Abstract As high performance computing (HPC) moves towards exascale, storage systems face core challenges such as data flooding, bandwidth bottlenecks, mixed load coordination, and performance cost balancing. This article systematically reviews the cutting-edge technologies of high performance storage systems, covering four aspects: storage architecture, hardware, software, and networking. At the architecture level, storage computing separation, distributed and hierarchical architectures decouple computing and storage resources, and optimize latency and scalability through high-speed networks. Typical cases include supercomputer systems such as Frontier and Fugaku. In terms of hardware, persistent memory, all flash array, and integrated storage and computing chips significantly improve throughput and reduce latency, while ZNS SSD and QLC technology optimize cost and lifespan. At the software level, distributed parallel file systems respond to massive small files and high concurrency access through burst buffering technology. In network communication, low latency protocols such as Slingshot, InfiniBand, and RoCE support TB level bandwidth, while CXL technology promotes storage resource pooling. In the future, photon interconnection, AI native architecture, and green energy-saving technologies will further promote the development of high performance storage towards efficiency and intelligence, to support ZB level storage requirements in scenarios such as Exascale computing and AI training.

Modern intensive duck farming has improved production efficiency while facing health problems for ducks. As duck behaviors are closely related to their health status, accurately monitoring their behaviors is necessary. With the development of artificial intelligence (AI), the application of AI offers an effective approach to animal behavior recognition. Currently, accurately recognizing duck behaviors consistently from day to night remains a challenge. This challenge stems from the persistent dynamic changes in light, which can lead to significant performance degradation in conventional behavior recognition methods. To overcome this challenge, this study proposes an enhanced You Only Look Once version 11 small (YOLOv11s) with frequency feature enhancement and illumination perception for duck behavior recognition in dynamic light scenarios (FIY4DBR). Specifically, to tackle the problem of unclear edge, texture, and behavior characteristics of ducks in the low-light condition, a frequency feature enhancement mechanism (FFEM) is designed, which effectively enhances the duck feature representation ability. Additionally, to improve the model’s robustness to light variations, an illumination perception mechanism (IPM) is developed, which adjusts the contrast of objects and background features according to different brightness conditions, thereby enhancing the model’s generalization capability across different brightness scenarios. Experimental simulations on the self-built dataset show that FIY4DBR achieves an average recognition precision of 92.0% and recall of 88.8%, representing improvements of 1.8 and 3.6 percentage points over the baseline YOLOv11s. This demonstrates that the proposed FIY4DBR provides a high-precision and highly adaptive solution for intelligent livestock behavior monitoring, contributing to advancing the development of intelligent farming technologies.

Directed Grey-Box Fuzzing (DGF) can improve bug exposure efficiency by stressing bug-prone areas. Recent studies have modeled DGF as the problem of finding and optimizing paths to reach target sites. However, they still face the “ multi-path ” challenge. When a target site is reachable by multiple paths, it is crucial to comprehensively evaluate and effectively select these paths, as this affects the fuzzer’s choice between reaching target sites via optimal paths and enhancing path diversity toward targets to expose hidden bugs in non-optimal paths. In this article, we propose MultiGo, a directed hybrid fuzzer designed for multi-path optimization. First, we propose a new fitness metric called path difficulty to comprehensively evaluate the promising paths. This metric uses the Poisson distribution to estimate the probability of exploring basic blocks along execution paths based on statistical block frequency, distinguishing between optimal and challenging paths. With path difficulty as a key factor, a customized Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit (CMAB) model is employed to efficiently optimize path scheduling by comprehensively considering the impact of testing conditions on path scheduling. We introduce the concept of the fuzzing context to represent and evaluate testing conditions, which encompass factors such as path characteristics (e.g., path difficulty), the testing agent (e.g., fuzzing or symbolic execution), and the testing goal (e.g., path exploitation or exploration). Then, the CMAB model predicts the expected rewards for scheduling paths under different testing agents and goals, thereby optimizing path scheduling. By leveraging the CMAB model, MultiGo enhances DGF’s capability to explore easier paths and symbolic execution’s capacity to handle more complex ones, enabling efficient target reaching through optimal paths while ensuring sufficient coverage of non-optimal paths. MultiGo is evaluated on 136 target sites of 41 real-world programs from 3 benchmarks. The experimental results show that MultiGo outperforms the state-of-the-art directed fuzzers (AFLGo, SelectFuzz, Beacon, WindRanger, and DAFL) and hybrid fuzzers (SymCC and SymGo) in reaching target sites and exposing known vulnerabilities. Moreover, MultiGo also discovered 14 undisclosed vulnerabilities.

