arXiv subjects

Zhigang Lu

Publications and source records attributed to Zhigang Lu.

25 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

MBTree: Detecting Encryption RAT Communication Using Malicious Behavior Tree

Network trace signature matching is one reliable approach to detect active Remote Control Trojan, (RAT). Compared to statistical-based detection of malicious network traces in the face of known RATs, the signature-based method can achieve more stable performance and thus more reliability. However, with the development of encrypted technologies and disguise tricks, current methods suffer inaccurate signature descriptions and inflexible matching mechanisms. In this paper, we propose to tackle above problems by presenting MBTree, an approach to detect encryption RATs Command and Control (C&C) communication based on host-level network trace behavior. MBTree first models the RAT network behaviors as the malicious set by automatically building the multiple level tree, MLTree from distinctive network traces of each sample. Then, MBTree employs a detection algorithm to detect malicious network traces that are similar to any MLTrees in the malicious set. To illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we adopt theoretical analysis of MBTree from the probability perspective. In addition, we have implemented MBTree to evaluate it on five datasets which are reorganized in a sophisticated manner for comprehensive assessment. The experimental results demonstrate the accurate and robust of MBTree, especially in the face of new emerging benign applications.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Data and Model Dependencies of Membership Inference Attack

Machine learning (ML) models have been shown to be vulnerable to Membership Inference Attacks (MIA), which infer the membership of a given data point in the target dataset by observing the prediction output of the ML model. While the key factors for the success of MIA have not yet been fully understood, existing defense mechanisms such as using L2 regularization \cite{10shokri2017membership} and dropout layers \cite{salem2018ml} take only the model's overfitting property into consideration. In this paper, we provide an empirical analysis of the impact of both the data and ML model properties on the vulnerability of ML techniques to MIA. Our results reveal the relationship between MIA accuracy and properties of the dataset and training model in use. In particular, we show that the size of shadow dataset, the class and feature balance and the entropy of the target dataset, the configurations and fairness of the training model are the most influential factors. Based on those experimental findings, we conclude that along with model overfitting, multiple properties jointly contribute to MIA success instead of any single property. Building on our experimental findings, we propose using those data and model properties as regularizers to protect ML models against MIA. Our results show that the proposed defense mechanisms can reduce the MIA accuracy by up to 25\% without sacrificing the ML model prediction utility.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Differentially Private k-Means Clustering with Guaranteed Convergence

Iterative clustering algorithms help us to learn the insights behind the data. Unfortunately, this may allow adversaries to infer the privacy of individuals with some background knowledge. In the worst case, the adversaries know the centroids of an arbitrary iteration and the information of n-1 out of n items. To protect individual privacy against such an inference attack, preserving differential privacy (DP) for the iterative clustering algorithms has been extensively studied in the interactive settings. However, existing interactive differentially private clustering algorithms suffer from a non-convergence problem, i.e., these algorithms may not terminate without a predefined number of iterations. This problem severely impacts the clustering quality and the efficiency of a differentially private algorithm. To resolve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel differentially private clustering framework in the interactive settings which controls the orientation of the movement of the centroids over the iterations to ensure the convergence by injecting DP noise in a selected area. We prove that, in the expected case, algorithm under our framework converges in at most twice the iterations of Lloyd's algorithm. We perform experimental evaluations on real-world datasets to show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art of the interactive differentially private clustering algorithms with guaranteed convergence and better clustering quality to meet the same DP requirement.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Protect Edge Privacy in Path Publishing with Differential Privacy

Paths in a given network are a generalised form of time-serial chains in many real-world applications, such as trajectories and Internet flows. Differentially private trajectory publishing concerns publishing path information that is usable to the genuine users yet secure against adversaries to reconstruct the path with maximum background knowledge. The exiting studies all assume this knowledge to be all but one vertex on the path. To prevent the adversaries recovering the missing information, they publish a perturbed path where each vertex is sampled from a pre-defined set with differential privacy (DP) to replace the corresponding vertex in the original path. In this paper, we relax this assumption to be all but one edge on the path, and hence consider the scenario of more powerful adversaries with the maximum background knowledge of the entire network topology and the path (including all the vertices) except one (arbitrary) missing edge. Under such an assumption, the perturbed path produced by the existing work is vulnerable, because the adversary can reconstruct the missing edge from the existence of an edge in the perturbed path. To address this vulnerability and effectively protect edge privacy, instead of publishing a perturbed path, we propose a novel scheme of graph-based path publishing to protect the original path by embedding the path in a graph that contains fake edges and replicated vertices applying the differential privacy technique, such that only the legitimate users who have the full knowledge of the network topology are able to recover the exact vertices and edges of the original path with high probability. We theoretically analyse the performance of our algorithm in differential privacy, utility, and execution efficiency. We also conduct extensive experimental evaluations on a high-performance cluster system to validate our analytical results.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2015

