published in:
AIAA Modeling and Simulation Technologies Conf., 8-11 August 2011.

Summary

Hazard alerting systems alert operators to potential future undesirable events so that action may be taken to mitigate risk. One way to develop a hazard alerting system based on probabilistic models is by using a threshold-based approach, where the probability of the undesirable event without mitigation is compared against a threshold. Another way to develop such a system is to model the system as a Markov decision process and solve for the hazard alerting strategy that maximizes expected utility. This paper analyzes and compares these two methods. The experiments reveal that an expected utility approach performs better than threshold-based approaches when the dynamic stochasticity is high, where accounting for delays or changes in the alert becomes more important. However, for certain system parameters and operating environments, a threshold-based approach may provide comparable performance.
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Summary

Hazard alerting systems alert operators to potential future undesirable events so that action may be taken to mitigate risk. One way to develop a hazard alerting system based on probabilistic models is by using a threshold-based approach, where the probability of the undesirable event without mitigation is compared against a...

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Update on COSPA storm forecasts

Summary

Air traffic congestion in the United States (US) is a serious national problem resulting in a critical need for timely, reliable and high quality forecasts of precipitation and echo tops with forecast time horizons of up to 8 hours. In order to address the short-term needs of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as well as the long-term goals of the US's Next Generation Airspace System (NextGen), MIT Lincoln Laboratory, NCAR Research Applications Laboratory and NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory (ESRL) Global Systems Division (GSD) are collaborating on developing a forecast system under funding from the FAA's Aviation Weather Research Program (AWRP). The CoSPA system combines the latest technologies in heuristic nowcasting, extrapolation, statistical techniques and numerical weather prediction to produce rapidly updating (15 min) 0-8 hour forecasts of storm locations, echo tops and intensities. The system blends highly-skillful heuristic nowcasts with output from NOAA's High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) using phase correction and statistical weighting functions. The CoSPA 0-8 hour forecasts are accessible to the aviation community via an operational situation display and a website that builds upon the FAA's Corridor Integrated Weather System (CIWS) and shows current time situational awareness products including: VIL, echo tops, lightning, growth and decay, forecasts and verification contours, as well as an animation of the weather from 8 hours in the past to 8 hours into the future. This presentation will include a brief description of the CoSPA forecast system and display, examples of forecast performance, and provide an overview of recent enhancements to CoSPA as well as ongoing research.
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Summary

Air traffic congestion in the United States (US) is a serious national problem resulting in a critical need for timely, reliable and high quality forecasts of precipitation and echo tops with forecast time horizons of up to 8 hours. In order to address the short-term needs of the Federal Aviation...

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Coherent combining of a 4 kW, eight-element fiber amplifier array

Published in:
Opt. Lett., vol. 36, No. 14, 15 July 2011, pp. 2686-2688.

Summary

Commercial 0:5kW Yb-doped fiber amplifiers have been characterized and found to be suitable for coherent beam combining. Eight such fiber amplifiers have been coherently combined in a tiled-aperture configuration with 78% combining efficiency and total output power of 4kW. The power-in-the-bucket vertical beam quality of the combined output is 1.25 times diffraction limited at full power. The beam-combining performance is independent of output power.
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Summary

Commercial 0:5kW Yb-doped fiber amplifiers have been characterized and found to be suitable for coherent beam combining. Eight such fiber amplifiers have been coherently combined in a tiled-aperture configuration with 78% combining efficiency and total output power of 4kW. The power-in-the-bucket vertical beam quality of the combined output is 1.25...

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Packaged, high-power, narrow-linewidth slab-coupled optical waveguide external cavity laser (SCOWECL)

Published in:
IEEE Photonics Technol. Lett., Vol. 23, No. 14, 15 July 2011.
Topic:

Summary

We report the demonstration of an InGaAlAs/InP quantum-well, high-power, low-noise packaged semiconductor external cavity laser (ECL) operating at 1550 nm. The laser comprises a double-pass, curved-channel slab-coupled optical waveguide amplifier (SCOWA) coupled to a narrow-bandwidth (2.5 GHz) fiber Bragg grating passive cavity using a lensedfiber. At a bias current of 4 A, the ECL produces 370 mW of fiber-coupled output power with a Voigt lineshape having Gaussian and Lorentzian linewidths of 35 kHz and 1 kHz, respectively, and relative intensity noise < -160 dB/Hz from 200 kHz to 10 GHz.
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Summary

We report the demonstration of an InGaAlAs/InP quantum-well, high-power, low-noise packaged semiconductor external cavity laser (ECL) operating at 1550 nm. The laser comprises a double-pass, curved-channel slab-coupled optical waveguide amplifier (SCOWA) coupled to a narrow-bandwidth (2.5 GHz) fiber Bragg grating passive cavity using a lensedfiber. At a bias current of...

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Eigenspace analysis for threat detection in social networks

Published in:
Int. Conf. on Information Fusion, 5 July 2011.

