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We present our investigations of the physical and dynamical properties of selected Earth co-orbital asteroids. The photometric optical light curves as well as rotation periods and pole solutions for a sample of four Earth co-orbital asteroids, namely (138175) 2000 EE104 (P=13.9476+/-0.0051 hrs), (418849) 2008 WM64 (P=2.4077+/-0.0001 hrs), 2016 CA138 (P=5.3137+/-0.0016 hrs) and 2017 SL16 (P=0.3188+/-0.0053 hrs), are determined or improved and presented in this work. For this investigation, we combine observations carried out at the Bulgarian National Astronomical Observatory - Rozhen using the FoReRo2 instrument attached to the 2mRCC telescope as well as sparse data from AstDys2 database. Parallel to the rotational properties we did numerical dynamical simulations to investigate the orbital stability of those objects and to find out if there is a relation with their rotational properties. Our results show that the orbit stability is affected by the orbit itself and mainly its eccentricity and inclination, which are responsible for the close encounters with other Solar system planets. We cannot make a definitive conclusion about the relation between orbit stability and the rotational state of the asteroids, so we need further investigations and observations in order to prove or disprove it., Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures and 4 tables

The first version of digital low level RF (DLLRF) for the Diamond Light Source storage ring and booster was developed with ALBA Synchrotron. Six systems have been built so far. Two of them are in routine operation controlling two normal conducting HOM-damped cavi-ties in the Diamond storage ring. A third system is being used for cavity testing in the RF test facility (RFTF). The fourth system is being commissioned to control the sec-ond normal conducting booster cavity. The fifth DLLRF system is being prepared for the third normal conducting RF cavity in the storage ring. A new DLLRF system based on SIS8300-KU with RTM has been developed and tested in the last few years. We are aiming to develop a common platform for the differ-ent RF systems in Diamond, including the storage ring, the booster and the Linac. It will also be our baseline design for the future Diamond II. Firmware, software and supporting hardware have been developed and tested. The Linac version with arbitrary waveform generator mode was tested successfully to generate flat top pulse from SLED in the high power test in the Linac. The stor-age ring version was also tested successfully in RFTF., Comment: Poster presented at LLRF Workshop 2022 (LLRF2022, arXiv:2208.13680)

We present IvySyn, the first fully-automated framework for discovering memory error vulnerabilities in Deep Learning (DL) frameworks. IvySyn leverages the statically-typed nature of native APIs in order to automatically perform type-aware mutation-based fuzzing on low-level kernel code. Given a set of offending inputs that trigger memory safety (and runtime) errors in low-level, native DL (C/C++) code, IvySyn automatically synthesizes code snippets in high-level languages (e.g., in Python), which propagate error-triggering input via high(er)-level APIs. Such code snippets essentially act as "Proof of Vulnerability", as they demonstrate the existence of bugs in native code that an attacker can target through various high-level APIs. Our evaluation shows that IvySyn significantly outperforms past approaches, both in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, in finding vulnerabilities in popular DL frameworks. Specifically, we used IvySyn to test TensorFlow and PyTorch. Although still an early prototype, IvySyn has already helped the TensorFlow and PyTorch framework developers to identify and fix 61 previously-unknown security vulnerabilities, and assign 39 unique CVEs., Comment: Accepted at USENIX Security 2023

Timely and accurate detection of anomalies in power electronics is becoming increasingly critical for maintaining complex production systems. Robust and explainable strategies help decrease system downtime and preempt or mitigate infrastructure cyberattacks. This work begins by explaining the types of uncertainty present in current datasets and machine learning algorithm outputs. Three techniques for combating these uncertainties are then introduced and analyzed. We further present two anomaly detection and classification approaches, namely the Matrix Profile algorithm and anomaly transformer, which are applied in the context of a power electronic converter dataset. Specifically, the Matrix Profile algorithm is shown to be well suited as a generalizable approach for detecting real-time anomalies in streaming time-series data. The STUMPY python library implementation of the iterative Matrix Profile is used for the creation of the detector. A series of custom filters is created and added to the detector to tune its sensitivity, recall, and detection accuracy. Our numerical results show that, with simple parameter tuning, the detector provides high accuracy and performance in a variety of fault scenarios.

