Busting the Paper Ballot: Voting Meets Adversarial Machine Learning

We show the security risk associated with using machine learning classifiers in United States election tabulators. The central classification task in election tabulation is deciding whether a mark does or does not appear on a bubble associated to an alternative in a contest on the ballot. Barrett...

EBS-CFL: Efficient and Byzantine-robust Secure Clustered Federated Learning

Despite federated learning FL's potential in collaborative learning, its performance has deteriorated due to the data heterogeneity of distributed users. Recently, clustered federated learning CFL has emerged to address this challenge by partitioning users into clusters according to their...

SecureFed: a Two-Phase Framework for Detecting Malicious Clients in Federated Learning

Federated Learning FL protects data privacy while providing a decentralized method for training models. However, because of the distributed schema, it is susceptible to adversarial clients that could alter results or sabotage model performance. This study presents SecureFed, a two-phase FL...

TooBadRL: Trigger Optimization to Boost Effectiveness of Backdoor Attacks on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Deep reinforcement learning DRL has achieved remarkable success in a wide range of sequential decision-making domains, including robotics, healthcare, smart grids, and finance. Recent research demonstrates that attackers can efficiently exploit system vulnerabilities during the training phase to...

Assessing the Resilience of Automotive Intrusion Detection Systems to Adversarial Manipulation

The security of modern vehicles has become increasingly important, with the controller area network CAN bus serving as a critical communication backbone for various Electronic Control Units ECUs. The absence of robust security measures in CAN, coupled with the increasing connectivity of vehicles,...

Differentially Private Relational Learning with Entity-Level Privacy Guarantees

Learning with relational and network-structured data is increasingly vital in sensitive domains where protecting the privacy of individual entities is paramount. Differential Privacy DP offers a principled approach for quantifying privacy risks, with DP-SGD emerging as a standard mechanism for...

Byzantine Outside, Curious Inside: Reconstructing Data through Malicious Updates

Federated learning FL enables decentralized machine learning without sharing raw data, allowing multiple clients to collaboratively learn a global model. However, studies reveal that privacy leakage is possible under commonly adopted FL protocols. In particular, a server with access to client...

Boosting Gradient Leakage Attacks: Data Reconstruction in Realistic FL Settings

Federated learning FL enables collaborative model training among multiple clients without the need to expose raw data. Its ability to safeguard privacy, at the heart of FL, has recently been a hot-button debate topic. To elaborate, several studies have introduced a type of attacks known as gradie...

Explainable AI for Enhancing IDS against Advanced Persistent Kill Chain

Advanced Persistent Threats APTs represent a sophisticated and persistent cy-bersecurity challenge, characterized by stealthy, multi-phase, and targeted attacks aimed at compromising information systems over an extended period. Develop-ing an effective Intrusion Detection System IDS capable of...

GradEscape: a Gradient-Based Evader against AI-Generated Text Detectors

In this paper, we introduce GradEscape, the first gradient-based evader designed to attack AI-generated text AIGT detectors. GradEscape overcomes the undifferentiable computation problem, caused by the discrete nature of text, by introducing a novel approach to construct weighted embeddings for t...

Secure Distributed Learning for CAVs: Defending against Gradient Leakage with Leveled Homomorphic Encryption

Federated Learning FL enables collaborative model training across distributed clients without sharing raw data, making it a promising approach for privacy-preserving machine learning in domains like Connected and Autonomous Vehicles CAVs. However, recent studies have shown that exchanged model...

D2R: Dual Regularization Loss with Collaborative Adversarial Generation for Model Robustness

The robustness of Deep Neural Network models is crucial for defending models against adversarial attacks. Recent defense methods have employed collaborative learning frameworks to enhance model robustness. Two key limitations of existing methods are i insufficient guidance of the target model via...

Dual-Priv Pruning : Efficient Differential Private Fine-Tuning in Multimodal Large Language Models

Differential Privacy DP is a widely adopted technique, valued for its effectiveness in protecting the privacy of task-specific datasets, making it a critical tool for large language models. However, its effectiveness in Multimodal Large Language Models MLLMs remains uncertain. Applying Differenti...

LADSG: Label-Anonymized Distillation and Similar Gradient Substitution for Label Privacy in Vertical Federated Learning

Vertical federated learning VFL has become a key paradigm for collaborative machine learning, enabling multiple parties to train models over distributed feature spaces while preserving data privacy. Despite security protocols that defend against external attacks - such as gradient masking and...

Rewriting the Budget: a General Framework for Black-Box Attacks under Cost Asymmetry

Traditional decision-based black-box adversarial attacks on image classifiers aim to generate adversarial examples by slightly modifying input images while keeping the number of queries low, where each query involves sending an input to the model and observing its output. Most existing methods...

GeoClip: Geometry-Aware Clipping for Differentially Private SGD

Differentially private stochastic gradient descent DP-SGD is the most widely used method for training machine learning models with provable privacy guarantees. A key challenge in DP-SGD is setting the per-sample gradient clipping threshold, which significantly affects the trade-off between privac...

Joint-GCG: Unified Gradient-Based Poisoning Attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

Retrieval-Augmented Generation RAG systems enhance Large Language Models LLMs by retrieving relevant documents from external corpora before generating responses. This approach significantly expands LLM capabilities by leveraging vast, up-to-date external knowledge. However, this reliance on...

Gradient Inversion Attacks on Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Federated learning FL allows multiple data-owners to collaboratively train machine learning models by exchanging local gradients, while keeping their private data on-device. To simultaneously enhance privacy and training efficiency, recently parameter-efficient fine-tuning PEFT of large-scale...

Mitigating Disparate Impact of Differentially Private Learning through Bounded Adaptive Clipping

Differential privacy DP has become an essential framework for privacy-preserving machine learning. Existing DP learning methods, however, often have disparate impacts on model predictions, e.g., for minority groups. Gradient clipping, which is often used in DP learning, can suppress larger...

Fingerprinting Deep Learning Models Via Network Traffic Patterns in Federated Learning

Federated Learning FL is increasingly adopted as a decentralized machine learning paradigm due to its capability to preserve data privacy by training models without centralizing user data. However, FL is susceptible to indirect privacy breaches via network traffic analysis-an area not explored in...