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Fuzz testing, or fuzzing, has become one of the de facto standard techniques for bug finding in the software industry. In general, fuzzing provides various inputs to the target program with the goal of discovering unhandled exceptions and crashes. In business sectors where the time budget is limited, software vendors often launch many fuzzing instances in parallel as a common means of increasing code coverage. However, most of the popular fuzzing tools — in their parallel mode — naively run multiple instances concurrently, without elaborate distribution of workload. This can lead different instances to explore overlapped code regions, eventually reducing the benefits of concurrency. In this paper, we propose a general model to describe parallel fuzzing. This model distributes mutually-exclusive but similarly-weighted tasks to different instances, facilitating concurrency and also fairness across instances. Following this model, we develop a solution, called AFL-EDGE, to improve the parallel mode of AFL, considering a round of mutations to a unique seed as a task and adopting edge coverage to define the uniqueness of a seed. We have implemented AFL-EDGE on top of AFL and evaluated the implementation with AFL on 9 widely used benchmark programs. It shows that AFL-EDGE can benefit the edgemore »coverage of AFL. In a 24-hour test, the increase of edge coverage brought by AFL-EDGE to AFL ranges from 9.5% to 10.2%, depending on the number of instances. As a side benefit, we discovered 14 previously unknown bugs.« less

In this paper, we present a new computational pipeline for designing and fabricating 4D garments as knitwear that considers comfort during body movement. This is achieved by careful control of elasticity distribution to reduce uncomfortable pressure and unwanted sliding caused by body motion. We exploit the ability to knit patterns in different elastic levels by single-jersey jacquard (SJJ) with two yarns. We design the distribution of elasticity for a garment by physics-based computation, the optimized elasticity on the garment is then converted into instructions for a digital knitting machine by two algorithms proposed in this paper. Specifically, a graph-based algorithm is proposed to generate knittable stitch meshes that can accurately capture the 3D shape of a garment, and a tiling algorithm is employed to assign SJJ patterns on the stitch mesh to realize the designed distribution of elasticity. The effectiveness of our approach is verified on simulation results and on specimens physically fabricated by knitting machines.

ABSTRACT X-ray observations provide a unique probe of the accretion disc corona of supermassive black holes (SMBHs). In this paper, we present a uniform Chandra X-ray data analysis of a sample of 152 z ≥ 4.5 quasars. We firmly detect 46 quasars of this sample in 0.5–2 keV above 3σ and calculate the upper limits of the X-ray flux of the remaining. We also estimate the power-law photon index of the X-ray spectrum of 31 quasars. 24 of our sample quasars are detected in the FIRST or NVSS radio surveys; all of them are radio-loud. We statistically compare the X-ray properties of our z ≥ 4.5 quasars to other X-ray samples of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) at different redshifts. The relation between the rest-frame X-ray luminosity and other quasar parameters, such as the bolometric luminosity, UV luminosity, or SMBH mass, shows large scatters. These large scatters can be attributed to the narrow luminosity range at the highest redshift, the large measurement error based on relatively poor X-ray data, and the inclusion of radio-loud quasars in the sample. The LX–LUV relationship is significantly sublinear. We do not find a significant redshift evolution of the LX–LUV relation, expressed either in the slope ofmore »this relation, or the departure of individual AGNs from the best-fitting αOX–LUV relation (ΔαOX). The median value of the X-ray photon index is Γ ≈ 1.79, which does not show redshift evolution from z = 0 to z ∼ 7. The X-ray and UV properties of the most distant quasars could potentially be used as a standard candle to constrain cosmological models. The large scatter of our sample on the Hubble diagram highlights the importance of future large unbiased deep X-ray and radio surveys in using quasars in cosmological studies.« less