System call interception is essential for tools that modify or monitor application behavior. However, current system call interception solutions on ARM platforms still face challenges related to performance and completeness. This paper introduces ASC-Hook, an efficient and comprehensive binary rewriting framework specifically designed for intercepting system calls on ARM architectures. ASC-Hook tackles two critical challenges: the misalignment of the target address caused by directly replacing the SVC instruction with BR x8, and the return to the original control flow after system call interception. To achieve this, we propose a hybrid replacement strategy combined with a customized trampoline mechanism. Additionally, multiple completeness strategies tailored for system call interception are implemented to guarantee thorough coverage. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that ASC-Hook reduces overhead to as low as 1/29 of existing solutions, while incurring an average performance loss of only 3.8% in system call-intensive applications.

Abstract To better provide fast computing services, vehicular edge computing can improve the quality of service and quality of experience for intelligent transportation in 6G by reducing task transmission delay. However, vehicular edge networks face network capability limitations and privacy issues in practice. High‐speed vehicles and the time‐varying environment make them unpredictable. In the meantime, smart vehicles with distinct computation capabilities need to process various tasks with different resource requirements, which will inevitably cause untimely task offloading and massive energy consumption. This paper proposes to use the space‐air‐ground integrated network with blockchain to enhance the network capability and the privacy protection of vehicular edge networks. The digital twin is taken to better capture the dynamic characteristics of vehicles and the entire environment. The urgency level is introduced to meet the delay requirements of different tasks, while considering the impact of digital twin deviation on task offloading. Moreover, the selection algorithm and the task distribution algorithm based on the improved genetic algorithmare are proposed to obtain the optimal offloading strategy. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with the existing algorithms, the proposed scheme can maximize the system utility while diminishing the total time for task processing.

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), data centers are facing growing performance demands for flow deadline requirements, other to the low latency and high throughput. To address congestion issues that affect the performance of data center networks, this paper proposes D2C4, a deadline-aware data-credit coupled congestion control scheme. By tightly coupled data-credit integration using an ECN-based feedback loop, D2C4 minimizes credit waste while a credit-driven scheduler meets IoT applications’ flow deadlines. The key innovations of D2C4 include: 1) Data-credit coupling for performance gains; 2) ECN-based credit rate control reducing waste; 3) Deadline-sensitive credit-based flow scheduling to meet flow deadline demands. We conduct extensive experiments of D2C4 through small-scale DPDK-based tests and large-scale OMNeT++ simulations. Experimental results show that D2C4 outperforms existing protocols in flow completion time, throughput, deadline miss ratio, and packet drop.

Turbulence, a complex multi-scale phenomenon inherent in fluid flow systems, presents critical challenges and opportunities for understanding physical mechanisms across scientific and engineering domains. Although high-resolution (HR) turbulence data remain indispensable for advancing both theoretical insights and engineering solutions, their acquisition is severely limited by prohibitively high computational costs. While deep learning architectures show transformative potential in reconstructing high-fidelity flow representations from sparse measurements, current methodologies suffer from two inherent constraints: strict reliance on perfectly paired training data and inability to perform multi-scale reconstruction within a unified framework. To address these challenges, we propose HADF, a hash-adaptive dynamic fusion implicit network for turbulence reconstruction. Specifically, we develop a low-resolution (LR) consistency loss that facilitates effective model training under conditions of missing paired data, eliminating the conventional requirement for fully matched LR and HR datasets. We further employ hash-adaptive spatial encoding and dynamic feature fusion to extract turbulence features, mapping them with implicit neural representations for reconstruction at arbitrary resolutions. Experimental results demonstrate that HADF achieves superior performance in global reconstruction accuracy and local physical properties compared to state-of-the-art models. It precisely recovers fine turbulence details for partially unpaired data conditions and diverse resolutions by training only once while maintaining robustness against noise.

Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) has been widely recognized as an effective technique for mitigating control-flow hijacking attacks. However, many binary-level CFI approaches suffer from weaknesses in safeguarding forward edges, particularly for the obfuscated binaries, due to the imprecision in binary analysis or heuristic algorithms. Moreover, these approaches often involve non-negligible overhead and are challenging to deploy, as they instrument plenty of code or employ hardware tracing to enforce the CFI policies. This paper introduces Mobius, the first complete implementation of security-instruction-based binary-only CFI solution on commercial processors. Mobius leverages the Branch Target Identification (BTI) technology in Arm v8.5 to safeguard the forward edges of binaries and shared libraries efficiently. It determines the forward-edge targets without false negatives and carefully instruments the bti instructions to conduct the CFI checking efficiently. Then, it mounts a runtime monitor to detect potential attacks. We deploy Mobius on an Alibaba Cloud server with Yitian 710 processors in practice without modifying the kernel or loader. Remarkably, Mobius successfully provides efficient protection for real-world applications, including obfuscated code, with marginal overhead (5.78% on SPEC2006).

