Effective defense against threat actors requires that security professionals accurately identify the underlying weaknesses associated with common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs). This under standing is crucial for deploying appropriate defensive mechanisms and prioritizing remediation efforts. However, manually mapping CVEs to common weakness enumerations (CWEs) has become increasingly impractical due to the rapid increase of new CVEs and the extensive, complex CWE taxonomy. In 2025, the number of CVEs awaiting analysis exceeded 25,000. To automate the mapping between CVEs and CWEs, we propose to leverage two insights. To harness the power of large language models, we first fine-tune different language models to perform this mapping based on the vulnerability-to-weakness relation. Second, we propose a supervised framework leveraging the hierarchical structure of CWEs, where we first categorize vulnerabilities into broad CWE classes (e.g., Injection, Buffer Overflow), which helps capture high-level patterns, and then utilizes specialized subnet works to distinguish fine-grained differences within each class. Evaluated on a benchmarkthat covers 95% of all CVEs associated with a CWE, our approach improves F1-score by 5% over the best prior supervised method, demonstrating the value of combining model fine-tuning with hierarchy-aware classification.

In this position paper we introduce Virtual Telco, a comprehensive effort to simplify the management of deployed telecommunication services by using a Cloud computing approach. The main objective of Virtual Telco is to replace the costly dedicated hardware implementing several centralized control plane functions and other services with distributed solutions that may be allocated on-demand over a pool of dependable, dynamically contracted computing and networking resources that are easy to manage. Virtual Telco relies on state-of-the-art techniques in the domains of virtualization and distributed systems to meet the challenging criteria of reliability, scalability, and timeliness required by present and future telecommunication standards and services. As a representative example of a Virtual Telco application, we propose the case of the distributed mobility management entity (MME) for next-generation LTE cellular networks.

The LTE architecture consists of eNBs that provide wireless connectivity to each UE, S-GWs that anchor the user plane for mobility, MMEs that provide control-plane support to each UE in its domain such as handover, paging, bearer management and tracking area updates and finally, PDNs that bridge the cellular network to the Internet. In this paper, we investigate LTE architectures with distributed MMEs and with a centralized MME. We present an analysis of the signaling load performance at the MME serving multimedia-capable UEs and compare the performance under both architectures. We propose a multicast paging procedure to alleviate the MME signaling load and compare the MME performance with multicast and unicast paging procedures. Our results show significant benefits of multicasting.

Traditionally, cellular systems have been built in a hierarchical manner: many specialized cellular access network elements that collectively form a hierarchical cellular system. When 2G and later 3G systems were designed there was a good reason to make system hierarchical: from a cost-perspective it was better to concentrate traffic and to share the cost of processing equipment over a large set of users while keeping the base stations relatively cheap. However, we believe the economic reasons for designing cellular systems in a hierarchical manner have disappeared: in fact, hierarchical architectures hinder future efficient deployments. In this paper, we argue for completely flat cellular wireless systems, which need just one type of specialized network element to provide radio access network (RAN) functionality, supplemented by standard IP-based network elements to form a cellular network. While the reason for building a cellular system in a hierarchical fashion has disappeared, there are other good reasons to make the system architecture flat: (1) as wireless transmission techniques evolve into hybrid ARQ systems, there is less need for a hierarchical cellular system to support spatial diversity; (2) we foresee that future cellular networks are part of the Internet, while hierarchical systems typically use interfaces between network elements that are specific to cellular standards or proprietary. At best such systems use IP as a transport medium, not as a core component; (3) a flat cellular system can be self scaling while a hierarchical system has inherent scaling issues; (4) moving all access technologies to the edge of the network enables ease of converging access technologies into a common packet core; and (5) using an IP common core makes the cellular network part of the Internet.

We have built a research prototype of UMTS access point called a UMTS IP router (UIP). This network element combines the hierarchy of GGSN, SGSN, RNC and NodeB in a single base station. The primary reason for integrating existing network elements into a single system is for performance. The UIP routes IP traffic from IP networks to IP capable UMTS terminals. Future transmission technologies rely on transmission in simplex using hybrid ARQ (H-ARQ). Today's UMTS networks, however, still rely on downlink soft handover and this has led to a hierarchical design. An alternative for the hierarchical design is one that combines the functionality of the typical cellular network elements into one wireless specific IP router. Since downlink diversity is no longer used when H-ARQ comes into play, giving up downlink soft handover does not constitute a performance penalty provided another, equally efficient handover method can be used in our flat cellular network design. In this paper we show that efficient hard handover is possible in a flat architecture and that giving up the hierarchical design allows us to (1) remove unnecessary protocol layers from the UMTS protocol stack; and (2) reduce the end-to-end latency of wireless transmission by abolishing UMTS base station synchronization. While our current prototype does not yet support HSDPA, the penalty for giving up downlink diversity is compensated by the large reductions in transmission delays

Abstract Coexistence of different access technologies, hierarchical cellular deployment, a wide variety of data services, requirements for transparent operation across different technologies, adaptivity to varying network conditions and mobility and quality of service (QoS) constraints introduce a number of challenges in the design of future generation systems and the specification of new air interfaces, such as efficiency and flexibility in the utilization of spectrum, dynamic resource allocation and exploitation of the multiuser diversity and reconfigurable interference management and inter‐cell coordination. In this paper, three critical issues for the design of next generation systems are addressed: (i) duplexing, (ii) scheduling and resource allocation and (iii) interference and inter‐cell coordination. A number of research directions are presented, which constitute promising potential candidates for next generation systems specification. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We believe there is a niche for exact sub-image searching in image databases. When only a sub-image is searched for, traditional image searching approaches fail because the sub-image features usually represent only a small fraction of the global image features. Said differently: it is difficult to find the sub-image in the global features. We present a new technique to find sub-images in a (possibly large) image database. The users articulate their interest in a sub-image, i.e. an object within an image, in a so-called precise multi-spot query. We search our spatially oriented color-based image database image-by-image for matches with this multi-spot query. 1.