The inner asteroid belt between 2.1 and 2.5 au is of particular dynamical significance because it is the dominant source of both chondritic meteorites and near-Earth asteroids. This inner belt is bounded by an eccentricity-type secular resonance and by the 1:3 mean motion resonance with Jupiter. Unless asteroid perihelia are low enough to allow scattering by Mars, escape requires transport to one of the bounding resonances. In addition Yarkovsky forces are generally ineffective in changing either the eccentricity and/or inclination for asteroids with diameter $\gtrsim$30 km. Thus, large asteroids with pericentres far from Mars may only escape from the inner belt through large changes in their eccentricities. In this paper we study chaotic diffusion of orbits near the 1:2 mean motion resonance with Mars in a systematic way. We show that, while chaotic orbital evolution in both resonant and non-resonant orbits increase the dispersion of the inclinations and eccentricities, it does not significantly change their mean values. We show further that, while the dispersive growth is greatest for resonant orbits, at high $e$ the resonance acts to mitigate asteroid scattering by Mars - making the asteroid lifetime in the belt longer than it would have been for a non-resonant orbit. For asteroids of all sizes in both resonant and non-resonant orbits, the changes in eccentricity needed to account for the observations cannot be achieved by gravitational forces alone. The role of resonant trapping in protecting asteroids from encounters with Mars is also analysed., Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 13 pages, 15 figures, 3 tables

We model the problem of optimizing the schedule of courses a student at the American College of Greece will need to take to complete their studies. We model all constraints set forth by the institution and the department, so that we guarantee the validity of all produced schedules. We formulate several different objectives to optimize in the resulting schedule, including fastest completion time, course difficulty balance, and so on, with a very important objective our model is capable of capturing being the maximization of the expected student GPA given their performance on passed courses using Machine Learning and Data Mining techniques. All resulting problems are Mixed Integer Linear Programming problems with a number of binary variables that is in the order of the maximum number of terms times the number of courses available for the student to take. The resulting Mathematical Programming problem is always solvable by the GUROBI solver in less than 10 seconds on a modern commercial off-the-self PC, whereas the manual process that was installed before used to take department heads that are designated as student advisors more than one hour of their time for every student and was resulting in sub-optimal schedules as measured by the objectives set forth., Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables

The single-molecule magnet {Mn84} is a challenge to theory due to its high nuclearity. Building on our prior work which characterized the structure of the spectrum of this magnet, we directly compute two experimentally accessible observables, the field-dependent magnetization up to 75 T and the temperature-dependent heat capacity, using parameter free theory. In particular, we use first principles calculations to derive short- and long-range exchange interactions, while we compute the exact partition function of the resulting classical Potts and Ising spin models for all 84 Mn $S=2$ spins to obtain the observables. The latter computation is possible because of a simulation methodology that uses hyper-optimized tensor network contraction, borrowing from recent techniques developed to simulate quantum supremacy circuits. We also synthesize the magnet and measure its heat capacity and field-dependent magnetization. We observe good qualitative agreement between theory and experiment, identifying an unusual peak in the heat capacity in both, as well as a plateau in the magnetization. Our work also identifies some limitations of current theoretical modeling in large magnets, such as the sensitivity to small, long-range, exchange couplings., Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures. DTC and PH contributed equally

A stellar occultation by Neptune's main satellite, Triton, was observed on 5 October 2017 from Europe, North Africa, and the USA. We derived 90 light curves from this event, 42 of which yielded a central flash detection. We aimed at constraining Triton's atmospheric structure and the seasonal variations of its atmospheric pressure since the Voyager 2 epoch (1989). We also derived the shape of the lower atmosphere from central flash analysis. We used Abel inversions and direct ray-tracing code to provide the density, pressure, and temperature profiles in the altitude range $\sim$8 km to $\sim$190 km, corresponding to pressure levels from 9 {\mu}bar down to a few nanobars. Results. (i) A pressure of 1.18$\pm$0.03 {\mu}bar is found at a reference radius of 1400 km (47 km altitude). (ii) A new analysis of the Voyager 2 radio science occultation shows that this is consistent with an extrapolation of pressure down to the surface pressure obtained in 1989. (iii) A survey of occultations obtained between 1989 and 2017 suggests that an enhancement in surface pressure as reported during the 1990s might be real, but debatable, due to very few high S/N light curves and data accessible for reanalysis. The volatile transport model analysed supports a moderate increase in surface pressure, with a maximum value around 2005-2015 no higher than 23 {\mu}bar. The pressures observed in 1995-1997 and 2017 appear mutually inconsistent with the volatile transport model presented here. (iv) The central flash structure does not show evidence of an atmospheric distortion. We find an upper limit of 0.0011 for the apparent oblateness of the atmosphere near the 8 km altitude., Comment: 52 pages, 26 figures in the main paper, 2 figures in appendix B, 9 figures in appendix C, 1 long table over 5 pages

