Reinforcement learning guided fuzz testing for a browser's HTML rendering engine

Generation-based fuzz testing can uncover various bugs and security vulnerabilities. However, compared to mutation-based fuzz testing, it takes much longer to develop a well-balanced generator that produces good test cases and decides where to break the underlying structure to exercise new code paths. We propose a novel approach to combine a trained test case generator deep learning model with a double deep Q-network (DDQN) for the first time. The DDQN guides test case creation based on a code coverage signal. Our approach improves the code coverage performance of the underlying generator model by up to 18.5\% for the Firefox HTML rendering engine compared to the baseline grammar based fuzzer.

Improving Robustness Against Adversarial Attacks with Deeply Quantized Neural Networks

Reducing the memory footprint of Machine Learning (ML) models, particularly Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), is essential to enable their deployment into resource-constrained tiny devices. However, a disadvantage of DNN models is their vulnerability to adversarial attacks, as they can be fooled by adding slight perturbations to the inputs. Therefore, the challenge is how to create accurate, robust, and tiny DNN models deployable on resource-constrained embedded devices. This paper reports the results of devising a tiny DNN model, robust to adversarial black and white box attacks, trained with an automatic quantizationaware training framework, i.e. QKeras, with deep quantization loss accounted in the learning loop, thereby making the designed DNNs more accurate for deployment on tiny devices. We investigated how QKeras and an adversarial robustness technique, Jacobian Regularization (JR), can provide a co-optimization strategy by exploiting the DNN topology and the per layer JR approach to produce robust yet tiny deeply quantized DNN models. As a result, a new DNN model implementing this cooptimization strategy was conceived, developed and tested on three datasets containing both images and audio inputs, as well as compared its performance with existing benchmarks against various white-box and black-box attacks. Experimental results demonstrated that on average our proposed DNN model resulted in 8.3% and 79.5% higher accuracy than MLCommons/Tiny benchmarks in the presence of white-box and black-box attacks on the CIFAR-10 image dataset and a subset of the Google Speech Commands audio dataset respectively. It was also 6.5% more accurate for black-box attacks on the SVHN image dataset.

mini-ELSA: using Machine Learning to improve space efficiency in Edge Lightweight Searchable Attribute-based encryption for Industry 4.0

In previous work a novel Edge Lightweight Searchable Attribute-based encryption (ELSA) method was proposed to support Industry 4.0 and specifically Industrial Internet of Things applications. In this paper, we aim to improve ELSA by minimising the lookup table size and summarising the data records by integrating Machine Learning (ML) methods suitable for execution at the edge. This integration will eliminate records of unnecessary data by evaluating added value to further processing. Thus, resulting in the minimization of both the lookup table size, the cloud storage and the network traffic taking full advantage of the edge architecture benefits. We demonstrate our mini-ELSA expanded method on a well-known power plant dataset. Our results demonstrate a reduction of storage requirements by 21% while improving execution time by 1.27x.