Confidentiality in our digital world is based on the security of cryptographic algorithms. These are usually executed transparently in the background, with people often relying on them without further knowledge. In the course of technological progress with quantum computers, the protective function of common encryption algorithms is threatened. This particularly affects public-key methods such as RSA and DH based on discrete logarithms and prime factorization. Our concept describes the transformation of a classical asymmetric encryption method to a modern complexity class. Thereby the approach of Cramer-Shoup is put on the new basis of elliptic curves. The system is provable cryptographically strong, especially against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks. In addition, the new method features small key lengths, making it suitable for Internet-of-Things. It represents an intermediate step towards an encryption scheme based on isogeny elliptic curves. This approach shows a way to a secure encryption scheme for the post-quantum computing era.
The security in networked systems depends greatly on recognizing and identifying adversarial behaviors. Traditional detection methods focus on specific categories of attacks and have become inadequate for increasingly stealthy and deceptive attacks that are designed to bypass detection strategically. This work aims to develop a holistic theory to countermeasure such evasive attacks. We focus on extending a fundamental class of statistical-based detection methods based on Neyman-Pearson's (NP) hypothesis testing formulation. We propose game-theoretic frameworks to capture the conflicting relationship between a strategic evasive attacker and an evasion-aware NP detector. By analyzing both the equilibrium behaviors of the attacker and the NP detector, we characterize their performance using Equilibrium Receiver-Operational-Characteristic (EROC) curves. We show that the evasion-aware NP detectors outperform the passive ones in the way that the former can act strategically against the attacker's behavior and adaptively modify their decision rules based on the received messages. In addition, we extend our framework to a sequential setting where the user sends out identically distributed messages. We corroborate the analytical results with a case study of anomaly detection.
It is often challenging for a user to articulate their preferences accurately in multi-objective decision-making problems. Demonstration-based preference inference (DemoPI) is a promising approach to mitigate this problem. Understanding the behaviours and values of energy customers is an example of a scenario where preference inference can be used to gain insights into the values of energy customers with multiple objectives, e.g. cost and comfort. In this work, we applied the state-of-art DemoPI method, i.e., the dynamic weight-based preference inference (DWPI) algorithm in a multi-objective residential energy consumption setting to infer preferences from energy consumption demonstrations by simulated users following a rule-based approach. According to our experimental results, the DWPI model achieves accurate demonstration-based preference inferring in three scenarios. These advancements enhance the usability and effectiveness of multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) in energy management, enabling more intuitive and user-friendly preference specifications, and opening the door for DWPI to be applied in real-world settings.
Recommendation systems, for documents, have become tools to find relevant content on the Web. However, these systems have limitations when it comes to recommending documents in languages different from the query language, which means they might overlook resources in non-native languages. This research focuses on representing documents across languages by using Transformer Leveraged Document Representations (TLDRs) that are mapped to a cross-lingual domain. Four multilingual pre-trained transformer models (mBERT, mT5 XLM RoBERTa, ErnieM) were evaluated using three mapping methods across 20 language pairs representing combinations of five selected languages of the European Union. Metrics like Mate Retrieval Rate and Reciprocal Rank were used to measure the effectiveness of mapped TLDRs compared to non-mapped ones. The results highlight the power of cross-lingual representations achieved through pre-trained transformers and mapping approaches suggesting a promising direction for expanding beyond language connections, between two specific languages.
The intersection between security and continuous software engineering has been of great interest since the early years of the agile development movement, and it remains relevant as software development processes are more frequently guided by agility and the adoption of DevOps. Several authors have contributed studies about the framing of secure agile development and secure DevOps, motivating academic contributions to methods and practices, but also discussions around benefits and challenges. Especially the challenges captured also our interest since, for the last few years, we are conducting research on secure continuous software engineering from a more applied, practical perspective with the overarching aim to introduce solutions that can be adopted at scale. The short positioning at hands summarizes a relevant part of our endeavors in which we validated challenges with several practitioners of different roles. More than framing a set of challenges, we conclude by presenting four key research directions we identified for practitioners and researchers to delineate future work.