Bugs exist in hardware, such as CPU. Unlike software bugs, these hardware bugs need to be detected before deployment. Previous fuzzing work in CPU bug detection has several disadvantages, e.g., the length of RTL input instructions keeps growing, and longer inputs are ineffective for fuzzing. In this paper, we propose INSTILLER (Instruction Distiller), an RTL fuzzer based on ant colony optimization (ACO). First, to keep the input instruction length short and efficient in fuzzing, it distills input instructions with a variant of ACO (VACO). Next, related work cannot simulate realistic interruptions well in fuzzing, and INSTILLER solves the problem of inserting interruptions and exceptions in generating the inputs. Third, to further improve the fuzzing performance of INSTILLER, we propose hardware-based seed selection and mutation strategies. We implement a prototype and conduct extensive experiments against state-of-the-art fuzzing work in real-world target CPU cores. In experiments, INSTILLER has 29.4% more coverage than DiFuzzRTL. In addition, 17.0% more mismatches are detected by INSTILLER. With the VACO algorithm, INSTILLER generates 79.3% shorter input instructions than DiFuzzRTL, demonstrating its effectiveness in distilling the input instructions. In addition, the distillation leads to a 6.7% increase in execution speed on average.

Vulnerability fixing is time-consuming, hence, not all of the discovered vulnerabilities can be fixed timely. In reality, developers prioritize vulnerability fixing based on exploitability. Large numbers of vulnerabilities are delayed to patch or even ignored as they are regarded as “unexploitable” or underestimated owing to the difficulty in exploiting the weak primitives. However, exploits may have been in the wild. In this paper, to exploit the weak primitives that traditional approaches fail to exploit, we propose a versatile exploitation strategy that can transform weak exploit primitives into strong exploit primitives. Based on a special object in the kernel named Thanos object, our approach can exploit a UAF vulnerability that does not have function pointer dereference and an OOB write vulnerability that has limited write length and value. Our approach overcomes the shortage that traditional exploitation strategies heavily rely on the capability of the vulnerability. To facilitate using Thanos objects, we devise a tool namedTAODEto automatically search for eligible Thanos objects from the kernel. Then, it evaluates the usability of the identified Thanos objects by the complexity of the constraints. Finally, it pairs vulnerabilities with eligible Thanos objects. We have evaluated our approach with real-world kernels.TAODEsuccessfully identified numerous Thanos objects from Linux. Using the identified Thanos objects, we proved the feasibility of our approach with 20 real-world vulnerabilities, most of which traditional techniques failed to exploit. Through the experiments, we find that in addition to exploiting weak primitives, our approach can sometimes bypass the kernel SMAP mechanism (CVE-2016-10150, CVE-2016-0728), better utilize the leaked heap pointer address (CVE-2022-25636), and even theoretically break certain vulnerability patches (e.g., double-free).

The goal of research in Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is to build a robust and strong recognizability model. In this paper, we propose a new scheme for FER systems based on convolutional neural network. Part of the regular convolution operation is replaced by depthwise separable convolution to reduce the number of parameters and the computational workload; the self-adaption joint loss function is adopted to improve the classification performance. In addition, we balance our train set through data augmentation, and we preprocess the input images through illumination processing, face detection, and other methods, effectively maximizing the expression recognition rate. Experiments to validate our methods are conducted based on the TensorFlow platform and Fer2013 dataset. We analyze the experimental results before and after train set balancing and network model modification, and we compare our results with those of other researchers. The results show that our method is effective at increasing the expression recognition rate under the same experiment conditions. We further conduct an experiment on our own expression dataset relevant to driving safety, and it yields similar results.

Similarity of nominal data plays fundamental roles in numerous fields of both machine learning and data mining. Unlike the similarity of numerical data, that of nominal data is much more difficult to describe, and few efforts have been done for it. Although existing nominal similarity measures can reveal a part of data properties, they suffer from low accuracy due to ignoring value relationships or integrating multi-view relationships inappropriately. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical measure for nominal data similarity (HNS). The HNS leverages the intrinsic data characteristics by considering low-level information both within and between attributes, and hierarchically seizes the value distributions, attribute interactions and attribute to object contributions. Meanwhile, it aggregates multi-view relationships trough a bottom to top framework, remaining consistency as well as complementary details. We theoretically analyzed this measure, and experiments on six UCI data sets demonstrate that the HNS outperforms the state-of-the-art nominal similarity measures in term of target alignment and clustering accuracy.