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Xiaojiang Du

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaojiang Du.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

WebWeaver: Breaking Topology Confidentiality in LLM Multi-Agent Systems with Stealthy Context-Based Inference

Communication topology is a critical factor in the utility and safety of LLM-based multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS), making it a high-value intellectual property (IP) whose confidentiality remains insufficiently studied. Existing topology inference attempts rely on impractical assumptions, including control over the administrative agent and direct identity queries via jailbreaks, which are easily defeated by basic keyword-based defenses. As a result, prior analyses fail to capture the real-world threat of such attacks. To bridge this realism gap, we propose \textit{WebWeaver}, an attack framework that infers the complete LLM-MAS topology by compromising only a single arbitrary agent instead of the administrative agent. Unlike prior approaches, WebWeaver relies solely on agent contexts rather than agent IDs, enabling significantly stealthier inference. WebWeaver further introduces a new covert jailbreak-based mechanism and a novel fully jailbreak-free diffusion design to handle cases where jailbreaks fail. Additionally, we address a key challenge in diffusion-based inference by proposing a masking strategy that preserves known topology during diffusion, with theoretical guarantees of correctness. Extensive experiments show that WebWeaver substantially outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, achieving about 60\% higher inference accuracy under active defenses with negligible overhead.

cs.CR

iSeal: Encrypted Fingerprinting for Reliable LLM Ownership Verification

Given the high cost of large language model (LLM) training from scratch, safeguarding LLM intellectual property (IP) has become increasingly crucial. As the standard paradigm for IP ownership verification, LLM fingerprinting thus plays a vital role in addressing this challenge. Existing LLM fingerprinting methods verify ownership by extracting or injecting model-specific features. However, they overlook potential attacks during the verification process, leaving them ineffective when the model thief fully controls the LLM's inference process. In such settings, attackers may share prompt-response pairs to enable fingerprint unlearning or manipulate outputs to evade exact-match verification. We propose iSeal, the first fingerprinting method designed for reliable verification when the model thief controls the suspected LLM in an end-to-end manner. It injects unique features into both the model and an external module, reinforced by an error-correction mechanism and a similarity-based verification strategy. These components are resistant to verification-time attacks, including collusion-based fingerprint unlearning and response manipulation, backed by both theoretical analysis and empirical results. iSeal achieves 100 percent Fingerprint Success Rate (FSR) on 12 LLMs against more than 10 attacks, while baselines fail under unlearning and response manipulations.

cs.CR

Identify As A Human Does: A Pathfinder of Next-Generation Anti-Cheat Framework for First-Person Shooter Games

The gaming industry has experienced substantial growth, but cheating in online games poses a significant threat to the integrity of the gaming experience. Cheating, particularly in first-person shooter (FPS) games, can lead to substantial losses for the game industry. Existing anti-cheat solutions have limitations, such as client-side hardware constraints, security risks, server-side unreliable methods, and both-sides suffer from a lack of comprehensive real-world datasets. To address these limitations, the paper proposes HAWK, a server-side FPS anti-cheat framework for the popular game CS:GO. HAWK utilizes machine learning techniques to mimic human experts' identification process, leverages novel multi-view features, and it is equipped with a well-defined workflow. The authors evaluate HAWK with the first large and real-world datasets containing multiple cheat types and cheating sophistication, and it exhibits promising efficiency and acceptable overheads, shorter ban times compared to the in-use anti-cheat, a significant reduction in manual labor, and the ability to capture cheaters who evaded official inspections.

