Enable Portrait Privacy Protection in Photo Capturing and Sharing

The wide adoption of wearable smart devices with onboard cameras greatly increases people's concern on privacy infringement. Here we explore the possibility of easing persons from photos captured by smart devices according to their privacy protection requirements. To make this work, we need to address two challenges: 1) how to let users explicitly express their privacy protection intention, and 2) how to associate the privacy requirements with persons in captured photos accurately and efficiently. Furthermore, the association process itself should not cause portrait information leakage and should be accomplished in a privacy-preserving way. In this work, we design, develop, and evaluate a protocol, that enables a user to flexibly express her privacy requirement and empowers the photo service provider (or image taker) to exert the privacy protection policy.Leveraging the visual distinguishability of people in the field-of-view and the dimension-order-independent property of vector similarity measurement, we achieves high accuracy and low overhead. We implement a prototype system, and our evaluation results on both the trace-driven and real-life experiments confirm the feasibility and efficiency of our system.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure

Parity Models: A General Framework for Coding-Based Resilience in ML Inference

Machine learning models are becoming the primary workhorses for many applications. Production services deploy models through prediction serving systems that take in queries and return predictions by performing inference on machine learning models. In order to scale to high query rates, prediction serving systems are run on many machines in cluster settings, and thus are prone to slowdowns and failures that inflate tail latency and cause violations of strict latency targets. Current approaches to reducing tail latency are inadequate for the latency targets of prediction serving, incur high resource overhead, or are inapplicable to the computations performed during inference. We present ParM, a novel, general framework for making use of ideas from erasure coding and machine learning to achieve low-latency, resource-efficient resilience to slowdowns and failures in prediction serving systems. ParM encodes multiple queries together into a single parity query and performs inference on the parity query using a parity model. A decoder uses the output of a parity model to reconstruct approximations of unavailable predictions. ParM uses neural networks to learn parity models that enable simple, fast encoders and decoders to reconstruct unavailable predictions for a variety of inference tasks such as image classification, speech recognition, and object localization. We build ParM atop an open-source prediction serving system and through extensive evaluation show that ParM improves overall accuracy in the face of unavailability with low latency while using 2-4$\times$ less additional resources than replication-based approaches. ParM reduces the gap between 99.9th percentile and median latency by up to $3.5\times$ compared to approaches that use an equal amount of resources, while maintaining the same median.Comment: This paper is superseded by the ACM SOSP 2019 paper "Parity Models: Erasure-Coded Resilience for Prediction Serving Systems

Privacy-preserving Machine Learning through Data Obfuscation

As machine learning becomes a practice and commodity, numerous cloud-based services and frameworks are provided to help customers develop and deploy machine learning applications. While it is prevalent to outsource model training and serving tasks in the cloud, it is important to protect the privacy of sensitive samples in the training dataset and prevent information leakage to untrusted third parties. Past work have shown that a malicious machine learning service provider or end user can easily extract critical information about the training samples, from the model parameters or even just model outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel and generic methodology to preserve the privacy of training data in machine learning applications. Specifically we introduce an obfuscate function and apply it to the training data before feeding them to the model training task. This function adds random noise to existing samples, or augments the dataset with new samples. By doing so sensitive information about the properties of individual samples, or statistical properties of a group of samples, is hidden. Meanwhile the model trained from the obfuscated dataset can still achieve high accuracy. With this approach, the customers can safely disclose the data or models to third-party providers or end users without the need to worry about data privacy. Our experiments show that this approach can effective defeat four existing types of machine learning privacy attacks at negligible accuracy cost

BAMCloud: A Cloud Based Mobile Biometric Authentication Framework

With an exponential increase in number of users switching to mobile banking, various countries are adopting biometric solutions as security measures. The main reason for biometric technologies becoming more common in the everyday lives of consumers is because of the facility to easily capture biometric data in real time, using their mobile phones. Biometric technologies are providing the potential security framework to make banking more convenient and secure than it has ever been. At the same time, the exponential growth of enrollment in the biometric system produces massive amount of high dimensionality data that leads to degradation in the performance of the mobile banking systems. Therefore, in order to overcome the performance issues arising due to this data deluge, this paper aims to propose a distributed mobile biometric system based on a high performance cluster Cloud. High availability, better time efficiency and scalability are some of the added advantages of using the proposed system. In this paper a Cloud based mobile biometric authentication framework (BAMCloud) is proposed that uses dynamic signatures and performs authentication. It includes the steps involving data capture using any handheld mobile device, then storage, preprocessing and training the system in a distributed manner over Cloud. For this purpose we have implemented it using MapReduce on Hadoop platform and for training Levenberg-Marquardt backpropagation neural network has been used. Moreover, the methodology adopted is very novel as it achieves a speedup of 8.5x and a performance of 96.23%. Furthermore, the cost benefit analysis of the implemented system shows that the cost of implementation and execution of the system is lesser than the existing ones. The experiments demonstrate that the better performance is achieved by proposed framework as compared to the other methods used in the recent literature

