10,086 research outputs found
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
Persons Versus Brains: Biological Intelligence in Human Organisms
I go deep into the biology of the human organism to argue that the psychological features and functions of persons are realized by cellular and molecular parallel distributed processing networks dispersed throughout the whole body. Persons supervene on the computational processes of nervous, endocrine, immune, and genetic networks. Persons do not go with brains
A Hybrid Approach to Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning
Federated learning facilitates the collaborative training of models without
the sharing of raw data. However, recent attacks demonstrate that simply
maintaining data locality during training processes does not provide sufficient
privacy guarantees. Rather, we need a federated learning system capable of
preventing inference over both the messages exchanged during training and the
final trained model while ensuring the resulting model also has acceptable
predictive accuracy. Existing federated learning approaches either use secure
multiparty computation (SMC) which is vulnerable to inference or differential
privacy which can lead to low accuracy given a large number of parties with
relatively small amounts of data each. In this paper, we present an alternative
approach that utilizes both differential privacy and SMC to balance these
trade-offs. Combining differential privacy with secure multiparty computation
enables us to reduce the growth of noise injection as the number of parties
increases without sacrificing privacy while maintaining a pre-defined rate of
trust. Our system is therefore a scalable approach that protects against
inference threats and produces models with high accuracy. Additionally, our
system can be used to train a variety of machine learning models, which we
validate with experimental results on 3 different machine learning algorithms.
Our experiments demonstrate that our approach out-performs state of the art
solutions
Security Applications of Formal Language Theory
We present an approach to improving the security of complex, composed systems based on formal language theory, and show how this approach leads to advances in input validation, security modeling, attack surface reduction, and ultimately, software design and programming methodology. We cite examples based on real-world security flaws in common protocols representing different classes of protocol complexity. We also introduce a formalization of an exploit development technique, the parse tree differential attack, made possible by our conception of the role of formal grammars in security. These insights make possible future advances in software auditing techniques applicable to static and dynamic binary analysis, fuzzing, and general reverse-engineering and exploit development.
Our work provides a foundation for verifying critical implementation components with considerably less burden to developers than is offered by the current state of the art. It additionally offers a rich basis for further exploration in the areas of offensive analysis and, conversely, automated defense tools and techniques.
This report is divided into two parts. In Part I we address the formalisms and their applications; in Part II we discuss the general implications and recommendations for protocol and software design that follow from our formal analysis
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