arXiv subjects

Adam Wilson

Publications and source records attributed to Adam Wilson.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory's First View of the Neptune Trojan L5 (Trailing) Cloud: Two New Long-Term Stable Trojans

The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory's combination of survey speed, sky coverage, and depth provides a unique opportunity to study the distant Trans-Neptunian region, including the Neptune Trojans. The Neptune Trojans are small bodies on orbits with Neptune's semimajor axis that are locked in the 1:1 mean motion resonance librating about the ice giant's stable Lagrange points, L4 (leading) and L5 (trailing), located 60$^{\circ}$ ahead of or behind the planet. For more than 15 years, the on-sky location of the L5 Neptune Trojan cloud has been coincident with the Galactic plane and Galactic center; the high stellar density has significantly hindered the discovery of L5 Neptune Trojans. In 2025, the L5 cloud has now moved sufficiently out of the galactic plane to overlap with the sky covered by Rubin Observatory's Science Validation (SV) survey that was executed during the Observatory's commissioning phase. We report on two new confirmed long-term stable (primordial) members of the Neptune L5 Trojan cloud (2025 MH348 and 2025 NN80), doubling the known sample, and one candidate (2025 MD138) that have been found in a preliminary search of the SV survey observations. We present our study to characterize the physical and dynamical properties of these objects and compare the L5 sample to the well-studied L4 cloud. This work also presents the first characterization of objects discovered by Rubin Observatory's moving object discovery pipelines using observations taken in an LSST-like cadence and as such, provides a blueprint for LSST-era analyses.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2024

WebGPU-SPY: Finding Fingerprints in the Sandbox through GPU Cache Attacks

Microarchitectural attacks on CPU structures have been studied in native applications, as well as in web browsers. These attacks continue to be a substantial threat to computing systems at all scales. With the proliferation of heterogeneous systems and integration of hardware accelerators in every computing system, modern web browsers provide the support of GPU-based acceleration for the graphics and rendering processes. Emerging web standards also support the GPU acceleration of general-purpose computation within web browsers. In this paper, we present a new attack vector for microarchitectural attacks in web browsers. We use emerging GPU accelerating APIs in modern browsers (specifically WebGPU) to launch a GPU-based cache side channel attack on the compute stack of the GPU that spies on victim activities on the graphics (rendering) stack of the GPU. Unlike prior works that rely on JavaScript APIs or software interfaces to build timing primitives, we build the timer using GPU hardware resources and develop a cache side channel attack on Intel's integrated GPUs. We leverage the GPU's inherent parallelism at different levels to develop high-resolution parallel attacks. We demonstrate that GPU-based cache attacks can achieve a precision of 90 for website fingerprinting of 100 top websites. We also discuss potential countermeasures against the proposed attack to secure the systems at a critical time when these web standards are being developed and before they are widely deployed.

cs.CR↗