3,209 research outputs found
Hacking Smart Machines with Smarter Ones: How to Extract Meaningful Data from Machine Learning Classifiers
Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are used to train computers to perform a
variety of complex tasks and improve with experience. Computers learn how to
recognize patterns, make unintended decisions, or react to a dynamic
environment. Certain trained machines may be more effective than others because
they are based on more suitable ML algorithms or because they were trained
through superior training sets. Although ML algorithms are known and publicly
released, training sets may not be reasonably ascertainable and, indeed, may be
guarded as trade secrets. While much research has been performed about the
privacy of the elements of training sets, in this paper we focus our attention
on ML classifiers and on the statistical information that can be unconsciously
or maliciously revealed from them. We show that it is possible to infer
unexpected but useful information from ML classifiers. In particular, we build
a novel meta-classifier and train it to hack other classifiers, obtaining
meaningful information about their training sets. This kind of information
leakage can be exploited, for example, by a vendor to build more effective
classifiers or to simply acquire trade secrets from a competitor's apparatus,
potentially violating its intellectual property rights
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
Preserving Both Privacy and Utility in Network Trace Anonymization
As network security monitoring grows more sophisticated, there is an
increasing need for outsourcing such tasks to third-party analysts. However,
organizations are usually reluctant to share their network traces due to
privacy concerns over sensitive information, e.g., network and system
configuration, which may potentially be exploited for attacks. In cases where
data owners are convinced to share their network traces, the data are typically
subjected to certain anonymization techniques, e.g., CryptoPAn, which replaces
real IP addresses with prefix-preserving pseudonyms. However, most such
techniques either are vulnerable to adversaries with prior knowledge about some
network flows in the traces, or require heavy data sanitization or
perturbation, both of which may result in a significant loss of data utility.
In this paper, we aim to preserve both privacy and utility through shifting the
trade-off from between privacy and utility to between privacy and computational
cost. The key idea is for the analysts to generate and analyze multiple
anonymized views of the original network traces; those views are designed to be
sufficiently indistinguishable even to adversaries armed with prior knowledge,
which preserves the privacy, whereas one of the views will yield true analysis
results privately retrieved by the data owner, which preserves the utility. We
present the general approach and instantiate it based on CryptoPAn. We formally
analyze the privacy of our solution and experimentally evaluate it using real
network traces provided by a major ISP. The results show that our approach can
significantly reduce the level of information leakage (e.g., less than 1\% of
the information leaked by CryptoPAn) with comparable utility
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