João Paulo Soares

Abstract
HAL 9000 is an Intrusion Tolerant Systems (ITSs) Risk Manager, which assesses configuration risks against potential intrusions. It utilizes gathered threat knowledge and remains operational, even in the absence of updated information. Based on its advice, the ITSs can dynamically and proactively adapt to recent threats to minimize and mitigate future intrusions from malicious adversaries. Our goal is to reduce the risk linked to the exploitation of recently uncovered vulnerabilities that have not been classified and/or do not have a script to reproduce the exploit, considering the potential that they may have already been exploited as zero-day exploits. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed solution can effectively learn and replicate National Vulnerability Database's evaluation process with 99% accuracy.

Abstract
Simple Summary Due to limited proteomic data for rabbit spermatozoa and less comprehensive databases compared to humans, we conducted a combined bioinformatic analysis of the proteome of rabbit X (RX) and human X and Y (HX and HY) chromosomes to identify membrane-associated proteins, particularly those accessible from the cell surface, for potential applications in sperm sexing techniques. Our analysis found 100 (RX), 211 (HX), and 3 (HY) plasma membrane or cell surface-associated proteins, of which 61, 132, and 3 are potentially accessible from the cell surface. Notably, among the HX targets, 60 could serve as additional RX targets not previously identified, bringing the total to 121 RX targets. Furthermore, at least 53 out of the 114 potential common HX and RX targets chromosomes have been previously identified in human spermatozoa, emphasizing their potential as targets of X-chromosome-bearing spermatozoa. The utility of these proteins as targets of rabbit X-chromosome-bearing spermatozoa warrants further exploration.Abstract Studying proteins associated with sex chromosomes can provide insights into sex-specific proteins. Membrane proteins accessible through the cell surface may serve as excellent targets for diagnostic, therapeutic, or even technological purposes, such as sperm sexing technologies. In this context, proteins encoded by sex chromosomes have the potential to become targets for X- or Y-chromosome-bearing spermatozoa. Due to the limited availability of proteomic studies on rabbit spermatozoa and poorly annotated databases for rabbits compared to humans, a bioinformatic analysis of the available rabbit X chromosome proteome (RX), as well as the human X (HX) and Y (HY) chromosomes proteome, was conducted to identify potential targets that could be accessible from the cell surface and predict which of the potential targets identified in humans might also exist in rabbits. We identified 100, 211, and 3 proteins associated with the plasma membrane or cell surface for RX, HX, and HY, respectively, of which 61, 132, and 3 proteins exhibit potential as targets as they were predicted to be accessible from the cell surface. Cross-referencing the potential HX targets with the rabbit proteome revealed an additional 60 proteins with the potential to be RX targets, resulting in a total of 121 potential RX targets. In addition, at least 53 possible common HX and RX targets have been previously identified in human spermatozoa, emphasizing their potential as targets of X-chromosome-bearing spermatozoa. Further proteomic studies on rabbit sperm will be essential to identify and validate the usefulness of these proteins for application in rabbit sperm sorting techniques as targets of X-chromosome-bearing spermatozoa.

Abstract
Byzantine Fault tolerant (BFT) protocols are implemented to guarantee the correct system/application behavior even in the presence of arbitrary faults (i.e., Byzantine faults). Byzantine Fault tolerant State Machine Replication (BFT-SMR) is a known software solution for masking arbitrary faults and malicious attacks (Liu et al., 2020). In this survey, we present and discuss relevant BFT-SMR protocols, focusing on deterministic and probabilistic approaches. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss the characteristics of proposed works for each approach, as well as identify the trade-offs for each different approach.& COPY; 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

Abstract
The increasing level of sophistication of cyber attacks which are employing cross-cutting strategies that leverage multi-domain attack surfaces, including but not limited to, software defined networking poisoning, biasing of machine learning models to suppress detection, exploiting software (development), and leveraging system design deficiencies. While current defensive solutions exist, they only partially address multi-domain and multi-stage attacks, thus rendering them ineffective to counter the upcoming generation of attacks. More specifically, we argue that a disruption is needed to approach separated knowledge domains, namely Intrusion Tolerant systems, cybersecurity, and machine learning. We argue that current solutions tend to address different concerns/facets of overlapping issues and they tend to make strong assumptions of supporting infrastructure, e.g., assuming that event probes/metrics are not compromised. To address these issues, we present Skynet, a platform that acts as a secure overseer that merges traditional roles of SIEMs with conventional orchestrators while being rooted on the fundamentals introduced by previous generations of intrusion tolerant systems. Our goal is to provide an open-source intrusion tolerant platform that can dynamically adapt to known and unknown security threats in order to reduce potential vulnerability windows.

Abstract
The European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) was the first animal model used to understand human diseases like rabies and syphilis. Nowadays, the rabbit is still used to study several human infectious diseases like syphilis, HIV and papillomavirus. However, due to several mainly practical reasons, it has been replaced as an animal model by mice (Mus musculus). The rabbit and mouse share a recent common ancestor and are classified in the superorder Glires which arose at approximately 82 million years ago (mya). These species diverged from the Primates' ancestor at around 92 million years ago and, as such, one expects the rabbit-human and mouse-human genetic distances to be very similar. To evaluate this hypothesis, we developed a set of tools for automatic data extraction, sequence alignment and similarity study, and a web application for visualization of the resulting data. We aligned and calculated the genetic distances for 2793 innate immune system genes from human, rabbit and mouse using sequences available in the NCBI database. The obtained results show that the rabbit-human genetic distance is lower than the mouse-human genetic distance for 88% of these genes. Furthermore, when we considered only genes with a difference in genetic distance higher than 0.05, this figure increase to 93%. These results can be explained by the increase of the mutation rates in the mouse lineage suggested by some authors and clearly show that, at least looking to the genetic distance to human genes, the European rabbit is a better model to study innate immune system genes than the mouse.