As the role of information and communication technologies gradually increases in our lives, source code security becomes a significant issue to protect against malicious attempts Furthermore with the advent of data-driven techniques, there is now a growing interest in leveraging machine learning and natural language processing as a source code assurance method to build trustworthy systems Therefore training our future software developers to write secure source code is in high demand In this thesis we propose a framework including learning modules and hands on labs to guide future IT professionals towards developing secure programming habits and mitigating source code vulnerabilities at the early stages of the software development lifecycle In this thesis our goal is to design learning modules with a set of hands on labs that will introduce students to secure programming practices using source code and log file analysis tools to predict and identify vulnerabilities In a Secure Coding Education framework we will improve students skills and awareness on source code vulnerabilities detection tools and mitigation techniques integrate concepts of source code vulnerabilities from Function API and library level to bad programming habits and practices leverage deep learning NLP and static analysis tools for log file analysis to introduce the root cause of source code vulnerabilities
Deep learning techniques have achieved superior performance in computer-aided medical image analysis, yet they are still vulnerable to imperceptible adversarial attacks, resulting in potential misdiagnosis in clinical practice. Oppositely, recent years have also witnessed remarkable progress in defense against these tailored adversarial examples in deep medical diagnosis systems. In this exposition, we present a comprehensive survey on recent advances in adversarial attack and defense for medical image analysis with a novel taxonomy in terms of the application scenario. We also provide a unified theoretical framework for different types of adversarial attack and defense methods for medical image analysis. For a fair comparison, we establish a new benchmark for adversarially robust medical diagnosis models obtained by adversarial training under various scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey paper that provides a thorough evaluation of adversarially robust medical diagnosis models. By analyzing qualitative and quantitative results, we conclude this survey with a detailed discussion of current challenges for adversarial attack and defense in medical image analysis systems to shed light on future research directions.
Today, deep learning is increasingly applied in security-critical situations such as autonomous driving and medical diagnosis. Despite its success, the behavior and robustness of deep networks are not fully understood yet, posing a significant risk. In particular, researchers recently found that neural networks are overly confident in their predictions, even on data they have never seen before. To tackle this issue, one can differentiate two approaches in the literature. One accounts for uncertainty in the predictions, while the second estimates the underlying density of the training data to decide whether a given input is close to the training data, and thus the network is able to perform as expected.In this thesis, we investigate the capabilities of EBMs at the task of fitting the training data distribution to perform detection of out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. We find that on most datasets, EBMs do not inherently outperform other density estimators at detecting OOD data despite their flexibility. Thus, we additionally investigate the effects of supervision, dimensionality reduction, and architectural modifications on the performance of EBMs. Further, we propose Energy-Prior Network (EPN) which enables estimation of various uncertainties within an EBM for classification, bridging the gap between two approaches for tackling the OOD detection problem. We identify a connection between the concentration parameters of the Dirichlet distribution and the joint energy in an EBM. Additionally, this allows optimization without a held-out OOD dataset, which might not be available or costly to collect in some applications. Finally, we empirically demonstrate that Energy-Prior Network (EPN) is able to detect OOD inputs, datasets shifts, and adversarial examples. Theoretically, EPN offers favorable properties for the asymptotic case when inputs are far from the training data.
Recently, video moment retrieval and highlight detection (MR/HD) are being spotlighted as the demand for video understanding is drastically increased. The key objective of MR/HD is to localize the moment and estimate clip-wise accordance level, i.e., saliency score, to the given text query. Although the recent transformer-based models brought some advances, we found that these methods do not fully exploit the information of a given query. For example, the relevance between text query and video contents is sometimes neglected when predicting the moment and its saliency. To tackle this issue, we introduce Query-Dependent DETR (QD-DETR), a detection transformer tailored for MR/HD. As we observe the insignificant role of a given query in transformer architectures, our encoding module starts with cross-attention layers to explicitly inject the context of text query into video representation. Then, to enhance the model's capability of exploiting the query information, we manipulate the video-query pairs to produce irrelevant pairs. Such negative (irrelevant) video-query pairs are trained to yield low saliency scores, which in turn, encourages the model to estimate precise accordance between query-video pairs. Lastly, we present an input-adaptive saliency predictor which adaptively defines the criterion of saliency scores for the given video-query pairs. Our extensive studies verify the importance of building the query-dependent representation for MR/HD. Specifically, QD-DETR outperforms state-of-the-art methods on QVHighlights, TVSum, and Charades-STA datasets. Codes are available at github.com/wjun0830/QD-DETR.
