New Way to Covertly Track Android Users

Researchers have discovered a new way to covertly track Android users. Both Meta and Yandex were using it, but have suddenly stopped now that they have been caught. The details are interesting, and worth reading in detail: Tracking code that Meta and Russia-based Yandex embed into millions of...

A week in security (June 1 – June 7)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: What does Facebook know about me? Lock and Code S06E11 Victims risk AsyncRAT infection after being redirected to fake Booking.com sites Juice jacking warnings are back, with a new twist The North Face warns customers about potentially stolen data Scammers are...

Doxing Via the Lens: Revealing Location-Related Privacy Leakage on Multi-Modal Large Reasoning Models

Recent advances in multi-modal large reasoning models MLRMs have shown significant ability to interpret complex visual content. While these models enable impressive reasoning capabilities, they also introduce novel and underexplored privacy risks. In this paper, we identify a novel category of...

Distortion Search, a Web Search Privacy Heuristic

Search engines have vast technical capabilities to retain Internet search logs for each user and thus present major privacy vulnerabilities to both individuals and organizations in revealing user intent. Additionally, many of the web search privacy enhancing tools available today require that the...

Private Evolution Converges

Private Evolution PE is a promising training-free method for differentially private DP synthetic data generation. While it achieves strong performance in some domains e.g., images and text, its behavior in others e.g., tabular data is less consistent. To date, the only theoretical analysis of the...

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...

Profiling Electric Vehicles Via Early Charging Voltage Patterns

Electric Vehicles EVs are rapidly gaining adoption as a sustainable alternative to fuel-powered vehicles, making secure charging infrastructure essential. Despite traditional authentication protocols, recent results showed that attackers may steal energy through tailored relay attacks. One...

Correlated Noise Mechanisms for Differentially Private Learning

This monograph explores the design and analysis of correlated noise mechanisms for differential privacy DP, focusing on their application to private training of AI and machine learning models via the core primitive of estimation of weighted prefix sums. While typical DP mechanisms inject...

Are Trees Really Green? A Detection Approach of IoT Malware Attacks

Nowadays, the Internet of Things IoT is widely employed, and its usage is growing exponentially because it facilitates remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, and data-driven decision making, especially in the healthcare and industrial sectors. However, IoT devices remain vulnerable due to the...

Minoritised Ethnic People'S Security and Privacy Concerns and Responses Towards Essential Online Services

Minoritised ethnic people are marginalised in society, and therefore at a higher risk of adverse online harms, including those arising from the loss of security and privacy of personal data. Despite this, there has been very little research focused on minoritised ethnic people's security and...

Private Memorization Editing: Turning Memorization into a Defense to Strengthen Data Privacy in Large Language Models

Large Language Models LLMs memorize, and thus, among huge amounts of uncontrolled data, may memorize Personally Identifiable Information PII, which should not be stored and, consequently, not leaked. In this paper, we introduce Private Memorization Editing PME, an approach for preventing private...

CAPAA: Classifier-Agnostic Projector-Based Adversarial Attack

Projector-based adversarial attack aims to project carefully designed light patterns i.e., adversarial projections onto scenes to deceive deep image classifiers. It has potential applications in privacy protection and the development of more robust classifiers. However, existing approaches...

Securing Unbounded Differential Privacy against Timing Attacks

Recent works have started to theoretically investigate how we can protect differentially private programs against timing attacks, by making the joint distribution the output and the runtime differentially private JOT-DP. However, the existing approaches to JOT-DP have some limitations, particular...

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...

Fuse and Federate: Enhancing EV Charging Station Security with Multimodal Fusion and Federated Learning

The rapid global adoption of electric vehicles EVs has established electric vehicle supply equipment EVSE as a critical component of smart grid infrastructure. While essential for ensuring reliable energy delivery and accessibility, EVSE systems face significant cybersecurity challenges, includin...

SecEmb: Sparsity-Aware Secure Federated Learning of On-Device Recommender System with Large Embedding

Federated recommender system FedRec has emerged as a solution to protect user data through collaborative training techniques. A typical FedRec involves transmitting the full model and entire weight updates between edge devices and the server, causing significant burdens to devices with limited...

Differentially Private Sparse Linear Regression with Heavy-Tailed Responses

As a fundamental problem in machine learning and differential privacy DP, DP linear regression has been extensively studied. However, most existing methods focus primarily on either regular data distributions or low-dimensional cases with irregular data. To address these limitations, this paper...

Breaking Data Silos: Towards Open and Scalable Mobility Foundation Models Via Generative Continual Learning

Foundation models have revolutionized fields such as natural language processing and computer vision by enabling general-purpose learning across diverse tasks and datasets. However, building analogous models for human mobility remains challenging due to the privacy-sensitive nature of mobility da...

Popular Chrome Extensions Found Leaking Data via Unencrypted Connections

Popular Chrome extensions exposed user data by sending it over unencrypted HTTP, raising privacy concerns. Symantec urges caution for users...

OpenAI forced to preserve ChatGPT chats

OpenAI has protested a court order that forces it to retain its users' conversations. The creator of the ChatGPT AI model objected to the order, which is part of a copyright infringement case against it by The New York Times and other publishers. The news organizations argued that ChatGPT was...