No Arabic abstract
Body sounds provide rich information about the state of the human body and can be useful in many medical applications. Auscultation, the practice of listening to body sounds, has been used for centuries in respiratory and cardiac medicine to diagnose or track disease progression. To date, however, its use has been confined to clinical and highly controlled settings. Our work addresses this limitation: we devise a chest-mounted wearable for continuous monitoring of body sounds, that leverages data processing algorithms that run on-device. We concentrate on the detection of heart sounds to perform heart rate monitoring. To improve robustness to ambient noise and motion artefacts, our device uses an algorithm that explicitly segments the collected audio into the phases of the cardiac cycle. Our pilot study with 9 users demonstrates that it is possible to obtain heart rate estimates that are competitive with commercial heart rate monitors, with low enough power consumption for continuous use.
This paper reports on an in-depth study of electrocardiogram (ECG) biometrics in everyday life. We collected ECG data from 20 people over a week, using a non-medical chest tracker. We evaluated user identification accuracy in several scenarios and observed equal error rates of 9.15% to 21.91%, heavily depending on 1) the number of days used for training, and 2) the number of heartbeats used per identification decision. We conclude that ECG biometrics can work in the wild but are less robust than expected based on the literature, highlighting that previous lab studies obtained highly optimistic results with regard to real life deployments. We explain this with noise due to changing body postures and states as well as interrupted measures. We conclude with implications for future research and the design of ECG biometrics systems for real world deployments, including critical reflections on privacy.
We performed the first systematic study of a new attack on Ethereum that steals cryptocurrencies. The attack is due to the unprotected JSON-RPC endpoints existed in Ethereum nodes that could be exploited by attackers to transfer the Ether and ERC20 tokens to attackers-controlled accounts. This study aims to shed light on the attack, including malicious behaviors and profits of attackers. Specifically, we first designed and implemented a honeypot that could capture real attacks in the wild. We then deployed the honeypot and reported results of the collected data in a period of six months. In total, our system captured more than 308 million requests from 1,072 distinct IP addresses. We further grouped attackers into 36 groups with 59 distinct Ethereum accounts. Among them, attackers of 34 groups were stealing the Ether, while other 2 groups were targeting ERC20 tokens. The further behavior analysis showed that attackers were following a three-steps pattern to steal the Ether. Moreover, we observed an interesting type of transaction called zero gas transaction, which has been leveraged by attackers to steal ERC20 tokens. At last, we estimated the overall profits of attackers. To engage the whole community, the dataset of captured attacks is released on https://github.com/zjuicsr/eth-honey.
Constructing stealthy malware has gained increasing popularity among cyber attackers to conceal their malicious intent. Nevertheless, the constructed stealthy malware still fails to survive the reverse engineering by security experts. Therefore, this paper modeled a type of malware with an unbreakable security attribute-unbreakable malware (UBM), and made a systematical probe into this new type of threat through modeling, method analysis, experiments, evaluation and anti-defense capacity tests. Specifically, we first formalized the definition of UBM and analyzed its security attributes, put forward two core features that are essential for realizing the unbreakable security attribute, and their relevant tetrad for evaluation. Then, we worked out and implemented four algorithms for constructing UBM, and verified the unbreakable security attribute based on our evaluation of the abovementioned two core features. After that, the four verified algorithms were employed to construct UBM instances, and by analyzing their volume increment and anti-defense capacity, we confirmed real-world applicability of UBM. Finally, to address the new threats incurred by UBM to the cyberspace, this paper explored some possible defense measures, with a view to establishing defense systems against UBM attacks.
Molecular hydrogen is the most abundant molecule in the universe. A large fraction of H2 forms by association of hydrogen atoms adsorbed on polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), where formation rates depend crucially on the H sticking probability. We have experimentally studied PAH hydrogenation by exposing coronene cations, confined in a radiofrequency ion trap, to gas phase atomic hydrogen. A systematic increase of the number of H atoms adsorbed on the coronene with the time of exposure is observed. Odd coronene hydrogenation states dominate the mass spectrum up to 11 H atoms attached. This indicates the presence of a barrier preventing H attachment to these molecular systems. For the second and fourth hydrogenation, barrier heights of 72 +- 6 meV and 40 +- 10 meV, respectively are found which is in good agreement with theoretical predictions for the hydrogenation of neutral PAHs. Our experiments however prove that the barrier does not vanish for higher hydrogenation states. These results imply that PAH cations, as their neutral counterparts, exist in highly hydrogenated forms in the interstellar medium. Due to this catalytic activity, PAH cations and neutrals seem to contribute similarly to the formation of H2.
Magnetricity- the magnetic equivalent of electricity- was recently verified experimentally for the first time. Indeed, just as the stream of electric charges produces electric current, emergent magnetic monopoles have been observed to roam freely (generating magnetic current) in geometrically frustrated magnets known as spin ice. However, this is realized only by considering extreme physical conditions as a single crystal of spin ice has to be cooled to a temperature of $0.36 K$. Candidates to overcome this difficulty are artificial analogues of spin ice crystals, the so-called artificial spin ices. Here we show that, by tuning geometrical frustration down, a peculiar type of these artificial systems is an excellent candidate. We produce this material and experimentally observe the emergent monopoles; then, we calculate the effects of external magnetic fields, illustrating how to generate controlled magnetic currents. This potential nano-device for use in magnetronics can be practical even at room temperature and the relevant parameters (such as magnetic charge strength etc) for developing this technology can be tuned at will.