An Accuracy-Assured Privacy-Preserving Recommender System for Internet Commerce

Recommender systems, tool for predicting users' potential preferences by computing history data and users' interests, show an increasing importance in various Internet applications such as online shopping. As a well-known recommendation method, neighbourhood-based collaborative filtering has attracted considerable attention recently. The risk of revealing users' private information during the process of filtering has attracted noticeable research interests. Among the current solutions, the probabilistic techniques have shown a powerful privacy preserving effect. When facing $k$ Nearest Neighbour attack, all the existing methods provide no data utility guarantee, for the introduction of global randomness. In this paper, to overcome the problem of recommendation accuracy loss, we propose a novel approach, Partitioned Probabilistic Neighbour Selection, to ensure a required prediction accuracy while maintaining high security against $k$NN attack. We define the sum of $k$ neighbours' similarity as the accuracy metric alpha, the number of user partitions, across which we select the $k$ neighbours, as the security metric beta. We generalise the $k$ Nearest Neighbour attack to beta k Nearest Neighbours attack. Differing from the existing approach that selects neighbours across the entire candidate list randomly, our method selects neighbours from each exclusive partition of size $k$ with a decreasing probability. Theoretical and experimental analysis show that to provide an accuracy-assured recommendation, our Partitioned Probabilistic Neighbour Selection method yields a better trade-off between the recommendation accuracy and system security.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2015

A Security-assured Accuracy-maximised Privacy Preserving Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Algorithm

The neighbourhood-based Collaborative Filtering is a widely used method in recommender systems. However, the risks of revealing customers' privacy during the process of filtering have attracted noticeable public concern recently. Specifically, $k$NN attack discloses the target user's sensitive information by creating $k$ fake nearest neighbours by non-sensitive information. Among the current solutions against $k$NN attack, the probabilistic methods showed a powerful privacy preserving effect. However, the existing probabilistic methods neither guarantee enough prediction accuracy due to the global randomness, nor provide assured security enforcement against $k$NN attack. To overcome the problems of current probabilistic methods, we propose a novel approach, Partitioned Probabilistic Neighbour Selection, to ensure a required security guarantee while achieving the optimal prediction accuracy against $k$NN attack. In this paper, we define the sum of $k$ neighbours' similarity as the accuracy metric $α$, the number of user partitions, across which we select the $k$ neighbours, as the security metric $β$. Differing from the present methods that globally selected neighbours, our method selects neighbours from each group with exponential differential privacy to decrease the magnitude of noise. Theoretical and experimental analysis show that to achieve the same security guarantee against $k$NN attack, our approach ensures the optimal prediction accuracy.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2015

A Faster Algorithm to Build New Users Similarity List in Neighbourhood-based Collaborative Filtering

Neighbourhood-based Collaborative Filtering (CF) has been applied in the industry for several decades, because of the easy implementation and high recommendation accuracy. As the core of neighbourhood-based CF, the task of dynamically maintaining users' similarity list is challenged by cold-start problem and scalability problem. Recently, several methods are presented on solving the two problems. However, these methods applied an $O(n^2)$ algorithm to compute the similarity list in a special case, where the new users, with enough recommendation data, have the same rating list. To address the problem of large computational cost caused by the special case, we design a faster ($O(\frac{1}{125}n^2)$) algorithm, TwinSearch Algorithm, to avoid computing and sorting the similarity list for the new users repeatedly to save the computational resources. Both theoretical and experimental results show that the TwinSearch Algorithm achieves better running time than the traditional method.

cs.IR↗