Exploring Computation-Communication Tradeoffs in Camera Systems

Cameras are the defacto sensor. The growing demand for real-time and low-power computer vision, coupled with trends towards high-efficiency heterogeneous systems, has given rise to a wide range of image processing acceleration techniques at the camera node and in the cloud. In this paper, we characterize two novel camera systems that use acceleration techniques to push the extremes of energy and performance scaling, and explore the computation-communication tradeoffs in their design. The first case study targets a camera system designed to detect and authenticate individual faces, running solely on energy harvested from RFID readers. We design a multi-accelerator SoC design operating in the sub-mW range, and evaluate it with real-world workloads to show performance and energy efficiency improvements over a general purpose microprocessor. The second camera system supports a 16-camera rig processing over 32 Gb/s of data to produce real-time 3D-360 degree virtual reality video. We design a multi-FPGA processing pipeline that outperforms CPU and GPU configurations by up to 10x in computation time, producing panoramic stereo video directly from the camera rig at 30 frames per second. We find that an early data reduction step, either before complex processing or offloading, is the most critical optimization for in-camera systems

Clome: The Practical Implications of a Cloud-based Smart Home

A rich body of work in recent years has advocated the use of cloud technologies within a home environment, but nothing has materialized so far in terms of real-world implementations. In this paper, we argue that this is due to the fact that none of these proposals have addressed some of the practical challenges of moving home applications to the cloud. Specifically, we discuss the pragmatic implications of moving to the cloud including, data and information security, increase in network traffic, and fault tolerance. To elicit discussion, we take a clean-slate approach and introduce a proof-of-concept smart home, dubbed Clome, that decouples non-trivial computation from home applications and transfers it to the cloud. We also discuss how a Clome-like smart home with decentralized processing and storage can be enabled through OpenFlow programmable switches, home-centric programming platforms, and thin-client computing

Privacy-Preserving Deep Inference for Rich User Data on The Cloud

Deep neural networks are increasingly being used in a variety of machine learning applications applied to rich user data on the cloud. However, this approach introduces a number of privacy and efficiency challenges, as the cloud operator can perform secondary inferences on the available data. Recently, advances in edge processing have paved the way for more efficient, and private, data processing at the source for simple tasks and lighter models, though they remain a challenge for larger, and more complicated models. In this paper, we present a hybrid approach for breaking down large, complex deep models for cooperative, privacy-preserving analytics. We do this by breaking down the popular deep architectures and fine-tune them in a particular way. We then evaluate the privacy benefits of this approach based on the information exposed to the cloud service. We also asses the local inference cost of different layers on a modern handset for mobile applications. Our evaluations show that by using certain kind of fine-tuning and embedding techniques and at a small processing costs, we can greatly reduce the level of information available to unintended tasks applied to the data feature on the cloud, and hence achieving the desired tradeoff between privacy and performance.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1703.0295

Cloud-based Privacy Preserving Image Storage, Sharing and Search

High-resolution cameras produce huge volume of high quality images everyday. It is extremely challenging to store, share and especially search those huge images, for which increasing number of cloud services are presented to support such functionalities. However, images tend to contain rich sensitive information (\eg, people, location and event), and people's privacy concerns hinder their readily participation into the services provided by untrusted third parties. In this work, we introduce PIC: a Privacy-preserving large-scale Image search system on Cloud. Our system enables efficient yet secure content-based image search with fine-grained access control, and it also provides privacy-preserving image storage and sharing among users. Users can specify who can/cannot search on their images when using the system, and they can search on others' images if they satisfy the condition specified by the image owners. Majority of the computationally intensive jobs are outsourced to the cloud side, and users only need to submit the query and receive the result throughout the entire image search. Specially, to deal with massive images, we design our system suitable for distributed and parallel computation and introduce several optimizations to further expedite the search process. We implement a prototype of PIC including both cloud side and client side. The cloud side is a cluster of computers with distributed file system (Hadoop HDFS) and MapReduce architecture (Hadoop MapReduce). The client side is built for both Windows OS laptops and Android phones. We evaluate the prototype system with large sets of real-life photos. Our security analysis and evaluation results show that PIC successfully protect the image privacy at a low cost of computation and communication.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figure

Reinforcement Learning Based Orchestration for Elastic Services

Due to the highly variable execution context in which edge services run, adapting their behavior to the execution context is crucial to comply with their requirements. However, adapting service behavior is a challenging task because it is hard to anticipate the execution contexts in which it will be deployed, as well as assessing the impact that each behavior change will produce. In order to provide this adaptation efficiently, we propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Orchestration for Elastic Services. We implement and evaluate this approach by adapting an elastic service in different simulated execution contexts and comparing its performance to a Heuristics based approach. We show that elastic services achieve high precision and requirement satisfaction rates while creating an overhead of less than 0.5% to the overall service. In particular, the RL approach proves to be more efficient than its rule-based counterpart; yielding a 10 to 25% higher precision while being 25% less computationally expensive.Comment: 2019 IEEE 5th World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT), 6 page

All One Needs to Know about Fog Computing and Related Edge Computing Paradigms: A Complete Survey

With the Internet of Things (IoT) becoming part of our daily life and our environment, we expect rapid growth in the number of connected devices. IoT is expected to connect billions of devices and humans to bring promising advantages for us. With this growth, fog computing, along with its related edge computing paradigms, such as multi-access edge computing (MEC) and cloudlet, are seen as promising solutions for handling the large volume of security-critical and time-sensitive data that is being produced by the IoT. In this paper, we first provide a tutorial on fog computing and its related computing paradigms, including their similarities and differences. Next, we provide a taxonomy of research topics in fog computing, and through a comprehensive survey, we summarize and categorize the efforts on fog computing and its related computing paradigms. Finally, we provide challenges and future directions for research in fog computing.Comment: 48 pages, 7 tables, 11 figures, 450 references. The data (categories and features/objectives of the papers) of this survey are now available publicly. Accepted by Elsevier Journal of Systems Architectur