FLTrojan: Privacy Leakage Attacks against Federated Language Models Through Selective Weight Tampering

Federated learning (FL) is becoming a key component in many technology-based applications including language modeling -- where individual FL participants often have privacy-sensitive text data in their local datasets. However, realizing the extent of privacy leakage in federated language models is not straightforward and the existing attacks only intend to extract data regardless of how sensitive or naive it is. To fill this gap, in this paper, we introduce two novel findings with regard to leaking privacy-sensitive user data from federated language models. Firstly, we make a key observation that model snapshots from the intermediate rounds in FL can cause greater privacy leakage than the final trained model. Secondly, we identify that privacy leakage can be aggravated by tampering with a model's selective weights that are specifically responsible for memorizing the sensitive training data. We show how a malicious client can leak the privacy-sensitive data of some other user in FL even without any cooperation from the server. Our best-performing method improves the membership inference recall by 29% and achieves up to 70% private data reconstruction, evidently outperforming existing attacks with stronger assumptions of adversary capabilities.Comment: 22 pages (including bibliography and Appendix), Submitted to USENIX Security '2

Health economics and cost-effective decision making: addressing contemporary challenges and exploring solutions in Pakistan

Health economics plays a vital role in underpinning the healthcare costs and their significant impact on healthcare decisions, particularly in resource-scarce settings such as Pakistan. this article emphasizes the multifaceted cost considerations in healthcare, including both direct treatment costs and often-overlooked indirect expenses like travel, parking, special diets, and lost wages due to illness. The article emphasizes the role of economic evaluations in addressing Pakistan's healthcare challenges, examining cost-effective options and providing a roadmap for a healthier future. An evidences synthesis approach was applied to explore possible solutions to health challenges. In addition to this, expert opinions were taken into account to investigate how economic concept are relevant in decision making for healthcare. The published qualitative data were combined, organized according to research objective and reported in tabular form. Economic concepts and evaluations are found useful in relation to healthcare infrastructure of Pakistan. There are possible economic solutions available to cope with the hurdles of health system. This article advocates the policymakers to prioritize involving health economists in policy formulation and promoting low-cost or cost-effective health interventions, ensuring fair allocation of health budget

Toxicity of Fusarium solani Strains on Brine Shrimp ( Artemia salina )

Discovery of anticancer drugs that must kill or disable tumor cells in the presence of normal cells without undue toxicity is an extraordinary challenge. Cytotoxicity of plant or fungal materials is considered as the presence of antitumor compounds. Brine shrimp lethality for larvae (nauplii) is used as prescreening test for the antitumor compounds. In this study, culture filtrates of eight strains of Fusarium solani isolated from seeds of various crops were tested for the toxic effect on brine shrimp. Five of the strains (TS, S-29, B-17, C-10, W-5) showed highest toxic effect and three of the strains (SR, T-9, L-25) showed low toxic activity on brine shrimp. Toxic activity reduced when culture filtrates were diluted. However, F. solani strains TS, B-17, SR, T-9 and L-25 caused more than 30% mortality at 1:10 dilution. Toxic activity was slightly reduced when the filtrates were neutralized with sodium hydroxide indicating possible role of pH of culture filtrate on toxicity. Lyophilized filtrates of these strains showed less activity as compared to un-lyophilized filtrates. n-Hexane soluble fraction was obtained only in three strains which showed mild toxicity whereas chloroform soluble fraction was obtained in negligible quantity and could not further be proceeded. Toxic effect of these strains showed variation from strain to strain. Compounds from F. solani could be exploited for the development of toxic compounds