550 research outputs found
Demonstrations of the Potential of AI-based Political Issue Polling
Political polling is a multi-billion dollar industry with outsized influence
on the societal trajectory of the United States and nations around the world.
However, it has been challenged by factors that stress its cost, availability,
and accuracy. At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots have
become compelling stand-ins for human behavior, powered by increasingly
sophisticated large language models (LLMs). Could AI chatbots be an effective
tool for anticipating public opinion on controversial issues to the extent that
they could be used by campaigns, interest groups, and polling firms? We have
developed a prompt engineering methodology for eliciting human-like survey
responses from ChatGPT, which simulate the response to a policy question of a
person described by a set of demographic factors, and produce both an ordinal
numeric response score and a textual justification. We execute large scale
experiments, querying for thousands of simulated responses at a cost far lower
than human surveys. We compare simulated data to human issue polling data from
the Cooperative Election Study (CES). We find that ChatGPT is effective at
anticipating both the mean level and distribution of public opinion on a
variety of policy issues such as abortion bans and approval of the US Supreme
Court, particularly in their ideological breakdown (correlation typically
>85%). However, it is less successful at anticipating demographic-level
differences. Moreover, ChatGPT tends to overgeneralize to new policy issues
that arose after its training data was collected, such as US support for
involvement in the war in Ukraine. Our work has implications for our
understanding of the strengths and limitations of the current generation of AI
chatbots as virtual publics or online listening platforms, future directions
for LLM development, and applications of AI tools to the political domain.
(Abridged)Comment: 23 pages, 7 figure
On the difficult tradeoff between security and privacy: Challenges for the management of digital identities
The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19713-5_39The deployment of security measures can lead in many occasions
to an infringement of users’ privacy. Indeed, nowadays we have
many examples about surveillance programs or personal data breaches
in online service providers. In order to avoid the latter problem, we need
to establish security measures that do not involve a violation of privacy
rights. In this communication we discuss the main challenges when conciliating
information security and users’ privacy.This work was supported by Comunidad de Madrid (Spain) under the project S2013/ICE-3095-CM (CIBERDINE)
Equivalence-based Security for Querying Encrypted Databases: Theory and Application to Privacy Policy Audits
Motivated by the problem of simultaneously preserving confidentiality and
usability of data outsourced to third-party clouds, we present two different
database encryption schemes that largely hide data but reveal enough
information to support a wide-range of relational queries. We provide a
security definition for database encryption that captures confidentiality based
on a notion of equivalence of databases from the adversary's perspective. As a
specific application, we adapt an existing algorithm for finding violations of
privacy policies to run on logs encrypted under our schemes and observe low to
moderate overheads.Comment: CCS 2015 paper technical report, in progres
Effective Theories for Circuits and Automata
Abstracting an effective theory from a complicated process is central to the
study of complexity. Even when the underlying mechanisms are understood, or at
least measurable, the presence of dissipation and irreversibility in
biological, computational and social systems makes the problem harder. Here we
demonstrate the construction of effective theories in the presence of both
irreversibility and noise, in a dynamical model with underlying feedback. We
use the Krohn-Rhodes theorem to show how the composition of underlying
mechanisms can lead to innovations in the emergent effective theory. We show
how dissipation and irreversibility fundamentally limit the lifetimes of these
emergent structures, even though, on short timescales, the group properties may
be enriched compared to their noiseless counterparts.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figure
Markov modeling of moving target defense games
We introduce a Markov-model-based framework for Moving Target Defense (MTD) analysis. The framework allows modeling of broad range of MTD strategies, provides general theorems about how the probability of a successful adversary defeating an MTD strategy is related to the amount of time/cost spent by the adversary, and shows how a multi-level composition of MTD strategies can be analyzed by a straightforward combination of the analysis for each one of these strategies. Within the proposed framework we define the concept of security capacity which measures the strength or effectiveness of an MTD strategy: the security capacity depends on MTD specific parameters and more general system parameters. We apply our framework to two concrete MTD strategies
Quantum-noise--randomized data-encryption for WDM fiber-optic networks
We demonstrate high-rate randomized data-encryption through optical fibers
using the inherent quantum-measurement noise of coherent states of light.
