The CAN Bus is crucial to the efficiency, and safety of modern vehicle infrastructure. Electronic Control Units (ECUs) exchange data across a shared bus, dropping messages whenever errors occur. If an ECU generates enough errors, their transmitter is put in a bus-off state, turning it off. Previous work abuses this process to disable ECUs, but is trivial to detect through the multiple errors transmitted over the bus. We propose a novel attack, undetectable by prior intrusion detection systems, which disables ECUs within a single message without generating any errors on the bus. Performing this attack requires the ability to flip bits on the bus, but not with any level of sophistication. We show that an attacker who can only flip bits 40% of the time can execute our stealthy attack 100% of the time. But this attack, and all prior CAN attacks, rely on the ability to read the bus. We propose a new technique which synchronizes the bus, such that even a blind attacker, incapable of reading the bus, can know when to transmit. Taking a limited attacker's chance of success from the percentage of dead bus time, to 100%. Finally, we propose a small modification to the CAN error process to ensure an ECU cannot fail without being detected, no matter how advanced the attacker is. Taken together we advance the state of the art for CAN attacks and blind attackers, while proposing a detection system against stealthy attacks, and the larger problem of CAN's abusable error frames.
Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) rely on insecure protocols and devices to monitor and operate critical infrastructure. Prior work has demonstrated that powerful attackers with detailed system knowledge can manipulate exchanged sensor data to deteriorate performance of the process, even leading to full shutdowns of plants. Identifying those attacks requires iterating over all possible sensor values, and running detailed system simulation or analysis to identify optimal attacks. That setup allows adversaries to identify attacks that are most impactful when applied on the system for the first time, before the system operators become aware of the manipulations. In this work, we investigate if constrained attackers without detailed system knowledge and simulators can identify comparable attacks. In particular, the attacker only requires abstract knowledge on general information flow in the plant, instead of precise algorithms, operating parameters, process models, or simulators. We propose an approach that allows single-shot attacks, i.e., near-optimal attacks that are reliably shutting down a system on the first try. The approach is applied and validated on two use cases, and demonstrated to achieve comparable results to prior work, which relied on detailed system information and simulations.
The widespread dependency on open-source software makes it a fruitful target for malicious actors, as demonstrated by recurring attacks. The complexity of today's open-source supply chains results in a significant attack surface, giving attackers numerous opportunities to reach the goal of injecting malicious code into open-source artifacts that is then downloaded and executed by victims. This work proposes a general taxonomy for attacks on open-source supply chains, independent of specific programming languages or ecosystems, and covering all supply chain stages from code contributions to package distribution. Taking the form of an attack tree, it covers 107 unique vectors, linked to 94 real-world incidents, and mapped to 33 mitigating safeguards. User surveys conducted with 17 domain experts and 134 software developers positively validated the correctness, comprehensiveness and comprehensibility of the taxonomy, as well as its suitability for various use-cases. Survey participants also assessed the utility and costs of the identified safeguards, and whether they are used.
Data poisoning attacks, in which a malicious adversary aims to influence a model by injecting "poisoned" data into the training process, have attracted significant recent attention. In this work, we take a closer look at existing poisoning attacks and connect them with old and new algorithms for solving sequential Stackelberg games. By choosing an appropriate loss function for the attacker and optimizing with algorithms that exploit second-order information, we design poisoning attacks that are effective on neural networks. We present efficient implementations that exploit modern auto-differentiation packages and allow simultaneous and coordinated generation of tens of thousands of poisoned points, in contrast to existing methods that generate poisoned points one by one. We further perform extensive experiments that empirically explore the effect of data poisoning attacks on deep neural networks.
We present a framework for gesture customization requiring minimal examples from users, all without degrading the performance of existing gesture sets. To achieve this, we first deployed a large-scale study (N=500+) to collect data and train an accelerometer-gyroscope recognition model with a cross-user accuracy of 95.7% and a false-positive rate of 0.6 per hour when tested on everyday non-gesture data. Next, we design a few-shot learning framework which derives a lightweight model from our pre-trained model, enabling knowledge transfer without performance degradation. We validate our approach through a user study (N=20) examining on-device customization from 12 new gestures, resulting in an average accuracy of 55.3%, 83.1%, and 87.2% on using one, three, or five shots when adding a new gesture, while maintaining the same recognition accuracy and false-positive rate from the pre-existing gesture set. We further evaluate the usability of our real-time implementation with a user experience study (N=20). Our results highlight the effectiveness, learnability, and usability of our customization framework. Our approach paves the way for a future where users are no longer bound to pre-existing gestures, freeing them to creatively introduce new gestures tailored to their preferences and abilities.
Deepfakes utilise Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to create synthetic media where the likeness of one person is replaced with another. There are growing concerns that deepfakes can be maliciously used to create misleading and harmful digital contents. As deepfakes become more common, there is a dire need for deepfake detection technology to help spot deepfake media. Present deepfake detection models are able to achieve outstanding accuracy (>90%). However, most of them are limited to within-dataset scenario, where the same dataset is used for training and testing. Most models do not generalise well enough in cross-dataset scenario, where models are tested on unseen datasets from another source. Furthermore, state-of-the-art deepfake detection models rely on neural network-based classification models that are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Motivated by the need for a robust deepfake detection model, this study adapts metamorphic testing (MT) principles to help identify potential factors that could influence the robustness of the examined model, while overcoming the test oracle problem in this domain. Metamorphic testing is specifically chosen as the testing technique as it fits our demand to address learning-based system testing with probabilistic outcomes from largely black-box components, based on potentially large input domains. We performed our evaluations on MesoInception-4 and TwoStreamNet models, which are the state-of-the-art deepfake detection models. This study identified makeup application as an adversarial attack that could fool deepfake detectors. Our experimental results demonstrate that both the MesoInception-4 and TwoStreamNet models degrade in their performance by up to 30\% when the input data is perturbed with makeup.
