26,630 research outputs found
Privacy-preserving network path validation
The end-users communicating over a network path currently have no control over the path. For a better quality of service, the source node often opts for a superior (or premium) network path in order to send packets to the destination node. However, the current Internet architecture provides no assurance that the packets indeed follow the designated path. Network path validation schemes address this issue and enable each node present on a network path to validate whether each packet has followed the specific path so far. In this work, we introduce two notions of privacy -- path privacy and index privacy -- in the context of network path validation. We show that, in case a network path validation scheme does not satisfy these two properties, the scheme is vulnerable to certain practical attacks (that affect the reliability, neutrality and quality of service offered by the underlying network). To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work that addresses privacy issues related to network path validation. We design PrivNPV, a privacy-preserving network path validation protocol, that satisfies both path privacy and index privacy. We discuss several attacks related to network path validation and how PrivNPV defends against these attacks. Finally, we discuss the practicality of PrivNPV based on relevant parameters
Synthetic sequence generator for recommender systems - memory biased random walk on sequence multilayer network
Personalized recommender systems rely on each user's personal usage data in
the system, in order to assist in decision making. However, privacy policies
protecting users' rights prevent these highly personal data from being publicly
available to a wider researcher audience. In this work, we propose a memory
biased random walk model on multilayer sequence network, as a generator of
synthetic sequential data for recommender systems. We demonstrate the
applicability of the synthetic data in training recommender system models for
cases when privacy policies restrict clickstream publishing.Comment: The new updated version of the pape
Learning Privacy Preserving Encodings through Adversarial Training
We present a framework to learn privacy-preserving encodings of images that
inhibit inference of chosen private attributes, while allowing recovery of
other desirable information. Rather than simply inhibiting a given fixed
pre-trained estimator, our goal is that an estimator be unable to learn to
accurately predict the private attributes even with knowledge of the encoding
function. We use a natural adversarial optimization-based formulation for
this---training the encoding function against a classifier for the private
attribute, with both modeled as deep neural networks. The key contribution of
our work is a stable and convergent optimization approach that is successful at
learning an encoder with our desired properties---maintaining utility while
inhibiting inference of private attributes, not just within the adversarial
optimization, but also by classifiers that are trained after the encoder is
fixed. We adopt a rigorous experimental protocol for verification wherein
classifiers are trained exhaustively till saturation on the fixed encoders. We
evaluate our approach on tasks of real-world complexity---learning
high-dimensional encodings that inhibit detection of different scene
categories---and find that it yields encoders that are resilient at maintaining
privacy.Comment: To appear in WACV 201
CryptoMaze: Atomic Off-Chain Payments in Payment Channel Network
Payment protocols developed to realize off-chain transactions in Payment
channel network (PCN) assumes the underlying routing algorithm transfers the
payment via a single path. However, a path may not have sufficient capacity to
route a transaction. It is inevitable to split the payment across multiple
paths. If we run independent instances of the protocol on each path, the
execution may fail in some of the paths, leading to partial transfer of funds.
A payer has to reattempt the entire process for the residual amount. We propose
a secure and privacy-preserving payment protocol, CryptoMaze. Instead of
independent paths, the funds are transferred from sender to receiver across
several payment channels responsible for routing, in a breadth-first fashion.
Payments are resolved faster at reduced setup cost, compared to existing
state-of-the-art. Correlation among the partial payments is captured,
guaranteeing atomicity. Further, two party ECDSA signature is used for
establishing scriptless locks among parties involved in the payment. It reduces
space overhead by leveraging on core Bitcoin scripts. We provide a formal model
in the Universal Composability framework and state the privacy goals achieved
by CryptoMaze. We compare the performance of our protocol with the existing
single path based payment protocol, Multi-hop HTLC, applied iteratively on one
path at a time on several instances. It is observed that CryptoMaze requires
less communication overhead and low execution time, demonstrating efficiency
and scalability.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures, 1 tabl
How Far Removed Are You? Scalable Privacy-Preserving Estimation of Social Path Length with Social PaL
Social relationships are a natural basis on which humans make trust
decisions. Online Social Networks (OSNs) are increasingly often used to let
users base trust decisions on the existence and the strength of social
relationships. While most OSNs allow users to discover the length of the social
path to other users, they do so in a centralized way, thus requiring them to
rely on the service provider and reveal their interest in each other. This
paper presents Social PaL, a system supporting the privacy-preserving discovery
of arbitrary-length social paths between any two social network users. We
overcome the bootstrapping problem encountered in all related prior work,
demonstrating that Social PaL allows its users to find all paths of length two
and to discover a significant fraction of longer paths, even when only a small
fraction of OSN users is in the Social PaL system - e.g., discovering 70% of
all paths with only 40% of the users. We implement Social PaL using a scalable
server-side architecture and a modular Android client library, allowing
developers to seamlessly integrate it into their apps.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper appears in ACM WiSec 2015. This
is the full versio
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
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