Input-Output Example-Guided Data Deobfuscation on Binary

Data obfuscation is usually used by malicious software to avoid detection and reverse analysis. When analyzing the malware, such obfuscations have to be removed to restore the program into an easier understandable form (deobfuscation). The deobfuscation based on program synthesis provides a good solution for treating the target program as a black box. Thus, deobfuscation becomes a problem of finding the shortest instruction sequence to synthesize a program with the same input-output behavior as the target program. Existing work has two limitations: assuming that obfuscated code snippets in the target program are known and using a stochastic search algorithm resulting in low efficiency. In this paper, we propose fine-grained obfuscation detection for locating obfuscated code snippets by machine learning. Besides, we also combine the program synthesis and a heuristic search algorithm of Nested Monte Carlo Search. We have applied a prototype implementation of our ideas to data obfuscation in different tools, including OLLVM and Tigress. Our experimental results suggest that this approach is highly effective in locating and deobfuscating the binaries with data obfuscation, with an accuracy of at least 90.34%. Compared with the state-of-the-art deobfuscation technique, our approach’s efficiency has increased by 75%, with the success rate increasing by 5%.

A Numerical Study of Optimization Methods for Phase-Only Optical Pulse-Shaping

The field of optical pulse-shaping and its applications is introduced, with a focus on time-domain approaches. A numerical investigation of all-fiber, time-domain, phase-only filtering is conducted for arbitrary temporal pulse synthesis. The theoretical phase modulation function required for generating use- specific target-intensity profiles is calculated using different optimization methods including a Brute Force Monte Carlo search, the Simulated Annealing method and the Genetic Algorithm method. The convergence speed, computational complexity and accuracy of these methods is compared under binary phase-only modulation, where the Genetic algorithm was found to outperform other methods.

InsulatorGAN: A Transmission Line Insulator Detection Model Using Multi-Granularity Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets for UAV Inspection

Insulator detection is one of the most significant issues in high-voltage transmission line inspection using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and has attracted attention from researchers all over the world. The state-of-the-art models in object detection perform well in insulator detection, but the precision is limited by the scale of the dataset and parameters. Recently, the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) was found to offer excellent image generation. Therefore, we propose a novel model called InsulatorGAN based on using conditional GANs to detect insulators in transmission lines. However, due to the fixed categories in datasets such as ImageNet and Pascal VOC, the generated insulator images are of a low resolution and are not sufficiently realistic. To solve these problems, we established an insulator dataset called InsuGenSet for model training. InsulatorGAN can generate high-resolution, realistic-looking insulator-detection images that can be used for data expansion. Moreover, InsulatorGAN can be easily adapted to other power equipment inspection tasks and scenarios using one generator and multiple discriminators. To give the generated images richer details, we also introduced a penalty mechanism based on a Monte Carlo search in InsulatorGAN. In addition, we proposed a multi-scale discriminator structure based on a multi-task learning mechanism to improve the quality of the generated images. Finally, experiments on the InsuGenSet and CPLID datasets demonstrated that our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art models by advancing both the resolution and quality of the generated images as well as the position of the detection box in the images.

Policy adaptation for vehicle routing

Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation (NRPA) is a Monte Carlo search algorithm that learns a playout policy in order to solve a single player game. In this paper we apply NRPA to the vehicle routing problem. This problem is important for large companies that have to manage a fleet of vehicles on a daily basis. Real problems are often too large to be solved exactly. The algorithm is applied to standard problem of the literature and to the specific problems of EDF (Electricité De France, the main French electric utility company). These specific problems have peculiar constraints. NRPA gives better result than the algorithm previously used by EDF.