SHARKS: Smart Hacking Approaches for RisK Scanning in Internet-of-Things and Cyber-Physical Systems based on Machine Learning

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are increasingly being deployed across multiple functionalities, ranging from healthcare devices and wearables to critical infrastructures, e.g., nuclear power plants, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and smart homes. These devices are inherently not secure across their comprehensive software, hardware, and network stacks, thus presenting a large attack surface that can be exploited by hackers. In this article, we present an innovative technique for detecting unknown system vulnerabilities, managing these vulnerabilities, and improving incident response when such vulnerabilities are exploited. The novelty of this approach lies in extracting intelligence from known real-world CPS/IoT attacks, representing them in the form of regular expressions, and employing machine learning (ML) techniques on this ensemble of regular expressions to generate new attack vectors and security vulnerabilities. Our results show that 10 new attack vectors and 122 new vulnerability exploits can be successfully generated that have the potential to exploit a CPS or an IoT ecosystem. The ML methodology achieves an accuracy of 97.4% and enables us to predict these attacks efficiently with an 87.2% reduction in the search space. We demonstrate the application of our method to the hacking of the in-vehicle network of a connected car. To defend against the known attacks and possible novel exploits, we discuss a defense-in-depth mechanism for various classes of attacks and the classification of data targeted by such attacks. This defense mechanism optimizes the cost of security measures based on the sensitivity of the protected resource, thus incentivizing its adoption in real-world CPS/IoT by cybersecurity practitioners.

Robot Design With Neural Networks, MILP Solvers and Active Learning

Central to the design of many robot systems and their controllers is solving a constrained blackbox optimization problem. This paper presents CNMA, a new method of solving this problem that is conservative in the number of potentially expensive blackbox function evaluations; allows specifying complex, even recursive constraints directly rather than as hard-to-design penalty or barrier functions; and is resilient to the non-termination of function evaluations. CNMA leverages the ability of neural networks to approximate any continuous function, their transformation into equivalent mixed integer linear programs (MILPs) and their optimization subject to constraints with industrial strength MILP solvers. A new learning-from-failure step guides the learning to be relevant to solving the constrained optimization problem. Thus, the amount of learning is orders of magnitude smaller than that needed to learn functions over their entire domains. CNMA is illustrated with the design of several robotic systems: wave-energy propelled boat, lunar lander, hexapod, cartpole, acrobot and parallel parking. These range from 6 real-valued dimensions to 36. We show that CNMA surpasses the Nelder-Mead, Gaussian and Random Search optimization methods against the metric of number of function evaluations.

TUTOR: Training Neural Networks Using Decision Rules as Model Priors

The human brain has the ability to carry out new tasks with limited experience. It utilizes prior learning experiences to adapt the solution strategy to new domains. On the other hand, deep neural networks (DNNs) generally need large amounts of data and computational resources for training. However, this requirement is not met in many settings. To address these challenges, we propose the TUTOR DNN synthesis framework. TUTOR targets non-image datasets. It synthesizes accurate DNN models with limited available data, and reduced memory and computational requirements. It consists of three sequential steps: (1) drawing synthetic data from the same probability distribution as the training data and labeling the synthetic data based on a set of rules extracted from the real dataset, (2) use of two training schemes that combine synthetic data and training data to learn DNN weights, and (3) employing a grow-and-prune synthesis paradigm to learn both the weights and the architecture of the DNN to reduce model size while ensuring its accuracy. We show that in comparison with fully-connected DNNs, on an average TUTOR reduces the need for data by 6.0x (geometric mean), improves accuracy by 3.6%, and reduces the number of parameters (floating-point operations) by 4.7x (4.3x) (geometric mean). Thus, TUTOR is a less data-hungry, accurate, and efficient DNN synthesis framework.