Smart devices are considered as an integral part of Internet of Things (IoT), have an aim to make a dynamic network to exchange information, collect data, analysis, and make optimal decisions in an autonomous way to achieve more efficient, automatic, and economical services. Message dissemination among these smart devices allows adding new features, sending updated instructions, alerts or safety messages, informing the pricing information or billing amount, incentives, and installing security patches. On one hand, such message disseminations are directly beneficial to the all parties involved in the IoT system. On the other hand, due to remote procedure, smart devices, vendors, and other involved authorities might have to meet a number of security, privacy, and performance related concerns while disseminating messages among targeted devices. To this end, in this paper, we design STarEdgeChain, a security and privacy aware targeted message dissemination in IoT to show how blockchain along with advanced cryptographic techniques are devoted to address such concerns. In fact, the STarEdgeChain employs a permissioned blockchain assisted edge computing in order to expedite a single signcrypted message dissemination among targeted groups of devices, at the same time avoiding the dependency of utilizing multiple unicasting approaches. Finally, we develop a software prototype of STarEdgeChain and show it's practicability for smart devices. The codes are publicly available at //github.com/mbaqer/Blockchain-IoT
Graphs are important data representations for describing objects and their relationships, which appear in a wide diversity of real-world scenarios. As one of a critical problem in this area, graph generation considers learning the distributions of given graphs and generating more novel graphs. Owing to their wide range of applications, generative models for graphs, which have a rich history, however, are traditionally hand-crafted and only capable of modeling a few statistical properties of graphs. Recent advances in deep generative models for graph generation is an important step towards improving the fidelity of generated graphs and paves the way for new kinds of applications. This article provides an extensive overview of the literature in the field of deep generative models for graph generation. Firstly, the formal definition of deep generative models for the graph generation and the preliminary knowledge are provided. Secondly, taxonomies of deep generative models for both unconditional and conditional graph generation are proposed respectively; the existing works of each are compared and analyzed. After that, an overview of the evaluation metrics in this specific domain is provided. Finally, the applications that deep graph generation enables are summarized and five promising future research directions are highlighted.
Advances in artificial intelligence often stem from the development of new environments that abstract real-world situations into a form where research can be done conveniently. This paper contributes such an environment based on ideas inspired by elementary Microeconomics. Agents learn to produce resources in a spatially complex world, trade them with one another, and consume those that they prefer. We show that the emergent production, consumption, and pricing behaviors respond to environmental conditions in the directions predicted by supply and demand shifts in Microeconomics. We also demonstrate settings where the agents' emergent prices for goods vary over space, reflecting the local abundance of goods. After the price disparities emerge, some agents then discover a niche of transporting goods between regions with different prevailing prices -- a profitable strategy because they can buy goods where they are cheap and sell them where they are expensive. Finally, in a series of ablation experiments, we investigate how choices in the environmental rewards, bartering actions, agent architecture, and ability to consume tradable goods can either aid or inhibit the emergence of this economic behavior. This work is part of the environment development branch of a research program that aims to build human-like artificial general intelligence through multi-agent interactions in simulated societies. By exploring which environment features are needed for the basic phenomena of elementary microeconomics to emerge automatically from learning, we arrive at an environment that differs from those studied in prior multi-agent reinforcement learning work along several dimensions. For example, the model incorporates heterogeneous tastes and physical abilities, and agents negotiate with one another as a grounded form of communication.
Data transmission between two or more digital devices in industry and government demands secure and agile technology. Digital information distribution often requires deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and Data Fusion techniques which have also gained popularity in both, civilian and military environments, such as, emergence of Smart Cities and Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT). This usually requires capturing and consolidating data from multiple sources. Because datasets do not necessarily originate from identical sensors, fused data typically results in a complex Big Data problem. Due to potentially sensitive nature of IoT datasets, Blockchain technology is used to facilitate secure sharing of IoT datasets, which allows digital information to be distributed, but not copied. However, blockchain has several limitations related to complexity, scalability, and excessive energy consumption. We propose an approach to hide information (sensor signal) by transforming it to an image or an audio signal. In one of the latest attempts to the military modernization, we investigate sensor fusion approach by investigating the challenges of enabling an intelligent identification and detection operation and demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed Deep Learning and Anomaly Detection models that can support future application for specific hand gesture alert system from wearable devices.
Seamlessly interacting with humans or robots is hard because these agents are non-stationary. They update their policy in response to the ego agent's behavior, and the ego agent must anticipate these changes to co-adapt. Inspired by humans, we recognize that robots do not need to explicitly model every low-level action another agent will make; instead, we can capture the latent strategy of other agents through high-level representations. We propose a reinforcement learning-based framework for learning latent representations of an agent's policy, where the ego agent identifies the relationship between its behavior and the other agent's future strategy. The ego agent then leverages these latent dynamics to influence the other agent, purposely guiding them towards policies suitable for co-adaptation. Across several simulated domains and a real-world air hockey game, our approach outperforms the alternatives and learns to influence the other agent.
Image-to-image translation aims to learn the mapping between two visual domains. There are two main challenges for many applications: 1) the lack of aligned training pairs and 2) multiple possible outputs from a single input image. In this work, we present an approach based on disentangled representation for producing diverse outputs without paired training images. To achieve diversity, we propose to embed images onto two spaces: a domain-invariant content space capturing shared information across domains and a domain-specific attribute space. Our model takes the encoded content features extracted from a given input and the attribute vectors sampled from the attribute space to produce diverse outputs at test time. To handle unpaired training data, we introduce a novel cross-cycle consistency loss based on disentangled representations. Qualitative results show that our model can generate diverse and realistic images on a wide range of tasks without paired training data. For quantitative comparisons, we measure realism with user study and diversity with a perceptual distance metric. We apply the proposed model to domain adaptation and show competitive performance when compared to the state-of-the-art on the MNIST-M and the LineMod datasets.