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This paper analyses several promising policies in the electronic parts industry for disrupting the flow of counterfeit electronic parts. A socio-technical electronic part supply-chain network model has been developed to facilitate policy analysis. The model is used to understand the technical and social dynamics associated with the insertion of counterfeit electronic components into critical systems (e.g., aerospace, transportation, defense, and infrastructure) and to analyze the impact of various anti-counterfeiting policies and practices. This network model is used to assess the effectiveness of mandatory original component manufacturer buyback programs and the debarment of distributors found to provide counterfeit components. In this agent-based model, each participant in the supply chain is modeled as an independent entity governed by its own motivations and constraints. The entities in the model include the original component manufacturers, distributors, system integrators, operators, and counterfeiters. Each of these entities has dynamic behaviors and connections to the other agents. Since time is an integral factor (lead times and inventory levels can be drivers behind the appearance of counterfeits), the simulation is dynamic. The model allows the prediction of the risk of counterfeits making it into an operator’s system and the length of time between relevant supply-chain events/disruptions and the appearance of counterfeits. 

Contaminants and other agents are often present at the interface between two fluids, giving rise to rheological properties such as surface shear and dilatational viscosities. The dynamics of viscous drops with interfacial viscosities has attracted greater interest in recent years, due to the influence of surface rheology on deformation and the surrounding flows. We investigate the effects of shear and dilatational viscosities on the electro-deformation of a viscous drop using the Taylor–Melcher leaky dielectric model. We use a large deformation analysis to derive an ordinary differential equation for the drop shape. Our model elucidates the contributions of each force to the overall deformation of the drop and reveals a rich range of dynamic behaviors that show the effects of surface viscosities and their dependence on rheological and electrical properties of the system. We also examine the physical mechanisms underlying the observed behaviors by analyzing the surface dilatation and surface deformation. 

Microservice Architecture (MSA) is rapidly taking over modern software engineering and becoming the predominant architecture of new cloud-based applications (apps). There are many advantages to using MSA, but there are many downsides to using a more complex architecture than a typical monolithic enterprise app. Beyond the normal bad coding practices and code-smells of a typical app, MSA specific code-smells are difficult to discover within a distributed app. There are many static code analysis tools for monolithic apps, but no tool exists to offer code-smell detection for MSA-based apps. This paper proposes a new approach to detect code smells in distributed apps based on MSA. We develop an open-source tool, MSANose, which can accurately detect up to eleven different types of MSA specific code smells. We demonstrate our tool through a case study on a benchmark MSA app and verify its accuracy. Our results show that it is possible to detect code-smells within MSA apps using bytecode and or source code analysis throughout the development or before deployment to production. 

This article, for the first time, demonstrates Cross-device Deep Learning Side-Channel Attack (X-DeepSCA), achieving an accuracy of > 99.9%, even in presence of significantly higher inter-device variations compared to the inter-key variations. Augmenting traces captured from multiple devices for training and with proper choice of hyper-parameters, the proposed 256-class Deep Neural Network (DNN) learns accurately from the power side-channel leakage of an AES-128 target encryption engine, and an N-trace (N ≤ 10) X-DeepSCA attack breaks different target devices within seconds compared to a few minutes for a correlational power analysis (CPA) attack, thereby increasing the threat surface for embedded devices significantly. Even for low SNR scenarios, the proposed X-DeepSCA attack achieves ~10× lower minimum traces to disclosure (MTD) compared to a traditional CPA. 

Heterochromatin is mostly composed of long stretches of repeated DNA sequences prone to ectopic recombination during double-strand break (DSB) repair. In Drosophila, “safe” homologous recombination (HR) repair of heterochromatic DSBs relies on a striking relocalization of repair sites to the nuclear periphery. Central to understanding heterochromatin repair is the ability to investigate the 4D dynamics (movement in space and time) of repair sites. A specific challenge of these studies is preventing phototoxicity and photobleaching effects while imaging the sample over long periods of time, and with sufficient time points and Z-stacks to track repair foci over time. Here we describe an optimized approach for high-resolution live imaging of heterochromatic DSBs in Drosophila cells, with a specific emphasis on the fluorescent markers and imaging setup used to capture the motion of repair foci over long-time periods. We detail approaches that minimize photobleaching and phototoxicity with a DeltaVision widefield deconvolution microscope, and image processing techniques for signal recovery postimaging using SoftWorX and Imaris software. We present a method to derive mean square displacement curves revealing some of the biophysical properties of the motion. Finally, we describe a method in R to identify tracts of directed motions (DMs) in mixed trajectories. These approaches enable a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of heterochromatin dynamics and genome stability in the three-dimensional context of the nucleus and have broad applicability in the field of nuclear dynamics.