Summary

The problem of detecting a small, anomalous subgraph within a large background network is important and applicable to many fields. The non-Euclidean nature of graph data, however, complicates the application of classical detection theory in this context. A recent statistical framework for anomalous subgraph detection uses spectral properties of a graph's modularity matrix to determine the presence of an anomaly. In this paper, this detection framework and the related algorithms are applied to data focused on a specific application: detection of a threat subgraph embedded in a social network. The results presented use data created to simulate threat activity among noisy interactions. The detectability of the threat subgraph and its separability from the noise is analyzed under a variety of background conditions in both static and dynamic scenarios.
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Summary

The problem of detecting a small, anomalous subgraph within a large background network is important and applicable to many fields. The non-Euclidean nature of graph data, however, complicates the application of classical detection theory in this context. A recent statistical framework for anomalous subgraph detection uses spectral properties of a...

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Maximum directivity of a series-fed microstrip array antenna for wireless application

Published in:
AP-S/URSI 2011, IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Int. Symp. and USNC/URSI National Radio Science Mtg., 3-8 July 2011, pp. 1327-1330.

Summary

An omnidirectional colinear microstrip array antenna is modeled as a ladder network. A formula is derived for the maximum directivity of a series-fed colinear antenna with an infinite number of ladder sections. It is shown that the maximum directivity is asymptotically limited and depends upon the product of the seriece impedance and shunt admittance of the equivalent ladder network. The result is verified by simulation and experiment.
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Summary

An omnidirectional colinear microstrip array antenna is modeled as a ladder network. A formula is derived for the maximum directivity of a series-fed colinear antenna with an infinite number of ladder sections. It is shown that the maximum directivity is asymptotically limited and depends upon the product of the seriece...

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Cryogenic Yb3+ -doped materials for pulsed solid-state laser applications

Published in:
Opt. Mat. Expr., Vol. 1, No. 3, 1 July 2011, pp. 434-450.

Summary

We review recent progress in pulsed lasers using cryogenically-cooled Yb3+ -doped gain media, with an emphasis on high average power. Recent measurements of thermo-optic properties for various host material at both room and cryogenic temperature are presented, including themral conductivity, coefficient of thermal expansion and refractive index. Host materials reviewed include Y2O3, Lu2O3, Sc2O3, YLF, YSO, GSAG, and YVO4. We report on performance of several cryogenic Yb lasers operating at 5-kHz pulse repetition frequency (PRF) a Q-switched Yb:YAG laser is shwon to operate at 114-W average power, with 16-ns pulse duration. A chirped pulse amplifier achieves 115-W output using a composite Yb:YAG/Yb:GSAG amplifier, with pulses that compress to 1.6 ps. Finally, a high-average-power femtosecond laser based on Yb:YLF is discussed, with results for a 10-W regenerative amplifier at 10-kHZ PRF.
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Summary

We review recent progress in pulsed lasers using cryogenically-cooled Yb3+ -doped gain media, with an emphasis on high average power. Recent measurements of thermo-optic properties for various host material at both room and cryogenic temperature are presented, including themral conductivity, coefficient of thermal expansion and refractive index. Host materials reviewed...

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Noise spectroscopy through dynamical decoupling with a superconducting flux qubit

Summary

Quantum coherence in natural and artificial spin systems is fundamental to applications ranging from quantum information science to magnetic-resonance imaging and identification. Several multipulse control sequences targeting generalized noise models have been developed to extend coherence by dynamically decoupling a spin system from its noisy environment. In any particular implementation, however, the efficacy of these methods is sensitive to the specific frequency distribution of the noise, suggesting that these same pulse sequences could also be used to probe the noise spectrum directly. Here we demonstrate noise spectroscopy by means of dynamical decoupling using a superconducting qubit with energy-relaxation time T1 D12 us. We first demonstrate that dynamical decoupling improves the coherence time T2 in this system up to the T2 D2 T1 limit (pure dephasing times exceeding 100 us), and then leverage its filtering properties to probe the environmental noise over a frequency (f) range 0.2-20 MHz, observing a 1=fa distribution with a < 1. The characterization of environmental noise has broad utility for spin-resonance applications, enabling the design of optimized coherent-control methods, promoting device and materials engineering, and generally improving coherence.
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Summary

Quantum coherence in natural and artificial spin systems is fundamental to applications ranging from quantum information science to magnetic-resonance imaging and identification. Several multipulse control sequences targeting generalized noise models have been developed to extend coherence by dynamically decoupling a spin system from its noisy environment. In any particular implementation...

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Accounting for state uncertainty in collision avoidance

Published in:
J. Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, Vol. 34, No. 4, July-August 2011, pp. 951-960.

Summary

An important consideration in the development of aircraft collision avoidance systems is how to account for state uncertainty due to sensor limitations and noise. However, many collision avoidance systems simply use point estimates of the state instead of leveraging the full posterior state distribution. Recently, there has been work on applying decision-theoretic methods to collision avoidance, but the importance of accommodating state uncertainty has not yet been well studied. This paper presents a computationally efficient framework for accounting for state uncertainty based on dynamic programming. Examination of characteristic encounters and Monte Carlo simulations demonstrates that properly handling state uncertainty rather than simply using point estimates can significantly enhance safety and improve robustness to sensor error.
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Summary

An important consideration in the development of aircraft collision avoidance systems is how to account for state uncertainty due to sensor limitations and noise. However, many collision avoidance systems simply use point estimates of the state instead of leveraging the full posterior state distribution. Recently, there has been work on...

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