We present aspects of ecosystem engineering for a strategy board game. Human and machine players of the ecosystem can pick opponents or form teams and play against other teams or players. We present the key features of the ecosystem, the highlights of the development process and we propose concrete potential uses of the ecosystem in research and education.

Direct Memory Access (DMA) attacks can allow attackers to access memory directly, bypassing OS supervision or software protections. In this work, we put forth and benchmark a cryptographically secure attestation scheme, which detects DMA attacks. In fact, our scheme detects any attack in a more general class of attacks which we call "direct injection". We prove security of our scheme under a realistic machine model which extends in a non-trivial manner a cryptographic model proposed by Lipton, Ostrovsky, and Zikas (ICALP 2016.) Despite the fact that our scheme, in its current form, protects against write-only attacks, both our security model and our scheme can be extended to allow the attacker to have additional read access to memory---thereby capturing leakage---as well as detecting more types of memory corruptions such as bit flips.

We report the development of a flexible database management system, based on a relational database format, for locus-specific database development and curation and its implementation for the development of a new locus-specific database, namely A1ATVar, for SERPINA1 gene variants, leading to α1-antitrypsin deficiency (available from http://www.goldenhelix.org/a1atvar). This tool allows data entry and display of mutation summaries in a tabular format, while user-generated queries can be formulated based on fields in the database table. A separate module, linked to FINDbase database for frequencies of inherited disorders allows the user to access relevant allele frequency information in different populations worldwide. Available experimental protocols to detect variant alleles at the protein and DNA levels can also be archived in a searchable format. A visualization tool, called VariVis, is implemented to combine variant information with gene sequence and annotation data. Finally, a direct data submission tool allows registered users to submit data on novel variant alleles as well as experimental protocols via a password-protected interface. Implementation of this tool is free of charge and there are no registration requirements for data querying. This database management system can serve as an example for an all-in-one solution for locus-specific database development and curation.