Information Theoretical Analysis of Identification based on Active Content Fingerprinting

Content fingerprinting and digital watermarking are techniques that are used for content protection and distribution monitoring. Over the past few years, both techniques have been well studied and their shortcomings understood. Recently, a new content fingerprinting scheme called {\em active content fingerprinting} was introduced to overcome these shortcomings. Active content fingerprinting aims to modify a content to extract robuster fingerprints than the conventional content fingerprinting. Moreover, contrary to digital watermarking, active content fingerprinting does not embed any message independent of contents thus does not face host interference. The main goal of this paper is to analyze fundamental limits of active content fingerprinting in an information theoretical framework.Comment: 35th WIC Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelu

Social Fingerprinting: detection of spambot groups through DNA-inspired behavioral modeling

Spambot detection in online social networks is a long-lasting challenge involving the study and design of detection techniques capable of efficiently identifying ever-evolving spammers. Recently, a new wave of social spambots has emerged, with advanced human-like characteristics that allow them to go undetected even by current state-of-the-art algorithms. In this paper, we show that efficient spambots detection can be achieved via an in-depth analysis of their collective behaviors exploiting the digital DNA technique for modeling the behaviors of social network users. Inspired by its biological counterpart, in the digital DNA representation the behavioral lifetime of a digital account is encoded in a sequence of characters. Then, we define a similarity measure for such digital DNA sequences. We build upon digital DNA and the similarity between groups of users to characterize both genuine accounts and spambots. Leveraging such characterization, we design the Social Fingerprinting technique, which is able to discriminate among spambots and genuine accounts in both a supervised and an unsupervised fashion. We finally evaluate the effectiveness of Social Fingerprinting and we compare it with three state-of-the-art detection algorithms. Among the peculiarities of our approach is the possibility to apply off-the-shelf DNA analysis techniques to study online users behaviors and to efficiently rely on a limited number of lightweight account characteristics

DeepMarks: A Digital Fingerprinting Framework for Deep Neural Networks

This paper proposes DeepMarks, a novel end-to-end framework for systematic fingerprinting in the context of Deep Learning (DL). Remarkable progress has been made in the area of deep learning. Sharing the trained DL models has become a trend that is ubiquitous in various fields ranging from biomedical diagnosis to stock prediction. As the availability and popularity of pre-trained models are increasing, it is critical to protect the Intellectual Property (IP) of the model owner. DeepMarks introduces the first fingerprinting methodology that enables the model owner to embed unique fingerprints within the parameters (weights) of her model and later identify undesired usages of her distributed models. The proposed framework embeds the fingerprints in the Probability Density Function (pdf) of trainable weights by leveraging the extra capacity available in contemporary DL models. DeepMarks is robust against fingerprints collusion as well as network transformation attacks, including model compression and model fine-tuning. Extensive proof-of-concept evaluations on MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets, as well as a wide variety of deep neural networks architectures such as Wide Residual Networks (WRNs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), corroborate the effectiveness and robustness of DeepMarks framework

Locational wireless and social media-based surveillance

The number of smartphones and tablets as well as the volume of traffic generated by these devices has been growing constantly over the past decade and this growth is predicted to continue at an increasing rate over the next five years. Numerous native features built into contemporary smart devices enable highly accurate digital fingerprinting techniques. Furthermore, software developers have been taking advantage of locational capabilities of these devices by building applications and social media services that enable convenient sharing of information tied to geographical locations. Mass online sharing resulted in a large volume of locational and personal data being publicly available for extraction. A number of researchers have used this opportunity to design and build tools for a variety of uses – both respectable and nefarious. Furthermore, due to the peculiarities of the IEEE 802.11 specification, wireless-enabled smart devices disclose a number of attributes, which can be observed via passive monitoring. These attributes coupled with the information that can be extracted using social media APIs present an opportunity for research into locational surveillance, device fingerprinting and device user identification techniques. This paper presents an in-progress research study and details the findings to date

Gossip Codes for Fingerprinting: Construction, Erasure Analysis and Pirate Tracing

This work presents two new construction techniques for q-ary Gossip codes from tdesigns and Traceability schemes. These Gossip codes achieve the shortest code length specified in terms of code parameters and can withstand erasures in digital fingerprinting applications. This work presents the construction of embedded Gossip codes for extending an existing Gossip code into a bigger code. It discusses the construction of concatenated codes and realisation of erasure model through concatenated codes.Comment: 28 page