Despite our best efforts, deep learning models remain highly vulnerable to even tiny adversarial perturbations applied to the inputs. The ability to extract information from solely the output of a machine learning model to craft adversarial perturbations to black-box models is a practical threat against real-world systems, such as autonomous cars or machine learning models exposed as a service (MLaaS). Of particular interest are sparse attacks. The realization of sparse attacks in black-box models demonstrates that machine learning models are more vulnerable than we believe. Because these attacks aim to minimize the number of perturbed pixels measured by l_0 norm-required to mislead a model by solely observing the decision (the predicted label) returned to a model query; the so-called decision-based attack setting. But, such an attack leads to an NP-hard optimization problem. We develop an evolution-based algorithm-SparseEvo-for the problem and evaluate against both convolutional deep neural networks and vision transformers. Notably, vision transformers are yet to be investigated under a decision-based attack setting. SparseEvo requires significantly fewer model queries than the state-of-the-art sparse attack Pointwise for both untargeted and targeted attacks. The attack algorithm, although conceptually simple, is also competitive with only a limited query budget against the state-of-the-art gradient-based whitebox attacks in standard computer vision tasks such as ImageNet. Importantly, the query efficient SparseEvo, along with decision-based attacks, in general, raise new questions regarding the safety of deployed systems and poses new directions to study and understand the robustness of machine learning models.
Out-of-distribution detection is a common issue in deploying vision models in practice and solving it is an essential building block in safety critical applications. Existing OOD detection solutions focus on improving the OOD robustness of a classification model trained exclusively on in-distribution (ID) data. In this work, we take a different approach and propose to leverage generic pre-trained representations. We first investigate the behaviour of simple classifiers built on top of such representations and show striking performance gains compared to the ID trained representations. We propose a novel OOD method, called GROOD, that achieves excellent performance, predicated by the use of a good generic representation. Only a trivial training process is required for adapting GROOD to a particular problem. The method is simple, general, efficient, calibrated and with only a few hyper-parameters. The method achieves state-of-the-art performance on a number of OOD benchmarks, reaching near perfect performance on several of them. The source code is available at //github.com/vojirt/GROOD.
Code-reuse attacks have become a kind of common attack method, in which attackers use the existing code in the program to hijack the control flow. Most existing defenses focus on control flow integrity (CFI), code randomization, and software debloating. However, most fine-grained schemes of those that ensure such high security suffer from significant performance overhead, and only reduce attack surfaces such as software debloating can not defend against code-reuse attacks completely. In this paper, from the perspective of shrinking the available code space at runtime, we propose LoadLord, which dynamically loads, and timely unloads functions during program running to defend against code-reuse attacks. LoadLord can reduce the number of gadgets in memory, especially high-risk gadgets. Moreover, LoadLord ensures the control flow integrity of the loading process and breaks the necessary conditions to build a gadget chain. We implemented LoadLord on Linux operating system and experimented that when limiting only 1/16 of the original function. As a result, LoadLord can defend against code-reuse attacks and has an average runtime overhead of 1.7% on the SPEC CPU 2006, reducing gadgets by 94.02%.