DISPATCH: Design Space Exploration of Cyber-Physical Systems

Design of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) is a challenging task that involves searching over a large search space of various CPS configurations and possible values of components composing the system. Hence, there is a need for sample-efficient CPS design space exploration to select the system architecture and component values that meet the target system requirements. We address this challenge by formulating CPS design as a multi-objective optimization problem and propose DISPATCH, a two-step methodology for sample-efficient search over the design space. First, we use a genetic algorithm to search over discrete choices of system component values for architecture search and component selection or only component selection and terminate the algorithm even before meeting the system requirements, thus yielding a coarse design. In the second step, we use an inverse design to search over a continuous space to fine-tune the component values and meet the diverse set of system requirements. We use a neural network as a surrogate function for the inverse design of the system. The neural network, converted into a mixed-integer linear program, is used for active learning to sample component values efficiently in a continuous search space. We illustrate the efficacy of DISPATCH on electrical circuit benchmarks: two-stage and three-stage transimpedence amplifiers. Simulation results show that the proposed methodology improves sample efficiency by 5-14x compared to a prior synthesis method that relies on reinforcement learning. It also synthesizes circuits with the best performance (highest bandwidth/lowest area) compared to designs synthesized using reinforcement learning, Bayesian optimization, or humans.

Fully Dynamic Inference with Deep Neural Networks

Modern deep neural networks are powerful and widely applicable models that extract task-relevant information through multi-level abstraction. Their cross-domain success, however, is often achieved at the expense of computational cost, high memory bandwidth, and long inference latency, which prevents their deployment in resource-constrained and time-sensitive scenarios, such as edge-side inference and self-driving cars. While recently developed methods for creating efficient deep neural networks are making their real-world deployment more feasible by reducing model size, they do not fully exploit input properties on a per-instance basis to maximize computational efficiency and task accuracy. In particular, most existing methods typically use a one-size-fits-all approach that identically processes all inputs. Motivated by the fact that different images require different feature embeddings to be accurately classified, we propose a fully dynamic paradigm that imparts deep convolutional neural networks with hierarchical inference dynamics at the level of layers and individual convolutional filters/channels. Two compact networks, called Layer-Net (L-Net) and Channel-Net (C-Net), predict on a per-instance basis which layers or filters/channels are redundant and therefore should be skipped. L-Net and C-Net also learn how to scale retained computation outputs to maximize task accuracy. By integrating L-Net and C-Net into a joint design framework, called LC-Net, we consistently outperform state-of-the-art dynamic frameworks with respect to both efficiency and classification accuracy. On the CIFAR-10 dataset, LC-Net results in up to 11.9$\times$ fewer floating-point operations (FLOPs) and up to 3.3% higher accuracy compared to other dynamic inference methods. On the ImageNet dataset, LC-Net achieves up to 1.4$\times$ fewer FLOPs and up to 4.6% higher Top-1 accuracy than the other methods.

CovidDeep: SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 Test Based on Wearable Medical Sensors and Efficient Neural Networks

The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has led to a pandemic. Due to its highly contagious nature, it has spread rapidly, resulting in major disruption to public health. In addition, it has also had a severe negative impact on the world economy. As a result, it is widely recognized now that widespread testing is key to containing the spread of the disease and opening up the economy. However, the current testing regime has been unable to keep up with testing demands. Hence, there is a need for an alternative approach for repeated large-scale testing of COVID-19. The emergence of wearable medical sensors (WMSs) and novel machine learning methods, such as deep neural networks (DNNs), points to a promising approach to address this challenge. WMSs enable continuous and user-transparent monitoring of the physiological signals. However, disease detection based on WMSs/DNNs and their deployment on resource-constrained edge devices remain challenging problems. In this work, we propose CovidDeep, a framework that combines efficient DNNs with commercially available WMSs for pervasive testing of the coronavirus. We collected data from 87 individuals, spanning four cohorts including healthy, asymptomatic (but SARS-CoV-2-positive) as well as moderately and severely symptomatic COVID-19 patients. We trained DNNs on various subsets of the features extracted from six WMS and questionnaire categories to perform ablation studies to determine which subsets are most efficacious in terms of test accuracy for a four-way classification. The highest test accuracy obtained was 99.4%. Since different WMS subsets may be more accessible (in terms of cost, availability, etc.) to different sets of people, we hope these DNN models will provide users with ample flexibility. The resultant DNNs can be easily deployed on edge devices, e.g., smartwatch or smartphone, which also has the benefit of preserving patient privacy.