We propose molecular magnets as a platform to emulate Majorana zero modes (MZMs). Using a quantum chemistry approach, we identify several candidates and predict a Co trimer to have sufficient properties to host MZMs. Parameters of the quantum spin Hamiltonian describing the three coupled magnetic centers are extracted from ab initio calculations. The low-energy subspace of this material realizes an effective anisotropic spin-1/2 chain. We show the presence of MZMs in this system and find that their response to electronic paramagnetic resonance provides an experimentally realizable signature., Comment: 11 pages, 12 figures

We investigate the long-term dynamical survival of Earth co-orbital asteroids, focusing on near-circular, near-planar orbits which existing studies suggest are the most stable. Through numerical integration of test particles we show that about a quarter of an initial population can survive for at least 50\% of the age of the solar system with horseshoe particles being four to five times more likely to survive than L4/L5 Trojans. From the end state statistics we constrain the existence of planetesimal-sized objects originally in co-orbital libration, finding that typically $5^{-2}_{+7}$ such planetesimals and no more than $27^{-9}_{+30}$ (95\% confidence) could have been present. Our simulations also suggest that episodic variations in the terrestrial orbital eccentricity may have caused bulk escape of co-orbitals, though variations large enough ($>$0.01) to generate such episodes are statistically unlikely. We then consider the orbital evolution of co-orbital asteroids of sizes down to $D = 50$ m under the Yarkovsky effect and find that objects with $D$ $<$ 1 km should escape over 4 Gyr with the smallest asteroids escaping after 200 Myr. Further, we test whether Earth's co-orbital region may be populated by asteroids arriving via outward Yarkovsky drift, as conjectured by Zhou et al.~(A\&A, 622, A97, 2019). We find this is an inefficient process, as planetary close encounters rapidly scatter the orbits far from Earth's and towards the asteroid belt. Finally, we discuss how the destabilising action of Yarkovsky may be mitigated through spin state evolution or late collisional comminution of large parent asteroids., Comment: 12 pages, 3 tables, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

Optomechanical systems are known to exhibit a rich set of complex dynamical features including various types of chaotic behavior and multi-stability. Although this exotic behavior has attracted an intense research interest, the utilization of optomechanical systems in technological applications, in most cases necessitates a complex, yet predictable and controllable, oscillatory response. In fact, the various types of robust oscillations supported by optomechanical systems are nested in either the same or neighboring regions of the parameter space, where chaos exists. In this work we systematically dissect the parameter space of the fundamental optomechanical oscillator in order to identify regions where stable self-sustained and self-modulated oscillations exist, by utilizing bifurcation analysis and advanced numerical continuation techniques. Moreover,in cases where bistability occurs, we study the accessibility of these oscillatory states in terms of initial conditions and their location with respect to well-defined basins of attraction. The results provide specific knowledge for the parameter sets enabling the appropriate oscillatory response for different types of applications., Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures

Entity Linking (EL) seeks to align entity mentions in text to entries in a knowledge-base and is usually comprised of two phases: candidate generation and candidate ranking. While most methods focus on the latter, it is the candidate generation phase that sets an upper bound to both time and accuracy performance of the overall EL system. This work's contribution is a significant improvement in candidate generation which thus raises the performance threshold for EL, by generating candidates that include the gold entity in the least candidate set (top-K). We propose a simple approach that efficiently embeds mention-entity pairs in dense space through a BERT-based bi-encoder. Specifically, we extend (Wu et al., 2020) by introducing a new pooling function and incorporating entity type side-information. We achieve a new state-of-the-art 84.28% accuracy on top-50 candidates on the Zeshel dataset, compared to the previous 82.06% on the top-64 of (Wu et al., 2020). We report the results from extensive experimentation using our proposed model on both seen and unseen entity datasets. Our results suggest that our method could be a useful complement to existing EL approaches., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures

Distantly-supervised relation extraction (RE) is an effective method to scale RE to large corpora but suffers from noisy labels. Existing approaches try to alleviate noise through multi-instance learning and by providing additional information, but manage to recognize mainly the top frequent relations, neglecting those in the long-tail. We propose REDSandT (Relation Extraction with Distant Supervision and Transformers), a novel distantly-supervised transformer-based RE method, that manages to capture a wider set of relations through highly informative instance and label embeddings for RE, by exploiting BERT's pre-trained model, and the relationship between labels and entities, respectively. We guide REDSandT to focus solely on relational tokens by fine-tuning BERT on a structured input, including the sub-tree connecting an entity pair and the entities' types. Using the extracted informative vectors, we shape label embeddings, which we also use as attention mechanism over instances to further reduce noise. Finally, we represent sentences by concatenating relation and instance embeddings. Experiments in the NYT-10 dataset show that REDSandT captures a broader set of relations with higher confidence, achieving state-of-the-art AUC (0.424)., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures

The SOUL project is upgrading the 4 SCAO systems of LBT, pushing the current guide star limits of about 2 magnitudes fainter thanks to Electron Multiplied CCD detector. This improvement will open the NGS SCAO correction to a wider number of scientific cases from high contrast imaging in the visible to extra-galactic source in the NIR. The SOUL systems are today the unique case where pyramid WFS, adaptive secondary and EMCCD are used together. This makes SOUL a pathfinder for most of the ELT SCAO systems like the one of GMT, MICADO and HARMONI of E-ELT, where the same key technologies will be employed. Today we have 3 SOUL systems installed on the telescope in commissioning phase. The 4th system will be installed in a few months. We will present here the results achieved during daytime testing and commissioning nights up to the present date., Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, 1 table. AO4ELT6 proceedings

This work builds a bridge between density functional theory (DFT) and model interpretations of Anderson's superexchange theory by constructing a $f$-$d$-$p$ model with DFT Wannier functions to enable a direct quantum many-body solution within an embedding approach. When applied to long-range magnetic interactions in a Mn-Ce magnetic molecule, we are able to obtain numerical insights about double exchange and superexchange interactions. Direct metal-metal charge transfer processes are generally weak in this molecule, which leads to small contributions from double exchange interactions. For long-range interactions, Mn-Ce charge transfer is not significant compared to Ce-O charge transfer. The unusual superexchange between Mn atoms with different valence states is identified as the dominant mechanism. This procedure opens a path for quantitative understanding of different exchange interactions in complex magnetic systems, including molecular magnets, transition metal organic frameworks, and other solid materials., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures

All planets and satellites of our solar system are subject to a continuous rain of material, ranging in size from specks of dust to objects the size of boulders. Upon impact, these objects deposit their kinetic energy into the incident surface or atmosphere and affect the environment of the target body in ways not yet well understood. Recent high-profile events - impact flashes on Jupiter and the encounter of comet C/Siding Spring with Mars - brought the study of "extraterrestrial meteors" and their effects into the fore. Here we review the history, status and future prospects of meteor studies on planets other than the Earth. Would bright meteors appear in the atmosphere of Mars and what are the long-term effects on the planet's atmosphere? How do high-speed impacts of particulate matter on the airless surfaces of Mercury and the Moon affect their environment and those of the countless other bodies like them? These are some of the questions we attempt to answer in this Chapter., Comment: 3 tables, 7 figures, author version of Chapter 5 in: "Meteoroids: Sources of Meteors on Earth and Beyond", Cambridge University Press, 2019

All asteroids are currently classified as either family, originating from the disruption of known bodies, or non-family. An outstanding question is the origin of these non-family asteroids. Were they formed individually, or as members of known families but with chaotically evolving orbits, or are they members of old ghost families, that is, asteroids with a common parent body but with orbits that no longer cluster in orbital element space? Here, we show that the sizes of the non-family asteroids in the inner belt are correlated with their orbital eccentricities and anticorrelated with their inclinations, suggesting that both non-family and family asteroids originate from a small number of large primordial planetesimals. We estimate that ~85% of the asteroids in the inner main belt originate from the Flora, Vesta, Nysa, Polana and Eulalia families, with the remaining ~15% originating from either the same families or, more likely, a few ghost families. These new results imply that we must seek explanations for the differing characteristics of the various meteorite groups in the evolutionary histories of a few, large, precursor bodies. Our findings also support the model that asteroids formed big through the gravitational collapse of material in a protoplanetary disk., Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, includes Supplementary Info

