arXiv subjects

Man Ho Au

Publications and source records attributed to Man Ho Au.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Latency-Optimal Adaptive Split Inference for Privacy-Preserving Cloud-Edge-End Collaboration

Internet of Things (IoT) end devices are increasingly expected to support privacy-sensitive batch inference, yet their limited computational resources often make full local execution of convolutional neural networks impractical. This paper presents a latency-optimal adaptive split inference framework for privacy-preserving cloud-edge-end collaboration. The end device acts as the trust anchor, executes the plaintext model prefix, encrypts the split activation using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and keeps the secret key locally, while the edge and cloud execute assigned model segments only on FHE ciphertexts. We formulate collaborative encrypted inference as a split-pair selection problem over an end-side split point and an edge-side termination point. The proposed planner jointly models plaintext prefix execution, encryption, communication, edge-side FHE execution, and cloud-side FHE completion, and supports both convolution-level and block-level split granularities. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and PathMNIST show that the proposed convolution-level collaborative scheme achieves amortized end-to-end speedups of approximately 12.9 times over full-cloud FHE and 3.9 times over the block-level alternative, while preserving the corresponding plaintext-model accuracy. Including modeled communication, the amortized latencies are 1033.279 s/sample on CIFAR-10 and 1023.429 s/sample on PathMNIST.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Lattice-Based Dynamic $k$-Times Anonymous Authentication with Attribute-Based Credentials

With the development of Internet, privacy has become a primary concern of users. Anonymous authentication plays an important role in privacy-preserving systems. A $k$-times anonymous authentication ($k$-TAA) scheme allows a group member to anonymously authenticate to the application provider up to $k$ times. Considering quantum computing attacks, lattice-based $k$-TAA was introduced. However, existing schemes neither support the dynamic granting and revocation of users nor enable users to control the release of their attributes. In this paper, we construct the first lattice-based dynamic $k$-TAA, which offers limited times anonymous authentication, dynamic member management, attribute-based authentication, and post-quantum security. We present a concrete construction, and reduce its security to standard complexity assumptions. Notably, compared with existing lattice-based $k$-TAA, our scheme is efficient in terms of communication cost.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Neural Networks with (Low-Precision) Polynomial Approximations: New Insights and Techniques for Accuracy Improvement

Replacing non-polynomial functions (e.g., non-linear activation functions such as ReLU) in a neural network with their polynomial approximations is a standard practice in privacy-preserving machine learning. The resulting neural network, called polynomial approximation of neural network (PANN) in this paper, is compatible with advanced cryptosystems to enable privacy-preserving model inference. Using ``highly precise'' approximation, state-of-the-art PANN offers similar inference accuracy as the underlying backbone model. However, little is known about the effect of approximation, and existing literature often determined the required approximation precision empirically. In this paper, we initiate the investigation of PANN as a standalone object. Specifically, our contribution is two-fold. Firstly, we provide an explanation on the effect of approximate error in PANN. In particular, we discovered that (1) PANN is susceptible to some type of perturbations; and (2) weight regularisation significantly reduces PANN's accuracy. We support our explanation with experiments. Secondly, based on the insights from our investigations, we propose solutions to increase inference accuracy for PANN. Experiments showed that combination of our solutions is very effective: at the same precision, our PANN is 10% to 50% more accurate than state-of-the-arts; and at the same accuracy, our PANN only requires a precision of 2^{-9} while state-of-the-art solution requires a precision of 2^{-12} using the ResNet-20 model on CIFAR-10 dataset.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Stateful Switch: Optimized Time Series Release with Local Differential Privacy

Time series data have numerous applications in big data analytics. However, they often cause privacy issues when collected from individuals. To address this problem, most existing works perturb the values in the time series while retaining their temporal order, which may lead to significant distortion of the values. Recently, we propose TLDP model that perturbs temporal perturbation to ensure privacy guarantee while retaining original values. It has shown great promise to achieve significantly higher utility than value perturbation mechanisms in many time series analysis. However, its practicability is still undermined by two factors, namely, utility cost of extra missing or empty values, and inflexibility of privacy budget settings. To address them, in this paper we propose {\it switch} as a new two-way operation for temporal perturbation, as opposed to the one-way {\it dispatch} operation. The former inherently eliminates the cost of missing, empty or repeated values. Optimizing switch operation in a {\it stateful} manner, we then propose $StaSwitch$ mechanism for time series release under TLDP. Through both analytical and empirical studies, we show that $StaSwitch$ has significantly higher utility for the published time series than any state-of-the-art temporal- or value-perturbation mechanism, while allowing any combination of privacy budget settings.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