Efficient Synthesis of Compact Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been deployed in myriad machine learning applications. However, advances in their accuracy are often achieved with increasingly complex and deep network architectures. These large, deep models are often unsuitable for real-world applications, due to their massive computational cost, high memory bandwidth, and long latency. For example, autonomous driving requires fast inference based on Internet-of-Things (IoT) edge devices operating under run-time energy and memory storage constraints. In such cases, compact DNNs can facilitate deployment due to their reduced energy consumption, memory requirement, and inference latency. Long short-term memories (LSTMs) are a type of recurrent neural network that have also found widespread use in the context of sequential data modeling. They also face a model size vs. accuracy trade-off. In this paper, we review major approaches for automatically synthesizing compact, yet accurate, DNN/LSTM models suitable for real-world applications. We also outline some challenges and future areas of exploration.

Dreaming to Distill: Data-free Knowledge Transfer via DeepInversion

We introduce DeepInversion, a new method for synthesizing images from the image distribution used to train a deep neural network. We 'invert' a trained network (teacher) to synthesize class-conditional input images starting from random noise, without using any additional information about the training dataset. Keeping the teacher fixed, our method optimizes the input while regularizing the distribution of intermediate feature maps using information stored in the batch normalization layers of the teacher. Further, we improve the diversity of synthesized images using Adaptive DeepInversion, which maximizes the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the teacher and student network logits. The resulting synthesized images from networks trained on the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets demonstrate high fidelity and degree of realism, and help enable a new breed of data-free applications - ones that do not require any real images or labeled data. We demonstrate the applicability of our proposed method to three tasks of immense practical importance -- (i) data-free network pruning, (ii) data-free knowledge transfer, and (iii) data-free continual learning.

STEERAGE: Synthesis of Neural Networks Using Architecture Search and Grow-and-Prune Methods

Neural networks (NNs) have been successfully deployed in many applications. However, architectural design of these models is still a challenging problem. Moreover, neural networks are known to have a lot of redundancy. This increases the computational cost of inference and poses an obstacle to deployment on Internet-of-Thing sensors and edge devices. To address these challenges, we propose the STEERAGE synthesis methodology. It consists of two complementary approaches: efficient architecture search, and grow-and-prune NN synthesis. The first step, covered in a global search module, uses an accuracy predictor to efficiently navigate the architectural search space. The predictor is built using boosted decision tree regression, iterative sampling, and efficient evolutionary search. The second step involves local search. By using various grow-and-prune methodologies for synthesizing convolutional and feed-forward NNs, it reduces the network redundancy, while boosting its performance. We have evaluated STEERAGE performance on various datasets, including MNIST and CIFAR-10. On MNIST dataset, our CNN architecture achieves an error rate of 0.66%, with 8.6x fewer parameters compared to the LeNet-5 baseline. For the CIFAR-10 dataset, we used the ResNet architectures as the baseline. Our STEERAGE-synthesized ResNet-18 has a 2.52% accuracy improvement over the original ResNet-18, 1.74% over ResNet-101, and 0.16% over ResNet-1001, while having comparable number of parameters and FLOPs to the original ResNet-18. This shows that instead of just increasing the number of layers to increase accuracy, an alternative is to use a better NN architecture with fewer layers. In addition, STEERAGE achieves an error rate of just 3.86% with a variant of ResNet architecture with 40 layers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest accuracy obtained by ResNet-based architectures on the CIFAR-10 dataset.