A Coordination Language for Databases

We present a coordination language for the modeling of distributed database applications. The language, baptized Klaim-DB, borrows the concepts of localities and nets of the coordination language Klaim but re-incarnates the tuple spaces of Klaim as databases. It provides high-level abstractions and primitives for the access and manipulation of structured data, with integrity and atomicity considerations. We present the formal semantics of Klaim-DB and develop a type system that avoids potential runtime errors such as certain evaluation errors and mismatches of data format in tables, which are monitored in the semantics. The use of the language is illustrated in a scenario where the sales from different branches of a chain of department stores are aggregated from their local databases. Raising the abstraction level and encapsulating integrity checks in the language primitives have benefited the modeling task considerably

Unveiling Backdoor Risks Brought by Foundation Models in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

The foundation models (FMs) have been used to generate synthetic public datasets for the heterogeneous federated learning (HFL) problem where each client uses a unique model architecture. However, the vulnerabilities of integrating FMs, especially against backdoor attacks, are not well-explored in the HFL contexts. In this paper, we introduce a novel backdoor attack mechanism for HFL that circumvents the need for client compromise or ongoing participation in the FL process. This method plants and transfers the backdoor through a generated synthetic public dataset, which could help evade existing backdoor defenses in FL by presenting normal client behaviors. Empirical experiments across different HFL configurations and benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack compared to traditional client-based attacks. Our findings reveal significant security risks in developing robust FM-assisted HFL systems. This research contributes to enhancing the safety and integrity of FL systems, highlighting the need for advanced security measures in the era of FMs.Comment: Jiaqi Wang is the corresponding author. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2311.0014