In the Machine Learning (ML) literature, a well-known problem is the Dataset Shift problem where, differently from the ML standard hypothesis, the data in the training and test sets can follow different probability distributions, leading ML systems toward poor generalisation performances. This problem is intensely felt in the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) context, where bio-signals as Electroencephalographic (EEG) are often used. In fact, EEG signals are highly non-stationary both over time and between different subjects. To overcome this problem, several proposed solutions are based on recent transfer learning approaches such as Domain Adaption (DA). In several cases, however, the actual causes of the improvements remain ambiguous. This paper focuses on the impact of data normalisation, or standardisation strategies applied together with DA methods. In particular, using \textit{SEED}, \textit{DEAP}, and \textit{BCI Competition IV 2a} EEG datasets, we experimentally evaluated the impact of different normalization strategies applied with and without several well-known DA methods, comparing the obtained performances. It results that the choice of the normalisation strategy plays a key role on the classifier performances in DA scenarios, and interestingly, in several cases, the use of only an appropriate normalisation schema outperforms the DA technique.
An in-depth understanding of uncertainty is the first step to making effective decisions under uncertainty. Deep/machine learning (ML/DL) has been hugely leveraged to solve complex problems involved with processing high-dimensional data. However, reasoning and quantifying different types of uncertainties to achieve effective decision-making have been much less explored in ML/DL than in other Artificial Intelligence (AI) domains. In particular, belief/evidence theories have been studied in KRR since the 1960s to reason and measure uncertainties to enhance decision-making effectiveness. We found that only a few studies have leveraged the mature uncertainty research in belief/evidence theories in ML/DL to tackle complex problems under different types of uncertainty. In this survey paper, we discuss several popular belief theories and their core ideas dealing with uncertainty causes and types and quantifying them, along with the discussions of their applicability in ML/DL. In addition, we discuss three main approaches that leverage belief theories in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), including Evidential DNNs, Fuzzy DNNs, and Rough DNNs, in terms of their uncertainty causes, types, and quantification methods along with their applicability in diverse problem domains. Based on our in-depth survey, we discuss insights, lessons learned, limitations of the current state-of-the-art bridging belief theories and ML/DL, and finally, future research directions.
Command, Control, Communication, and Intelligence (C3I) system is a kind of system-of-system that integrates computing machines, sensors, and communication networks. C3I systems are increasingly used in critical civil and military operations for achieving information superiority, assurance, and operational efficacy. C3I systems are no exception to the traditional systems facing widespread cyber-threats. However, the sensitive nature of the application domain (e.g., military operations) of C3I systems makes their security a critical concern. For instance, a cyber-attack on military installations can have detrimental impacts on national security. Therefore, in this paper, we review the state-of-the-art on the security of C3I systems. In particular, this paper aims to identify the security vulnerabilities, attack vectors, and countermeasures for C3I systems. We used the well-known systematic literature review method to select and review 77 studies on the security of C3I systems. Our review enabled us to identify 27 vulnerabilities, 22 attack vectors, and 62 countermeasures for C3I systems. This review has also revealed several areas for future research and identified key lessons with regards to C3I systems' security.
As data are increasingly being stored in different silos and societies becoming more aware of data privacy issues, the traditional centralized training of artificial intelligence (AI) models is facing efficiency and privacy challenges. Recently, federated learning (FL) has emerged as an alternative solution and continue to thrive in this new reality. Existing FL protocol design has been shown to be vulnerable to adversaries within or outside of the system, compromising data privacy and system robustness. Besides training powerful global models, it is of paramount importance to design FL systems that have privacy guarantees and are resistant to different types of adversaries. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive survey on this topic. Through a concise introduction to the concept of FL, and a unique taxonomy covering: 1) threat models; 2) poisoning attacks and defenses against robustness; 3) inference attacks and defenses against privacy, we provide an accessible review of this important topic. We highlight the intuitions, key techniques as well as fundamental assumptions adopted by various attacks and defenses. Finally, we discuss promising future research directions towards robust and privacy-preserving federated learning.