36,660 research outputs found
Undermining User Privacy on Mobile Devices Using AI
Over the past years, literature has shown that attacks exploiting the
microarchitecture of modern processors pose a serious threat to the privacy of
mobile phone users. This is because applications leave distinct footprints in
the processor, which can be used by malware to infer user activities. In this
work, we show that these inference attacks are considerably more practical when
combined with advanced AI techniques. In particular, we focus on profiling the
activity in the last-level cache (LLC) of ARM processors. We employ a simple
Prime+Probe based monitoring technique to obtain cache traces, which we
classify with Deep Learning methods including Convolutional Neural Networks. We
demonstrate our approach on an off-the-shelf Android phone by launching a
successful attack from an unprivileged, zeropermission App in well under a
minute. The App thereby detects running applications with an accuracy of 98%
and reveals opened websites and streaming videos by monitoring the LLC for at
most 6 seconds. This is possible, since Deep Learning compensates measurement
disturbances stemming from the inherently noisy LLC monitoring and unfavorable
cache characteristics such as random line replacement policies. In summary, our
results show that thanks to advanced AI techniques, inference attacks are
becoming alarmingly easy to implement and execute in practice. This once more
calls for countermeasures that confine microarchitectural leakage and protect
mobile phone applications, especially those valuing the privacy of their users
BioWorkbench: A High-Performance Framework for Managing and Analyzing Bioinformatics Experiments
Advances in sequencing techniques have led to exponential growth in
biological data, demanding the development of large-scale bioinformatics
experiments. Because these experiments are computation- and data-intensive,
they require high-performance computing (HPC) techniques and can benefit from
specialized technologies such as Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWfMS)
and databases. In this work, we present BioWorkbench, a framework for managing
and analyzing bioinformatics experiments. This framework automatically collects
provenance data, including both performance data from workflow execution and
data from the scientific domain of the workflow application. Provenance data
can be analyzed through a web application that abstracts a set of queries to
the provenance database, simplifying access to provenance information. We
evaluate BioWorkbench using three case studies: SwiftPhylo, a phylogenetic tree
assembly workflow; SwiftGECKO, a comparative genomics workflow; and RASflow, a
RASopathy analysis workflow. We analyze each workflow from both computational
and scientific domain perspectives, by using queries to a provenance and
annotation database. Some of these queries are available as a pre-built feature
of the BioWorkbench web application. Through the provenance data, we show that
the framework is scalable and achieves high-performance, reducing up to 98% of
the case studies execution time. We also show how the application of machine
learning techniques can enrich the analysis process
PerfWeb: How to Violate Web Privacy with Hardware Performance Events
The browser history reveals highly sensitive information about users, such as
financial status, health conditions, or political views. Private browsing modes
and anonymity networks are consequently important tools to preserve the privacy
not only of regular users but in particular of whistleblowers and dissidents.
Yet, in this work we show how a malicious application can infer opened websites
from Google Chrome in Incognito mode and from Tor Browser by exploiting
hardware performance events (HPEs). In particular, we analyze the browsers'
microarchitectural footprint with the help of advanced Machine Learning
techniques: k-th Nearest Neighbors, Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines,
and in contrast to previous literature also Convolutional Neural Networks. We
profile 40 different websites, 30 of the top Alexa sites and 10 whistleblowing
portals, on two machines featuring an Intel and an ARM processor. By monitoring
retired instructions, cache accesses, and bus cycles for at most 5 seconds, we
manage to classify the selected websites with a success rate of up to 86.3%.
The results show that hardware performance events can clearly undermine the
privacy of web users. We therefore propose mitigation strategies that impede
our attacks and still allow legitimate use of HPEs
Applying Deep Machine Learning for psycho-demographic profiling of Internet users using O.C.E.A.N. model of personality
In the modern era, each Internet user leaves enormous amounts of auxiliary
digital residuals (footprints) by using a variety of on-line services. All this
data is already collected and stored for many years. In recent works, it was
demonstrated that it's possible to apply simple machine learning methods to
analyze collected digital footprints and to create psycho-demographic profiles
of individuals. However, while these works clearly demonstrated the
applicability of machine learning methods for such an analysis, created simple
prediction models still lacks accuracy necessary to be successfully applied for
practical needs. We have assumed that using advanced deep machine learning
methods may considerably increase the accuracy of predictions. We started with
simple machine learning methods to estimate basic prediction performance and
moved further by applying advanced methods based on shallow and deep neural
networks. Then we compared prediction power of studied models and made
conclusions about its performance. Finally, we made hypotheses how prediction
accuracy can be further improved. As result of this work, we provide full
source code used in the experiments for all interested researchers and
practitioners in corresponding GitHub repository. We believe that applying deep
machine learning for psycho-demographic profiling may have an enormous impact
on the society (for good or worse) and provides means for Artificial
Intelligence (AI) systems to better understand humans by creating their
psychological profiles. Thus AI agents may achieve the human-like ability to
participate in conversation (communication) flow by anticipating human
opponents' reactions, expectations, and behavior
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