Distributed machine learning (ML) can bring more computational resources to bear than single-machine learning, thus enabling reductions in training time. Distributed learning partitions models and data over many machines, allowing model and dataset sizes beyond the available compute power and memory of a single machine. In practice though, distributed ML is challenging when distribution is mandatory, rather than chosen by the practitioner. In such scenarios, data could unavoidably be separated among workers due to limited memory capacity per worker or even because of data privacy issues. There, existing distributed methods will utterly fail due to dominant transfer costs across workers, or do not even apply. We propose a new approach to distributed fully connected neural network learning, called independent subnet training (IST), to handle these cases. In IST, the original network is decomposed into a set of narrow subnetworks with the same depth. These subnetworks are then trained locally before parameters are exchanged to produce new subnets and the training cycle repeats. Such a naturally "model parallel" approach limits memory usage by storing only a portion of network parameters on each device. Additionally, no requirements exist for sharing data between workers (i.e., subnet training is local and independent) and communication volume and frequency are reduced by decomposing the original network into independent subnets. These properties of IST can cope with issues due to distributed data, slow interconnects, or limited device memory, making IST a suitable approach for cases of mandatory distribution. We show experimentally that IST results in training times that are much lower than common distributed learning approaches.
Fog computing is introduced by shifting cloud resources towards the users' proximity to mitigate the limitations possessed by cloud computing. Fog environment made its limited resource available to a large number of users to deploy their serverless applications, composed of several serverless functions. One of the primary intentions behind introducing the fog environment is to fulfil the demand of latency and location-sensitive serverless applications through its limited resources. The recent research mainly focuses on assigning maximum resources to such applications from the fog node and not taking full advantage of the cloud environment. This introduces a negative impact in providing the resources to a maximum number of connected users. To address this issue, in this paper, we investigated the optimum percentage of a user's request that should be fulfilled by fog and cloud. As a result, we proposed DeF-DReL, a Systematic Deployment of Serverless Functions in Fog and Cloud environments using Deep Reinforcement Learning, using several real-life parameters, such as distance and latency of the users from nearby fog node, user's priority, the priority of the serverless applications and their resource demand, etc. The performance of the DeF-DReL algorithm is further compared with recent related algorithms. From the simulation and comparison results, its superiority over other algorithms and its applicability to the real-life scenario can be clearly observed.
The success of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is largely built upon the adversarial training between a generator (G) and a discriminator (D). They are expected to reach a certain equilibrium where D cannot distinguish the generated images from the real ones. However, such an equilibrium is rarely achieved in practical GAN training, instead, D almost always surpasses G. We attribute one of its sources to the information asymmetry between D and G. We observe that D learns its own visual attention when determining whether an image is real or fake, but G has no explicit clue on which regions to focus on for a particular synthesis. To alleviate the issue of D dominating the competition in GANs, we aim to raise the spatial awareness of G. Randomly sampled multi-level heatmaps are encoded into the intermediate layers of G as an inductive bias. Thus G can purposefully improve the synthesis of certain image regions. We further propose to align the spatial awareness of G with the attention map induced from D. Through this way we effectively lessen the information gap between D and G. Extensive results show that our method pushes the two-player game in GANs closer to the equilibrium, leading to a better synthesis performance. As a byproduct, the introduced spatial awareness facilitates interactive editing over the output synthesis. Demo video and code are available at //genforce.github.io/eqgan-sa/.
Our research aims to highlight and alleviate the complex tensions around online safety, privacy, and smartphone usage in families so that parents and teens can work together to better manage mobile privacy and security-related risks. We developed a mobile application ("app") for Community Oversight of Privacy and Security ("CO-oPS") and had parents and teens assess whether it would be applicable for use with their families. CO-oPS is an Android app that allows a group of users to co-monitor the apps installed on one another's devices and the privacy permissions granted to those apps. We conducted a study with 19 parent-teen (ages 13-17) pairs to understand how they currently managed mobile safety and app privacy within their family and then had them install, use, and evaluate the CO-oPS app. We found that both parents and teens gave little consideration to online safety and privacy before installing new apps or granting privacy permissions. When using CO-oPS, participants liked how the app increased transparency into one another's devices in a way that facilitated communication, but were less inclined to use features for in-app messaging or to hide apps from one another. Key themes related to power imbalances between parents and teens surfaced that made co-management challenging. Parents were more open to collaborative oversight than teens, who felt that it was not their place to monitor their parents, even though both often believed parents lacked the technological expertise to monitor themselves. Our study sheds light on why collaborative practices for managing online safety and privacy within families may be beneficial but also quite difficult to implement in practice. We provide recommendations for overcoming these challenges based on the insights gained from our study.
Adversarial attack is a technique for deceiving Machine Learning (ML) models, which provides a way to evaluate the adversarial robustness. In practice, attack algorithms are artificially selected and tuned by human experts to break a ML system. However, manual selection of attackers tends to be sub-optimal, leading to a mistakenly assessment of model security. In this paper, a new procedure called Composite Adversarial Attack (CAA) is proposed for automatically searching the best combination of attack algorithms and their hyper-parameters from a candidate pool of \textbf{32 base attackers}. We design a search space where attack policy is represented as an attacking sequence, i.e., the output of the previous attacker is used as the initialization input for successors. Multi-objective NSGA-II genetic algorithm is adopted for finding the strongest attack policy with minimum complexity. The experimental result shows CAA beats 10 top attackers on 11 diverse defenses with less elapsed time (\textbf{6 $\times$ faster than AutoAttack}), and achieves the new state-of-the-art on $l_{\infty}$, $l_{2}$ and unrestricted adversarial attacks.