Debbie Perouli | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

Is Protective DNS Blocking the Wild West?

We perform a passive measurement study investigating how a Protective DNS service might perform in a Research & Education Network serving hundreds of member institutions. Utilizing freely-available DNS blocklists consisting of domain names deemed to be threats, we test hundreds of millions of users' real DNS queries, observed over a week's time, to find which answers would be blocked because they involve domain names that are potential threats. We find the blocklists disorderly regarding their names, goals, transparency, and provenance making them quite difficult to compare. Consequently, these Protective DNS underpinnings lack organized oversight, presenting challenges and risks in operation at scale.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2016

Solving Set Cover with Pairs Problem Using Quantum Annealing

Here we consider using quantum annealing to solve Set Cover with Pairs (SCP), an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that play an important role in networking, computational biology, and biochemistry. We show an explicit construction of Ising Hamiltonians whose ground states encode the solution of SCP instances. We numerically simulate the time-dependent Schrödinger equation in order to test the performance of quantum annealing for random instances and compare with that of simulated annealing. We also discuss explicit embedding strategies for realizing our Hamiltonian construction on the D-wave type restricted Ising Hamiltonian based on Chimera graphs. Our embedding on the Chimera graph preserves the structure of the original SCP instance and in particular, the embedding for general complete bipartite graphs and logical disjunctions may be of broader use than that the specific problem we deal with.

quant-ph↗