cs.CR

Revisiting Privacy-Utility Trade-off for DP Training with Pre-existing Knowledge

Differential privacy (DP) provides a provable framework for protecting individuals by customizing a random mechanism over a privacy-sensitive dataset. Deep learning models have demonstrated privacy risks in model exposure as an established learning model unintentionally records membership-level privacy leakage. Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) has been proposed to safeguard training individuals by adding random Gaussian noise to gradient updates in the backpropagation. Researchers identify that DP-SGD causes utility loss since the injected homogeneous noise can alter the gradient updates calculated at each iteration. Namely, all elements in the gradient are contaminated regardless of their importance in updating model parameters. In this work, we argue that the utility can be optimized by involving the heterogeneity of the the injected noise. Consequently, we propose a generic differential privacy framework with heterogeneous noise (DP-Hero) by defining a heterogeneous random mechanism to abstract its property. The insight of DP-Hero is to leverage the knowledge encoded in the previously trained model to guide the subsequent allocation of noise heterogeneity, thereby leveraging the statistical perturbation and achieving enhanced utility. Atop DP-Hero, we instantiate a heterogeneous version of DP-SGD, and further extend it to federated training. We conduct comprehensive experiments to verify and explain the effectiveness of the proposed DP-Hero, showing improved training accuracy compared with state-of-the-art works. Broadly, we shed light on improving the privacy-utility space by learning the noise guidance from the pre-existing leaked knowledge encoded in the previously trained model, showing a different perspective of understanding the utility-improved DP training.

cs.CR

GRU: Mitigating the Trade-off between Unlearning and Retention for LLMs

Large language model (LLM) unlearning has demonstrated its essential role in removing privacy and copyright-related responses, crucial for their legal and safe applications. However, the pursuit of complete unlearning often comes with substantial costs due to its compromises in their general functionality, leading to a notorious trade-off between unlearning and retention. It motivates this paper to explore enhanced unlearning schemes that can mitigate this trade-off. Specifically, we propose Gradient Rectified Unlearning (GRU), an improved framework that regulates the directions of gradient updates during the unlearning procedure such that their side impacts on other, unrelated responses can be minimized. GRU is easy and general to implement, demonstrating practical effectiveness across a variety of well-established unlearning benchmarks.

cs.LG

INVARLLM: LLM-assisted Physical Invariant Extraction for Cyber-Physical Systems Anomaly Detection

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are vulnerable to cyber-physical attacks that violate physical laws. While invariant-based anomaly detection is effective, existing methods are limited: data-driven approaches lack semantic context, and physics-based models require extensive manual work. We propose INVARLLM, a hybrid framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to extract semantic information from CPS documentation and generate physical invariants, then validates these against real system data using a PCMCI+-inspired K-means method. This approach combines LLM semantic understanding with empirical validation to ensure both interpretability and reliability. We evaluate INVARLLM on SWaT and WADI datasets, achieving 100% precision in anomaly detection with no false alarms, outperforming all existing methods. Our results demonstrate that integrating LLM-derived semantics with statistical validation provides a scalable and dependable solution for CPS security.

cs.CR

A Comparative Study of Full Apps and Lite Apps for Android

App developers aim to create apps that cater to the needs of different types of users. This development approach, also known as the "one-size-fits-all" strategy, involves combining various functionalities into one app. However, this approach has drawbacks, such as lower conversion rates, slower download speed, larger attack surfaces, and lower update rates. To address these issues, developers have created "lite" versions to attract new users and enhance the user experience. Despite this, there has been no study conducted to examine the relationship between lite and full apps. To address this gap, we present a comparative study of lite apps, exploring the similarities and differences between lite and full apps from various perspectives. Our findings indicate that most existing lite apps fail to fulfill their intended goals (e.g., smaller in size, faster to download, and using less data). Our study also reveals the potential security risks associated with lite apps.

cs.SE

AsyncSC: An Asynchronous Sidechain for Multi-Domain Data Exchange in Internet of Things

