CRS-FL: Conditional Random Sampling for Communication-Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL), a privacy-oriented distributed ML paradigm, is being gaining great interest in Internet of Things because of its capability to protect participants data privacy. Studies have been conducted to address challenges existing in standard FL, including communication efficiency and privacy-preserving. But they cannot achieve the goal of making a tradeoff between communication efficiency and model accuracy while guaranteeing privacy. This paper proposes a Conditional Random Sampling (CRS) method and implements it into the standard FL settings (CRS-FL) to tackle the above-mentioned challenges. CRS explores a stochastic coefficient based on Poisson sampling to achieve a higher probability of obtaining zero-gradient unbiasedly, and then decreases the communication overhead effectively without model accuracy degradation. Moreover, we dig out the relaxation Local Differential Privacy (LDP) guarantee conditions of CRS theoretically. Extensive experiment results indicate that (1) in communication efficiency, CRS-FL performs better than the existing methods in metric accuracy per transmission byte without model accuracy reduction in more than 7% sampling ratio (# sampling size / # model size); (2) in privacy-preserving, CRS-FL achieves no accuracy reduction compared with LDP baselines while holding the efficiency, even exceeding them in model accuracy under more sampling ratio conditions.

DI-AA: An Interpretable White-box Attack for Fooling Deep Neural Networks

White-box Adversarial Example (AE) attacks towards Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have a more powerful destructive capacity than black-box AE attacks in the fields of AE strategies. However, almost all the white-box approaches lack interpretation from the point of view of DNNs. That is, adversaries did not investigate the attacks from the perspective of interpretable features, and few of these approaches considered what features the DNN actually learns. In this paper, we propose an interpretable white-box AE attack approach, DI-AA, which explores the application of the interpretable approach of the deep Taylor decomposition in the selection of the most contributing features and adopts the Lagrangian relaxation optimization of the logit output and L_p norm to further decrease the perturbation. We compare DI-AA with six baseline attacks (including the state-of-the-art attack AutoAttack) on three datasets. Experimental results reveal that our proposed approach can 1) attack non-robust models with comparatively low perturbation, where the perturbation is closer to or lower than the AutoAttack approach; 2) break the TRADES adversarial training models with the highest success rate; 3) the generated AE can reduce the robust accuracy of the robust black-box models by 16% to 31% in the black-box transfer attack.

IWA: Integrated Gradient based White-box Attacks for Fooling Deep Neural Networks

The widespread application of deep neural network (DNN) techniques is being challenged by adversarial examples, the legitimate input added with imperceptible and well-designed perturbations that can fool DNNs easily in the DNN testing/deploying stage. Previous adversarial example generation algorithms for adversarial white-box attacks used Jacobian gradient information to add perturbations. This information is too imprecise and inexplicit, which will cause unnecessary perturbations when generating adversarial examples. This paper aims to address this issue. We first propose to apply a more informative and distilled gradient information, namely integrated gradient, to generate adversarial examples. To further make the perturbations more imperceptible, we propose to employ the restriction combination of $L_0$ and $L_1/L_2$ secondly, which can restrict the total perturbations and perturbation points simultaneously. Meanwhile, to address the non-differentiable problem of $L_1$, we explore a proximal operation of $L_1$ thirdly. Based on these three works, we propose two Integrated gradient based White-box Adversarial example generation algorithms (IWA): IFPA and IUA. IFPA is suitable for situations where there are a determined number of points to be perturbed. IUA is suitable for situations where no perturbation point number is preset in order to obtain more adversarial examples. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms on both structured and unstructured datasets, and we compare them with five baseline generation algorithms. The results show that our proposed algorithms do craft adversarial examples with more imperceptible perturbations and satisfactory crafting rate. $L_2$ restriction is more suitable for unstructured dataset and $L_1$ restriction performs better in structured dataset.

