Security Evaluation of Support Vector Machines in Adversarial Environments

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are among the most popular classification techniques adopted in security applications like malware detection, intrusion detection, and spam filtering. However, if SVMs are to be incorporated in real-world security systems, they must be able to cope with attack patterns that can either mislead the learning algorithm (poisoning), evade detection (evasion), or gain information about their internal parameters (privacy breaches). The main contributions of this chapter are twofold. First, we introduce a formal general framework for the empirical evaluation of the security of machine-learning systems. Second, according to our framework, we demonstrate the feasibility of evasion, poisoning and privacy attacks against SVMs in real-world security problems. For each attack technique, we evaluate its impact and discuss whether (and how) it can be countered through an adversary-aware design of SVMs. Our experiments are easily reproducible thanks to open-source code that we have made available, together with all the employed datasets, on a public repository.Comment: 47 pages, 9 figures; chapter accepted into book 'Support Vector Machine Applications

On Lightweight Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Learning for IoT Objects

The Internet of Things (IoT) will be a main data generation infrastructure for achieving better system intelligence. This paper considers the design and implementation of a practical privacy-preserving collaborative learning scheme, in which a curious learning coordinator trains a better machine learning model based on the data samples contributed by a number of IoT objects, while the confidentiality of the raw forms of the training data is protected against the coordinator. Existing distributed machine learning and data encryption approaches incur significant computation and communication overhead, rendering them ill-suited for resource-constrained IoT objects. We study an approach that applies independent Gaussian random projection at each IoT object to obfuscate data and trains a deep neural network at the coordinator based on the projected data from the IoT objects. This approach introduces light computation overhead to the IoT objects and moves most workload to the coordinator that can have sufficient computing resources. Although the independent projections performed by the IoT objects address the potential collusion between the curious coordinator and some compromised IoT objects, they significantly increase the complexity of the projected data. In this paper, we leverage the superior learning capability of deep learning in capturing sophisticated patterns to maintain good learning performance. Extensive comparative evaluation shows that this approach outperforms other lightweight approaches that apply additive noisification for differential privacy and/or support vector machines for learning in the applications with light data pattern complexities.Comment: 12 pages,IOTDI 201