Sidechain techniques improve blockchain scalability and interoperability, providing decentralized exchange and cross-chain collaboration solutions for Internet of Things (IoT) data across various domains. However, current state-of-the-art (SOTA) schemes for IoT multi-domain data exchange are constrained by the need for synchronous networks, hindering efficient cross-chain interactions in discontinuous networks and leading to suboptimal data exchange. In this paper, we propose AsyncSC, a novel asynchronous sidechain construction. It employs a committee to provide Cross-Blockchain as a Service (C-BaaS) for data exchange in multi-domain IoT. To fulfill the need for asynchronous and efficient data exchange, we combine the ideas of aggregate signatures and verifiable delay functions to devise a novel cryptographic primitive called delayed aggregate signature (DAS), which constructs asynchronous cross-chain proofs (ACPs) that ensure the security of cross-chain interactions. To ensure the consistency of asynchronous transactions, we propose a multilevel buffered transaction pool that guarantees the transaction sequencing. We analyze and prove the security of AsyncSC, simulate an asynchronous communication environment, and conduct a comprehensive evaluation. The results show that AsyncSC outperforms SOTA schemes, improving throughput by an average of 1.21 to 3.96 times, reducing transaction latency by 59.76% to 83.61%, and maintaining comparable resource overhead.

cs.CR

GainNet: Coordinates the Odd Couple of Generative AI and 6G Networks

The rapid expansion of AI-generated content (AIGC) reflects the iteration from assistive AI towards generative AI (GAI) with creativity. Meanwhile, the 6G networks will also evolve from the Internet-of-everything to the Internet-of-intelligence with hybrid heterogeneous network architectures. In the future, the interplay between GAI and the 6G will lead to new opportunities, where GAI can learn the knowledge of personalized data from the massive connected 6G end devices, while GAI's powerful generation ability can provide advanced network solutions for 6G network and provide 6G end devices with various AIGC services. However, they seem to be an odd couple, due to the contradiction of data and resources. To achieve a better-coordinated interplay between GAI and 6G, the GAI-native networks (GainNet), a GAI-oriented collaborative cloud-edge-end intelligence framework, is proposed in this paper. By deeply integrating GAI with 6G network design, GainNet realizes the positive closed-loop knowledge flow and sustainable-evolution GAI model optimization. On this basis, the GAI-oriented generic resource orchestration mechanism with integrated sensing, communication, and computing (GaiRom-ISCC) is proposed to guarantee the efficient operation of GainNet. Two simple case studies demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed schemes. Finally, we envision the key challenges and future directions concerning the interplay between GAI models and 6G networks.

cs.NI

Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Computing for Cost-effective Multimodal Federated Perception

Federated learning (FL) is a classic paradigm of 6G edge intelligence (EI), which alleviates privacy leaks and high communication pressure caused by traditional centralized data processing in the artificial intelligence of things (AIoT). The implementation of multimodal federated perception (MFP) services involves three sub-processes, including sensing-based multimodal data generation, communication-based model transmission, and computing-based model training, ultimately relying on available underlying multi-domain physical resources such as time, frequency, and computing power. How to reasonably coordinate the multi-domain resources scheduling among sensing, communication, and computing, therefore, is crucial to the MFP networks. To address the above issues, this paper investigates service-oriented resource management with integrated sensing, communication, and computing (ISCC). With the incentive mechanism of the MFP service market, the resources management problem is redefined as a social welfare maximization problem, where the idea of "expanding resources" and "reducing costs" is used to improve learning performance gain and reduce resource costs. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed resource scheduling mechanisms.

cs.NI

Sparsity-Aware Intelligent Massive Random Access Control in Open RAN: A Reinforcement Learning Based Approach

Massive random access of devices in the emerging Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) brings great challenge to the access control and management. Exploiting the bursting nature of the access requests, sparse active user detection (SAUD) is an efficient enabler towards efficient access management, but the sparsity might be deteriorated in case of uncoordinated massive access requests. To dynamically preserve the sparsity of access requests, a reinforcement-learning (RL)-assisted scheme of closed-loop access control utilizing the access class barring technique is proposed, where the RL policy is determined through continuous interaction between the RL agent, i.e., a next generation node base (gNB), and the environment. The proposed scheme can be implemented by the near-real-time RAN intelligent controller (near-RT RIC) in O-RAN, supporting rapid switching between heterogeneous vertical applications, such as mMTC and uRLLC services. Moreover, a data-driven scheme of deep-RL-assisted SAUD is proposed to resolve highly complex environments with continuous and high-dimensional state and action spaces, where a replay buffer is applied for automatic large-scale data collection. An actor-critic framework is formulated to incorporate the strategy-learning modules into the near-RT RIC. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes can achieve superior performance in both access efficiency and user detection accuracy over the benchmark scheme for different heterogeneous services with massive access requests.

