Category: Blog

Domain specific languages for robotics are hardly considered as an attack vector—however, we found that they expose sensitive primitives that enable vulnerabilities and malware. In an upcoming BlackHat talk and ASIA CCS paper, we will present the security-relevant impact of such code primitives, and we will introduce a code analyzer we built to automatically detect “insecure” uses of such code primitives. By Marcello Pogliani Research Collaborator at the NECSTLab, working on Systems Security This post is a “preview” of a research work that will be presented at Black Hat USA 2020 on August 5th, 2020. The history of this work goes back to 2017, when we published a paper showing what happens when and if sophisticated adversaries compromise an industrial robot. While working on that research, we learnt that robots…

Stress was first defined by Selye in 1936 as a general adaptation syndrome, caused by the perception of danger.In recent decades, mainly in developed countries, the trend of stressed individuals is dramatically increasing, affecting more than 70% of Americans. It has negative effects on both health, and private life and working performance. By Jessica Leoni,PhD candidate in Data Analysis and Decision Science at mOve lab, Politecnico di Milano Mindfulness techniques prove to be effective solutions in the management of stress and anxiety attacks, increasing the subject's awareness of their psychophysical state.Initially, these techniques were taught during outpatient sessions, where a series of sensors were applied to monitor the patient's stress level. The recent refinement of the acquisition technology and Machine-Learning algorithms made it possible to perform this monitoring outside the…

The cloud-computing paradigm is nowadays facing a fast-growing trend, playing a more and more important role in the development and maintenance cycle of big infrastructures. The vast majority of web-based application of everyday use is based on this paradigm: examples are video chats, widely employed during the lockdown. By Samuele Barbieri, Student in Computer Science and Engineering, Politecnico di Milano Not all computations, however, are efficiently performed by classic processors. Although the ones made available by cloud providers are far more powerful than those implemented in personal computers, they are often insufficient and technological solutions have to be developed in order to overcome this limitation. For this reason, heterogeneous computing systems involving specific accelerators have been found out to represent a valid alternative to satisfy the request of more stringent…

Cloud computing has experienced a massive evolution in the past few years. The unstoppable growth of cloud services is requiring more and more optimizations in order to satisfy the end users. For this purpose, autonomous systems – capable of self-adapting to the users’ requests and the environment – represent one of the growing interests in this research field.  By Giorgia Fiscaletti, Master Student in Computer Science and Engineering, Politecnico di Milano The past few years have seen a crucial development of the cloud computing paradigm, alongside its various execution models. This came with the growing need to extend the offer to new platforms and implement new optimizations for the services offered to the users. Optimizations that go from simple concepts – such as speed and resource usage – to the…

In the last few years we have seen a substantial growth of cloud services: cloud storage, video streaming, video conferencing, social platforms, instant messaging and smart working apps are applications that each of us has to deal with on a daily basis. What we are noticing today is an increase in the adoption of these new technologies: day after day they become more and more present in our daily life.  By Luca Danelutti, Undergraduated student in Computer Science and Engineering, Politecnico di Milano In this historical moment marked by a pandemic, it is easy to point out how some digital services are supporting us in carrying out work activities or in keeping in touch with our friends even if we are forced to limit real-life interactions. Technology seems to have…

The recent explosion of Big Data in the medical field has paved the way for the automatic analysis of vital signals. Currently, the majority of the diagnoses in critical situations are based on information obtained with outdated instrumentations that do not take advantage of newer technologies.  By Ian Di Dio Lavore, Marco Di Gennaro and Luigi Fusco Undergraduated students in Computer Science and Engineering, Politecnico di Milano Cardiovascular diseases are the first cause of death worldwide as stated by the World Health Organization. The “Golden-Hour” in emergencies refers to the short amount of time in which the patient has the highest chance of survival. The goal of the Anomalous project is to reduce the time needed for diagnosis to fall within the Golden-Hour. It has become a standard procedure to…

University means many things: lessons, exams, people. Study, learn, grow. A reality of which there is often little awareness in the context of academic life is that represented by student associations. By Greta Valsecchi and Alice ArcardiniJEMP members and student, Politecnico di Milano The horizon of student associations is very broad, varied and welcoming: we deal with representation, social, political, cultural, sports and entertainment projects. In different ways and forms, the aim is to bring students closer to the academic institution, to provide tools to enrich the course of study. Projects, people and ideas are just some of the benefits available to students who want to get involved to do something more.Sometimes these realities even manage to create a very tangible bridge between the academic classroom and the world of…

Universities have to face increasing challenges posed by new technologies, techniques, and tools. If we consider technical studies such as computer science and computer engineering, one of the key roles of the university is to help the students to learn the hard and soft skills that will enable them to continuously learn throughout their life. This is fundamental as technology keeps changing and the students should be able to apply the concepts they learn and measure themselves independently from the actual technology. By Rolando Brondolin and Alberto ParraviciniPhD Students at NECSTLab, Politecnico di Milano @NECSTLab, Politecnico di Milano Along with classical frontal lessons, Politecnico di Milano decided to add new classes to the “Passion In Action” program, to support the development of transversal, soft and social skills to encourage and…

In our previous article we introduced HyPPO, our project aimed at optimizing workloads in Docker and Kubernetes based environments, in order to minimize power consumption. To do so, HyPPO is equipped with a monitoring agent, DEEP-mon, which exploits Linux eBPF to collect various metrics at runtime, from Docker containers and assigns a power consumption level to each container. By Tommaso Sardelli Student at Politecnico di Milano With this follow up, we would like to talk about the recent changes we made to DEEP-mon, in order to add a new metric to our arsenal: latency.As we anticipated in the first article about DEEP-mon, our target is a specific kind of applications which are referred as On-Line Data Intensive applications (OLDI). Web search, advertising, and machine translation are some examples of this…