Muhammad Arif Butt

Containerized workloads are gaining traction due to microservices architecture adaptation in many fields, including healthcare, finance, Internet of Things, and smart cities. Modern data centers are containerized to facilitate this growing demand. Most of the existing resource allocation methods for data centers used efficient scheduling algorithms to place the containers using static computing resources. These static resource allocation techniques are not energy efficient and do not help maximize data center utilization. Dynamic resource allocation and a migration-enabled placement method can reduce energy utilization while improving the utilization of the available computing infrastructure. This article presents and evaluates a novel dynamic resource management system that uses active migrations to minimize energy utilization to serve containerized workloads and improve data center utilization. Our approach uses a deep learning method to estimate the job execution time and then employs an unsupervised learning method to identify similar jobs. Similar jobs are placed and migrated to achieve energy efficiency and better utilization of the available data center infrastructure. Our proposed system is evaluated and compared with the existing state-of-the-art baseline methods. The proposed solution reduces the energy consumption from $\times 1.18$ to $\times 2.35$ compared to the baseline methods while maintaining similar performance.

Buffer Overflow (BOF) has been a ubiquitous security vulnerability for more than three decades, potentially compromising any software application or system. This vulnerability occurs primarily when someone attempts to write more bytes of data (shellcode) than a buffer can handle. To date, this primitive attack has been used to attack many different software systems, resulting in numerous buffer overflows. The most common type of buffer overflow is the stack overflow vulnerability, through which an adversary can gain admin privileges remotely, which can then be used to execute shellcode. Numerous mitigation techniques have been developed and deployed to reduce the likelihood of BOF attacks, but attackers still manage to bypass these techniques. A variety of mitigation techniques have been proposed and implemented on the hardware, operating system, and compiler levels. These techniques include No-EXecute (NX) and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). The NX bit prevents the execution of malicious code by making various portions of the address space of a process inoperable. The ASLR algorithm randomly assigns addresses to various parts of the logical address space of a process as it is loaded in memory for execution. Position Independent Executable (PIE) and ASLR provide more robust protection by randomly generating binary segments. Read-only relocation (RELRO) protects the Global Offset Table (GOT) from overwriting attacks. StackGuard protects the stack by placing the canary before the return address in order to prevent stack smashing attacks. Despite all the mitigation techniques in place, hackers continue to be successful in bypassing them, making buffer overflow a persistent vulnerability. The current work aims to describe the stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability and review in detail the mitigation techniques reported in the literature as well as how hackers attempt to bypass them.

We present a new intuitionistic fuzzy rule-based decision-making system based on intuitionistic fuzzy sets for a process scheduler of a batch operating system. Our proposed intuitionistic fuzzy scheduling algorithm, inputs the nice value and burst time of all available processes in the ready queue, intuitionistically fuzzify the input values, triggers appropriate rules of our intuitionistic fuzzy inference engine and finally calculates the dynamic priority (dp) of all the processes in the ready queue. Once the dp of every process is calculated the ready queue is sorted in decreasing order of dp of every process. The process with maximum dp value is sent to the central processing unit for execution. Finally, we show complete working of our algorithm on two different data sets and give comparisons with some standard non-preemptive process schedulers.