cs.LG

Towards Explainability in NLP: Analyzing and Calculating Word Saliency through Word Properties

The wide use of black-box models in natural language processing brings great challenges to the understanding of the decision basis, the trustworthiness of the prediction results, and the improvement of the model performance. The words in text samples have properties that reflect their semantics and contextual information, such as the part of speech, the position, etc. These properties may have certain relationships with the word saliency, which is of great help for studying the explainability of the model predictions. In this paper, we explore the relationships between the word saliency and the word properties. According to the analysis results, we further establish a mapping model, Seq2Saliency, from the words in a text sample and their properties to the saliency values based on the idea of sequence tagging. In addition, we establish a new dataset called PrSalM, which contains each word in the text samples, the word properties, and the word saliency values. The experimental evaluations are conducted to analyze the saliency of words with different properties. The effectiveness of the Seq2Saliency model is verified.

cs.CL

Auction-Promoted Trading for Multiple Federated Learning Services in UAV-Aided Networks

Federated learning (FL) represents a promising distributed machine learning paradigm that allows smart devices to collaboratively train a shared model via providing local data sets. However, problems considering multiple co-existing FL services and different types of service providers are rarely studied. In this paper, we investigate a multiple FL service trading problem in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-aided networks, where FL service demanders (FLSDs) aim to purchase various data sets from feasible clients (smart devices, e.g., smartphones, smart vehicles), and model aggregation services from UAVs, to fulfill their requirements. An auction-based trading market is established to facilitate the trading among three parties, i.e., FLSDs acting as buyers, distributed located client groups acting as data-sellers, and UAVs acting as UAV-sellers. The proposed auction is formalized as a 0-1 integer programming problem, aiming to maximize the overall buyers' revenue via investigating winner determination and payment rule design. Specifically, since two seller types (data-sellers and UAV-sellers) are considered, an interesting idea integrating seller pair and joint bid is introduced, which turns diverse sellers into virtual seller pairs. Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG)-based, and one-sided matching-based mechanisms are proposed, respectively, where the former achieves the optimal solutions, which, however, is computationally intractable. While the latter can obtain suboptimal solutions that approach to the optimal ones, with low computational complexity, especially upon considering a large number of participants. Significant properties such as truthfulness and individual rationality are comprehensively analyzed for both mechanisms. Extensive experimental results verify the properties and demonstrate that our proposed mechanisms outperform representative methods significantly.

cs.GT

A Practical Cross-Device Federated Learning Framework over 5G Networks

The concept of federated learning (FL) was first proposed by Google in 2016. Thereafter, FL has been widely studied for the feasibility of application in various fields due to its potential to make full use of data without compromising the privacy. However, limited by the capacity of wireless data transmission, the employment of federated learning on mobile devices has been making slow progress in practical. The development and commercialization of the 5th generation (5G) mobile networks has shed some light on this. In this paper, we analyze the challenges of existing federated learning schemes for mobile devices and propose a novel cross-device federated learning framework, which utilizes the anonymous communication technology and ring signature to protect the privacy of participants while reducing the computation overhead of mobile devices participating in FL. In addition, our scheme implements a contribution-based incentive mechanism to encourage mobile users to participate in FL. We also give a case study of autonomous driving. Finally, we present the performance evaluation of the proposed scheme and discuss some open issues in federated learning.

