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...

Scalable and Verifiable Federated Learning for Cross-Institution Financial Fraud Detection

The global financial ecosystem confronts a critical asymmetry: while fraud syndicates operate as borderless, distributed networks, banking institutions remain constrained by regulatory data silos, limiting visibility into cross-institutional threat patterns under strict privacy laws such as GDPR...

SecureDyn-FL: A Robust Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning Framework for Intrusion Detection in IoT Networks

The rapid proliferation of Internet of Things IoT devices across domains such as smart homes, industrial control systems, and healthcare networks has significantly expanded the attack surface for cyber threats, including botnet-driven distributed denial-of-service DDoS, malware injection, and dat...

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...

Per-Element Secure Aggregation against Data Reconstruction Attacks in Federated Learning

Federated learning FL enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data, but individual model updates may still leak sensitive information. Secure aggregation SecAgg mitigates this risk by allowing the server to access only the sum of client updates, thereby concealing individual...

From Split to Share: Private Inference with Distributed Feature Sharing

Cloud-based Machine Learning as a Service MLaaS raises serious privacy concerns when handling sensitive client data. Existing Private Inference PI methods face a fundamental trade-off between privacy and efficiency: cryptographic approaches offer strong protection but incur high computational...

AdeptHEQ-FL: Adaptive Homomorphic Encryption for Federated Learning of Hybrid Classical-Quantum Models with Dynamic Layer Sparing

Federated Learning FL faces inherent challenges in balancing model performance, privacy preservation, and communication efficiency, especially in non-IID decentralized environments. Recent approaches either sacrifice formal privacy guarantees, incur high overheads, or overlook quantum-enhanced...

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...

Zero-Trust Foundation Models: a New Paradigm for Secure and Collaborative Artificial Intelligence for Internet of Things

This paper focuses on Zero-Trust Foundation Models ZTFMs, a novel paradigm that embeds zero-trust security principles into the lifecycle of foundation models FMs for Internet of Things IoT systems. By integrating core tenets, such as continuous verification, least privilege access LPA, data...

Privacy-Aware Cyberterrorism Network Analysis Using Graph Neural Networks and Federated Learning

Cyberterrorism poses a formidable threat to digital infrastructures, with increasing reliance on encrypted, decentralized platforms that obscure threat actor activity. To address the challenge of analyzing such adversarial networks while preserving the privacy of distributed intelligence data, we...

SVAFD: a Secure and Verifiable Co-Aggregation Protocol for Federated Distillation

Secure Aggregation SA is an indispensable component of Federated Learning FL that concentrates on privacy preservation while allowing for robust aggregation. However, most SA designs rely heavily on the unrealistic assumption of homogeneous model architectures. Federated Distillation FD, which...

Standing Firm in 5G: a Single-Round, Dropout-Resilient Secure Aggregation for Federated Learning

Federated learning FL is well-suited to 5G networks, where many mobile devices generate sensitive edge data. Secure aggregation protocols enhance privacy in FL by ensuring that individual user updates reveal no information about the underlying client data. However, the dynamic and large-scale...

Efficient Full-Stack Private Federated Deep Learning with Post-Quantum Security

Federated learning FL enables collaborative model training while preserving user data privacy by keeping data local. Despite these advantages, FL remains vulnerable to privacy attacks on user updates and model parameters during training and deployment. Secure aggregation protocols have been...