Protecting On-Device AI Inference: A Systematic Review of Attacks and Defence Mechanisms

The need for secure and private Artificial Intelligence AI and Machine Learning ML on edge and mobile devices has increased the necessity of protecting the architecture of these systems from threats to both security and privacy. With an ever-increasing number of pre-trained AI models being used o...

On Reliability of Efficient Membership Inference Vulnerability Evaluation

Membership inference attacks MIAs are popular methods for empirically assessing the leakage of sensitive information in the training data through models or statistics learned from the data. The MIA vulnerability is often evaluated through false positive rate FPR and true positive rate TPR of a...

Auditing Apple'S DifferentialPrivacy.Framework: Implementation Bugs, Misconfigurations, and Practical Risks

Since 2016, Apple has claimed that device analytics collected to improve user experience are protected by differential privacy DP. Apple's DifferentialPrivacy.framework is deployed across its operating systems and handles sensitive signals such as Safari domains, keyboard events, photo attributes...

DP-FlogTinyLLM: Differentially Private Federated Log Anomaly Detection Using Tiny LLMs

Modern distributed systems generate massive volumes of log data that are critical for detecting anomalies and cyber threats. However, in real world settings, these logs are often distributed across multiple organizations and cannot be centralized due to privacy and security constraints. Existing...

Evaluating Differential Privacy against Membership Inference in Federated Learning: Insights from the NIST Genomics Red Team Challenge

While Federated Learning FL mitigates direct data exposure, the resulting trained models remain susceptible to membership inference attacks MIAs. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of Differential Privacy DP as a defense mechanism against MIAs in FL, leveraging the environment of the 202...

Digital Privacy in IoT: Exploring Challenges, Approaches and Open Issues

Privacy has always been a critical issue in the digital era, particularly with the increasing use of Internet of Things IoT devices. As the IoT continues to transform industries such as healthcare, smart cities, and home automation, it has also introduced serious challenges regarding the security...

Towards Secure Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Comprehensive Review of Threats, Defenses and Benchmarks

Retrieval-Augmented Generation RAG significantly mitigates the hallucinations and domain knowledge deficiency in large language models by incorporating external knowledge bases. However, the multi-module architecture of RAG introduces complex system-level security vulnerabilities. Guided by the R...

Hardening Confidential Federated Compute against Side-Channel Attacks

In this work, we identify a set of side-channels in our Confidential Federated Compute platform that a hypothetical insider could exploit to circumvent differential privacy DP guarantees. We show how DP can mitigate two of the side-channels, one of which has been implemented in our open-source...

PenTiDef: Enhancing Privacy and Robustness in Decentralized Federated Intrusion Detection Systems against Poisoning Attacks

The increasing deployment of Federated Learning FL in Intrusion Detection Systems IDS introduces new challenges related to data privacy, centralized coordination, and susceptibility to poisoning attacks. While significant research has focused on protecting traditional FL-IDS with centralized...

PrivFly: A Privacy-Preserving Self-Supervised Framework for Rare Attack Detection in IoFT

The Internet of Flying Things IoFT plays a vital role in modern applications such as aerial surveillance and smart mobility. However, it remains highly vulnerable to cyberattacks that threaten the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive data. Developing effective intrusion...

A Critical Analysis of the Medibank Health Data Breach and Differential Privacy Solutions

This paper critically examines the 2022 Medibank health insurance data breach, which exposed sensitive medical records of 9.7 million individuals due to unencrypted storage, centralized access, and the absence of privacy-preserving analytics. To address these vulnerabilities, we propose an...

Exploring the Integration of Differential Privacy in Cybersecurity Analytics: Balancing Data Utility and Privacy in Threat Intelligence

To resolve the acute problem of privacy protection and guarantee that data can be used in the context of threat intelligence, this paper considers the implementation of Differential Privacy DP in cybersecurity analytics. DP, which is a sound mathematical framework, ensures privacy by adding a...

LegionITS: A Federated Intrusion-Tolerant System Architecture

The growing sophistication, frequency, and diversity of cyberattacks increasingly exceed the capacity of individual entities to fully understand and counter them. While existing solutions, such as Security Information and Event Management SIEM systems, Security Orchestration, Automation, and...

Can Federated Learning Safeguard Private Data in LLM Training? Vulnerabilities, Attacks, and Defense Evaluation

Fine-tuning large language models LLMs with local data is a widely adopted approach for organizations seeking to adapt LLMs to their specific domains. Given the shared characteristics in data across different organizations, the idea of collaboratively fine-tuning an LLM using data from multiple...

Risk Assessment and Security Analysis of Large Language Models

As large language models LLMs expose systemic security challenges in high risk applications, including privacy leaks, bias amplification, and malicious abuse, there is an urgent need for a dynamic risk assessment and collaborative defence framework that covers their entire life cycle. This paper...

On the Security and Privacy of Federated Learning: a Survey with Attacks, Defenses, Frameworks, Applications, and Future Directions

Federated Learning FL is an emerging distributed machine learning paradigm enabling multiple clients to train a global model collaboratively without sharing their raw data. While FL enhances data privacy by design, it remains vulnerable to various security and privacy threats. This survey provide...

Differential Privacy for Regulatory Compliance in Cyberattack Detection on Critical Infrastructure Systems

Industrial control systems are a fundamental component of critical infrastructure networks CIN such as gas, water and power. With the growing risk of cyberattacks, regulatory compliance requirements are also increasing for large scale critical infrastructure systems comprising multiple utility...

Enhancing Privacy in Decentralized Min-Max Optimization: a Differentially Private Approach

Decentralized min-max optimization allows multi-agent systems to collaboratively solve global min-max optimization problems by facilitating the exchange of model updates among neighboring agents, eliminating the need for a central server. However, sharing model updates in such systems carry a ris...

SelectiveShield: Lightweight Hybrid Defense against Gradient Leakage in Federated Learning

Federated Learning FL enables collaborative model training on decentralized data but remains vulnerable to gradient leakage attacks that can reconstruct sensitive user information. Existing defense mechanisms, such as differential privacy DP and homomorphic encryption HE, often introduce a...

Benchmarking Fraud Detectors on Private Graph Data

We introduce the novel problem of benchmarking fraud detectors on private graph-structured data. Currently, many types of fraud are managed in part by automated detection algorithms that operate over graphs. We consider the scenario where a data holder wishes to outsource development of fraud...