Internet of Things devices are widely adopted by the general population. People today are more connected than ever before. The widespread use and low-cost driven construction of these devices in a competitive marketplace render Internet-connected devices an easier and attractive target for malicious actors. This paper demonstrates non-invasive physical attacks against IoT devices in two case studies in a tutorial style format. The study focuses on demonstrating the: i)exploitation of debug interfaces, often left open after manufacture; and ii)the exploitation of exposed memory buses. We illustrate a person could commit such attacks with entry-level knowledge, inexpensive equipment, and limited time (in 8 to 25 minutes).
Runtime verification or runtime monitoring equips safety-critical cyber-physical systems to augment design assurance measures and ensure operational safety and security. Cyber-physical systems have interaction failures, attack surfaces, and attack vectors resulting in unanticipated hazards and loss scenarios. These interaction failures pose challenges to runtime verification regarding monitoring specifications and monitoring placements for in-time detection of hazards. We develop a well-formed workflow model that connects system theoretic process analysis, commonly referred to as STPA, hazard causation information to lower-level runtime monitoring to detect hazards at the operational phase. Specifically, our model follows the DepDevOps paradigm to provide evidence and insights to runtime monitoring on what to monitor, where to monitor, and the monitoring context. We demonstrate and evaluate the value of multilevel monitors by injecting hazards on an autonomous emergency braking system model.
We introduce a new constrained optimization method for policy gradient reinforcement learning, which uses two trust regions to regulate each policy update. In addition to using the proximity of one single old policy as the first trust region as done by prior works, we propose to form a second trust region through the construction of another virtual policy that represents a wide range of past policies. We then enforce the new policy to stay closer to the virtual policy, which is beneficial in case the old policy performs badly. More importantly, we propose a mechanism to automatically build the virtual policy from a memory buffer of past policies, providing a new capability for dynamically selecting appropriate trust regions during the optimization process. Our proposed method, dubbed as Memory-Constrained Policy Optimization (MCPO), is examined on a diverse suite of environments including robotic locomotion control, navigation with sparse rewards and Atari games, consistently demonstrating competitive performance against recent on-policy constrained policy gradient methods.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the emerging technologies that has grabbed the attention of researchers from academia and industry. The idea behind Internet of things is the interconnection of internet enabled things or devices to each other and to humans, to achieve some common goals. In near future IoT is expected to be seamlessly integrated into our environment and human will be wholly solely dependent on this technology for comfort and easy life style. Any security compromise of the system will directly affect human life. Therefore security and privacy of this technology is foremost important issue to resolve. In this paper we present a thorough study of security problems in IoT and classify possible cyberattacks on each layer of IoT architecture. We also discuss challenges to traditional security solutions such as cryptographic solutions, authentication mechanisms and key management in IoT. Device authentication and access controls is an essential area of IoT security, which is not surveyed so far. We spent our efforts to bring the state of the art device authentication and access control techniques on a single paper.
Over the past few decades, interest in algorithms for face recognition has been growing rapidly and has even surpassed human-level performance. Despite their accomplishments, their practical integration with a real-time performance-hungry system is not feasible due to high computational costs. So in this paper, we explore the recent, fast, and accurate face recognition system that can be easily integrated with real-time devices, and tested the algorithms on robot hardware platforms to confirm their robustness and speed.
The concept of federated learning (FL) was first proposed by Google in 2016. Thereafter, FL has been widely studied for the feasibility of application in various fields due to its potential to make full use of data without compromising the privacy. However, limited by the capacity of wireless data transmission, the employment of federated learning on mobile devices has been making slow progress in practical. The development and commercialization of the 5th generation (5G) mobile networks has shed some light on this. In this paper, we analyze the challenges of existing federated learning schemes for mobile devices and propose a novel cross-device federated learning framework, which utilizes the anonymous communication technology and ring signature to protect the privacy of participants while reducing the computation overhead of mobile devices participating in FL. In addition, our scheme implements a contribution-based incentive mechanism to encourage mobile users to participate in FL. We also give a case study of autonomous driving. Finally, we present the performance evaluation of the proposed scheme and discuss some open issues in federated learning.
With the growing advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, IoT device management platforms are becoming increasingly important. We conducted a web-based survey and usability study with 43 participants who use IoT devices frequently to: 1) examine their smart home IoT usage patterns and privacy preferences, and 2) evaluate a web-based prototype for smart home IoT device management. We found that participants perceived privacy as more important than the convenience afforded by the IoT devices. Based on their average scores of privacy vs. convenience importance, participants with low privacy and low convenience significantly reported less privacy control and convenience preferences than participants with high privacy and high convenience. Overall, all participants were satisfied with the proposed website prototype and their actual usability evaluation demonstrated a good understanding of the website features. This paper provides an empirical examination of the privacy versus convenience trade-offs smart home users make when managing their IoT devices.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great success in solving many challenging tasks via use of deep neural networks. Although using deep learning for RL brings immense representational power, it also causes a well-known sample-inefficiency problem. This means that the algorithms are data-hungry and require millions of training samples to converge to an adequate policy. One way to combat this issue is to use action advising in a teacher-student framework, where a knowledgeable teacher provides action advice to help the student. This work considers how to better leverage uncertainties about when a student should ask for advice and if the student can model the teacher to ask for less advice. The student could decide to ask for advice when it is uncertain or when both it and its model of the teacher are uncertain. In addition to this investigation, this paper introduces a new method to compute uncertainty for a deep RL agent using a secondary neural network. Our empirical results show that using dual uncertainties to drive advice collection and reuse may improve learning performance across several Atari games.
Imitation learning aims to extract knowledge from human experts' demonstrations or artificially created agents in order to replicate their behaviors. Its success has been demonstrated in areas such as video games, autonomous driving, robotic simulations and object manipulation. However, this replicating process could be problematic, such as the performance is highly dependent on the demonstration quality, and most trained agents are limited to perform well in task-specific environments. In this survey, we provide a systematic review on imitation learning. We first introduce the background knowledge from development history and preliminaries, followed by presenting different taxonomies within Imitation Learning and key milestones of the field. We then detail challenges in learning strategies and present research opportunities with learning policy from suboptimal demonstration, voice instructions and other associated optimization schemes.
Humans have a natural instinct to identify unknown object instances in their environments. The intrinsic curiosity about these unknown instances aids in learning about them, when the corresponding knowledge is eventually available. This motivates us to propose a novel computer vision problem called: `Open World Object Detection', where a model is tasked to: 1) identify objects that have not been introduced to it as `unknown', without explicit supervision to do so, and 2) incrementally learn these identified unknown categories without forgetting previously learned classes, when the corresponding labels are progressively received. We formulate the problem, introduce a strong evaluation protocol and provide a novel solution, which we call ORE: Open World Object Detector, based on contrastive clustering and energy based unknown identification. Our experimental evaluation and ablation studies analyze the efficacy of ORE in achieving Open World objectives. As an interesting by-product, we find that identifying and characterizing unknown instances helps to reduce confusion in an incremental object detection setting, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance, with no extra methodological effort. We hope that our work will attract further research into this newly identified, yet crucial research direction.
Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.