cs.LG

Effective Anomaly Detection in Smart Home by Integrating Event Time Intervals

Smart home IoT systems and devices are susceptible to attacks and malfunctions. As a result, users' concerns about their security and safety issues arise along with the prevalence of smart home deployments. In a smart home, various anomalies (such as fire or flooding) could happen, due to cyber attacks, device malfunctions, or human mistakes. These concerns motivate researchers to propose various anomaly detection approaches. Existing works on smart home anomaly detection focus on checking the sequence of IoT devices' events but leave out the temporal information of events. This limitation prevents them to detect anomalies that cause delay rather than missing/injecting events. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a novel anomaly detection method that takes the inter-event intervals into consideration. We propose an innovative metric to quantify the temporal similarity between two event sequences. We design a mechanism to learn the temporal patterns of event sequences of common daily activities. Delay-caused anomalies are detected by comparing the sequence with the learned patterns. We collect device events from a real-world testbed for training and testing. The experiment results show that our proposed method achieves accuracies of 93%, 88%, 89% for three daily activities.

cs.CR

PFirewall: Semantics-Aware Customizable Data Flow Control for Smart Home Privacy Protection

Internet of Things (IoT) platforms enable users to deploy home automation applications. Meanwhile, privacy issues arise as large amounts of sensitive device data flow out to IoT platforms. Most of the data flowing out to a platform actually do not trigger automation actions, while homeowners currently have no control once devices are bound to the platform. We present PFirewall, a customizable data-flow control system to enhance the privacy of IoT platform users. PFirewall automatically generates data-minimization policies, which only disclose minimum amount of data to fulfill automation. In addition, PFirewall provides interfaces for homeowners to customize individual privacy preferences by defining user-specified policies. To enforce these policies, PFirewall transparently intervenes and mediates the communication between IoT devices and the platform, without modifying the platform, IoT devices, or hub. Evaluation results on four real-world testbeds show that PFirewall reduces IoT data sent to the platform by 97% without impairing home automation, and effectively mitigates user-activity inference/tracking attacks and other privacy risks.

cs.CR

Cross-App Interference Threats in Smart Homes: Categorization, Detection and Handling

A number of Internet of Things (IoTs) platforms have emerged to enable various IoT apps developed by third-party developers to automate smart homes. Prior research mostly concerns the overprivilege problem in the permission model. Our work, however, reveals that even IoT apps that follow the principle of least privilege, when they interplay, can cause unique types of threats, named Cross-App Interference (CAI) threats. We describe and categorize the new threats, showing that unexpected automation, security and privacy issues may be caused by such threats, which cannot be handled by existing IoT security mechanisms. To address this problem, we present HOMEGUARD, a system for appified IoT platforms to detect and cope with CAI threats. A symbolic executor module is built to precisely extract the automation semantics from IoT apps. The semantics of different IoT apps are then considered collectively to evaluate their interplay and discover CAI threats systematically. A user interface is presented to users during IoT app installation, interpreting the discovered threats to help them make decisions. We evaluate HOMEGUARD via a proof-of-concept implementation on Samsung SmartThings and discover many threat instances among apps in the SmartThings public repository. The evaluation shows that it is precise, effective and efficient.

cs.CR

Robust Attacks on Deep Learning Face Recognition in the Physical World

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been increasingly used in face recognition (FR) systems. Recent studies, however, show that DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which can potentially mislead the FR systems using DNNs in the physical world. Existing attacks on these systems either generate perturbations working merely in the digital world, or rely on customized equipments to generate perturbations and are not robust in varying physical environments. In this paper, we propose FaceAdv, a physical-world attack that crafts adversarial stickers to deceive FR systems. It mainly consists of a sticker generator and a transformer, where the former can craft several stickers with different shapes and the latter transformer aims to digitally attach stickers to human faces and provide feedbacks to the generator to improve the effectiveness of stickers. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of FaceAdv on attacking 3 typical FR systems (i.e., ArcFace, CosFace and FaceNet). The results show that compared with a state-of-the-art attack, FaceAdv can significantly improve success rate of both dodging and impersonating attacks. We also conduct comprehensive evaluations to demonstrate the robustness of FaceAdv.

cs.CV