An Adaptive Gas Cost Mechanism for Ethereum to Defend Against Under-Priced DoS Attacks

The gas mechanism in Ethereum charges the execution of every operation to ensure that smart contracts running in EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) will be eventually terminated. Failing to properly set the gas costs of EVM operations allows attackers to launch DoS attacks on Ethereum. Although Ethereum recently adjusted the gas costs of EVM operations to defend against known DoS attacks, it remains unknown whether the new setting is proper and how to configure it to defend against unknown DoS attacks. In this paper, we make the first step to address this challenging issue by first proposing an emulation-based framework to automatically measure the resource consumptions of EVM operations. The results reveal that Ethereum's new setting is still not proper. Moreover, we obtain an insight that there may always exist exploitable under-priced operations if the cost is fixed. Hence, we propose a novel gas cost mechanism, which dynamically adjusts the costs of EVM operations according to the number of executions, to thwart DoS attacks. This method punishes the operations that are executed much more frequently than before and lead to high gas costs. To make our solution flexible and secure and avoid frequent update of Ethereum client, we design a special smart contract that collaborates with the updated EVM for dynamic parameter adjustment. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively thwart both known and unknown DoS attacks with flexible parameter settings. Moreover, our method only introduces negligible additional gas consumption for benign users.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Towards Privacy-assured and Lightweight On-chain Auditing of Decentralized Storage

How to audit outsourced data in centralized storage like cloud is well-studied, but it is largely under-explored for the rising decentralized storage network (DSN) that bodes well for a billion-dollar market. To realize DSN as a usable service in a truly decentralized manner, the blockchain comes in handy -- to record and verify audit trails in forms of proof of storage, and based on that, to handle fair payments with necessary dispute resolution. Leaving the audit trails on the blockchain offers transparency and fairness, yet it 1) sacrifices privacy, as they may leak information about the data under audit, and 2) overwhelms on-chain resources, as they may be practically large in size and expensive to verify. Prior auditing designs in centralized settings are not directly applicable here. A handful of proposals targeting DSN cannot satisfactorily address these issues either. We present an auditing solution that addresses on-chain privacy and efficiency, from a synergy of homomorphic linear authenticators with polynomial commitments for succinct proofs, and the sigma protocol for provable privacy. The solution results in, per audit, 288-byte proof written to the blockchain, and constant verification cost. It can sustain long-term operation and easily scale to thousands of users on Ethereum.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Meta-Key: A Secure Data-Sharing Protocol under Blockchain-Based Decentralised Storage Architecture

In this letter we propose Meta-key, a data-sharing mechanism that enables users share their encrypted data under a blockchain-based decentralized storage architecture. All the data-encryption keys are encrypted by the owner's public key and put onto the blockchain for safe and secure storage and easy key-management. Encrypted data are stored in dedicated storage nodes and proxy re-encryption mechanism is used to ensure secure data-sharing in the untrusted environment. Security analysis of our model shows that the proxy re-encryption adopted in our system is naturally free from collusion-attack due to the specific architecture of Meta-key.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2019

Matrix Bloom Filter: An Efficient Probabilistic Data Structure for 2-tuple Batch Lookup

With the growing scale of big data, probabilistic structures receive increasing popularity for efficient approximate storage and query processing. For example, Bloom filters (BF) can achieve satisfactory performance for approximate membership existence query at the expense of false positives. However, a standard Bloom filter can only handle univariate data and single membership existence query, which is insufficient for OLAP and machine learning applications. In this paper, we focus on a common multivariate data type, namely, 2-tuples, or equivalently, key-value pairs. We design the matrix Bloom filter as a high-dimensional extension of the standard Bloom filter. This new probabilistic data structure can not only insert and lookup a single 2-tuple efficiently, but also support these operations efficiently in batches --- a key requirement for OLAP and machine learning tasks. To further balance the insertion and query efficiency for different workload patterns, we propose two variants, namely, the maximum adaptive matrix BF and minimum storage matrix BF. Through both theoretical and empirical studies, we show the performance of matrix Bloom filter is superior on datasets with common statistical distributions; and even without them, it just degrades to a standard Bloom filter.

cs.DS↗