Specifically, we demonstrate 650Mbps data encryption through a 10Gbps
data-bearing, in-line amplified 200km-long line. In our protocol, legitimate
users (who share a short secret-key) communicate using an M-ry signal set while
an attacker (who does not share the secret key) is forced to contend with the
fundamental and irreducible quantum-measurement noise of coherent states.
Implementations of our protocol using both polarization-encoded signal sets as
well as polarization-insensitive phase-keyed signal sets are experimentally and
theoretically evaluated. Different from the performance criteria for the
cryptographic objective of key generation (quantum key-generation), one
possible set of performance criteria for the cryptographic objective of data
encryption is established and carefully considered.Comment: Version 2: Some errors have been corrected and arguments refined. To
appear in Physical Review A. Version 3: Minor corrections to version
Trust and reputation policy-based mechanisms for self-protection in autonomic communications
Currently, there is an increasing tendency to migrate the management of communications and information systems onto the Web. This is making many traditional service support models obsolete. In addition, current security mechanisms are not sufficiently robust to protect each management system and/or subsystem from web-based intrusions, malware, and hacking attacks. This paper presents research challenges in autonomic management to provide self-protection mechanisms and tools by using trust and reputation concepts based on policy-based management to decentralize management decisions. This work also uses user-based reputation mechanisms to help enforce trust management in pervasive and communications services. The scope of this research is founded in social models, where the application of trust and reputation applied in communication systems helps detect potential users as well as hackers attempting to corrupt management operations and services. These so-called “cheating services” act as “attacks”, altering the performance and the security in communication systems by consumption of computing or network resources unnecessarily
EmLog:Tamper-Resistant System Logging for Constrained Devices with TEEs
Remote mobile and embedded devices are used to deliver increasingly impactful
services, such as medical rehabilitation and assistive technologies. Secure
system logging is beneficial in these scenarios to aid audit and forensic
investigations particularly if devices bring harm to end-users. Logs should be
tamper-resistant in storage, during execution, and when retrieved by a trusted
remote verifier. In recent years, Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have
emerged as the go-to root of trust on constrained devices for isolated
execution of sensitive applications. Existing TEE-based logging systems,
however, focus largely on protecting server-side logs and offer little
protection to constrained source devices. In this paper, we introduce EmLog --
a tamper-resistant logging system for constrained devices using the
GlobalPlatform TEE. EmLog provides protection against complex software
adversaries and offers several additional security properties over past
schemes. The system is evaluated across three log datasets using an
off-the-shelf ARM development board running an open-source,
GlobalPlatform-compliant TEE. On average, EmLog runs with low run-time memory
overhead (1MB heap and stack), 430--625 logs/second throughput, and five-times
persistent storage overhead versus unprotected logs.Comment: Accepted at the 11th IFIP International Conference on Information
Security Theory and Practice (WISTP '17
Secret Key Cryptography Using Graphics Cards
One frequently cited reason for the lack of wide deployment of cryptographic protocols is the (perceived) poor performance of the algorithms they employ and their impact on the rest of the system. Although high-performance dedicated cryptographic accelerator cards have been commercially available for some time, market penetration remains low. We take a different approach, seeking to exploit {\it existing system resources,} such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate cryptographic processing. We exploit the ability for GPUs to simultaneously process large quantities of pixels to offload cryptographic processing from the main processor. We demonstrate the use of GPUs for stream ciphers, which can achieve 75\% the performance of a fast CPU. We also investigate the use of GPUs for block ciphers, discuss operations that make certain ciphers unsuitable for use with a GPU, and compare the performance of an OpenGL-based implementation of AES with implementations utilizing general CPUs. In addition to offloading system resources, the ability to perform encryption and decryption within the GPU has potential applications in image processing by limiting exposure of the plaintext to within the GPU
The Current State of Performance Appraisal Research and Practice: Concerns, Directions, and Implications
On the surface, it is not readily apparent how some performance appraisal research issues inform performance appraisal practice. Because performance appraisal is an applied topic, it is useful to periodically consider the current state of performance research and its relation to performance appraisal practice. This review examines the performance appraisal literature published in both academic and practitioner outlets between 1985 and 1990, briefly discusses the current state of performance appraisal practice, highlights the juxtaposition of research and practice, and suggests directions for further research
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