We investigate the mineralogy of L5 Martian Trojan asteroids via reflectance spectroscopy, in particular (101429) 1998 $\mbox{VF}_{31}$, the only L5 Trojan that does not belong to the Eureka family (Christou, 2013). We find that this asteroid most likely belongs to the Bus-Demeo S-complex, in agreement with Rivkin et al. (2007) and obtain good spectral matches with Sq- or S-type asteroids, the lunar surface and of Martian and lunar meteorites. Mixture fitting to spectral endmembers suggests a surface abundance of Mg-rich orthopyroxene and iron metal or, alternatively, a mixture of plagioclase and metal with a small amount of Mg-poor orthopyroxene. The metallic component may be part of the intrinsic mineral makeup of the asteroid or an indication of extreme space weathering. We discuss several origin scenarios for (101429). The asteroid could be related to iron-rich primitive achondrites (Rivkin et al.), may have originated as impact ejecta from Mars - as proposed recently for the Eureka family asteroids (Polishook et al., 2017) - or could be a relic fragment of the Moon's original solid crust. If, on the other hand, (101429) is a relatively recent addition to the Martian Trojan clouds (Christou et al., 2020), its origin is probably traced to high-inclination asteroid families in the Inner Main Belt. For the olivine-dominated Eureka family, we find that the two smaller asteroids are more spectrally similar to one another than to (5261) Eureka. Spectral profiles of all three asteroids are closely similar shortward of $\sim$0.7$\mu$m but diverge at longer wavelengths. For the two smaller asteroids in particular, we find the spectra are virtually identical up to $0.8$$\mu$m. We attribute spectral differences in the near-IR region to differences in either: degree of space weathering, olivine chemical composition and/or regolith grain size., Comment: 22 pages, 13 figures and 7 tables

We consider the fermionic quantum criticality of anisotropic nodal point semimetals in $d = d_L + d_Q$ spatial dimensions that disperse linearly in $d_L$ dimensions, and quadratically in the remaining $d_Q$ dimensions. When subject to strong interactions, these systems are susceptible to semimetal-insulator transitions concurrent with spontaneous symmetry breaking. Such quantum critical points are described by effective field theories of anisotropic nodal fermions coupled to dynamical order parameter fields. We analyze the universal scaling in the physically relevant spatial dimensions, generalizing to a large number $N_f$ of fermion flavors for analytic control. Landau damping by gapless fermionic excitations gives rise to non-analytic self-energy corrections to the bosonic order-parameter propagator that dominate the long-wavelength behavior. We show that perturbative momentum shell RG leads to non-universal, cutoff dependent results, as it does not correctly account for this non-analytic structure. In turn, using a completely general soft cutoff formulation, we demonstrate that the correct IR scaling of the dressed bosonic propagator can be deduced by enforcing that results are independent of the cutoff scheme. Using this soft cutoff approach, we compute the exact critical exponents for anisotropic semi-Dirac fermions $(d_L=1$, $d_Q=1)$ to leading order in $1/N_f$, and to all loop orders. Applying the same method to relativistic Dirac fermions, we reproduce the critical exponents obtained by other methods, such as conformal bootstrap..., Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 1 table

We consider the generalized $k$-server problem on uniform metrics. We study the power of memoryless algorithms and show tight bounds of $\Theta(k!)$ on their competitive ratio. In particular we show that the \textit{Harmonic Algorithm} achieves this competitive ratio and provide matching lower bounds. This improves the $\approx 2^{2^k}$ doubly-exponential bound of Chiplunkar and Vishwanathan for the more general setting of uniform metrics with different weights.

A determination of the dynamical evolution of the asteroid belt is difficult because the asteroid belt has evolved since the time of asteroid formation through mechanisms that include: (1) catastrophic collisions, (2) rotational disruption, (3) chaotic orbital evolution and (4) orbital evolution driven by Yarkovsky radiation forces. The timescales of these loss mechanisms are uncertain and there is a need for more observational constraints. In the inner main belt, the mean size of the non-family asteroids increases with increasing inclination. Here, we use that observation to show that all inner main belt asteroids originate from either the known families or from ghost families, that is, old families with dispersed orbital elements. We estimate that the average age of the asteroids in the ghost families is a factor of 1/3 less than the Yarkovsky orbital evolution timescale. However, this orbital evolution timescale is a long-term average that must allow for the collisional evolution of the asteroids and for stochastic changes in their spin directions. By applying these constraints on the orbital evolution timescales to the evolution of the size-frequency distribution of the Vesta asteroid family, we estimate that the age of this family is greater than 1.3 $Gyr$ and could be comparable with the age of the solar system. By estimating the number of ghost families, we calculate that the number of asteroids that are the root sources of the meteorites and the near-Earth asteroids that originate from the inner main belt is about 20., Comment: 23 pages, 25 figures, submitted to MNRAS (to replace an old version of the paper titled "A new observational constraint on the Yarkovsky-driven mobility of main belt") asteroids

