This comprehensive review outlines the impact of military-relevant respiratory infections, with special attention to recruit training environments, influenza pandemics in 1918 to 1919 and 2009 to ...2010, and peacetime operations and conflicts in the past 25 years. Outbreaks and epidemiologic investigations of viral and bacterial infections among high-risk groups are presented, including (i) experience by recruits at training centers, (ii) impact on advanced trainees in special settings, (iii) morbidity sustained by shipboard personnel at sea, and (iv) experience of deployed personnel. Utilizing a pathogen-by-pathogen approach, we examine (i) epidemiology, (ii) impact in terms of morbidity and operational readiness, (iii) clinical presentation and outbreak potential, (iv) diagnostic modalities, (v) treatment approaches, and (vi) vaccine and other control measures. We also outline military-specific initiatives in (i) surveillance, (ii) vaccine development and policy, (iii) novel influenza and coronavirus diagnostic test development and surveillance methods, (iv) influenza virus transmission and severity prediction modeling efforts, and (v) evaluation and implementation of nonvaccine, nonpharmacologic interventions.
ILR: Where'd My Gadgets Go? Hiser, J.; Nguyen-Tuong, A.; Co, M. ...
2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
Conference Proceeding
Odprti dostop
Through randomization of the memory space and the confinement of code to non-data pages, computer security researchers have made a wide range of attacks against program binaries more difficult. ...However, attacks have evolved to exploit weaknesses in these defenses. To thwart these attacks, we introduce a novel technique called Instruction Location Randomization (ILR). Conceptually, ILR randomizes the location of every instruction in a program, thwarting an attacker's ability to re-use program functionality (e.g., arc-injection attacks and return-oriented programming attacks). ILR operates on arbitrary executable programs, requires no compiler support, and requires no user interaction. Thus, it can be automatically applied post-deployment, allowing easy and frequent re-randomization. Our preliminary prototype, working on 32-bit x86 Linux ELF binaries, provides a high degree of entropy. Individual instructions are randomly placed within a 31-bit address space. Thus, attacks that rely on a priori knowledge of the location of code or derandomization are not feasible. We demonstrated ILR's defensive capabilities by defeating attacks against programs with vulnerabilities, including Adobe's PDF viewer, acroread, which had an in-the-wild vulnerability. Additionally, using an industry-standard CPU performance benchmark suite, we compared the run time of prototype ILR-protected executables to that of native executables. The average run-time overhead of ILR was 13% with more than half the programs having effectively no overhead (15 out of 29), indicating that ILR is a realistic and cost-effective mitigation technique.
Tuberculosis (TB) is a communicable disease that poses a threat to force health protection to the U.S. military. The rate of TB disease in the military is low; however, there are unique challenges ...for its control in this setting. As a low-risk population, TB testing in the U.S. military can be scaled back from the universal testing approach used previously. Reactivation of latent TB infection (LTBI) present at accession into service is the most important factor leading to TB disease; therefore, its diagnosis and treatment among recruits should be given a high priority. Deployment and overseas military service is an uncommon but important source of TB infection, and rigorous surveillance should be ensured. Case management of TB disease and LTBI can be improved by the use of cohort reviews at the service and installation levels and case finding and delays in the diagnosis of TB disease can be improved by education of providers, as well as increased use of molecular diagnostic tests. Program outcomes can be improved by making LTBI treatment compulsory, offering shorter treatment regimens, and increasing accountability through oversight and evaluation. The diagnosis of LTBI can be improved by implementing targeted testing in all settings and reducing confirmatory interferon-gamma release assay testing.
Global register partitioning Hiser, J.; Carr, S.; Sweany, P.
Proceedings 2000 International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (Cat. No.PR00622),
2000
Conference Proceeding
Modern computers have taken advantage of the instruction-level parallelism (ILP) available in programs with advances in both architecture and compiler design. Unfortunately, large amounts of ILP ...hardware and aggressive instruction scheduling techniques put great demands on a machine's register resources. With increasing ILP, it becomes difficult to maintain a single monolithic register bank and a high clock rate. To provide support for large amounts of ILP while retaining a high clock rate, registers can be partitioned among several different register banks. Each bank is directly accessible by only a subset of the functional units with explicit inter-bank copies required to move data between banks. Therefore, a compiler must deal not only with achieving maximal parallelism via aggressive scheduling, but also with data placement to limit inter-bank copies. Our approach to code generation for ILP architectures with partitioned register resources provides flexibility by representing machine dependent features as node and edge weights and by remaining independent of scheduling and register allocation methods. Experimentation with our framework has shown a degradation in execution performance of 10% on average when compared to an unrealizable monolithic-register-bank architecture with the same level of ILP.
Security monitoring systems operate typically at the process level. Various authors have indicated that monitoring at a finer level of granularity than the process is highly desirable. In this paper, ...we introduce COMB, a framework for imposing policies to confine the behavior of applications. Unlike previous approaches, our technique is applied per component (functions, libraries, and/or plugins) while requiring only the availability of the binary executable form of the program. To demonstrate the feasibility of COMB, we report a case study on a real-world, representative program, the Firefox web browser. Two characteristics of Firefox permit possibly untrusted code to be executed. First, it provides an extensible architecture to allow third-party developers to extend its functionality, and second it makes use of more than 150 external libraries. Using a simple system-call monitoring policy applied to Firefox plugins, we show that COMB can provide protection with reasonable overhead.
This study was designed to test the hypothesis that significant maternal physiologic adaptations to pregnancy take place in multiple systems long before they are functionally necessary (during the ...embryonic period). To test this hypothesis, 20 women were studied serially before pregnancy and in the seventh and fifteenth postconceptional week of an accurately dated, clinically normal, singleton pregnancy. By the seventh week, significant changes were noted in body composition and cardiopulmonary and metabolic functions. Body fat and plasma volume increased 2% and 11%, respectively, accounting for all of the observed 2 kg weight gain. With the patient standing at rest after eating, heart rate increased 13 beats/min (16%) while mean arterial pressure fell 8 mm Hg (9%). Minute ventilation rose 24% and oxygen consumption increased by 27 ml/min, or 10%. The postprandial respiratory exchange ratio also increased, from 0.78 to 0.83; the whole blood glucose level was unchanged at rest, although there was a 15% decrease in whole blood lactate levels. We conclude that our hypothesis is correct, which suggests these adaptations are preparative and may have diagnostic value.
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