11,338 research outputs found
Adversarial Training Towards Robust Multimedia Recommender System
With the prevalence of multimedia content on the Web, developing recommender
solutions that can effectively leverage the rich signal in multimedia data is
in urgent need. Owing to the success of deep neural networks in representation
learning, recent advance on multimedia recommendation has largely focused on
exploring deep learning methods to improve the recommendation accuracy. To
date, however, there has been little effort to investigate the robustness of
multimedia representation and its impact on the performance of multimedia
recommendation.
In this paper, we shed light on the robustness of multimedia recommender
system. Using the state-of-the-art recommendation framework and deep image
features, we demonstrate that the overall system is not robust, such that a
small (but purposeful) perturbation on the input image will severely decrease
the recommendation accuracy. This implies the possible weakness of multimedia
recommender system in predicting user preference, and more importantly, the
potential of improvement by enhancing its robustness. To this end, we propose a
novel solution named Adversarial Multimedia Recommendation (AMR), which can
lead to a more robust multimedia recommender model by using adversarial
learning. The idea is to train the model to defend an adversary, which adds
perturbations to the target image with the purpose of decreasing the model's
accuracy. We conduct experiments on two representative multimedia
recommendation tasks, namely, image recommendation and visually-aware product
recommendation. Extensive results verify the positive effect of adversarial
learning and demonstrate the effectiveness of our AMR method. Source codes are
available in https://github.com/duxy-me/AMR.Comment: TKD
On content-based recommendation and user privacy in social-tagging systems
Recommendation systems and content filtering approaches based on annotations and ratings, essentially rely on users expressing their preferences and interests through their actions, in order to provide personalised content. This activity, in which users engage collectively has been named social tagging, and it is one of the most popular in which users engage online, and although it has opened new possibilities for application interoperability on the semantic web, it is also posing new privacy threats. It, in fact, consists of describing online or offline resources by using free-text labels (i.e. tags), therefore exposing the user profile and activity to privacy attacks. Users, as a result, may wish to adopt a privacy-enhancing strategy in order not to reveal their interests completely. Tag forgery is a privacy enhancing technology consisting of generating tags for categories or resources that do not reflect the user's actual preferences. By modifying their profile, tag forgery may have a negative impact on the quality of the recommendation system, thus protecting user privacy to a certain extent but at the expenses of utility loss. The impact of tag forgery on content-based recommendation is, therefore, investigated in a real-world application scenario where different forgery strategies are evaluated, and the consequent loss in utility is measured and compared.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft
Software that Learns from its Own Failures
All non-trivial software systems suffer from unanticipated production
failures. However, those systems are passive with respect to failures and do
not take advantage of them in order to improve their future behavior: they
simply wait for them to happen and trigger hard-coded failure recovery
strategies. Instead, I propose a new paradigm in which software systems learn
from their own failures. By using an advanced monitoring system they have a
constant awareness of their own state and health. They are designed in order to
automatically explore alternative recovery strategies inferred from past
successful and failed executions. Their recovery capabilities are assessed by
self-injection of controlled failures; this process produces knowledge in
prevision of future unanticipated failures
An Evasion Attack against ML-based Phishing URL Detectors
Background: Over the year, Machine Learning Phishing URL classification
(MLPU) systems have gained tremendous popularity to detect phishing URLs
proactively. Despite this vogue, the security vulnerabilities of MLPUs remain
mostly unknown. Aim: To address this concern, we conduct a study to understand
the test time security vulnerabilities of the state-of-the-art MLPU systems,
aiming at providing guidelines for the future development of these systems.
Method: In this paper, we propose an evasion attack framework against MLPU
systems. To achieve this, we first develop an algorithm to generate adversarial
phishing URLs. We then reproduce 41 MLPU systems and record their baseline
performance. Finally, we simulate an evasion attack to evaluate these MLPU
systems against our generated adversarial URLs. Results: In comparison to
previous works, our attack is: (i) effective as it evades all the models with
an average success rate of 66% and 85% for famous (such as Netflix, Google) and
less popular phishing targets (e.g., Wish, JBHIFI, Officeworks) respectively;
(ii) realistic as it requires only 23ms to produce a new adversarial URL
variant that is available for registration with a median cost of only
$11.99/year. We also found that popular online services such as Google
SafeBrowsing and VirusTotal are unable to detect these URLs. (iii) We find that
Adversarial training (successful defence against evasion attack) does not
significantly improve the robustness of these systems as it decreases the
success rate of our attack by only 6% on average for all the models. (iv)
Further, we identify the security vulnerabilities of the considered MLPU
systems. Our findings lead to promising directions for future research.
Conclusion: Our study not only illustrate vulnerabilities in MLPU systems but
also highlights implications for future study towards assessing and improving
these systems.Comment: Draft for ACM TOP
ANTIDS: Self-Organized Ant-based Clustering Model for Intrusion Detection System
Security of computers and the networks that connect them is increasingly
becoming of great significance. Computer security is defined as the protection
of computing systems against threats to confidentiality, integrity, and
availability. There are two types of intruders: the external intruders who are
unauthorized users of the machines they attack, and internal intruders, who
have permission to access the system with some restrictions. Due to the fact
that it is more and more improbable to a system administrator to recognize and
manually intervene to stop an attack, there is an increasing recognition that
ID systems should have a lot to earn on following its basic principles on the
behavior of complex natural systems, namely in what refers to
self-organization, allowing for a real distributed and collective perception of
this phenomena. With that aim in mind, the present work presents a
self-organized ant colony based intrusion detection system (ANTIDS) to detect
intrusions in a network infrastructure. The performance is compared among
conventional soft computing paradigms like Decision Trees, Support Vector
Machines and Linear Genetic Programming to model fast, online and efficient
intrusion detection systems.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, Swarm Intelligence and Patterns (SIP)- special
track at WSTST 2005, Muroran, JAPA
Worst-input mutation approach to web services vulnerability testing based on SOAP messages
The growing popularity and application of Web services have led to an increase in attention to the vulnerability of software based on these services. Vulnerability testing examines the trustworthiness, and reduces the security risks of software systems, however such testing of Web services has become increasing challenging due to the cross-platform and heterogeneous characteristics of their deployment. This paper proposes a worst-input mutation approach for testing Web service vulnerability based on SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) messages. Based on characteristics of the SOAP messages, the proposed approach uses the farthest neighbor concept to guide generation of the test suite. The test case generation algorithm is presented, and a prototype Web service vulnerability testing tool described. The tool was applied to the testing of Web services on the Internet, with experimental results indicating that the proposed approach, which found more vulnerability faults than other related approaches, is both practical and effective
WormBase: a comprehensive resource for nematode research
WormBase (http://www.wormbase.org) is a central data repository for nematode biology. Initially created as a service to the Caenorhabditis elegans research field, WormBase has evolved into a powerful research tool in its own right. In the past 2 years, we expanded WormBase to include the complete genomic sequence, gene predictions and orthology assignments from a range of related nematodes. This comparative data enrich the C. elegans data with improved gene predictions and a better understanding of gene function. In turn, they bring the wealth of experimental knowledge of C. elegans to other systems of medical and agricultural importance. Here, we describe new species and data types now available at WormBase. In addition, we detail enhancements to our curatorial pipeline and website infrastructure to accommodate new genomes and an extensive user base
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