Single-binary scattering may lead to an exchange where the single object captures a component of the binary, forming a new binary. This has been well studied in encounters between a star--planet pair and a single star. Here we explore the application of the exchange mechanism to a planet--satellite pair and another planet in the gravitational potential of a central star. As a case study, we focus on encounters between a satellite-bearing object and Neptune. We investigate whether Neptune can capture satellites from that object and if the captured satellites have orbits analogous to the Neptunian moons Triton and Nereid. Using $N$-body simulations, we study the capture probability at different encounter distances. Post-capture, we use a simple analytical argument to estimate how the captured orbits evolve under collisional and tidal effects. We find that the average capture probability reaches $\sim$$10\%$ if Neptune penetrates the donor planet's satellite system. Most moons grabbed by Neptune acquire highly eccentric orbits. Post-capture, around half of those captured, especially those on tight orbits, can be circularised, either by tides only or by collisions+tides, turning into Triton-like objects. Captures further out, on the other hand, stay on wide and eccentric orbits like that of Nereid. Both moon types can be captured in the same encounter and they have wide distributions in orbital inclination. Therefore, Triton naturally has a $\sim$50\% chance of being retrograde. A similar process potentially applies to an exoplanetary system, and our model predicts that exomoons can jump from one planet to another during planetary scattering. Specifically, there should be two distinct populations of captured moons: one on close-in circular orbits and the other on far-out eccentric orbits. The two populations may have highly inclined prograde or retrograde orbits., Comment: A&A in press

Phishing is considered to be one of the most prevalent cyber-attacks because of its immense flexibility and alarmingly high success rate. Even with adequate training and high situational awareness, it can still be hard for users to continually be aware of the URL of the website they are visiting. Traditional detection methods rely on blocklists and content analysis, both of which require time-consuming human verification. Thus, there have been attempts focusing on the predictive filtering of such URLs. This study aims to develop a machine-learning model to detect fraudulent URLs which can be used within the Splunk platform. Inspired from similar approaches in the literature, we trained the SVM and Random Forests algorithms using malicious and benign datasets found in the literature and one dataset that we created. We evaluated the algorithms' performance with precision and recall, reaching up to 85% precision and 87% recall in the case of Random Forests while SVM achieved up to 90% precision and 88% recall using only descriptive features., Comment: In Proceedings of the 6th ICISSP

This paper introduces a general approach to design a tailored solution to detect rare events in different industrial applications based on Internet of Things (IoT) networks and machine learning algorithms. We propose a general framework based on three layers (physical, data and decision) that defines the possible designing options so that the rare events/anomalies can be detected ultra-reliably. This general framework is then applied in a well-known benchmark scenario, namely Tennessee Eastman Process. We then analyze this benchmark under three threads related to data processes: acquisition, fusion and analytics. Our numerical results indicate that: (i) event-driven data acquisition can significantly decrease the number of samples while filtering measurement noise, (ii) mutual information data fusion method can significantly decrease the variable spaces and (iii) quantitative association rule mining method for data analytics is effective for the rare event detection, identification and diagnosis. These results indicates the benefits of an integrated solution that jointly considers the different levels of data processing following the proposed general three layer framework, including details of the communication network and computing platform to be employed.

The MITRE ATT&CK Framework provides a rich and actionable repository of adversarial tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP). However, this information would be highly useful for attack diagnosis (i.e., forensics) and mitigation (i.e., intrusion response) if we can reliably construct technique associations that will enable predicting unobserved attack techniques based on observed ones. In this paper, we present our statistical machine learning analysis on APT and Software attack data reported by MITRE ATT&CK to infer the technique clustering that represents the significant correlation that can be used for technique prediction. Due to the complex multidimensional relationships between techniques, many of the traditional clustering methods could not obtain usable associations. Our approach, using hierarchical clustering for inferring attack technique associations with 95% confidence, provides statistically significant and explainable technique correlations. Our analysis discovers 98 different technique associations (i.e., clusters) for both APT and Software attacks. Our evaluation results show that 78% of the techniques associated by our algorithm exhibit significant mutual information that indicates reasonably high predictability., Comment: 13 pages, 15 figures. Pre-print / expanded version of paper accepted for publication at IEEE CNS 2020