arXiv subjects

Yuwei Sun

Publications and source records attributed to Yuwei Sun.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Federated Phish Bowl: LSTM-Based Decentralized Phishing Email Detection

With increasingly more sophisticated phishing campaigns in recent years, phishing emails lure people using more legitimate-looking personal contexts. To tackle this problem, instead of traditional heuristics-based algorithms, more adaptive detection systems such as natural language processing (NLP)-powered approaches are essential to understanding phishing text representations. Nevertheless, concerns surrounding the collection of phishing data that might cover confidential information hinder the effectiveness of model learning. We propose a decentralized phishing email detection framework called Federated Phish Bowl (FedPB) which facilitates collaborative phishing detection with privacy. In particular, we devise a knowledge-sharing mechanism with federated learning (FL). Using long short-term memory (LSTM) for phishing detection, the framework adapts by sharing a global word embedding matrix across the clients, with each client running its local model with Non-IID data. We collected the most recent phishing samples to study the effectiveness of the proposed method using different client numbers and data distributions. The results show that FedPB can attain a competitive performance with a centralized phishing detector, with generality to various cases of FL retaining a prediction accuracy of 83%.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

Semi-Targeted Model Poisoning Attack on Federated Learning via Backward Error Analysis

Model poisoning attacks on federated learning (FL) intrude in the entire system via compromising an edge model, resulting in malfunctioning of machine learning models. Such compromised models are tampered with to perform adversary-desired behaviors. In particular, we considered a semi-targeted situation where the source class is predetermined however the target class is not. The goal is to cause the global classifier to misclassify data of the source class. Though approaches such as label flipping have been adopted to inject poisoned parameters into FL, it has been shown that their performances are usually class-sensitive varying with different target classes applied. Typically, an attack can become less effective when shifting to a different target class. To overcome this challenge, we propose the Attacking Distance-aware Attack (ADA) to enhance a poisoning attack by finding the optimized target class in the feature space. Moreover, we studied a more challenging situation where an adversary had limited prior knowledge about a client's data. To tackle this problem, ADA deduces pair-wise distances between different classes in the latent feature space from shared model parameters based on the backward error analysis. We performed extensive empirical evaluations on ADA by varying the factor of attacking frequency in three different image classification tasks. As a result, ADA succeeded in increasing the attack performance by 1.8 times in the most challenging case with an attacking frequency of 0.01.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Decentralized Deep Learning for Multi-Access Edge Computing: A Survey on Communication Efficiency and Trustworthiness

Wider coverage and a better solution to a latency reduction in 5G necessitate its combination with multi-access edge computing (MEC) technology. Decentralized deep learning (DDL) such as federated learning and swarm learning as a promising solution to privacy-preserving data processing for millions of smart edge devices, leverages distributed computing of multi-layer neural networks within the networking of local clients, whereas, without disclosing the original local training data. Notably, in industries such as finance and healthcare where sensitive data of transactions and personal medical records is cautiously maintained, DDL can facilitate the collaboration among these institutes to improve the performance of trained models while protecting the data privacy of participating clients. In this survey paper, we demonstrate the technical fundamentals of DDL that benefit many walks of society through decentralized learning. Furthermore, we offer a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art in the field by outlining the challenges of DDL and the most relevant solutions from novel perspectives of communication efficiency and trustworthiness.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2021

Homogeneous Learning: Self-Attention Decentralized Deep Learning

Federated learning (FL) has been facilitating privacy-preserving deep learning in many walks of life such as medical image classification, network intrusion detection, and so forth. Whereas it necessitates a central parameter server for model aggregation, which brings about delayed model communication and vulnerability to adversarial attacks. A fully decentralized architecture like Swarm Learning allows peer-to-peer communication among distributed nodes, without the central server. One of the most challenging issues in decentralized deep learning is that data owned by each node are usually non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID), causing time-consuming convergence of model training. To this end, we propose a decentralized learning model called Homogeneous Learning (HL) for tackling non-IID data with a self-attention mechanism. In HL, training performs on each round's selected node, and the trained model of a node is sent to the next selected node at the end of each round. Notably, for the selection, the self-attention mechanism leverages reinforcement learning to observe a node's inner state and its surrounding environment's state, and find out which node should be selected to optimize the training. We evaluate our method with various scenarios for an image classification task. The result suggests that HL can produce a better performance compared with standalone learning and greatly reduce both the total training rounds by 50.8% and the communication cost by 74.6% compared with random policy-based decentralized learning for training on non-IID data.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Suspicious ARP Activity Detection and Clustering Based on Autoencoder Neural Networks

The rapidly increasing number of smart devices on the Internet necessitates an efficient inspection system for safeguarding our networks from suspicious activities such as Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) probes. In this research, we analyze sequence data of ARP traffic on LAN based on the numerical count and degree of its packets. Moreover, a dynamic threshold is employed to detect underlying suspicious activities, which are further converted into feature vectors to train an unsupervised autoencoder neural network. Then, we leverage K-means clustering to separate the extracted latent features of suspicious activities from the autoencoder into various patterns. Besides, to evaluate the performance, we collect and adopt a real-world network traffic dataset from five different LANs. At last, we successfully detect suspicious ARP patterns varying in scale, lifespan, and regularity on the LANs.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

Information Stealing in Federated Learning Systems Based on Generative Adversarial Networks

An attack on deep learning systems where intelligent machines collaborate to solve problems could cause a node in the network to make a mistake on a critical judgment. At the same time, the security and privacy concerns of AI have galvanized the attention of experts from multiple disciplines. In this research, we successfully mounted adversarial attacks on a federated learning (FL) environment using three different datasets. The attacks leveraged generative adversarial networks (GANs) to affect the learning process and strive to reconstruct the private data of users by learning hidden features from shared local model parameters. The attack was target-oriented drawing data with distinct class distribution from the CIFAR- 10, MNIST, and Fashion-MNIST respectively. Moreover, by measuring the Euclidean distance between the real data and the reconstructed adversarial samples, we evaluated the performance of the adversary in the learning processes in various scenarios. At last, we successfully reconstructed the real data of the victim from the shared global model parameters with all the applied datasets.

cs.LG↗