A novel DL approach to PE malware detection: exploring Glove vectorization, MCC_RCNN and feature fusion

In recent years, malware becomes more threatening. Concerning the increasing malware variants, there comes Machine Learning (ML)-based and Deep Learning (DL)-based approaches for heuristic detection. Nevertheless, the prediction accuracy of both needs to be improved. In response to the above issues in the PE malware domain, we propose the DL-based approaches for detection and use static-based features fed up into models. The contributions are as follows: we recapitulate existing malware detection methods. That is, we propose a vec-torized representation model of the malware instruction layer and semantic layer based on Glove. We implement a neural network model called MCC_RCNN (Malware Detection and Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network), comprising of the combination with CNN and RNN. Moreover, we provide a description of feature fusion in static behavior levels. With the numerical results generated from several comparative experiments towards evaluating the Glove-based vectoriza-tion, MCC_RCNN-based classification methodology and feature fusion stages, our proposed classification methods can obtain a higher prediction accuracy than the other baseline methods.

Generalizing Adversarial Examples by AdaBelief Optimizer

Recent research has proved that deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial examples, the legitimate input added with imperceptible and well-designed perturbations can fool DNNs easily in the testing stage. However, most of the existing adversarial attacks are difficult to fool adversarially trained models. To solve this issue, we propose an AdaBelief iterative Fast Gradient Sign Method (AB-FGSM) to generalize adversarial examples. By integrating AdaBelief optimization algorithm to I-FGSM, we believe that the generalization of adversarial examples will be improved, relying on the strong generalization of AdaBelief optimizer. To validate the effectiveness and transferability of adversarial examples generated by our proposed AB-FGSM, we conduct the white-box and black-box attacks on various single models and ensemble models. Compared with state-of-the-art attack methods, our proposed method can generate adversarial examples effectively in the white-box setting, and the transfer rate is 7%-21% higher than latest attack methods.

Towards interpreting ML-based automated malware detection models: a survey

Malware is being increasingly threatening and malware detectors based on traditional signature-based analysis are no longer suitable for current malware detection. Recently, the models based on machine learning (ML) are developed for predicting unknown malware variants and saving human strength. However, most of the existing ML models are black-box, which made their pre-diction results undependable, and therefore need further interpretation in order to be effectively deployed in the wild. This paper aims to examine and categorize the existing researches on ML-based malware detector interpretability. We first give a detailed comparison over the previous work on common ML model inter-pretability in groups after introducing the principles, attributes, evaluation indi-cators and taxonomy of common ML interpretability. Then we investigate the interpretation methods towards malware detection, by addressing the importance of interpreting malware detectors, challenges faced by this field, solutions for migitating these challenges, and a new taxonomy for classifying all the state-of-the-art malware detection interpretability work in recent years. The highlight of our survey is providing a new taxonomy towards malware detection interpreta-tion methods based on the common taxonomy summarized by previous re-searches in the common field. In addition, we are the first to evaluate the state-of-the-art approaches by interpretation method attributes to generate the final score so as to give insight to quantifying the interpretability. By concluding the results of the recent researches, we hope our work can provide suggestions for researchers who are interested in the interpretability on ML-based malware de-tection models.

Towards Interpretable Ensemble Learning for Image-based Malware Detection

Deep learning (DL) models for image-based malware detection have exhibited their capability in producing high prediction accuracy. But model interpretability is posing challenges to their widespread application in security and safety-critical application domains. This paper aims for designing an Interpretable Ensemble learning approach for image-based Malware Detection (IEMD). We first propose a Selective Deep Ensemble Learning-based (SDEL) detector and then design an Ensemble Deep Taylor Decomposition (EDTD) approach, which can give the pixel-level explanation to SDEL detector outputs. Furthermore, we develop formulas for calculating fidelity, robustness and expressiveness on pixel-level heatmaps in order to assess the quality of EDTD explanation. With EDTD explanation, we develop a novel Interpretable Dropout approach (IDrop), which establishes IEMD by training SDEL detector. Experiment results exhibit the better explanation of our EDTD than the previous explanation methods for image-based malware detection. Besides, experiment results indicate that IEMD achieves a higher detection accuracy up to 99.87% while exhibiting interpretability with high quality of prediction results. Moreover, experiment results indicate that IEMD interpretability increases with the increasing detection accuracy during the construction of IEMD. This consistency suggests that IDrop can mitigate the tradeoff between model interpretability and detection accuracy.